Religion and technology. To celebrate World Backup Day (31 March), Scott Midson reminds us that human consciousness might one day be backed up. "Hans Moravec, in his book Mind Children (1988) originally proposed the notion of the 'upload', which has been picked up in lots of sci-fi since (e.g. Transcendence, The Matrix). The key question that I and others explore here is whether we’ll stay human if we upload ourselves to machines.
Antonio Spadaro, in his book Cybertheology (2014) thinks that part of being human, as well having a physical body, is our ability to forget things, which the upload (and the related notion of the ‘cloud’) would challenge. An episode of the first series of Black Mirror, ‘The Entire History of You’, plays on this idea – as well as others about the ethics of uploading parts of ourselves to machines (see ‘San Junipero’, ‘White Christmas’)." Scott was a contributor to Irwin and Johnson, eds, Black Mirror and Philosophy: Dark Reflections (2019), which picks up on these themes further, and is the author of Cyborg Theology: Humans, Technology and God (2017).
