Can We Copy the Mind? Disputing with Transhumanism

The paper discusses the technical and humanitarian aspects of the thesis of transhumanism about the pos- sibility of copying the mind to a medium and rewriting it repeatedly (digital immortality). It is argued that the nature of the mind implies that it cannot be supported without its functioning, even if recorded, and such func- tioning (digital life) would inevitably lead to a discrepancy between the copy and the original. The paper fur- ther substantiates that the very fact of making such record seems highly unlikely due to the physical restric- tions of the world, as well as to the effects of the following natural tendency: technologies would develop not in the direction of the 'copyableness' of the evolving human consciousness, but in the opposite direction of the increasing impossibility of copying the even more complicated mind (i.e. complexity growing faster than the means of precise copying).

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