An examination of the strength and persistence of a person’s belief in a fundamental aspect of their consciousness, such as gender or personal identity, that requires the person to live for a year in accordance with their belief and to persuade one or two mental health professionals on the basis of a year’s worth of weekly or semi-monthly interviews that the belief has been implemented in practice and enhanced the overall health of the person.
Published in Chapter:
Mindclone Technoselves: Multi-Substrate Legal Identities, Cyber-Psychology, and Biocyberethics
Martine Rothblatt (Terasem Movement Foundation, USA)
Copyright: © 2013
|Pages: 18
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-2211-1.ch006
Abstract
Ethical issues arise with respect to a digitized analog of a person. Such an analog exists when a person transfers an adequate quantity of digitized memories into a database coupled to software capable of discerning, and reproducing, a close facsimile of the person’s apparent consciousness, including personality, mannerisms, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes, and values. This chapter refers to such a digitized analog of a person as a “mindclone.” The requisite software to create a mindclone is called “mindware,” and the database upon which mindware operates is called a “mindfile.” The purpose of this chapter is to assess two issues with respect to the ethical boundaries and cyber-psychological precepts for mindclone technoselves. First, is the legal identity of the mindclone separate from, or unified with, the identity of the biological original? Second, how does traditional bioethical analysis of biomedical actions toward people morph into a biocyberethical analysis of biomedical actions toward mindclones?