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Personal Identity

Brain State Transfer

(Text as at 26/11/2007 23:25:26)

*** THIS IS NOT THE LATEST VERSION OF THIS NOTE ***

The idea that we can, even in principle, copy the information from a brain¹ to a backup device and then restore it to another (or the same) brain - as in "Williams (Bernard) - The Self and the Future" - without changing the identity of that brain seems fanciful to me. This is partly because I am antipathetic to functionalism². The information stored in brains appears to be in highly distributed representations along connectionist lines rather than according to classical AI. The very physical structure of the brain changes along with what it represents. There is no simple software / hardware distinction in a realistic psychology³ of human beings. Any backup will need to be molecule by molecule to retain the informational richness of the original, and any restore will create a replica⁴ of the original brain. It will not simply feed information into a pre-existing brain. Hence, I now think that Williams’s intuitions about A-body-person remaining a “mixed up” A-person to be incorrect. Nor does A-body-person end up as B, but as a fusion of a confused replica of B’s brain and A’s body⁵.