Pandora's Brain by Calum Chace

Author:Calum Chace [Chace, Calum]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Three Cs
Published: 2015-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-SIX

Malcolm Ross smiled at the cameras and the studio guests. Confidently into the home straight, he gathered up his audience in preparation for the last leg of their intellectual journey together.

‘Let’s turn to the fascinating idea of uploading the human mind into a computer,’ he said. ‘Professor Montaubon, you said just now that uploading is our best hope of surviving the arrival of a super-intelligence. The key questions that follow from that seem to me to be: is it possible to upload a mind, both technologically and philosophically, and would it be a good thing? Reverend Cuthman: we haven’t heard from you yet. Perhaps this is an issue you might like to comment on?’

The reverend placed the tips of his fingers together and pressed them to his lips. Then he pointed them down again and looked up at Ross.

‘Thank you, Malcolm. Well I confess to feeling somewhat alienated from much of this conversation. That is partly because I’m not as au fait with the latest technology as your other guests. But more importantly, I think, I start from a very different set of premises. You see I believe that humans are distinguished from brute animals by our possession of an immortal soul, which was placed inside us by almighty God. So as far as I’m concerned, whatever technological marvels may or may not come down the road during this century and the next, we won’t be uploading ourselves into any computers because you can’t upload a soul into a computer. And a body or even a mind without a soul is not a human being.’

‘Yes, I can see that presents some difficulty,’ Ross said. ‘So if Dr Metcalfe here and his peers were to succeed in uploading a human mind into a computer, and it passed the Turing test, persuading all comers that it was the same person as had previously been running around inside a human body, you would simply deny that it was the same person?’

‘Yes, I would. Partly because it wouldn’t have a soul. At least, I assume that Dr Metcalfe isn’t going to claim that he and his peers are about to become gods, complete with the ability to create souls?’

David smiled and shook his head.

‘But even putting that to one side,’ the reverend continued, ‘this uploading idea doesn’t seem to preserve the individual. It makes a copy. A clone. Everybody has heard of Dolly, a cloned sheep, which was born in 1996. And many people know that the first animal, a frog, was cloned way back in the 1960s. But no-one is claiming that cloning preserves the individual. Uploading is the same. It just makes a copy.’

‘Yes,’ Ross said, thoughtfully. ‘This is an important problem, isn’t it, Professor Christensen? Uploading doesn’t perpetuate the individual: it destroys the individual and creates a copy.’

‘That is an important objection, I agree,’ Christensen said. ‘But not a fatal one, I think. If you could upload me into a computer and then give the newly created being a body exactly like mine, but leave me still alive, I might well deny that the new entity was me.

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