Nick Bostrom

Oxford University

Functionalist What matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material

Nick Bostrom Photograph by Future of Humanity Institute, CC BY 4.0.

Nick Bostrom argues from a functionalist framework that consciousness and cognitive identity are substrate-independent. In his landmark 2003 paper “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” (Philosophical Quarterly, DOI: 10.1111/1467-9213.00309) and the 2008 Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap (with Anders Sandberg), he formalized the philosophical foundations for transferring minds into computational substrates.

Bostrom’s position holds that a sufficiently fine-grained computational simulation of a human brain, replicating its causal and functional structure, would possess genuine phenomenal consciousness and subjective experience.

In Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford University Press, 2014, ISBN 978-0-19-967811-2), he identified whole brain emulation as one of the primary plausible pathways to synthetic intelligence, while noting that the societal and ethical implications of mind uploading hinge on whether digital copies possess moral status and continuous subjective identity.

Known for. Superintelligence (2014), the Simulation Argument (2003), and co-authoring Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap (2008)

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Nick Bostrom is listed with the other functionalists and computationalists, who hold that what matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.