“What does it really mean to upload your consciousness into immaterial space?”
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IN Every version of youThe heroes are faced with an impossible choice: upload their minds to a virtual utopia or collapse in an abandoned physical world.
Mind uploading is a familiar science fiction trope, often the basis of relationship dramas and philosophical explorations. But what does it actually mean to upload your consciousness into immaterial space? Is it possible to extrapolate mechanics from our modern science? And if you could do it, You?
At the heart of my novel, beneath the sweet romance and brilliant technology, lies a theoretical and philosophical problem: the paradox of the Ship of Theseus. A version recorded by Plutarch in the 1st century asks whether a ship that has been completely replaced piece by piece remains the same ship. In subsequent centuries, philosophers used an original thought experiment. What if you collected all the original parts of the ship – planks, oars, masts, sails – and built a second ship? Which ship, if any, is the real ship of Theseus? The paradox forces us to distinguish between the material essence of a thing (wooden boards, neural circuits, molecules…) and our idea of its integrity, its truth.
IN Every version of youmy character Naveen, who decides to upload himself to Gaia, a virtual utopia, is our ship. Navin is a fork in the road. At the moment of uploading, his physical and uploaded selves are theoretically identical. But from that moment on, the two would-be Naveens diverge and go their separate ways. Virtual Naveen is not what Naveen from Meatspace would have been had he survived.
I had to reverse engineer the science of loading to make it sound somewhat plausible. In some stories, mechanics are glossed over in order to highlight other important elements: the relational, the philosophical, the satirical. The subject can place the device on their head or inject it through their veins and find themselves magically lifted out of their body into a “cloud”. Other stories deal with science in a rigorous and intuitive way. Image of a brain being absorbed by a laser scan, slice by slice, in a television series. Pantheonleaves no ambiguity regarding the destruction of the embodied self.
Using my writing skills, I abandoned the neurobiological foundations and began to make wild hypotheses in the field of science fiction. At the time I was working on the novel, I was working in several neuropsychiatric departments and studying for exams in psychiatry. (Recent version belonging New scientist's How to think a series exploring theories of consciousness would certainly come in handy in my research!)
After reading about neural networks and connectomes, I began to imagine consciousness as an incredibly complex network of activity whose activation patterns vary from person to person. If these connections and their activation patterns could be replicated by a sufficiently advanced computer, then perhaps it would be possible to create a copy of the mind without any connection to the physical body. The other side of the coin, of course, is whether we will ever have computers advanced enough to hold the human mind without information being lost or degraded.
When I donated the early manuscripts Every version of you friends, what struck me was the range of reactions to the download. Some were horrified. “You mean they killed the originals?!” Others naturally took a more detached and philosophical position: if there is a continuity of content and subjectivity, then what does it mean that a busy person is not the same person?
Will I upload to Gaia? My answer is not clear-cut. In our intellectualistic society, we sometimes forget that we are not just detached minds controlling carnal appendages. We forget that the mind and body are woven into a complex fabric – and most often the body leads the dance. The intestines, heart, skin, glands and blood vessels are in constant dialogue with the brain.
Beyond this, we are shaped by our external environment, our attachments to others, our relationship to nature. Psychoanalyst Esther Bick wrote about how our “psychic skin,” the seat of our sense of inner self, arises from sensory experiences in early childhood. Separate our mind from our body and something will be lost.
IN Every version of youdownloading forces us to acknowledge the insidious ways technology is consuming us. We bring technology into our lives – into the intimate spaces of our homes, into our bodies – because it is convenient, shiny, fun and exciting. But who owns what we give to technology? Who will own our busy minds? I hope that I can hold out against the download for a long time to find another way of life on Earth. But I can't say exactly what I would do in the end. If all my loved ones were in Gaia, it would be difficult for me to resist the temptation.
Grace Chan – author Every version of you (Verve Books), November 2025 reading for the New Scholars Book Club. Register to read with us Here.
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