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In recent years, both science fiction and real-world science have explored the tantalizing idea of transferring human consciousness into machines, raising questions about identity, continuity, and the nature of self. Movies like Chappie, Transcendence, and Black Mirror illustrate how humans may one day achieve this, but they also leave us with a deeper, more troubling question: Can a copy of your mind ever really be you?
The New You or Just an Identical Twin?
Derek Parfit, a philosopher who focused on personal identity, argued that the notion of a fixed, unchanging self is an illusion. Parfit proposed that identity is more about psychological connectedness—memory, personality, and consciousness—than about the persistence of a single, enduring soul. From this perspective, if your consciousness is copied into a machine with all your memories intact, the new entity would feel as though it were you, and perhaps that’s all that matters. But even Parfit acknowledged the unsettling possibility that while the new you might seem identical, the original you—the one who experienced life up to that point—has ceased to exist.
The Soul Cause
This leads us to a deeper question: Is personal identity rooted in subjective continuity—the experience of existing from one moment to the next—or is it something else entirely, like the presence of an unchanging “soul” or consciousness that persists independently of our physical bodies? Theories of consciousness, like those discussed by David Chalmers, point to the “hard problem of consciousness,” which asks how subjective experiences—our sense of self and awareness—arise from the physical processes of the brain. If consciousness truly emerges from the brain’s physical structure, duplicating that structure might duplicate consciousness. But if there is more to consciousness than physical matter, something immaterial or metaphysical, then a copy of your brain would be a hollow imitation, lacking the real you.
“Energize”
Another philosophical concept that challenges the idea of a seamless transfer of consciousness is the Teletransportation Paradox, first introduced in Star Trek and popularized by philosophers. In this scenario, a person is teleported by being disassembled atom by atom at one location and reassembled at another. On one hand, the person who appears at the new location has the same memories, personality, and physical traits as the original. But was the original person destroyed in the process, with only a perfect copy emerging on the other side? Are they the same person, or has one version died and another come to life?
The teleportation analogy mirrors the dilemma of consciousness transfer: even if we could upload a mind to a machine or reconstruct a brain neuron by neuron, would that preserve the person, or would the original consciousness experience oblivion while a new consciousness—indistinguishable from the first—takes its place? The crux of the issue lies in the continuity of subjective experience. If a person feels continuous in their identity—if the mind feels that it is the same mind that existed a moment before—does that make the copy authentic? Or is the loss of the original, the one who lived and died, an inescapable reality?
In BV Larson’s famous and awesome sci-fi series Undying Mercenaries, soldiers are scanned and their information is backed up on a regular basis. This gives them great comfort when going on life-threatening missions because when they die, they know they can be recreated from stored information.
But if a soldier is rebuilt from a previous snapshot, is it really “him” (or “her”)? Has their consciousness survived, or is it only a copy of themselves?
What Is Consciousness?
Let’s look at BV Larson’s assumption of consciousness preservation again. If you as a soldier die, to restore yourself from a snapshot carries different meanings depending on your point of view. For your fellow soldiers, seeing you, their departed comrade, restored means the comrade they knew is back unchanged. It’s still you to them.
But from the point of view of you who died, your consciousness has not survived. You’re dead, gone onto whatever is beyond. The fact that a copy has been restored and an identical twin created somewhere else is neither here nor there for you. The person, the consciousness that existed, is gone.
In software terms, let’s liken it to a program running on one computer. Let’s call the program Alpha. A backup process now takes a snapshot, copies it to another computer where it starts to run (Beta). These two programs, although similar, are now different processes, responding to different inputs, running independently. Turn Alpha’s computer off and Alpha dies. It’s existence and awareness ceases; it experienced its own death and then oblivion after that.
Beta sees itself as Alpha that was copied to a new host, where it now runs happily. We’re not interested in Beta’s happiness; we want to prevent Alpha from experiencing death. In other words, if we want to get Alpha onto another (newer) machine, we will have to think of a cleverer copy process to have Alpha on the other machine and not Beta, who looks a lot like Alpha but is not Alpha.
How to Preserve Consciousness in a Copy Process?
In his book The House of Suns, Alastair Reynolds came up with what seems to be a viable solution. The person in the story wanted to copy his consciousness into a machine body. He approached the problem in a step-by-step fashion, by having his neurons replaced one-by-one with machine parts in the same fashion as is described by Paul King in this Quora article. His solution is similar to people working for a company defining its character and lending it a certain voice. People will come and go gradually, and in a couple of years, the entire staff might be different, but because it was a gradual process, the voice of the company did not change. The same could be done if intelligent robots replaced personnel as they left, as long it remained a gradual process.
If we go back to the Alpha and Beta programs, where we wanted Alpha on the second machine and not Beta, we’d have to replace the first machine, transistor by transistor, until we had a new machine with Alpha running on it.
But, are we not oversimplifying consciousness? What if there are elements of multidimensionality or even a whack of the supernatural thrown into what we are?
Consciousness and the Soul
For centuries, philosophers and scientists both have been trying to determine what exactly makes us the individuals we are. It isn’t the physical body completely. We teach our children it is what they think and feel that makes them unique. We teach them it is what is “inside” that makes them who they are. But inside where? Most would answer “the brain”. But what is it about the brain that makes us who we are? It is a mass of tissue that operates by a combination of electrical and chemical connections.
Every brain is designed to work the same way. Circuits made up of nerves are created or blocked and the impulses send messages throughout the body. This is, however, exactly how the brain works in the majority of living things. It is not the operation of the brain that makes us who we are but what is often referred to as the soul, or consciousness. So what is this soul?
The Theories
The Sum of All Parts
Consciousness can be defined as having an awareness of ourselves and our surroundings. By this definition, we are the sum of our sensory experiences, emotions, thoughts, and actions. However, this definition omits the instinctual and subconscious elements that also shape who we are.
This brings up a significant problem: if consciousness is limited to what we are aware of, what about the processes that occur without conscious thought? For example, your heartbeat, breathing, and reflexes like pulling your hand away from a flame all happen instinctively. You don’t think about them, yet they are integral to your experience of being alive. Similarly, deeply buried emotions, such as fear or trauma, exist on a subconscious level and can still influence your behavior.
If consciousness alone defines who we are, these subconscious and instinctual processes might be excluded, which would make any attempt at transferring or replicating consciousness incomplete. Without capturing these elements, the resulting being—whether biological or mechanical—would be an incomplete version of the original person.
It’s All Energy
One theory posits that everything, both physical and non-physical, is composed of energy. This theory suggests that the only difference between a physical object, like a table, and something non-physical, like an idea, is the rate at which the energy vibrates. But this raises challenges when considering consciousness transfer.
For one, we do not yet fully understand the nature of this energy or where it originates. While it’s a compelling theory, it hasn’t been proven how one form of energy can vibrate at the myriad speeds necessary to produce the vast diversity of things in the universe, both tangible and intangible.
Another problem: how can you capture or contain an idea, emotion, or feeling, all of which are thought to be forms of energy? If we cannot precisely identify or understand the properties of this energy, how could we effectively transfer it from one body to another? Without this ability, the notion of transferring one’s essence seems incomplete at best.
…But I’m Not a Soldier
A metaphysical theory, supported by the works of Michael Newton and Dolores Cannon, is that the soul, not the body or brain, is the true essence of our being. Through their extensive research into past-life regression and hypnosis, both Newton and Cannon suggested that the body and brain are merely vehicles—a “meat puppet”—while the soul provides the spark of life and consciousness. According to this view, the body serves as a temporary vessel for the soul’s experience on Earth, while the soul exists independently, transcending the physical.
If this theory is correct, the essence of a person cannot be captured solely through the replication of the brain or the body. The brain, in this perspective, is simply an instrument used by the soul to interact with the physical world. Thus, even if we were able to create an exact copy of a person’s brain, thoughts, and memories, we would still be missing the most critical part: the soul, which gives the body life, purpose, and individuality.
Without the soul, the copy would be just that—a mere imitation lacking the unique consciousness that animates the original. Moreover, since no one has yet been able to definitively capture or transfer a soul, this theory raises serious doubts about the possibility of creating an authentic, fully living version of a person through technology alone. While some claim to have seen images of an essence leaving the body at the moment of death, this remains unproven and elusive. Without a method of transferring the soul itself, any form of consciousness transfer would be incomplete, and the resulting entity would be something less than the original.
Conclusion
Transferring the essence of an individual from a physical body to a cyborg or any other substitution for a body is not possible because we do not truly know what makes up the essence of an individual. Without this knowledge, we can’t capture that essence and contain it until it can be transferred. Until such a time when these important questions can be answered, any attempt at transference will result in something that is less than the original.
