Downloading our mind
Mar 18th, 2008 by Ivo Quartiroli | 
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In 1964 Marshall McLuhan said: “Having extended or translated our central nervous system into the electromagnetic technology, it is but a further stage to transfer our consciousness to the computer world as well” (Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1994).
Hans Moravec took him in earnest, stating that the mind’s contents could be copied on a mechanical support - and who knows, perhaps even transplanted as any other organ. The technological dream of transcending the body is a revival of separation of the “impure” body and the “divine” mind, shared both by Christianity and the Cartesian science.
But our identification with the mind could be challenged in the very moment when the mind could be copied, reproduced and shared between people.
