Some countries even grant their citizens the right to end their life, of their own will, with the help of a trained specialist – euthanasia. But what if we would have the possibility to transfer our mind, or simply backup our brain, in order to preserve ourselves for the future?

The possibility of mind uploading, brain backups, is being a quite old sci fi topic, thus largely explored, and inspiring philosophers, engineers, and of course – lawyers. The question of legal outcomes of a mind upload is far more concerning, than the biggest ethical issues regarding “the moral right to reduce a person to a hard drive record or a quantum computer state”.

The main legal issue is the status of the “entity”, or ent for short, created in the process. Will we regard it as a person, as a human, or just another gadget we have no need for, but it’s fun to show it on the internet. Regarding the entity as solely a property, an intellectual property would certainly lead lots of abuse, and rending it mostly as an entertainment product, or a part of another, more complex product. This would be mostly robots acting as servants for house keeping, office running, or sexual entertainment, but I’d find it rather risky, for ones mind would have be severely altered, not to say somewhat lobotomized, in order to out root the possibilities of aggressive behavioral response or depression. The other cruel possibility would be could be displayed in a simple sentence:

“We can play you, we can freeze you, we can rewind you, we can erase you. Expect nothing else”¹. This sentence could represent, what would happen if ents weren’t to be granted any kind of personhood or rights, being mere data on a storage device. Another possibility here would be to treat them more like human remains. Those would be protected by the law from defacing and desecration and should be treated in a suitable manner. And why is that? One of those ideas that come into mind is an interactive cemetery, or more commonly more like a cinerary urn put some where in the house.

This would be a form of prosthesis for the family, compensating in some way the loss of a loved one. Paraphrasing H.P. Lovecraft one could say “that is not dead which can eternally lie on a memory card”, but quoting here the legend of horror stories had something else to remind us of. Being an same persona, reduced to a hologram or a robotic substitute body, being regularly turned on and off on birthdays, holidays and anniversaries, unable to perform any physical or legal action on his own and kept that way because the family “just can’t let go”, can drive anyone insane. Therefore, here we get to the point where the question on “pulling the plug” on the other human being is moral and should it be legal.

The second way would be to grant them some human rights, but without granting them personhood. They’re less vulnerable to abuse, but still, lacking autonomy, would serve as a more complex “instrumentum vocativum”². Treated like a livestock, the ent would be only disposed off when expired, and only under several circumstances and in a manner specified by law. Any type of harmful alterations would be prohibited. The plausibility of this being the case of mind upload legislative solutions is not as low as one may think. Leaving behind the issue of replacing AI’s with “infomorphs”, as some sci fi fans tend to call them, the biggest argument for that is the principle of possessing a body and being a straight biological descendant of human parents. As anthropochauvinistic as it may seem, it’s the most common recognition of the whole brain emulation idea by present day lawyers. There would be some use for them, like working in special bodies or machines, to carry tasks which require “the human factor” in a hazardous or even lethal environment. Another thing that comes to mind is that the entity would not pose a threat to it’s original as being only a simulation, a personal communicable copy.

The third way is to grant them human personhood. As mentioned above, a human person, from the time of conception³, till his death, regardless of brain damage, anencephaly, deformities, despite having prosthetic organ and body part replacements, one still is human. Following this path, is a person with parts of the brain, replace with prosthetic due to some severe brain trauma or surgical treatment of seizures still a person? One can still use “the ship of Theseus” argument, but that doesn’t quite concern the law. The easiest way to explain it is to just say, that if you can afford to have yourself uploaded into a computer in order to achieve a kind of longevity, you can also afford a squad of lawyers, who will do everything, to prove in front of any court or tribunal that “ this here talking box contains a human being, therefore it should be recognized as a human being”.

The more serious answer would be, it doesn’t matter how much a person has been replaced with augmentations, cybernetics, if a neuroprosthetic arm is still regarded as an integral body part commanded by the brain, so than the prosthetic brain, as the backup storage device should be recognized as, is still containing a human being, being able to function without life support, and requiring mobility and manipulative prosthetics. A robotic body, long story short. There is a quite a concern, as if the law should treat them as a people with disabilities, for they require prosthetics to function normally, or like normal people because they’d surpass them in many matters, including physical strength and endurance.

Regarding them as a person would have serious legal outcomes. The first matter is inheritance. Regarding the entity, or the “emulee”, as a being the same person as the original he was created from, in the case of the originals a terminal state, will mean that the ent inherits all his rights, fortune and debts. Even more likely, it unables any inheritance proceedings after all, for if even the original is dead, the ent is fully functional and will carry on his duties. That would be an outstanding opportunity for many CEOs or scientists for instance. On the other hand, giving the ent the exact rights as the original human, and that one being in a coma or in a vegetative state, the “pulling the plug” on oneself can be seen as either suicide, euthanasia, raising moral and ethical concerns, or as a form of discarding a faulty organ after a transplant.

The other way to look at this option is the case of coexistence, of the original, and the ent. It could be settled in several ways, where the one with regarding the ent as an adolescent and subordinate to the original, until the original passes away, granting the ent it’s personhood and earning him every right and privilege of the original, would lead to major abuses and make typical class C crime story plot come to reality in a bloody way. The coexistence of the ent and the original is not only possible, it is required in some proposed mind uploading techniques. The worst one can think about is to die before the scheduled uploading procedure, therefore, as a form of insurance, one must upload or backup his self as soon as possible.

There are three ways of dealing with this manner. The first requires freezing the ent, or just “pausing it”, hiding him someplace safe, and activate him after death. And as I mentioned before, it was a basis of couple of sci fi stories, and even there it didn’t turn out well for the person “brought back to life” via activating an backup. The second option would be to give the ent a patronage of the original for only a several years, during which it’ll be treated as an adolescent, and most of his actions would require to be signed by the original. After those years⁴, let’s say from three to five⁵, he’ll be regarded as a separate adult entity, able to make his own decisions and take full responsibility for his actions. This mechanism has some holes, like, what if there was such mechanism and a technological possibility available at hand, and we upload a five year olds brain, and after five years, the original would be only 10 years, and the ent would be considered as an adult. The third model is to treat the entity as an equal adult ( considering mostly adults for this example), with a separate name, same surname, and not being treated as the same person, but as it’s fully grown descendant. That way the ent would be immediately responsible for his actions, with his full personhood granted, but not sharing his personal rights, as the intellectual and industrial property rights, copyrights, board membership rights, and so on.

Besides being able to work, run a company or invest, an ent would also have a right to marry and have children. Tough it would probably adopted children, or in vitro breed from the genetic material of the original, or maybe even being able to reproduce via copying. This wouldn’t be regarded as the most likely way for the rest of the society, probably worrying about “swarms of infomorphs taking over the net, than the world”. There would be no contradictions for an ent to engage in a civil law partnership or a marriage, regardless of the gender issue that would need to be settled.

That should be all for now on the topic of the uploaded entity’s personhood and the main concerns. The issue of the criminal liability and the idea of a soul cloud⁶ would be the topic of another article on the matter of the legal outcomes of whole brain emulation, aka mind uploading.