Редактирование: Transhumanist FAQ Live (раздел)

===Won’t things like uploading, cryonics, and AI fail because they can’t preserve or create the soul?===

If we answer this question from a religious standpoint, there is no clear ground for ruling out these technologies as incompatible with teachings about the soul. There is no scriptural basis in the Bible for assuming that God can’t get to our soul if we freeze our physical body, nor is there a single word in the Christian or Jewish scriptures, or the Quran, the Dhammapada, or the Tao Teh Ching, that prohibits cryonics. Or, for someone who believes in reincarnation, there are no traditional beliefs that say reincarnation is prevented when someone freezes to death or whose body is frozen after clinical death. If there is a soul and it enters the body at conception, then cryonics may well work – after all, human embryos have been frozen, stored for extended periods, and then implanted in their mothers, resulting in healthy children (who presumably have souls). Uploading and machine intelligence may reveal new things to us about the soul works. It is interesting to note that the Dalai Lama, when asked, did not rule out the possibility of reincarnating into computers (Hayward et al. 1992), pp. 152f.

While the concept of a soul is not used much in a naturalistic philosophy such as transhumanism, many transhumanists do take an interest in the related problems concerning personal identity (Parfit 1984) and consciousness (Churchland 1988). These problems are being intensely studied by contemporary analytic philosophers, and although some progress has been made, e.g. in Derek Parfit’s work on personal identity, they have still not been resolved to general satisfaction.

References:

Churchland, P. Matter and Consciousness. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988).

Hayward, J. et at. Gentle Bridges: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on the Sciences of the Mind. (Shambala Publications, 1992).

Parfit, D. Reasons and Persons. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).