Consciousness and Personal Identity
4 Immortality
As detailed in his book The Singularity Is Near, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has been
taking aggressive steps to survive in good health for long enough to experience “the full blos-
soming of the biotechnology revolution” (Kurzweil 2005: 212). Not only does he take a daily
regimen of 250 pill supplements, but he also receives approximately six intravenous therapies
per week. In Kurzweil’s view, we will someday be able to overcome the limitations of our frail
and cumbersome current bodies – what he calls our “version 1.0 biological bodies” (Kurzweil
2005: 9). In particular, once we achieve the Singularity – a point of such rapidly accelerating
technological innovation that our whole way of life will be drastically rewritten – we will be
able to transcend our biological limitations and take our mortality into our own hands.
Kurzweil describes his own philosophical position on personal identity as patternism: one’s
identity as a person lies principally in a pattern that persists through time. The pattern is inde-
pendent of the susbstrate in which it is realized. As Kurzweil notes, “the particles containing my
brain and body change within weeks, but there is a continuity to the pattern that these particles
make” (Kurzweil 2005: 5). Moreover, such continuity could exist even were the pattern to be
realized in a different physical substrate – a robotic body made up principally of a network of
nanobots, say. For the patternist, it’s the continuity that fundamentally matters. As long as a par-
ticular personal pattern continues to exist that person also continues to exist.
While the proponent of the continuity of consciousness approach need not adopt this
Kurzweilian patternism, the two approaches seem broadly consonant with one another.
Moreover, as our discussion has already suggested, there is at least prima facie reason to believe
that both of these approaches seem to support the possibility of survival through uploading. But
what kind of uploading? Here it is perhaps worth considering different varieties of uploading
scenarios, to see which would be most conducive to the preservation of personal identity after
bodily death (and thus to possible immortality).
In a recent discussion of the issue, David Chalmers distinguishes three different kinds of
uploading that might one day be possible: destructive uploading, gradual uploading, and non-
destructive uploading. In destructive uploading, the brain is frozen and then its precise state is
analyzed and recorded – perhaps by way of serial sectioning where scientists analyze its struc-
ture one layer at a time. After all of the information about the distribution of neurons and their
interconnections is retrieved, it is then loaded onto a computer model, where a simulation is
produced. Gradual uploading, in contrast, occurs by way of nanotransfer:
One or more nanotechnological devices (perhaps tiny robots) are inserted into the
brain and each attaches itself to a single neuron, learning to simulate the behavior
of the associated neuron and also learning about its connectivity. Once it simulates
the neuron’s behavior well enough, it takes the place of the original neuron, perhaps
leaving receptors and transmitters in place and uploading the relevant processing to a
computer via radio transmitters. It then moves to other neurons and repeats the pro-
cedure, until eventually every neuron has been replaced by an emulation, and perhaps
all processing has been uploaded to a computer.
(Chalmers 2014: 103)
Finally, nondestructive uploading works in a similar fashion to gradual uploading, only without
the destruction of the original neurons.
As Chalmers notes, two different kinds of questions arise as we assess these three methods
of uploading. Firstly: Will the resulting uploaded entity be conscious? And secondly: Will the