Will Psychological Disorders Afflict Uploaded Personalities?

Abstract

Uploading human minds into computer systems is an intriguing concept. Will this process become part of our evolutionary future? This paper begins by arguing that successfully replicating human minds in virtual environments will require more than computing power and the ability to transfer the information content of neural connections into computer memory. Virtual minds must also be equipped with certain properties of the human biological mind that may prove to be not easily transferable. These include psychological motivations and even our collective unconsciousness. Lacking these, virtual minds could suffer from a wide range of serious psychological disorders. Efforts to treat such disorders with “program” fixes would invalidate any plausible claim that a virtual mind had the same ‘identity’ as its biological ancestor, and also raise perplexing ethical issues. The paper next provides a theoretical psychological framework for these assertions, and goes on to explore nine specific psychological disorders that could afflict virtual personalities. The paper then concludes by identifying several ethical issues that might arise from attempts to “fix” the psychological problems of virtual personalities.

Uploading would involve first freezing a brain, then slicing it, then scanning the slices with some high- resolution scanning technique, then using automated image processing software to reconstruct and tag a very detailed 3-D map of the original brain. The map would show all the neurons, the matrix of their synaptic interconnections, the strengths of these connections, and other relevant detail. Using computational models of how these basic elements operate, the whole brain could then be emulated on a sufficiently capacious computer.—Nick Bostrom (2004)