Mass production of my beautiful self

Can brains be copied? Or more precisely, will we be able in some distant future to make copies of the information contained in our heads for some future use. I am sure top secret scientists are working on it and one day we will learn that the illuminating papers written on philosophy of mind were for some scholars only a front for some substantial undercover operation paid for by the military (mind uploading, whole brain emulation, mind transfer).
But we must not expect that one day we will be able to pack in our mindes and wake up in a different, possibly more superior bodies. Subjectivity cannot be copied, now or in the future, I think. Just imagine what happens if they make 100 copies of me. I would have to wake up in 100 bodies, if they put me into all of them. I would have to listen to a cacophony of thoughts, from different selves, less and reminding me and going their separate ways. Or if I wake up in one body, while should be this particular one, and no other. How to keep just one loudspeaker on, and turn off the remaining ones.
I better remain mortal.
Dualist without God.

Mind, God and immortality

On my Polish blog I wrote about the difference between the old philosophising about the soul and modern mind/body problem. The concept of the soul appears in inquiries about human immortality, while the concept of more or less non-material mind is to explain an equally puzzling miracle of private access to our minds, introspection, etc. Our minds need not be immortal, while the concept of soul more often than not implies immortality. While we have direct access to our minds, Cicero thinks that we do not have direct access to our souls. We can learn about them indirectly, the same as we learn about God.

That our inquiries about the human mind bear few consequences for the issue of our immortality is shown by the following quotation from Hume. Hume starts with the panpsychism of the stoics (which nowadays seems to be restored by David Chalmers, who thinks that consciousness is more dispersed in the world than usually expected).

“…admitting a spiritual substance to be dispersed throughout the universe, like ethereal fire or the Stoics and to be the only inherent subject of the thought, we have reason to conclude from analogy that nature uses it after the manner she does the other substance, matter. She employs it as a kind or paste or clay; modifies it into a variety of forms and existences; dissolves after a time each modification and from its substance erects a new form. As the same material substance may successively compose the bodies of all animals, the same spiritual substance may compose their minds. Their consciousness or the system of thought, which they form during life, may be continually dissolved by death. And nothing interests them in the new modification. The most positive asserters of mortality of the soul never denied the immortality of its substance. And that an immaterial substance, as well as material may lose its memory or consciousness appears, in part, from experience, if the soul be immaterial”.

David Hume Of the Immortality of the Soul (page one or two)


Let me put very simply: you do not need to believe in God or immortality to be a dualist.