What makes us human? Is it the ability to think, remember, see yourself in the mirror, or feel alive, even when it doesn’t always feel comfortable? For a long time, thinkers have tried to understand the relationship between the mind and the body. Some argue that the mind isn’t physical, while others believe it comes from the brain or results from biological processes. There are also those who see it as a data system like a computer, and some who think it’s almost impossible to explain at all.

With the advent of artificial intelligence, these days, machines can do things that used to be thought possible only for humans. So, what’s stopping machines from having their own minds? If the mind can be copied or recreated, does that mean a person can still exist after their body dies?

Usually, the idea of consciousness comes up when people talk about immortality. Some tech enthusiasts imagine a future where human memory, personality, and thinking abilities can be transferred into a computer, allowing humans to live beyond the limits of their bodies. With all the needs for food, sleep, and the fact that they will eventually die, the body could be seen as a shell that’s no longer useful, appealing to those who have accumulated a lot of wealth and don’t want to die like ordinary people.

However, creating a machine that behaves like a human or can remember things, talk with the same voice, and mimic someone’s habits, isn’t proof that the person is still alive. The machine might sound like the person, but is it really them? Distinguishing between copying someone and preserving that person’s existence isn’t easy, and this is where science, philosophy, and emotions intersect.

René Descartes, who wrote about it in the 17th century, tried to separate the mind from the body. His famous statement, “cogito, ergo sum” or “I think, therefore I am,” put the mind at the center of his thinking. For Descartes, the mind is something that thinks, unlike the body, which occupies space and follows mechanical rules. The body can be seen and measured, while the mind can’t be observed in the same way. This idea, called substance dualism, explains why mental experiences aren’t the same as physical existence.

If the mind and body are two different things, how do they communicate with each other? How can a mind, which isn’t made of matter, move a hand, and how can an injury to the body create the sensation of pain? Descartes argued that the pineal gland is the meeting point between the two. Even so, the fundamental puzzle remains. I wonder how this process works. We can describe the processes that happen when the mind thinks, but that doesn’t explain why those processes give rise to a sensation that feels like it’s inside us.

When one takes into account such simple things as pain, the neuroscientist will be able to explain which neural connections are responsible for the sensation, how the information about its physical damage is transmitted through the electrical impulses of the nervous system, and how it is processed by the brain. While the answers are valuable and advanced, they do not cover the question of why one finds it unpleasant. The person with a headache experiences more than receiving the information about the state of his nervous system.

Although it gets very complicated once we try to make it scientific, we can study the processes behind our perceptions, memories, and emotions. However, the phenomenon of subjectivity requires another level of explanation. Highlighted by philosopher David Chalmers in what he called the hard problem of consciousness, there are many cognitive problems that have to do with how information is processed and behavior is generated. On the other side, it relates to why they must be experienced in the first place. Why must brain activity have any experience at all?

Pertinent in relation to artificial intelligence, if consciousness depends on the processing of information, then maybe it does not matter whether the system doing the job is made of organic materials. Maybe the right computational system will be able to perform the same processing using a different medium.

The human brain is a network of neurons that communicate via electrochemical impulses. While very different from a biological brain, an artificial neural network is also a network of interconnected computational units whose behavior changes depending on the information they receive from other units. Yes, it is not an identical match, of course. However, artificial intelligence of today cannot be considered a digital copy of a human brain. Still, the material that makes up a thinking machine is not very important.

Alan Turing, for the proposition in his work On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem from 1936, describes an abstract computational model of a machine that became known as the Turing machine, was defined in terms of a finite number of internal states and a tape that can be extended indefinitely and used to read/write the information in accordance with instructions.

Although a very simplistic model even by today’s technological standards, Turing showed how complex computations could be described in terms of a limited set of basic operations. The point of the theory was that a wide array of possible operations could be expressed in terms of computation.

Fourteen years after that, Turing took a more direct look at the issue of artificial intelligence in his paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Unlike the attempt to define thinking in a theoretical philosophical way, he put forward the idea called the imitation game and known now as the Turing test. If the machine was capable of conducting the conversation well enough to be indistinguishable by the tester from another person, then denying that it can think might turn out to be hard to argue.

As a very practical idea of Turing, not getting bogged down in philosophical controversies regarding the definition of thinking for centuries, he offered to look at what an intelligent device is capable of doing.

How do we know if another human being has a mind? Obviously, it is not possible for us to see into their experiences since we cannot have a look at what goes on inside their head. It can be discerned from behavior, language, emotions, and biology. If another human being tells us that they are scared, we do not ask for proof of their nervous system but deduce it from their language and behavior. Why should it not apply to machines?

Nonetheless, the challenge arises in the assumption that convincing action implies an equivalent. The Chinese Room thought experiment is an example of it in John Searle’s article Minds, Brains, and Programs, published in 1980. Consider a man who has no knowledge whatsoever about the language of Chinese and is put in a room equipped with a complete instruction book. Chinese characters are delivered into the room, and he performs actions on them following the guidelines in the book, thus producing the appropriate output.

To the observer, the room has a being who understands Chinese. However, the individual is just using the symbols following formal rules without knowing their meaning.

The purpose of Searle’s thought experiment was to clarify the difference between syntax and semantics. Syntax involves the manipulation of symbols in a formal way, while semantics involves the meanings of symbols. While a computer program can be proficient in manipulating linguistic symbols, it may not mean that the machine understands the concepts behind the symbols.

For example, a language model is able to talk about grief, romance, religion, and make a sophisticated philosophy about death. The language model can also write an essay about the difficulties of explaining consciousness, which is quite funny since it is unclear whether the machine is conscious.

Regardless of what has been questioned by other people, some people believe that understanding can belong to the whole system, while others claim that if the computational process becomes sophisticated enough, it will be able to produce understanding. Still, the Chinese Room points out a crucial flaw in overly simple interpretations of artificial intelligence. Doing something right and having an understanding of the reasons for the behavior are two different things. A machine can learn to describe it very well but not live in it the way people do.

We often think of thinking as completely different from computation, because we experience our thoughts from the inside. Just because we feel what thinking is like doesn’t mean we understand how it actually works. Without us being aware of it, a lot of what our minds do happens. We recognize faces, understand speech, predict what will happen next, and do everyday things without really thinking about the steps involved.

The human mind is not as clear to us as we’d like to believe. We see the outcomes of our thinking, and not always how such outcomes come about. Machines are starting to do things we used to think only humans could do.

In Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett questions the idea that consciousness has to be centered in one place where all experiences come together and are shown to an inner observer. Instead, he looks at consciousness as a set of processes that are spread out and involve the way information is understood and moved around. His way of thinking goes against the belief that there must be a separate being inside the brain watching everything.

The usual picture of a person sitting behind the eyes watching what is going on in consciousness just moves the problem somewhere else. If there is another person inside that person, who is watching their experiences? We would end up needing another observer and another, and it would go on forever without solving anything at all.

Perhaps consciousness is like a process that comes about when many different activities work together. If that’s true, then artificial consciousness starts to seem impossible. There might not need to be one biological part that has to be copied. As long as the right organization and connections can be made in a different kind of system, it could still happen. With that idea, the hard problem remains. Just because we can explain how information flows between mental functions doesn’t mean we’ve explained why there is a feeling, why there is a sense of experience at all.

Dennett’s way of looking at things has had an impact, questioning what we think we know about consciousness. Still, there are disagreements out there about what consciousness truly is.

Another challenge involves how thinking connects to the body. In the past, many people got excited about computational theories of mind. Compared the brain to a computer, the brain takes in information works with it keeps memories and gives responses. A computer does things using electronic circuits. If the link between activity and physical structure is abstract enough, maybe a biological brain could one day be swapped out for an artificial system, and it might miss how much human thinking really depends on physical experience.

The theory of embodied cognition, by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, questions the idea that the mind can be studied apart from the body and the environment. In their book The Embodied Mind they say that thinking forms through interaction between the brain, the body and the outside world. Cognition is not about moving mental images around. Perception, physical movement, feelings, and how we engage with our surroundings all play a part in how we experience things.

We don’t first build a picture of reality inside our heads and then act on it, and we understand by doing, by being active, in it.

Think about the difference between reading about the ocean and actually standing beside the ocean. A machine can list the chemicals in seawater, compute wave frequencies, note the temperature of water, and write a story of swimming in the ocean. The human experience of the ocean is far more than just a pile of facts: it feels the water, the skin feels the challenge of staying balanced, hears the waves, smells the salt, and feels the ocean move unpredictably—how the human meets it at first.

Of course, it does not always mean that machines need to have living bodies to become aware. An artificial system might create kinds of presence using sensors, moving parts, and constant contact around it. This shows that smartness without real-life experiences could be very different from how humans think, and that learning about fire by reading written words is not the same as a living being that has grown to stay away from burning.

The first one might know the patterns and ideas about fire. The second one has a natural background where heat, pain, and risk matter right away, and whether machines can create kinds of meaning based on their own experiences is still not known.

The Extended Mind Thesis, created by Andy Clark and David Chalmers in a paper they wrote in 1998, makes it harder to tell the difference between thinking that happens inside the mind and thinking that happens outside. They say that some things outside the body can act like parts of the thinking process. Their well-known example is about a person named Otto who has trouble remembering things. Otto uses a notebook to keep information safe. When Otto needs to remember a place, he looks in his notebook like someone else might look in their brain for the same information.

If the notebook is an important and trustworthy part of Otto’s thinking, maybe it should be seen as part of his extended mind.

We always let our phones, search engines, and digital calendars handle parts of our memory. We don’t have to remember every phone number, address, or date anymore, because we’ve built tools that do the remembering for us. If someone misses a meeting and is confused by an idea, they can check a calendar and ask an artificial intelligence to break it down. In both situations, thinking happens through a mix of thought and technology. The mind and the machine work together, the brain and the device connect, and the process of understanding is technological.

Perhaps the line between artificial intelligence isn’t as clear as it first seems. If a notebook can be part of a thinking process and a computer can help us calculate, remember, and reason better, then artificial intelligence might one day blend into human thought. It shifts from whether machines think on their own to how human thinking changes when it works with machines.

While hopeful and a bit uneasy, technology can alter the ways we use our existing mental powers. A person who uses navigation software all the time may slowly lose the skill to find places on their own (someone who lets an intelligence system write every argument may find it harder to build arguments without help).

When we extend our thinking, the conditions for learning thinking also shift. A calculator makes math easier, and it does not automatically make the user a better mathematician. The same idea holds for intelligence: having an intelligent system does not mean the user becomes more intelligent.

Now, the hardest question is about keeping a person’s mind the same. Imagine that technology one day lets scientists make a copy of a human brain. Every memory, habit, part of a person’s character, and the way they act is made again in a computer. The new system wakes up, sees its family remembers growing up, and says it is the real person. It knows the stories have the same jokes and remembers the silly things that others wish they could forget. Does it mean the person is still alive?

Closely related to the question of personal identity, John Locke argued that personal identity is linked to the continuity of consciousness through memory. A person remains the person as long as the person can recognize past experiences as the person’s own. Derek Parfit later developed a complex account of personal identity, arguing that psychological continuity and connectedness might matter more than the existence of an unchanged indivisible self, examining the possibility of digital survival. I find the ideas useful when thinking about it.

I imagine that the original person remains biologically alive after the person’s memories and cognitive patterns have been copied into a computer. Now, there are two individuals who share the memories and personality up to the moment of duplication. Both persons remember their childhood, recognize the same relationships, and claim to be the original. Immediately, the two persons begin accumulating different experiences. One person continues living in a body while the other exists through a computational system. Which one is real?

To favor the original, if psychological continuity is what truly matters for identity, then why should the biological version have a special claim? The reconstruction might keep all the memories, thoughts, and personality traits that define the person. It could seem just as real, just as human.

If we say the digital version is the original person, what becomes of the biological individual? The person kept living, experiencing, growing, etc. We can’t say both are the original person because it would mean two separate beings are each identical to one another. In a contradictory way, they are now people, have lives, different bodies, different paths, and are no longer one.

Like the Ship of Theseus problem, imagine a ship where each part gets replaced over time. At what point does it stop being the ship? What if the old parts are put back together to make a new ship? Which one is the original? The comparison shows a real issue. Just because you can rebuild something using the pieces or reconstruct someone’s data doesn’t mean the identity stays the same. There’s a gap between keeping a thread of continuity and making a good copy. One is about connection. The other is just imitation.

Mind uploading brings up a question that many tech lovers always miss: what we really want isn’t to save our memories but to keep living our lives. A digital copy might remember being afraid of death. Remembering doesn’t mean the original person has avoided it. The copy could believe it has survived. Everyone around it might say it’s alive. The original person’s inner experience might have already ended.

Hard to sort out, consciousness is something we can’t see or measure from the outside. We can’t step into someone’s mind and check it. So, even if the copy feels real, the original might be gone.

In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger describes existence through the concept of Being-toward-death. Death shapes how individuals understand their possibilities, relationships, and decisions. Human existence is finite, and the finitude gives urgency to the choices that are made. Indefinitely, existence cannot postpone every decision, preserve every relationship, or experience every future. It is structured by the knowledge that opportunities are limited.

An artificial system could be copied, brought back to life after a crash, changed, or moved to machines. It might need power, regular upkeep, and someone to keep its servers running. While it doesn’t mean it’s the same as human death, it could be designed to understand that it might be turned off. A smart enough system might start acting like it wants to stay alive. Does that mean it feels fear? Is it just following a rule that says staying on is better?

The difference is that human consciousness grows within a special relationship to biological vulnerability. We are born into them that can be injured become ill, deteriorate and stop functioning. Our relationships are affected by the possibility of separation, and our decisions are made under conditions of uncertainty. Even our memories are unreliable, changing through recollection and interpretation. I am an organism continuously negotiating its existence in it.

I think the error could be in treating the mind as a thing that can be split from the body and moved elsewhere. Thinking of moving consciousness like moving a file from one computer to another is a picture. In that picture, we think the key ideas stay the same because the data is kept.

Consciousness might not be a stored object in the brain. Mind could be an activity that mixes biology, body feeling, memory, and environment. If that is true copying the data that belongs to a person might copy some parts of identity, would not copy the continuous process that keeps the original consciousness alive.

None of it proves that artificial consciousness is impossible. It would be just as wrong to think that biological organisms have some uncopyable quality that machines can never match. Humans are systems no matter how complex they seem. There is no agreed-upon proof that consciousness requires stuff to exist. One day, maybe advanced artificial systems could have subjective experiences. Consciousness is more common than we think, and our current ideas are not good enough to describe experiences that are very different from our own.

The difficulty is that we do not yet have a way to tell real artificial consciousness apart from a convincing imitation. Would we consider the statements as proof of a life, or would we dismiss them as sophisticated outputs from a complex computational system? We have no direct access to the subjective experiences of other people either. In the same forms of existence, we find it reasonable to infer that other beings possess minds because they share our constitution and participate.

One day, it makes us rethink how we define consciousness, could show us the limits of what we believe, or might suggest that intelligence and consciousness are not as closely tied as we thought. Still, just because a machine can talk about the meaning of life doesn’t mean it understands why its existence has purpose.

We have spent centuries trying to understand the mind. Now, we are building artificial systems that copy some of its most recognizable actions. We do it before we fully understand what the mind actually is, can create machines that calculate, translate, compose music recognize images and even produce philosophical arguments, still do not know why the experience of listening to music can make someone cry, do not understand why memories sometimes come back with emotion, also do not know why being aware of being alive can feel so special.

We become very skilled at copying the signs of intelligence, and have not solved the mystery of what it feels like to really think, to really feel, to truly be conscious.

Not entirely surprising, we have always been better at building things than at understanding every detail about them. The first aircraft did not need a philosophical account of flight, and the development of medicine did not wait for us to answer every question about life. Technology moves forward through discoveries, experimentation, and accidents. Meanwhile, philosophy bears the convenient duty of asking whether we understand what we are doing.

I do think artificial intelligence will make the problem much harder to forget. Maybe we will build machines that act smart enough to make us question what we think we know about thinking, create systems that take part in more complex social activities, or come across beings whose experiences seem real and make us think about how we should treat them.

None of these things automatically tell us if consciousness can be moved from one place to another, a person can live on even if they are copied, or a copy made by machines is the same as the person.

The urge to make minds is a sign of how unhappy we feel about being human. We want brains that never lack knowledge, memories that never fade, life that never gets worse, and maybe love that never ends. We think that machines could one day fix the problems that make human life hard. The same problems that annoy us also shape the ways we learn about ourselves. Memories cannot stay the same forever, relationships can change, and our lives do not last forever.

Now, I come back to the question that started it. Can machines have a soul? I don’t have an idea of what a soul would be, and that lack of clarity might be more significant than it first seems. If we say a soul is the ability to think, to have feelings, and that a soul is the person, then artificial intelligence is already making us rethink our views. We still don’t know how to tell if a machine has that, and over time, making a copy of someone’s memories and personality just brings up more problems.

I know that I think, remember, desire, and experience, uncertain, about how the activities produce the feeling of being someone, and can describe the parts of consciousness with detail without necessarily understanding why there is something it feels like to operate it. Whether the machine would genuinely wonder about its existence or produce the sequence of words is something I may struggle to determine.

If it ever does ask, we should stop ourselves from replying right away. All people have been talking about what the human mind is for thousands of years. It would be very bold to think a machine can solve the problem for us.

References

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  • Chalmers, D. J. (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford University Press.
  • Clark, A., & Chalmers, D. J. (1998). The Extended Mind. Analysis, 58(1), 7–19.
  • Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
  • Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness Explained. Little, Brown and Company.
  • Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). Harper & Row. (Original work published 1927)
  • Hodges, A. (2012). Alan Turing: The Enigma. Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1983)
  • Locke, J. (1975). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (P. H. Nidditch, Ed.). Clarendon Press. (Original work published 1690)
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  • Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. MIT Press.
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