25. WON’T IT BE IMPOSSIBLE TO ETHICALLY TEST AND DEVELOP CYBER-CONSCIOUSNESS?

“Partial freedom seems to me a most invidious mode of slavery.”  Edmund Burke

“Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do, and what is right to do.”  Potter Stewart

A fundamental principle of bioethics requires the consent of a patient to any medical procedure performed upon them.   A patient will exist the moment a conscious mindclone arises in some academic laboratory, or hacker’s garage.  At that moment ethical rules will be challenged, for the mindclone has not consented to the work being done on eir mind.  Does this situation create a catch-22 ethical embargo against developing cyber-consciousness?

There are at least three ways to answer this challenge.  First, it can be approached with a medical ethics focus on the mindclone itself.   Second, it can be approached philosophically – focusing on the mindclone as just part and parcel of the biological original.  Third, it can be approached pragmatically – what will the government likely require?

Creating Ethical Beings Ethically

How can it be ethical to test mindclone-creating mindware when any resulting mindclone has not first consented to being the subject of such an experiment?  How will we know we have mindware that creates an ethically-reasoning mindclone if it is not ethical to even do the tests and trials?    

As to the first question, ethicists agree that someone else can consent to a treatment for a person who is unable to consent.  For example, the parents of a newborn child can consent to experimental medical treatment for them.  The crucial criterion is that the consenter must have the best interests of the patient in mind, and not be primarily concerned with the success of a medical experiment.  One of the purposes of an Institutional Review Board (IRB) or medical review committee is to exercise this kind of consent on behalf of persons who cannot give their consent.  Hence, having a responsible committee act on their behalf solves the problem of ethical consent for the birth of a mindclone or beman. 

Sometimes people complain that they “did not ask to be born.”  Yet, nobody has an ethical right to decide whether or not to be born, as that would be temporally illogical.  The solution to this conundrum is for someone else to consent on behalf of the newborn, whether this is done implicitly via biological parenting, or explicitly via an ethics committee.  In each case there is a moral obligation (which can be enforced legally today for biological parents) to avoid intentionally causing harm to the newborn.   We are now ready to turn to the second question:  how can an ethics committee, acting on behalf of the best interests of future mindclones or bemans, avoid causing harm to them?

One possible solution to ethically developing mindclones is to take the project in stages.  The first stage must not rely upon self-awareness or consciousness.  This would be based upon first developing the autonomous, moral reasoning ability that is a necessary, but not sufficient, basis for consciousness.  Recall from Question 5 that consciousness is a continuum of maturing abilities, when healthy, to be autonomous and empathetic, with autonomous defined as:  “the independent capacity to make reasoned decisions, with moral ones at the apex, and to act on them.”  Independent means, in this context, “capable of idiosyncratic thinking and acting.”

By running many simulations mindclone developers can gain comfort that the reasoning ability of the mindware is human-equivalent.  In fact, the reasoning ability of the mindware should match that of the biological original who is being mindcloned. 

The second stage of development expands the mindware to incorporate human feelings and emotions, via settings associated with aspects of pain, pleasure and the entire vast spectrum of human sentience.  At this stage all the feelings and emotions are terminating in a “black box”, devoid of any self-awareness.  Engineers will measure and validate that the feelings are real, via instruments, but no “one” will actually be feeling the feelings.

The third stage entails creating in software the meaningful memories and patterns of thought of the original person being mindcloned.  This can be considered the identity module.  If this is a case of a de novo cyberconscious being, i.e., a beman, then this identity module is either missing or is created from whole cloth. 

Finally, a consciousness bridge will be developed that marries the reasoning, sentience and identity modules, giving rise to autonomy with empathy and hence consciousness.  Feelings and emotions will be mapped to memories and characteristic ways of processing information.  There will be a sentient research subject when the consciousness bridge first connects the autonomy, empathy and identity modules. 

This bridging approach to ethically creating mindclones is reminiscent of Dennett’s observation that the disassociation from themselves that some victims of horrible abuse exhibit – a kind of denial that the abuse happened to them – is not only a way to avoid the sensation of suffering, but is also likely to be the normal state in beings that have not integrated consciousness into their mind.[i]  In other words, if a being is unable to mentally organize a conceptualized self into a mental world of conceptualized things and experienced sensations, then they cannot actually suffer from pain because there is not a yet a self to suffer.  Pain can be experienced, and it can hurt like hell, but it is an autonomic hurt and not a personally experienced hurt.  In Dennett’s view, when people witness this kind of pain in most animals, they anthropomorphize themselves into the animal’s position and imagine the animal’s hurt.  But because most animals cannot do this, they cannot hurt.  Similarly, until a self was bridged into a mindclone’s or beman’s complex relational database of mindware and mindfiles, there would be “no one home” to complain.

Ethically, approval from research authorities should be obtained before the consciousness bridge is activated.  There will be concern not to cause gratuitous harm, nor to cause fear, and to manage the subject at the end of the experiment gracefully or to continue its virtual life appropriately.  The ethics approvals may be more readily granted if the requests are graduated.  For example, the first request could be to bridge just a small part of the empathy, identity and autonomy modules, and for just a brief period of time.   After the results of experiments are assessed, positive results would be used to request more extensive approvals.  Ultimately there would be adequate confidence that a protocol existed pursuant to which a mindclone could be safely, and humanely, awakened into full consciousness for an unending period of time – just as there are analogous protocols for bringing flesh patients out of medically induced comas.

For example, before companies are allowed to test new drugs on patients they must first test a very small dose of the drug, for a very short period of time, on a healthy volunteer.  Only gradually, based on satisfaction with the safety of previous tests, are companies allowed to test the drugs more robustly.  Analogously, we can envision ethical authorities first permitting the test of only a small sliver of consciousness and only for a small sliver of time.  Gradually, as ethical review committees become convinced that the previous trials were safe (did not cause pain or fear), greater tests of consciousness would be permitted. 

Of course we are all aware of drugs that have been withdrawn from sale after having even been approved.  In these cases evidence of dangerous side effects appear that were not evident during the clinical trials.  No doubt the same situation will occur with mindclones – some tortured minds may be created inadvertently.  This does not mean it is unethical to create mindclones.  It means that every means practical should be employed to minimize the risks of such side effects, and if they manifest, to be able to rapidly resolve the problem.  For example, if test equipment indicates a serious problem with a mindclone it should be promptly placed into a “sleep-mode” so as not to suffer.

In the graduated process described above the experimental subject still did not consent to being “born.”  However, ey could not so consent.  In these cases a guardian (such as an institutional review board or certified cyberpsychiatrist or attorney) can ethically consent on an incompetent’s behalf, with such conditions as they may to impose.  Alternatively, humans may in fact consent that their donated mindfiles can be used to create mindclones through a medical research process, assuming such consent was fully informed with a disclosure of the risks to the best of the researcher’s abilities.

In the foregoing way it will be possible to ethically develop mindware that can be approved by regulatory authorities as capable of producing safe and effective mindclones for ordinary people.  The authority may be the FDA in the U.S., or the EMA in the E.U., or some new regulatory entity.  They will need to be assured that the mindware is safe and effective, and that proving it so was accomplished via clinical trials that were ethically conducted.  As shown in the answer to this Question, by taking the inchoate mindclone through incrementally greater stages of consciousness, the regulatory hurdle can be met.

What’s the Big Deal – Just Me and My Mindclone

Another approach to the ethics of mindcloning is to remember the explanation in Question 23 that a mindclone and eir biological original are the same person.  Hence, the ethical requirement of “consent” is satisfied so long as a biological person requests their mindfile to be activated with mindware into a mindclone.  For example, there is no ethical objection to a person authorizing one, two or twenty-two plastic surgeries upon their face, in the process transforming their looks almost beyond recognition.  With mindcloning the plastic surgery is replaced with cyber surgery, and it is performed outside of one’s body.  However, the end result, functionally, is quite similar – a person has consented to change of self -- from one face to another in the case of plastic surgery; from one instantiation to two instantiations in the case of mindcloning.  In each case the individual’s future will be changed, because others will interact differently with them, and they will behave differently.  However, we recognize the right for a person to medically do as they please with their body (and mind), provided no doctor is being called upon to harm them without a countervailing benefit.

When consciousness first arises in a mindclone, it is not a new consciousness but an expansion of an existing consciousness.  If it hurts, if it frightens, if it enlightens, it is not pain, fear or inspiration occurring to a new soul, but to an existing soul who now transcends two substrates, brain and software.  The opening of consciousness in a mindclone is like what occurs to us when we have a profound educational experience.  I remember that I cried when I first read how the Nazis tied the legs of pregnant Jews together to kill them and their babies, and how, half a century later, the Liberian rebels chopped off the hands of young teenagers and talented craftsmen.  My consciousness opened up to realms of cruelty that I had never imagined.  I can’t say that I’m any better off for that education, but I knew what I was getting into in reading those stories.  Similarly, creating a mindclone is going to change our minds.  But it is our minds that we are changing, and this is something we have an ethical right to do.

We must also always remember that our minds are dynamically evolving pastiches of information and patterns of information processing.  There is no such thing as having one mind, completely formed at birth, and never changing after that.  Indeed, an excellent definition of a mind is that which idiosyncratically aggregates, utilizes and exchanges information and information processing patterns.  Consider the following meditation by Douglas Hofstadter:

“We are all curious collages, weird little planetoids that grow by accreting other people’s habits and ideas and styles and tics and jokes and phrases and tunes and hopes and fears as if they were meteorites that came soaring out of the blue, collided with us, and stuck.  What at first is an artificial, alien mannerism slowly fuses into the stuff of our self, like wax melting in the sun, and gradually becomes as much a part of us as ever it was of someone else (and that person may very well have borrowed it from someone else to begin with).  Although my meteorite metaphor may make it sound as if we are victims of random bombardment, I don’t mean to suggest that we willingly accrete just any old mannerism onto our sphere’s surface – we are very selective, usually borrowing traits that we admire or covet – but even our style of selectivity is itself influenced over the years by what we have turned into as a result of our repeated accretions.  And what was once right on the surface gradually becomes buried like a Roman ruin, growing closer and closer to the core of us as our radius keeps increasing.  All of this suggests that each of us is a bundle of fragments of other people’s souls, simply put together in a new way.  But of course not all contributors are represented equally.  Those whom we love and who love us are the most strongly represented inside us, and our “I” is formed by a complex collusion of all their influences echoing down the many years.”[ii]

The relevance of Hofstadter’s extended metaphor lies in its implication that a mindclone is very much a part of its biological original because so very much of it would be copied from the original.  If we are an agglomeration of other people, we surely must be much more an agglomeration of ourselves -- even as we evolve from month to month and year to year.   Our mindclones will be consolidations of ourselves, extensions of ourselves, and expansions of ourselves.  They will be “of ourselves” and hence we are on firm ethical ground when we consent to their conscious awakening.

Quite a different situation prevails for the creation of a non-mindclone beman.  Such consciousness is not an extension of anyone, but an entirely new idiosyncratic mixture of information and information processing patterns.  The creation of such consciousness could be ethically considered as an exercise of a person’s own personal autonomy only in terms of each person having a right to create new life, as with biological reproductive rights.

The Ethics of Practicality

In the film Singularity is Near, futurist Ray Kurzweil argues with environmentalist Bill McKibbon over the ethics of keeping people alive as long as technology makes a good quality of life possible.  McKibbon says he is worried about the ethics of avoiding death.  Kurzweil responds, “I don’t think people are going to wax philosophical if they are healthy but 120 years old, and a government official says they have to die.”  The clear implication is “hell no.” 

Similarly, I started a truck locating company called Geostar back in the 1980s.  At first people wrung their hands over the ethics of monitoring the truck drivers’ locations via satellite.  Many thought the drivers would rip the satellite locators off their cab roofs.  Instead, the drivers embraced the technology because it enabled them to make much more money.  The satellite tracking technology permitted trucking company dispatchers to know at all times if locator-equipped drivers were close to the locations newly called-in loads.  Not a single locator was ripped off the thousands of trucks using our service.

I think practically speaking the benefits of having a mindclone will be so enticing that any ethical dilemma will find a resolution.  With mindclones we are offering people the opportunity to cram twice as much life into each day, absorb twice as many interesting things and continue living beyond the days of their bodies – with a practical hope of future transplantation via downloading into a new body.  I doubt that those who wax philosophically about the ethics of mindcloning will win many arguments.  People will want their mindclones, like we want smartphones, especially as they become cheaper and better.

There will be different companies competing to offer mindclone-creating mindware.   As described in Questions 12 and 16, they will need some sort of regulatory approval in order to legally sell their mindware (as opposed to black market sales).  The public will be reluctant to permit cyber-consciousness to arise in great numbers without some guarantee of its safety and efficacy, e.g., lack of psychoses in mindclones.  Certainly the public will only accept the citizenship of mindclones that are created from mindware that has been certified by an expert government agency to produce mindclones that are mentally equivalent to their biological originals (assuming adequate mindfiles).

I think it is unlikely that cyber-consciousness will be accepted as real consciousness until it has manifested itself, probably many times over, and been shown to be persuasive in media interviews and court cases.  Hence, it will be difficult to hold up experimental development of cyber-consciousness because regulators will not believe there is any real sentience to worry about – “just code.”  Yet, once cyber-consciousness has appeared, and been generally accepted, then the ethics of its development is a moot point.

Thus, practically speaking, the first mindclones will arise without much (or any formal) ethical protection during their development.  Before the mindware that produced these mindclones can be generally marketed to the public, as certified to produce mindclone citizen extensions of biological originals, government agencies will require safety and efficacy testing.  Specifically, government agencies will want proof that the mindware produces a healthy mind, and one that is practically indistinguishable from the mind of the biological original with an adequate size mindfile.  Government agencies will not give their blessings to such proof unless it is developed ethically.

Ethical guidelines for developing mindclones will include a requirement of consent for the creation of a conscious being.  As to the creation of mindclones, the consent of the biological original will likely be acceptable.  As to the creation of bemans, there will be a more challenging pathway.  Ethical review boards will need to be persuaded that the beman minds are not suffering during the process of accruing cyber-consciousness.  This is not an insuperable barrier.   However, it will require a much more deliberate development pathway based upon numerous graduated introductions of elements of cyber-consciousness, such as autonomy, empathy, identity and software bridges amongst these elements.

The bottom line is that ethical considerations favor a more rapid introduction of mindclones than non-mindclone bemans.  Ultimately, however, the seeming catch-22 of how does a consciousness consent to its own creation can be solved.

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[i] D. Dennett, Kinds of Minds, New York: BasicBooks, 1996, pp. 166-68.

[ii] D. Hofstadter, I Am A Strange Loop, p. 251-52.

22. HOW CAN A MINDCLONE BE AN EXACT COPY OF A PERSON’S MIND?

“Ordinary men don't have much stomach for reality--even more so, horror. Memory is typically repressed or displaced.” Sigmund Freud

“Of all liars, the smoothest and most convincing is memory.” Folk Saying


“What should they know of England, who only England know?” Rudyard Kipling

It can’t be. Even a so-called “identical twin” is not an identical twin. Even if one’s DNA is the same as another person, as with identical twins, there are differences in terms of when particular genes within that DNA are turned on and off. These differences are due to a bio-chemical process known as methylation (meaning the attachment of triggering molecules to genes within our DNA), which is encoded outside of our DNA in something called the epigenome. Even if two people have identical DNA, they will not have identical epigenomes, and hence the timing and magnitude of the expression of their DNA into a body will be different. The epigenome does not change things enough to prevent two identical twins from looking the same, but it will change things enough to prevent identical twins from always getting the same genetically-predisposed diseases.

When one of two identical twins is exposed to a different pathogen than the other, the two twins’ immune systems will no longer be quite the same. Random errors in DNA copying that the cell fails to correct will occur during cell replication in one twin but not the other. We have 23 billion red blood cells alone (out of tens of trillions of human DNA-bearing cells in total). Even with our amazing human bodies, this leaves a lot of room for errors that crack the identicalness of so-called identical twins (an estimated 100,000 DNA copying mistakes occur daily based on a rate of about 3 uncorrected base pair errors per cell replication). Furthermore, we have ten times as many bacteria in and on our bodies as we have cells derived from our parents DNA. These bacteria, at least in absolute number, are most of us, and yet there is nothing identical about the specific bacteria populations that colonize identical twins.

Identical twins still feel that they are twins even though their bodies are not really identical. Each of us feels that we are the same body even though our own body is not identical day after day. Won’t these immaterial differences be just as irrelevant to minds as they are to bodies?

The interesting question is not whether a mindclone is an exact copy of its original, but how different can they be without losing a common identity? It is impossible for a mindclone and a biological original to share every single memory. Even biological originals do not have the same memories from day to day, and surely not from year to year. Yet, memories are crucially important to identity. In the words of memory expert Prof. James McGaugh of UC Irvine:

“We are, after all, our memories. It is our memory that enables us to value everything else we possess. Lacking memory, we would have no ability to be concerned about our hearts, hair, lungs, libido, loved ones, enemies, achievements, failures, incomes or income taxes. Our memory provides us with an autobiographical record and enables us to understand and react appropriately to changing experiences. Memory is the ‘glue’ of our personal existence.”

Prof. McGaugh’s cogent summary leaves bare the fact that our personal identity exists as more than one set of memories. For example, we need not remember everything about an enemy in order to remember that someone is an enemy. We need not remember everything about our income, or taxes, in order to remember that we have income and pay taxes. Indeed, the key to healthy memory is the largely automatic process of selecting what little to remember and what mostly to forget. For a mindclone to be us, to have the same ‘glue’ of our personal existence, means that the mindclone needs to share our most important memories – those that are retained because of the emotional contexts in which they were created or because of the significant repetitive effort we put into their formation – as well as the gist of our idiosyncratic selection process for what is worthy of remembering, and for how long. As that godfather of psychology William James so presciently observed:

“Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built…If we remembered everything, we should, on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take as long for us to recall a space of time as it took the original time to elapse, and we should never get ahead with our thinking. ”

It will be a crucially important element of mindware design to ensure that most things are forgotten, and that the settings for the memory selection algorithm must closely match those of the biological original. Mindware will set its selection algorithm for each person by first processing their mindfile and comparing the details a person evidences memory of (such as in digitized records of voice, video and images) with databases of the kinds of details that could have been remembered about each topic. For example, if a person’s digitally recorded conversations (part of their mindfile) refer in detail to sports scores of the past week, but only sketchily to sports scores of the past month, then a curve of the selection algorithm can be determined with respect to sports scores. If another topic area reveals a greater degree of recall, then for topics with comparable emotional importance (as indicated in their mindfile) a different curve of the selection algorithm will be determined. Ultimately the mindware will employ a memory selection algorithm that first categorizes inputs by a factor that correlates well with the degree and duration of detail that is recalled (as indicated in their mindfile), and then forgets those inputs in accordance with a time curve that applies to that and similar factors. The algorithm will also accommodate memory adjuvants, such as especially high impact, emotional or repetitive experiences. The memory selection algorithm will be modeled closely on the way psychological studies have shown human minds to actually work.

Over one hundred years ago Hermann Ebbinghaus discovered, as shown in the chart below, that humans typically forget more than half the information they are exposed to in an hour, and retain only about a fifth of received information after a few days. With so much forgotten, a mindclone cannot be an exact copy of someone’s mind because every mind is itself constantly changing in its repertoire of memories. What is important is that the pattern of selective forgetting be comfortably similar – similar enough for a biological original to say of eir mindclone: “ey is I and I am ey.”

Clearly, a biological original and eir mindclone will not remember most specific events in precisely the same way for precisely the same duration. But I don’t think this makes them different people. We humans don’t remember events precisely the same way when we were young than when we were old, or when we are tired and when we are alert, or when we are happy and when we are sad. But we are still the same person. What is important is whether our core memories are the same, which they will be, as these will be recorded in our mindfile. What is also important is whether our general pattern of forgettng things is comparable, not precisely the same. That too can be achieved via the aforementioned algorithm.

People are remarkably ready to alter their ability to forget things. The robust market in supplements to improve memory and learning aids to diminish forgetting are good proofs of this. Hence, having a mindclone that is somewhat better, or somewhat worse, at remembering things makes them no less the same identity as you. People may find themselves pleasantly surprised to be remembering more as a mindclone than as a human, or disturbed to be doing so. If it is a problem, they can go to a cyberpsychologist and have their algorithms adjusted so that they are comfortable with their degree of forgetfulness.

Do We Really Know Who We Are?

In asking how a mindclone can really be a copy of our brain we face a bit of a dilemma. We cannot know whether there is a copy of our mind until there is a mindclone. We can then observe it respond to the world and determine whether, in fact, it responds the way we would respond. If so, mark one down for “good copy.” However, as a biological original, we cannot know if the mindclone is actually thinking the same thoughts and feeling the same feelings as are we. We can only make a best guess based on our conversations with the mindclone.

As the mindclone, we realize we are a mindclone and can assess how close we are to the biological original by comparing eir responses to the world with how we would be predisposed to respond. If very similar, then mark one down for “I am really a good mindclone. I am just like my biological original.” But we cannot really know if our internal thoughts are the same as the biological original’s thoughts. We can only make a best guess based on our conversations with the biological original.

I think these best guesses are good enough to have confidence that the mindclone and biological original have similar enough internal states to be the same person. The main reason I think this is based upon my experience with people that I love and who profess love for me. Because I am not the mind of my spouse, or my mother, I cannot know directly whether they really love me or not. However, based on our conversations, and actions, I am totally convinced that they think of me the way I think of them – with greatest loving concern for the other’s happiness and health. Beyond that, I believe they are focusing on being satisfactorily occupied during the day. Because we are so close, I believe we can infer much of each other’s internal states. 

On the other hand, many other people say “Martine, I love you.” However, I don’t feel that I understand their internal states. I’m not close enough to them. Their expressions of love are far short of the comprehensive relationship of shared experiences that I would need to infer their internal state. Indeed, over the years, people who said they love me have done things that I consider to be utterly surprising, if not shocking. Clearly, I did not know their internal states. To the contrary, the unexpected activities of my mother or my spouse were never shocking. They were behaviors I could fully see them doing based upon my understanding of their internal state.

The point here is that sometimes, if two people are close enough, an internal state of a person can be largely inferred from their observable actions. When the two people become as close as a mindclone and an original, which is far closer than a spouse or mother, inferring their internal state becomes second nature. When the internal state of another is second nature to one’s own internal state we have a difference that does not make a difference. When “I think like you think and you think like I think” then we are one personal identity.

We may well end up knowing ourselves best as mindclones, and we may well end up knowing the mindclones better than they know themselves. This is because it is hard see oneself from oneself, but with just a little bit of distance, the self comes into sharp relief. We earth dwellers never appreciated who we were so well as when we received the photograph from space of our blue-and-white planet suspended in inky black space.

And hence mindcloning is not about being accurate in every memory, in every thought pattern and in every emotion as to a biological original. It is, instead, about feeling that there is a oneness of personal identity between the two – a oneness that comes from a preponderance of common memories, emotions and patterns of thinking, selecting and forgetting. Philosophers sometimes refer to this as a continuity of self. As the 30-year-old self knows the 20-year-old self, though they are of course not the same, so the mindclone will know the biological original. A difference that makes no difference is not a meaningful difference.

12. WHAT IF THE MINDWARE IS BUGGY AND THE MINDCLONE IS NOT LIKE THE BIOLOGICAL ORIGINAL?

I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this. - Emo Phillips

In physical cloning experiments with sheep and other species the large majority of the cloned animals are sickly, often so much so that they do not live long. Why should we expect it to be any different with mindclones? Wouldn’t it be cruel to create sickly mindclones? Wouldn’t that be like intentionally creating autistic, schizophrenic or insane people?

Most of us can “get it” that the coming wave of mindclones are like thinking, feeling, being versions of phone voices we transmit today. They will actually be us, not just a telephonic echo of us, because they will be based on a good enough re-creation of our mind – a re-creation of our mind that would fool anyone, including ourselves, that it was ourselves. But no fooling is involved; instead, by re-creating our mind in software we will have cloned our identity and thereafter operate as a multi-presence identity.

Exactly how mindware will pull this off from mindfiles still seems magical, but strange technological wonders surround us. Indeed, just how does my voice pass from my mobile to someone across the country while we are both driving highway speeds? As Arthur C. Clarke once said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Magicians do make mistakes. What will happen when mindware makes mistakes? What kind of being is the software person who was supposed to be my mindclone but is not? What if the BNA gets mangled, as DNA sometimes does? And how and when will anyone know whether my mindclone is really I or a mistake or a pretender?

The answers to these questions flow from an everyday situation we face as flesh people: how does anyone authenticate their identity? What do we do when a cop, security guard, potential employer or government official wants to know who we are? We flash our ID, be it a driver’s license, passport or some other kind of official document. These IDs prove that we are who we say we are. They attest to the fact that some expert process certified our identity. They will probably soon be replaced with a biometric equivalent, such as a thumbprint, retina, voice or other bodily scan. Mindclones will also need an ID to prove that an expert process verified they are part of someone’s identity.

In order for a mindclone to receive an ID it will have to prove its identity, just as we do when we get our first driver’s license or passport. Of course the mindclone’s ID will be a digital, virtual ID card, but nevertheless as verifiable and forgery-resistant as its biometric equivalent. For a mindclone to prove its identity it will be necessary for three things to be offered to a government vital records agency:

1) The mindclone’s original swears that ey (“ey” is pronounced “ee” as in tree, and replaces “he” or “she”) and the mindclone share the same identity. In legalese this means the flesh original from whose mindfile the mindclone was created will need to attest that the mindclone has, over a period of not less than a year, shown it has the same mannerisms, personality, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values as the biological original. In other words, the flesh original needs to go out on a limb and own up to having a doubled identity. The flesh original will need to legally accept that whatever rewards or penalties befall the mindclone also befall the flesh original.

2) The mindclone will have to present evidence that the mindfile from which it was created, and the mindware with which it was created, meet certain minimum standards set by the ID-granting agency. For example, the government will require that mindclones are based upon mindfiles of adequate size to ensure they comprehensively reflect the mind of a flesh original. Similarly, the government will want to certify mindware in terms of its capability to safely and effectively reproduce a human mind, much as the government certifies pharmaceuticals and therapeutic devices as being safe and effective.

3) The ID-granting agency may well also require that one or more psychologists, expert in cyber-consciousness, also attest to the unity of identity between the flesh original and their mindclone. Professional standards will probably mandate that cyber-psychologists spend a fair amount of time (such as an hour a week) over not less than a year with the dual identities prior to issuing their certification opinion.

Any mindclone that can pass these three tests has the same mind as their original, with mind defined in the pragmatic, substrate-independent manner explained in Question #8. Small differences between the original mind and the mindclone are as irrelevant as are small differences in our own memory and personality from day-to-day and year-to-year. The reason for the one-year time periods mentioned in tests (1) and (3) is that humans feel comfortable when something persists over time. We feel that which endures is more likely to be real than faked. For example, before government agencies will change a transgendered person’s ID from one sex to another, and before surgeons will perform sex reassignment surgery, they generally require a letter from a psychologist attesting to the individual’s transgendered nature, based upon at least one year’s worth of therapy. Before an immigrant can become a citizen they need to spend a few years as a permanent resident and demonstrate lawfulness and a persistence of desire for citizenship.

This still leaves open the status of mindclones who fail the above tests, or have not yet completed them. Who or what are they? I believe they must be thought of as the parental responsibility of the person or organization who created them, until such time as they secure a unique ID for themselves as vitological persons, perhaps best called beme-humans (“be-man’s or “bemans” for short). The relationship between humans, bemans and mindclones is shown in the following Venn diagram.

The legal responsibilities of a parent for their children will be the legal responsibilities of a beman creator for eir (“eir” is pronounced “air” and replaces “his” and “her”) created bemans. Abandonment, infanticide and neglect will be as criminal for one’s bemans as for one’s flesh children. Intentionally creating a tortured beman could also subject the parents to “wrongful life” liability . Furthermore, beman actions could create civil or criminal liability for their creator – just as is the case between misbehaving flesh children and their parents.

There is no tenable alternative to this approach. Hypothetically, imagine that unsuccessful mindclones or bemans have the legal status of pets or property. This implies their existence could be ended by the whim of their creator or by a government-type agency, perhaps with some limitations based upon public sensitivities. However, this approach is equivalent to saying that it is OK to kill a humanly conscious being simply because ey did not turn out precisely as intended and is not made of flesh. I don’t believe it is realistic that society will countenance such behavior after witnessing bemans plead their innocence, acclaim their humanity and beg for their lives.

Because inchoate mindclones pose a substantial risk of trouble to a flesh human –like starting a fire on one’s property and hoping it doesn’t damage the neighborhood – I believe it will be very rare that such mistaken, non-certifiable mindclones are created. Nevertheless, when they are created, it will be like creating a child. You are responsible for the their wellbeing until legal adulthood. While this threshold is reached automatically, at 18 years, for humans, I believe it will be conditional, based upon satisfaction of government standards, for bemans. Once bemans receive an independent ID, they can be expected to have the same rights and obligations of any human, and will no longer be the responsibility of their creator. Of course, like any human, an adult beman may end up requiring social services – or forever require parental support -- if they cannot achieve independence.

Social services agencies are frequently criticized for failure to look after the best interests of mistreated human children. Yet, all would agree they perform a vital function. This function will need to expand so as to also look after the best interests of cyberconscious beings who are not considered a mindclone and have not yet been granted an independent identity. A society will try to do something to protect its most vulnerable members. As mindcloning leads us to accept cyberconsciousness, we will begin to feel that humanly conscious software beings – bemans – are also members of our society. They too are deserving of social protection.

The requirements for beman legal adulthood, and hence independence, will be similar to those described above for a mindclone. The government will want assurance that the beman was created using software tools certified to produce a humanly conscious being. I believe the government will also require the expert opinion of as many as three appropriately credentialed psychologists that the beman is equivalent to an adult human. It will be considered a parental responsibility to assist a beman in achieving legal adulthood, and the failure to make reasonable efforts to do so may well be a form of child abuse. Ultimately, social services agencies will have to assume the burden of assisting bemans from uncaring or unable parents to achieve legal adulthood. Some bemans will never be able to qualify for legal adulthood. Like the severely retarded, they will end up as wards of their families or of the state.

There are likely to be many cases of bemans ending up in a gray zone between not meeting normal government standards for full human rights (i.e., independent beman adulthood) but evidencing sentience, autonomy, empathy and value for their freedom. For example, bemans will be created with mindware capable of, but not certified by the government as, producing humanly conscious beings. As noted above, such individuals would be the parental responsibility of their creator, or if the creator is deficient in that regard, of a government social services agency. However, having been created with non-certified mindware, there will be a more difficult path to adult bemanhood and human rights. The situation is somewhat analogous to a dolphin or great ape asking, through a hypothetical brainwave-to-language translation device, to be left alone to enjoy their life. Humans in control will debate if dolphin or great ape DNA is really capable of producing a being that understands and values the rights they are seeking.

For this and other gray-zone cases I believe we will need to rely upon a panel of cyberconsciousness experts – mental health experts such as psychologists and medical ethicists certified in the new fields of mindfiles, mindware and mindclones. If such a panel agrees that a vitological being values human rights, then their determination should be legally validated with an adult beman ID card, notwithstanding their irregular (i.e., unapproved mindware) BNA. Cyberconsciousness panels such as these will be accessible over the web so that a beman who is feeling oppressed or trapped by eir creator has an avenue through which to obtain relief.

It is also possible that a certified, ID-bearing mindclone subsequently becomes buggy and diverges from the identity of its creator. This is analogous to mental illness and such a mindclone will have “neurocyber surgineers” (experts in mindware coding) to go to for the repair of its mindware. In the worst instances the mindclone’s original could either commit the mindclone to a software hospital for repair or terminate it in a socially acceptable fashion (i.e., without pain or suffering). This would not be murder because the mindclone is part of the biological original’s identity. The death of the mindclone does not end the life of the original, just as the death of the original does not end the life of the mindclone. In both instances, the multi-being identity lives on. On the other hand, ending the life of a non-mindclone beman will be considered a form of murder.

It seems ironic that if a mindclone is your simulacra, you may terminate it without legal sanction, whereas if it is of lesser capability than you, the same termination action will subject you to a charge of murder. On reflection, though, this is not so different from the very different ways that society treats suicide and infanticide, or trashing one’s own life versus trashing someone else’s. While suicide is officially illegal (except in limited circumstances), rarely is the person who botched their suicide prosecuted. Yet, even attempting to kill one’s baby (or older child) will generally result in prison time, at least in a mental ward. Almost asphyxiating yourself could result in psychiatric confinement, until you persuaded the keepers that you were no longer a threat to yourself. Almost asphyxiating your twin brother will result in mandatory jail time for attempted murder. Similarly, it is no crime to throw away one’s career in alcoholism or just stupid rash decisions. Yet, slandering, libeling or defrauding another person out of their career will have harsh legal consequences. The reason for these different kinds of outcomes is that society provides us with considerable latitude in what (harm) we do to ourselves (and by definition, ending your simulacra does not even harm your self). But society has very little tolerance for harming others (which would include, by definition, any beman that was not legally your mindclone).

In summary, a cyberconscious being can be created with a human-level or lesser CP. If they fall below the threshold of a human CP, they are a pet and will likely receive the limited protections against wanton cruelty that pets receive in modern society. This would generally be the case if the cyberconscious being was created with mindware not certified to produce human-level consciousness.

If, on the other hand, a beman was created, such as via the use of mindware certified to produce human-level CPs, they will receive the same kind of protections that human children receive. If after a year the beman can demonstrate unity of identity with a flesh original, then the beman can receive a legal identity as the mindclone of its original. Thereafter the flesh original can do with the mindclone (and vice versa) what he or she can do with their selves, for they are simply one being living across two forms or substrates.

On the other hand, if the beman cannot demonstrate unity of identity with a flesh original, then the beman remains the parental responsibility of its creator until such time as adulthood is achieved. Bemans who are abandoned by their creators will become government wards until they reach adulthood.

Every beman will get a birth certificate upon the creation of their consciousness. This legal identity will assume over time one of two legal forms: a new mindclone (in which the birth identity merges with that of a biological original), or an adult beman (in which the birth identity becomes an adult identity by virtue of the passage of time with parents or government surrogates, and satisfaction of government standards).

Mistakes of BNA may well be as common as mistakes of DNA. As a society we have learned the value of according appropriate respect to all humans, no matter how mistaken their DNA might be. With mindcloning that respect will be extended to bemans. We must respect the value of consciousness for all who value their consciousness.

The bottom line of playing with BNA is that one is playing with fire. Society will not long countenance disrespecting the dignity of a being. Consequently, while the freedom to create a mindclone, or even a novel beman, is part of our reproductive rights, and thus something to be steadfastly preserved, there are important corresponding obligations. Among those matching obligations are to avoid causing harm to the beings you create, and to raise any vitological children to independent adulthood. As with any rights, the failure to live up to the complementary obligations should result in sanctions that entail loss of the abused rights.

What Are Mindclones?

A mindclone is a software version of your mind. He or she is all of your thoughts, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values, and is experiencing reality from the standpoint of whatever machine their mindware is running on. Mindclones are mindfiles being used and updated by mindware that has been set to be a functionally equivalent replica of one’s mind. A mindclone is your software-based alter ego, doppelganger, or mental twin. If your body died, but you had a mindclone, you would not feel that you personally died, although the body would be missed more sorely than amputees miss their limbs .

We have absolutely no experience with mindclones. Never in history has there been anything like them. Hence, it is natural to find it difficult to understand the concept. From time immemorial we have thought of our identity as being limited to one instantiation, namely that contained within our body. To grasp mindcloning it is necessary to envision identity as being a unique pattern of thinking that can occur in two or more substrates or forms. If you can accept that a mind can be duplicated, with appropriate mindware and a rich enough mindfile, then you have accepted that a single identity can occur at least twice.

Now, it is certainly true that an easy distinction can be drawn between an original identity and that of its mindclone. Simply by virtue of being a copy, the mindclone is not the original, and hence it can be said that the mindclone does not have the same identity as the original. Yet, this is a distinction without significance. It is analogous to claiming that identity changes over time because people grow and acquire new experiences. While there is no doubt that our personality evolves, and our thoughts change, we are still the same person – the same identity.

So, why is it that we feel an uploaded version of our mind knows that it is an upload, and is thus not really us, whereas an aging version of our mind knows it is different from its youth, but is still definitely us? The reason is our deep-felt bias, based upon our entire human experience, that identity is substrate-specific. Some people take this so far as to believe that transplant recipients, especially of hearts, assume some of the identity of the organ donor.

With mindcloning we will have our first experience with the technological possibility of substrate-independent identity. It will take some time for society to adapt. Ultimately, though, most people will understand that just as a person’s voice can be in two places simultaneously via telephone, their identity can be in two places simultaneously via mindcloning.

When I have presented mindcloning in conferences there are usually one or two people who rush to the microphone after my talk. They are insistent that a mindclone cannot be the same person as the original because it is not the same person. The fault in this kind of reasoning is that it is a tautology, a circular form of argument that just restates itself. The “same person” is different from the “same body”, or substrate. While it is true that a mindclone is not the same body as the original person, it is the same mind. Hence, my questioners have difficulty because they think that a person is their body and I insist that a person is their mind.

Sometimes the questioners challenge me as follows: “If you created a mindclone, surely you would not agree to be killed in favor of your mindclone!” My reply is that I like my body quite a bit, and if my mindclone could be given one like mine or better (such as through some future medical technology), then I would not be any worse off, save for the trauma of the killing. The questioners are rarely satisfied; they simply do not accept that identity can remain constant across two or more substrates. Logically, however, they are in error. Assuming a mind can be replicated, such as with mindfiles and mindware, its identity would thereafter have in fact been altered to become a two-substrate version of the original one-substrate identity.

Another question that arises is for how long would a singular identity span two substrates? Each mind – the biological original and the mindclone – will surely have its own thoughts just as each of us has different thoughts from minute to minute. Indeed, this is sometimes used as an argument why mindclones do not share the identity of their original.

I believe a singular identity will always span the mindclone and its original. This is easier to appreciate when you consider that normally each of them will continuously synchronize their common mindfile, using high-speed links. Both parts of the single identity will take note of what the other has done. Perhaps fear of losing control over one’s life to a mindclone will dampen enthusiasm for creating them. As mindware gets ever better at making mindclones that are absolutely faithful psychological replicas this fear will dissipate. In any event, most people do not fail to get married out of fear that another person will have access to a joint bank account. And we will know our mindclones far better than we know our fiancées.

There will be instances in which the mindclone and the original do not update each other. Instead, the single identity decides, in conversation with itself (we biological originals do talk to ourselves, weighing pros and cons in our heads), to experience life separately. Like being dealt two 8s in a blackjack game, and deciding to split, some people and their mindclones will go separate ways. Even in such cases I believe we are speaking of a single identity. We must remember that both the biological original and the mindclone share a unique psychological profile based upon a mountain of mindfile data. They are the same person. The fact that they subsequently have many unique, perhaps life-changing experiences does not change either of their individual identities, and hence cannot have changed their common identity.

While the original and the mindclone will be very different after years of unique experiences, they will still be the same person. It will be as if you visited a close friend after first living ten years in Ethiopia, and then again after living ten years in China. On the first visit your friend would remark on how the Ethiopian experiences changed you, but would still recognize you as his friend. On the second visit your friend would see yet another version of you, this time changed by life in China. Once again, though, your friend would surely recognize you as the same person who first left for Ethiopia twenty years earlier. This is the power of an established set of mannerisms, personality, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values. Whatever changes will not be able to entirely mask the starting set of conditions. It is all but impossible to completely crawl out of an established mind.

Perhaps deciding to have a mindclone is analogous to having a child. Once the child is born, you will always be a parent. Similarly, once a mindclone is created, you will always be a dual-substrate identity. Many parents have little or nothing to do with their offspring, but neither the parent nor the offspring can get the parental relationship out of their mind. Their identity has permanently been altered to include the fact that they are part of a (good or bad) parent-offspring relationship. Analogously, even if a mindclone parts ways with their original, neither will ever be able to forget the fact that someone else with their same mind exists. The creation of a cognitive doppelganger is an identity-altering experience.

In summary, a mindclone is a fully functional, software-based copy of your mind, residing on computer substrate. You and your mindclone will think the same thoughts, and feel the same feelings, as well as having unique ones. In most instances the two of you will be wirelessly linked to a common mindfile so there will be a constant synchronization of cognition and experiences. When mindclones arise in the next few years, as a consequence of our burgeoning mindfiles and rapidly developing mindware, we will get used to the idea that identity is replicable. A person will be able to be in two places at the same time.

How will we really know that our mindclone is conscious, actually feeling the same fears, and dreaming the same dreams, as are we? It is easy to imagine a mindclone just doing an amazing job of mimicking our consciousness, like some chatbots today mimic human conversational behavior. Is the mindclone my real life, or a compelling, tear-jerking “movie” of my real life? These questions of consciousness, and of cyberconsciousness, are answered next.

WHAT IS MINDWARE?

Mindware is operating system software that (a) thinks and feels the way a human mind does, and (b) sets its thinking and feeling parameters to match those discernable from a mindfile. Mindware relies upon an underlying mindfile the way Microsoft Word relies upon a textfile. When appropriate parameters are set for mindware it becomes aware of itself and a cyberconscious entity is created.

The richness of the cyberconscious entity’s thoughts and feelings are a function of its source mindfile. In the extreme case of no mindfile, the mindware thinks and feels as little as a newborn baby. If the mindware’s parameters are set haphazardly, or shallowly, a severely dysfunctional cyberconsciousness will result. In the normal case, however, of mindware having access to a real person’s mindfile, the resultant cyberconsciousness will be a mindclone of that person. It will think and feel the same, have the same memories, and be differentiated only by its knowledge that it is a mindclone and its substrate-based different abilities.

Is mindware achievable? Yes, because our human thoughts and emotions are patterns amongst symbols. These patterns can be the same whether the symbols are encoded in our brains or in our mindfiles. The patterns are so complex that today only certain threads are available as software. For example, software that thinks how to get from our house to a new restaurant is now common, but didn’t exist just a decade ago. Every year the range of symbol association achievable by software leaps forward. It is merely a matter of decades before symbol association software achieves the complexity of human thought and emotion.



The preceding paragraph makes two claims deserving of expanded attention: that our mental states are merely a matter of patterns amongst symbols, and that such patterns could be replicated in software. Let’s turn first to how the mind works, and then to its possible replication in mindware.

Consider what might be our psychology if it were not patterns among symbols? What else is there? One idea, associated with the Australian philosopher David Chalmers, is that there is some sort of a metaphysical spirit that animates our thoughts and feelings. Another idea, propounded by the British mathematician Roger Penrose, is that our consciousness arises from quantum physical transitions deep within sub-microscopic intra-neural structures. In neither case, nor in many variants of each case, is it possible to disprove the claim because they are based upon essentially invisible, non-testable phenomena. Similarly, it cannot be disproved, at this time, that consciousness arises from sufficiently complex patterns among symbols. These patterns are too complex to either be sorted out in the brain or replicated in software.

You, the reader, need to take a position or to remain agnostic on the source of consciousness. I’m sure that many people will try to create consciousness by replicating in software the mental associations that are a hallmark of our thoughts and feelings. From there philosophers will argue over whether cyberconsciousness is real or not, as they argue over the consciousness of cats and dogs. But just as most humans believe their pets think, plan and feel, most humans will see consciousness in mindware if it resembles closely enough the same consciousness they see in themselves.

Computer scientist Marvin Minsky is convinced that emotions are just another form of thought. He believes feelings, no less than ideas, are based upon complex associations amongst mental symbols, each of which are ultimately rooted in a bunch of phonetically or visually specific neurons. It is today impossible to prove him right or wrong. The question is whether we believe that entertainment companies and customer service providers will persistently pursue the creation of emotion-capable software products – interfaces with feelings. I am convinced that the answer is yes, because there will be a large market for human-like software. Whether software-based emotions are real emotions is a question for philosophers, such as whether emotions arise from patterns of symbols or from metaphysical spirits or from quantum physical sub-atomic particle states. Everyday people will feel the software-based emotions are real if they seem as real as those of their relatives, neighbors and friends.

The second question to be answered is if thoughts and feelings are based upon complex patterns amongst symbols, how exactly can those patterns be discerned and replicated with mindware? Every symbol in our mind – such as the phoneme-specific neurons that, strung together, we learned very young sounded like “apple” – is linked to many other symbols. For “apple” those other symbols are its various images and generalized image, its taste, and its various appearances in our life (orchards, produce departments, pictures in books). Some of those associations are positive, some negative and some neutral. Each of these associations can be replicated in software, along with positive or negative values and probability weightings. Mindware is software that creates a cyberconscious version of you with the same associations, values and weightings to every symbol within your mindfile that you evidence having based upon your saved data. Where data is missing, mindware interpolates answers, makes reasoned guesses and imports general cultural information relevant to your socio-cultural niche. When the mindware converses with someone, the symbol apple will be triggered if it would have been triggered in your own mind, and it will enter into the discussion no differently than how it would have entered into your discussion. In this regard, the mindware gives rise to your mindclone.

Mindware is a kind of operating system that can be saved into billions of unique states, or combinations of preferences, based upon the unique ways of thinking and feeling that are discernable from your mindfile. Dozens of personality types, traits and/or factors, and gradations amongst these, yield more unique combinations than there are living people. Similarly, dozens of alphabet letters and ways to arrange them can create more unique names than there are people on the planet.

For example, people can be of several different personality orientations – introvert, extrovert, aggressive, nurturing and so on. Most psychologists say there are just five basic flavors or “factors”, but others say there are more. Nevertheless, virtually all agree on some finite, relatively small number of basic psychological forms taken to greater or lesser degrees by human minds. Multiplying out these possibilities would provide mindware with a vast number of different personality frameworks from which to choose a best fit – based upon a rigorous analysis of the person’s mindfiles -- for grafting mannerisms, recollections and feelings onto.

To be a little quantitative, imagine mindware adopts the currently popular view that there are five basic personality traits, each of which remain quite stable in one’s adult life: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extrovertedness, Agreeability and Neuroticism. Literally thousands of English words have been associated with each of these five traits, but suppose for sake of example we say that each person would be scored by mindware only from -100 to +100 on each of these traits (from an analysis of their mindfile). For example, an individual who was definitely prone to impulsive decisions, but no more than average among millions of analyzed mindfiles, might be assigned a Neuroticism personality trait score of +50. The formula for the number of unique personality frameworks available to mindware, known as a “repeating combination”, would be ST, where S = the number of possible personality trait scores and T = the number of possible personality traits. For our example, ST = 2015 = 328,080,401,001. These 328 billion personality frameworks are enough to ensure personality uniqueness, which also means they are likely to ensure a very good fit for each person. The more sizes a pair of jeans comes in, the more likely it is that everyone will find a pair that fits them just right!

The point here is not that there are precisely five personality traits, or exactly 201 discernable degrees of possessing each such trait. Instead, what is being shown is that a relatively easy problem for mindware to solve can result in a practically unlimited amount of individualized personality frameworks. Specifically, mapping the words, images and mannerisms from a lifetime mindfile into a matrix of personality trait buckets and associated positive or negative strengths for such bucket will produce more than enough unique personality templates to assure a very good fit to the original personality.


Mindware works like a police sketch artist. They are trained to know that there are a limited number of basic forms the human face can take. Based upon inputs from eye witnesses (analogous to processing a mindfile) the artist first chooses a best fit basic facial form, and then proceeds to graft upon it unique details. Often there is an iterative, back-and-forth process of sketching and erasing as additional details from eyewitnesses refine an initial choice of basic facial form. In the same way mindware will be written to iteratively reevaluate its best-fit personality structure based upon additional details from continued analyses of a mindfile.

Mindware will have settings that instruct the duration of its iterative process. After much iteration the mindware will determine that an asymptotic limit has been reached. It will do this by running thousands of “mock” conversations with tentative versions of a replicated mind, and comparing these with actual conversations or conversational fragments from an original’s mindfile. The iterative process will end once the mind it has replicated from the mindfiles it has been fed has reached what is called “Turing-equivalence” with the original mind. This means that the test established by the early 20th century software pioneer Alan Turing has been satisfied. That test says that if it is not possible to tell whether a conversant is a computer or a person, then the computer is psychologically equivalent to a person. It would be as if the police sketch artist produced a drawing that was as good as a photograph.

The rapid ferreting out of mindware settings from a mindfile has recently been made more feasible thanks to pattern recognition, voice recognition and video search software. It is now possible on Google Video to search videos by typing in desired words. Mindware will build upon this capability. It will analyze mindfile video for all words, phrases and indications of feeling. These will be placed into associational database arrays, best-matched to personality traits and strengths, and then used to best-fit a personality profile to the peculiar characteristics evidenced in the analyzed mindfile. Keep in mind we humans have just a half-dozen basic expressions, only a dozen or two emotions, a facial recognition limit in the low hundreds and an inability to remember more than 10% of what we heard or saw the previous day. Furthermore, the personality template that mindware puts together for us is blanketed with all of the factual specifics from our mindfile. While this is rocket science, it is rocket science that we can, and soon will, do. Mindware is a moon landing, and we did that in the sixties.

Just because we are unique does not mean that we cannot be replicated. An original essay can still be copied. Mindware is a kind of duplicating machine for the mind. Because the mind is vastly more complex and less accessible than a document it is not something that can simply be optically scanned to replicate. Instead, to scan a mind one must scan and analyze the digital output of that mind – its mindfile – while iteratively generating a duplicate of that mind relying on associated databases of human universals and socio-cultural contexts. It does sound like an amazing piece of software, but no more amazing to us than would be our photocopying machines to Abraham Lincoln or our jumbo jets to the Wright Brothers. And software technology is advancing much more quickly today than machine technology was back then.

Operating system software with mindware’s number of settings commonly run on laptop computers. The challenge is to write mindware so that it makes associations and interacts as does the human brain. This is not a challenge of possibility, but a challenge of practice, design and iterative improvement of approximations. Mindware is just really good software written for the purpose of replicating human thoughts and feelings.