At last, someone — in this case, Johns Hopkins humanities prof William Egginton — has honestly addressed the idea of creating immortality by digitally uploading our minds: It isn’t possible.
“A Necessary Limit”
At IAI.TV, he writes,
When I conceive of another being in front of me — another human, a chimp, a dog, a fly, or a machine — as experiencing the world in some way, I’m implicitly asking the question the philosopher Thomas Nagel famously asked about bats, namely: what is it like to be that being? If I am capable of asking the question, that implies that I can’t have that experience in the sense of being able to step into it and experience it myself. If I could, it wouldn’t be something I ask myself about but instead something I, well, experience — like reading a book or watching a movie, something I tend to do without asking myself what it is like to be that book or be that movie. What we call consciousness, in other words, my experience of being a living being, entails a necessary limit. Specifically, while it entails wondering what it might be like to be other beings, it equally entails not being able to cross that limit and actually experience what it is like to be them.
“Consciousness can’t be uploaded,” September 1, 2025
Egginton, author of The Rigor of Angels (2023), points out that the same limitation applies to trying to convert memories into bits in a computer program:
… let’s return to Kurzweil and his desire to outlive his own body. For him to become immortal in any meaningful sense, the memories he uploads would have to be accompanied by something like an experience of being the one who had those memories and continues to have them — otherwise, the immortality in question is nothing more than a more detailed version of a photo album, memoir, or video journal. In other words, the “memories” would be experienced from the outside, by someone else, rather than by Kurzweil himself. What is specific and unique about Kurzweil’s experience is not the memories he experienced, but rather the ego, which synthesizes the elements of consciousness over time, and which was the condition of possibility of having them in the first place. And this unity is, by definition, non-transferable.
“Can’t be uploaded”
From a traditional perspective, the immortal mind, whose memories the computer supposedly holds, has moved on. It isn’t in the computer and whatever is in the computer is not an element of that mind. The computer’s simulation may be a good one but it is not a surviving self.
But even if you don’t accept that the human mind is immortal, memories and quirks, separated from a live human body, would not be experienced by a human person. They are just data.
“What if I Were Born in China in the Ming Dynasty?”
We sometimes forget that we are radically contingent beings. The answer to “What if I were born in China in the Ming Dynasty?” is this: You exist because of an interaction between two unique, specific individuals at a given time and place. If you did not exist as a result of that interaction, you would not exist at all. Whoever was born in China in the Ming dynasty was someone else.
The existence of a human person is not transferable. When we grasp that, we see why we can no more instantiate ourselves in a computer than we can travel backwards in time to be born in the Ming Dynasty.
Existential Limits
In The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, Egginton looks at the contingencies and limits of our existence in general:
Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges was madly in love when his life was shattered by painful heartbreak. But the breakdown that followed illuminated an incontrovertible truth — that love is necessarily imbued with loss, that the one doesn’t exist without the other. German physicist Werner Heisenberg was fighting with the scientific establishment on the meaning of the quantum realm’s absurdity when he had his own epiphany — that there is no such thing as a complete, perfect description of reality. Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant pushed the assumptions of human reason to their mind-bending conclusions, but emerged with an idea that crowned a towering philosophical system — that the human mind has fundamental limits, and those limits undergird both our greatest achievements as well as our missteps.
Through fiction, science, and philosophy, the work of these three thinkers coalesced around the powerful, haunting fact that there is an irreconcilable difference between reality “out there” and reality as we experience it. Out of this profound truth comes a multitude of galvanizing ideas: the notion of selfhood, free will, and purpose in human life; the roots of morality, aesthetics, and reason; and the origins and nature of the cosmos itself.
From the Publisher
Our Losses, Our Uncertainties, Our Limits
Efforts to free ourselves from the fundamental nature and limits of human existence will simply amount to losing either ourselves or what matters to us most. If Borges had experienced no losses, he could not have been a great poet. If Heisenberg had not faced conflict, he would never have come to his most important realization: the impossibility of complete certainty. If Kant could have persuaded himself that there are easy answers to everything, he would have been a good after-dinner speaker but not a great philosopher. Our achievements are, as Egginton says, bound up with our our losses, our uncertainties, our limits.
And — getting back to the proposal to upload our minds — in this world, we are bound up with our physical nature and its natural mortality. We can’t change that; we can only delude ourselves.
Cross-posted at Mind Matters News.