Spirit an operating system for an autonomous robot.
Joscha Bach VP of Research at the AI Foundation
I was listening to the Lex Fridman Podcast with Joscha Bach. Perhaps the most interesting concept that comes out of it is spirit or maybe soul as an operating system. That is what animates the body, and when it stops running the body dies. Something damages the wetware (your brain) and the software can’t run anymore. Or some other hardware fails and your brain no longer has the power to run the software and again the body dies.
So the question is what happens if you can copy the software to another substrate. The concept that you can upload your consciousness. On a computer moving between two volumes (e.g. hard drives) is not really a move. It is a copy and a delete. So deleting the copy off of one of the substrates (body) is killing that substrate.
Is Uploading Death or Reincarnation
I think the thought has to change that our spirit/soul is a singular thing. There is no copyright against making a copy. Then which soul is yours? Both have the same memories and experiences. They are both you. If one is uploaded it is just running on a different platform. If you have a setup on a computer you like you could clone the hard drive to another one and drop it into a new machine. After going through the pain of driver hell to make sure all the settings settings in the software work on the new hardware, you boot up the machine for the first time. Everything is where you left it, the only difference is everything works faster on your new hardware.
Now carry this over to uploading a spirit. Ideally we have figured out the hardware of the brain to be able to create the substrate the spirit will run on. Also again go through the driver hell to make sure the spirit is comfortable in the new hardware. We do we have the spirit reborn in a new body. We have achieved reincarnation in our modern world. We have gone one better is you do not have to die to be reincarnated.
The Continuity Problem
Many years ago Steven Novella wrote a good post on The Continuity Problem. The idea that even a copy of you is not you. Your old self died, and while the copy has all the memory and experiences of you. The physical you that existed is gone. For people who believe in life after death this doesn’t seem to be a problem. You consider your soul or spirit living on. The question is are you your body. If you think you are then uploading is not for you. Oddly enough I have never been a Cartesian Dualist. The mind and the body are not different the mind is just what the brain does. But if you can replace my brain with a new one and copy over my software I would accept that as a solution. So my answer to The Continuity Problem is hardware agnostic dualism, and I think I could deal with uploading, as long as you give me good hardware to run my spirit on.