When faced with confusing conundrums like this, I find it useful to go back to basics: evolutionary psychology. You are a human, that is to say, you’re an evolved intelligence, one evolved as a helpful planning-and-guidance system for a biological organism, specifically a primate. Your purpose, evolutionarily, is to maximize the evolutionary fitness of your genes, i.e. to try your best to pass them on successfully. You have whole bunch of drives/emotions/instincts that were evolved to, on the African Savannah, approximately maximize that fitness. Even in our current rather different environment, while not quite as well tuned to that as they used to be to the Savannah, these still do a pretty good job of that (witness the fact that there are roughly 8 billion of us).
So, is an upload of your mind the same “person”? It (if uploaded correctly) shares your memories, drives, and so forth. it will presumably regard you (the organism, and the copy of your mind running on your biological brain, if the uploading process was non-destructive) as somewhere between itself, an identical twin, and a close blood relative. Obviously you will understand each other very well, at least at first before your experiences diverge.. So it’s presumably likely to be an ally in your (the organism’s) well-being and thus help pass your genes on.
So, is an upload exactly the same thing as your biological mind? No. Is it more similar than an identical twin? Yes. Does the English language have a good set of words to compactly describe this? No.
[Obviously if the mind uploading process is destructive, that makes passing on your genes harder, especially if you haven’t yet had any children, and don’t have any siblings. Freezing eggs or sperm before doing destructive mind uploading seems like a wise precaution.]
When faced with confusing conundrums like this, I find it useful to go back to basics: evolutionary psychology. You are a human, that is to say, you’re an evolved intelligence, one evolved as a helpful planning-and-guidance system for a biological organism, specifically a primate. Your purpose, evolutionarily, is to maximize the evolutionary fitness of your genes, i.e. to try your best to pass them on successfully. You have whole bunch of drives/emotions/instincts that were evolved to, on the African Savannah, approximately maximize that fitness. Even in our current rather different environment, while not quite as well tuned to that as they used to be to the Savannah, these still do a pretty good job of that (witness the fact that there are roughly 8 billion of us).
So, is an upload of your mind the same “person”? It (if uploaded correctly) shares your memories, drives, and so forth. it will presumably regard you (the organism, and the copy of your mind running on your biological brain, if the uploading process was non-destructive) as somewhere between itself, an identical twin, and a close blood relative. Obviously you will understand each other very well, at least at first before your experiences diverge.. So it’s presumably likely to be an ally in your (the organism’s) well-being and thus help pass your genes on.
So, is an upload exactly the same thing as your biological mind? No. Is it more similar than an identical twin? Yes. Does the English language have a good set of words to compactly describe this? No.
[Obviously if the mind uploading process is destructive, that makes passing on your genes harder, especially if you haven’t yet had any children, and don’t have any siblings. Freezing eggs or sperm before doing destructive mind uploading seems like a wise precaution.]