An excerpt from a class discussion on Information Ethics.
Human consciousness is difficult to define. It can include things like personality, preferences, emotions, and memories. These things are encoded within the roughly 86 billion neurons of the brain. These neuron encodings are a type of information, and just like a book can be converted into a digital copy, it follows that the information in a brain could be converted into a format that could be stored in a computer. However, as anyone who enjoys the smell of old tomes in the reference section will tell you, even if the information in a digital books is the same as the print version, reading it in one form vs the other will still be a different experience. Cheshire (2015) declares any such attempt at human consciousness relocation to be reductionist for much the same reason: it’s not just the information, but the process of how that information produces consciousness that defines the human mind.
Nevertheless, research in human consciousness mapping and digitization is an active area of scientific pursuit. Much like the fetal fibroblast cells collected in the 1960s are still used as a basis for modern vaccine development, it’s likely that some digital human mind-approximation will be captured during our lifetimes. But a mind is a different thing from a simple cell. Would a mind in a computer without internet access be equivalent to a prisoner in solitary confinement? What rights does the original donor of the mind scan retain over the digital representation? If the data of the scan is deleted, does that constitute murder? Since the ethical implications of digital immortality affect all people on Earth, what rights should the general public have regarding findings from this kind of research? As science forges ahead, information ethicists will need to address the myriad of intellectual property and freedom concerns that such research produces.
Cheshire Jr., W. P. (2015). The sum of all thoughts: Prospects of uploading the mind to a computer. Ethics & Medicine: An International Journal of Bioethics, 31(3), 135–141.