Nick Bostrom
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)
Coverage on this site
Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers, grouped by the position their published work defends. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories.