Neuroscience, AI and Society: Justin Smith-Ruiu

Seminar presented by the UW Computational Neuroscience Center as part of our Neuroscience, AI, and Technology series. See more info on the series and the CNC at https://compneuro.washington.edu/news-and-events/neuroscience-ai-and-society/.

How to Survive Death:Moral Personhood and the Limits of the Continuity-of-Consciousness Argument

Philosophers habitually speak of consciousness-uploading and self-uploading as if these were the same thing. In so doing they take for granted the correctness of a broadly Lockean account of personal identity, according to which I remain the same person from moment to moment, or perhaps someday from eon to eon, in virtue of the continuity of conscious memory. Woody Allen, too, was following in Locke’s footsteps when he joked: “I do not want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen, I want to live on in my apartment.” But is ongoing temporal duration from a distinct node of subjective experience really the only way to keep on being a person? Cross-cultural considerations show that many human groups make use of extremely low-tech devices for personhood-uploading —effigies, story-boards, tree-trunks—, and they hardly expect these objects, after the transfer of the deceased kin’s identity into them, to pass the Turing test or to display any observable signs of consciousness at all. “Yes, but they’re just imagining things,” you’ll say. Fair enough, but perhaps we are as well. If we are ever going to succeed at exploiting substrate-neutrality to evade or postpone mortality, it will be necessary not only to follow the right roadmap towards whole-brain emulation in effecting a high-fidelity transfer of consciousness from one substrate to another. It will also be necessary to examine our longstanding presumption, these days proliferated almost entirely without argument, that personhood and consciousness are identical. In this talk I will make a first stab at just such an examination, drawing in particular on the work of Bostrom, Chalmers, Parfit, and Charles Taylor, as well as on what I take to be salient examples of radically different conceptions of personhood from the ethnographic and historical record of human representations of reality and of our place in it.

Also check out other Arts events in Seattle, Workshops in Seattle, Fine Arts events in Seattle.