Interview of me on mind uploading

"Upload Your Mind and Live Forever" is an interview of me on mind uploading over at hopesandfears.com.

Excerpt:

Well, part of what I’m trying to say is that, like most metaphysical debates, this is going to be irresoluble by argumentation. There’s really nothing that pure reason is going to allow us to settle one way or another. All the evidence that we have we all tend to agree on. That evidence just underdetermines whether computers could have conscious experiences or whether they would be mere copies or actual survival of personal identity.

What I try to do as a way of resolving that metaphysical impasse is to look at it from a Darwinian or evolutionary point of view. The basic point of Darwinian evolution applies to any kind of system where you have things that are replicating and various degrees of fitness that would apply to the things that are reproducing. On this kind of abstract characterization, we could describe various hypothetical systems as having features that would be more fit.

Now one of the features that these computer simulations would have is something we could describe as being belief-like. In particular, these things are going to have the belief that they are going to survive the procedure. Now the metaphysical debate is about whether that belief is true, and what I’m trying to argue is that we can say, regardless of whether that belief is true, that belief would have survival value. Physical systems that have that belief are more likely to make more copies of themselves than physical systems that lack that belief.