Our identity is not just about our internal memories, beliefs, hopes and fears. We are made up equally of our environment, of things outside ourselves – for example, by how we react to people and places. With this in mind, the dream of uploading ourselves to the cloud has a fatal flaw. We can upload our inner selves to the cloud, but we are nothing without the outside world in which we live and the people in it, writes Charlie Huenemann.
We will turn to the possibility of uploading our ethereal souls to supercomputers in just a moment, but first let’s talk about keys and locks. A key is an ingenious little device with a handle (or bow) and a blade with some particular series of cuts in it. One could provide a very precise mathematical description of those cuts, and one might wish to do so because that specific series of cuts — exactly those, in that sequence — is what makes a key that particular key and no other. For this reason, we might well suppose that the shape of the key is the essence of the key, so that one need not look beyond the key itself to find its essence.
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