Mind transfer

In transhumanism and science fiction, mind transfer (also referred to as mind uploading or mind downloading, depending on one's point of reference), or whole body emulation refers to the hypothetical transfer of a human mind, body, and environment to an artificial substrate.

Mind transfer in science fiction

Mind transfer is a theme in many works of science fiction, including:

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• Garth Nix's "Shade's Children", in which Shade is an uploaded consciousness acting in loco parentis to teenagers to help save them from evil Overlords. Shade contemplates at times how human he is, especially as his personality degenerates during the story, and whether or not he should have humanity.
• Roger MacBride Allen's The Modular Man portrays the interior experience of a personality(David Bailey)uploaded into a vacuum cleaner and his legal battle for recognition as a legal personality. See also Political ideas in science fiction.
• Michael Berlyn's The Integrated Man, where a human mind, or part of it(or even just a set of skills)can be encoded on a chip and inserted into a special socket at the base of the brain.
• The Simultaneous Man by Ralph Blum, where brainwashing and psychosurgery techniques are used to create a copy of the experiences and memories of one person in the body of another.
• Kiln People by David Brin, postulates a future where people can create clay duplicates of themselves with all their memories up to that time. The duplicates only last 24 hours, and the original can then choose whether or not to upload the ditto's memories back into himself afterward. Most people use dittos to do their work.
• Permutation City and Diaspora by Greg Egan, where "Copies" are made by computer simulation of scanned brain physiology. See also Egan's "jewelhead" stories, where the mind is transferred from the organic brain to a small, immortal backup computer at the base of the skull, the organic brain then being surgically removed.
• Similar to Egan's "jewelhead" stories, Battle Angel Alita, also known as Gunnm, has a major plot point, in which a closely guarded secret of the elite city of Tiphares/Zalem is that it's citizens, after being eugenically screened and rigorously tested in a maturity ritual, have their brains scanned, removed and replaced with chips. When revealed to a Tipharean/Zalem citizen, the internalized philosophical debate causes most citizens to go insane.
• William Gibson's Neuromancer, in which a hacking tool used by the main character is an artificial infomorph of a notorious cyber-criminal, Dixie Flatline.
• Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon and other Takeshi Kovacs books, where everyone (except Catholics) has a ?cortical stack? implanted at the base of their skull, soon after being born. The device then records all your memories and experiences in real-time. The stack can be "resleeved" in another body, be it a clone or otherwise, and/or backed up digitally at a remote location.
• Charles Platt's The Silicon Man, where an FBI agent who has stumbled on top-secret project called LifeScan is destructively uploaded against his will. Realistically describes the constraints of the process and machinery.
• Where is the travellers home? by a Russian author Aleksandr Mirer describes a variant of the theory - a world where the minds are of three types and the more subtle level of minds can be uploaded to a body without removing the other mind it possesses - it just overrides some of its functions.
• John Sladek's satirical The Muller-Fokker Effect, in which a human mind could be recorded on cassette tapes and then imprinted on a human body using tailored viruses.
• Red Dwarf, where a person's memories and personality can be recorded in just a few seconds and, upon their death, they can be recreated as a holographic simulation. Arnold Rimmer is an example of such a person.
• Tad Williams' Otherland quadrilogy, which focuses on the activities of a secret society whose nefarious goals are to create a virtual reality network where they will be uploaded and in which they will live as gods. Otherland contains a very hard SF approach to the topic, but balances the hard approach with fantastical adventures of the protagonists within the virtual reality network.
• Iain M. Banks's Culture novels make extensive reference to the transfer of mind-states.
• The computer game "Independence War", in which the player is assisted by a recreation of CNV-301 Dreadnought's former captain, who is quite bitter about having been recreated without his consent.
• In the TV series Stargate SG-1, the Asgard cheat death by transferring their minds into new clone bodies. The mind of Thor, the high commander of the Asgard fleet, was for a time transferred into the computer of a Goa'uld spaceship. In other episodes, many of the main characters have had their minds transferred to computers, robots, and virtual reality, including one episode in which the primary characters temporarily switch bodies.
• The television series Battlestar Galactica (2003) features human-like androids which, upon the destruction of their physical bodies, transfer their conciousness into another identical body somewhere else in the universe.
• Anne McCaffrey's Ship series is about children born with severe physical handicaps whose healthy brains are placed into spaceships and other mechanical shells.
• In Carlos Atanes' ' the Sisterhood of Metacontrol transfer Angeline's conciousness into the virtual world of the Réseau Céleste.