Představení prezentace The Ethical and Legal Problems in Mind-Uploading: Identity and Consciousness as Foundational Constraints a diskuse o metodologii

This conference paper addresses two problems concerning the conception of mind-uploading – a hypothetical process of transferring human mental contents, memories, and personality into an artificial computational system.
Drawing on work by R. Weir, D. Parfit, D. Chalmers, and N. Block, the paper argues that attempts to deal with specific ethical and legal issues concerning this conception are, in fact, constrained by two key underlying problems.
The first problem pertains to whether the uploaded ‘digital person’ can be considered personally identical to one prior to undergoing this process. (Weir, R. 2023, Parfit, D. 1973, 2001). The second problem concerns artificial phenomenal consciousness: Even the successful uploading of the mental contents of a particular person into an artificial system that is functionally isomorphic to the human mind (of that very individual) does not automatically guarantee the presence of phenomenal consciousness, qualia, or ‘what-it-is-likeness’ in such a system (Block, N. 1995; Chalmers, D. 1995).
The paper presents several ethical and legal dilemmas concerning mind-uploading and shows how they can be resolved based on the different answers to these two problems. It argues that the presence of phenomenal consciousness ought to determine whether we may attribute to the uploaded entity the status of moral agent as well as legal rights of natural persons and secondly, that the personal identity of a ‘digital person’ with its original can (if established) determine ascription of moral and legal continuity to this ‘artificial entity’.

Doktorský seminář se uskuteční v místnosti SP319.