Mind uploading in fiction

The concept of uploading a mind into a computer, often into a simulated reality, is a recurring theme in science-fiction novels and films since the 1950s. Some stories describe societies of such minds.

Early and particularly important examples

Izzard and the Membrane

A story featuring human minds replicated in a computer is the novella Izzard and the Membrane by Walter M. Miller, Jr., first published in May 1951. In this story, an American cyberneticist named Scott MacDonney is captured by Russians and made to work on an advanced computer, Izzard, which they plan to use to coordinate an attack on the United States. He has conversations with Izzard as he works on it, and when he asks it if it is self-aware, it says "answer indeterminate" and then asks "can human individual's self-awareness transor be mechanically duplicated?" MacDonney is unfamiliar with the concept of a self-awareness transor (it is later revealed that this information was loaded into Izzard by a mysterious entity who may nor may not be God), and Izzard defines it by saying "A self-awareness transor is the mathematical function which describes the specific consciousness pattern of one human individual."

It is later found that this mathematical function can indeed be duplicated, although not by a detailed scan of the individual's brain as in later notions of mind uploading; instead, Donney just has to describe the individual verbally in sufficient detail, and Izzard uses this information to locate the transor in the appropriate "mathematical region". In Izzard's words, "to duplicate consciousness of deceased, it will be necessary for you to furnish anthropometric and psychic characteristics of the individual. These characteristics will not determine transor, but will only give its general form. Knowing its form, will enable me to sweep my circuit pattern through its mathematical region until the proper transor is reached. At that point, the consciousness will appear among the circuits."

Using this method, MacDonney is able to recreate the mind of his dead wife in Izzard's memory, as well as create a virtual duplicate of himself, which seems to have a shared awareness with the biological MacDonney.

Other stories

Something close to the notion of mind uploading is very briefly mentioned in Isaac Asimov's 1956 short story The Last Question: "One by one Man fused with AC, each physical body losing its mental identity in a manner that was somehow not a loss but a gain." A more detailed exploration of the idea (and one in which individual identity is preserved, unlike in Asimov's story) can be found in Arthur C. Clarke's novel The City and the Stars, also from 1956 (this novel was a revised and expanded version of Clarke's earlier story Against the Fall of Night, but the earlier version did not contain the elements relating to mind uploading). The story is set in a city named Diaspar one billion years in the future, where the minds of inhabitants are stored as patterns of information in the city's Central Computer in between a series of 1000-year lives in cloned bodies. Various commentators identify this story as one of the first (if not the first) to deal with mind uploading, human–machine synthesis, and computerized immortality.

Further examples

Mind transfer is a theme in many other works of science fiction in a wide range of media. Specific examples include the following:

Literature

• Frederik Pohl's Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (1982), the second of four novels in the Heechee Saga, introduces uploading technology. In the next, Heechee Rendezvous (1984), the protagonist Robinette Broadhead has died and been uploaded into a computer.

Television

• In Upload (2020–) by Greg Daniels, set in 2033, humans can upload themselves into a virtual afterlife of their choosing, with different levels similar to socioeconomic strata of society, and they are cared for by "handlers". When computer programmer Nathan Brown dies prematurely, he is uploaded to the very expensive Lakeview, but then finds himself under the thumb of his possessive, still-living girlfriend Ingrid. As Nathan adjusts to the pros and cons of digital heaven, he bonds with Nora, his living customer service rep. Nora struggles with the pressures of her job, her dying father who does not want to be uploaded, and her growing feelings for Nathan while slowly coming to believe that Nathan was murdered.

Comics

• In DC Comics, the hero "NoMan" was a 76-year-old man before having his consciousness uploaded.

Video games

• In the horror/thriller game SOMA (2015), which centers around the concept and ethics of mind uploading. Taking place after an apocalypse renders the surface uninhabitable, the player explores the underwater research station Pathos-II, encountering and evading a malfunctioning artificial intelligence called the Wau.

Other media

• In the online collaborative world-building project "Orion's Arm" (2000–) the concepts of mind copying and uploading are used extensively, particularly in the e-novel Betrayals.

See also

• Body swap appearances in media
• Cyborgs in fiction (includes examples of the related notion of placing a biological brain in an artificial body)
• Technologically enabled telepathy
• Whole-body transplants in popular culture

Further reading

• Booker, M. Keith (2014). "Artificial Intelligence (AI)". Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction in Literature. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 28. ISBN 978-0-8108-7884-6.
• Blackford, Russell (2017). "Reshaping the Human". Science Fiction and the Moral Imagination: Visions, Minds, Ethics. Science and Fiction. Springer. pp. 173–174. ISBN 978-3-319-61685-8.
• Webb, Stephen (2017). "Mind Uploading". All the Wonder that Would Be: Exploring Past Notions of the Future. Science and Fiction. Springer. pp. 276–278. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-51759-9_10. ISBN 978-3-319-51759-9.

External links

• Machine Intelligence List – list of stories with machine intelligences, those marked with "H" include "humans in computerized/program/digitized form"