Guest Post: The Computational Theory of Mind by Jason Resch
According to the computational theory of mind, the conscious state must be identified not with any particular physical manifestation (body), but rather, with some abstract informational/computational pattern. At first glance, this seems like a trivial distinction, but on a deeper inspection we see that it yields many properties which religions typically ascribe to souls: It has no definitive physical location, no associated mass or energy. In a sense, it is immaterial . Moreover, none of the states of an abstract computation bear any dependence on physical properties, so in this sense it might also be called non-physical . It can survive the death of the body (just as a story can survive the death of a book containing it), and be resurrected into new bodies via a transfer of this "immaterial" pattern, e.g. mind uploading. By replicating the pattern of one's mind, we recover the consciousness (the imagined teletransporters of science fiction exploi...