Mind transfer in fiction

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Mind transfer is a common theme in science fiction. The idea is very briefly mentioned in Isaac Asimov's 1956 short story The Last Question: "One by one Man fused with AC, each physical body losing its mental identity in a manner that was somehow not a loss but a gain." The 1966 comic book superhero NoMan "was a human mind housed in a robotic body. The mind, that of Anthony Dunn, had been transferred into the robotic form as his human body passed away." One of the earlier instances of mind transfer was in the Roger Zelazny 1968 novel Lord of Light.

Another of the "firsts" is the novel Detta är verkligheten (This is reality), 1968, by the renowned philosopher and logician Bertil Mårtensson. A novel in which he describes people living in an uploaded state as a means to control overpopulation. The uploaded people believe that they are "alive", but in reality they are playing elaborate and advanced fantasy games. In a twist at the end, the author changes everything into one of the best "multiverse" ideas of science fiction. Together with the 1969 book Ubik by Philip K. Dick it takes the subject to its furthest point of all the early novels in the field.

Frederik Pohl's Gateway series (also known as the Heechee Saga) deals with a human being, Robinette Broadhead, who "dies" and, due to the efforts of his computer scientist (and quite fetching wife) as well as the computer program Sigfrid von Shrink, is uploaded into the "64 Gigabit space" (now archaic, but Fred Pohl wrote Gateway in 1976). The series consists of Gateway, Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (Heechee Saga, Book 2), Heechee Rendezvous, Annals of the Heechee, and The Gateway Trip : Tales and Vignettes of the Heechee. In Pohl's universe, death is therefore conquered in two ways: the Heechee are in touch with their "ancient ancestors"; and the humans are able to talk to the standing wave instantiations of cyberspaced human beings. The Heechee Saga deals with the physical, social, sexual, recreational, and scientific nature of cyberspace before William Gibson's award-winning Neuromancer, and the interactions between cyberspace and "meatspace" commonly depicted in cyberpunk fiction. In Neuromancer, a hacking tool used by the main character is an artificial infomorph of a notorious cyber-criminal, Dixie Flatline. The infomorph only assists in exchange for the promise that he be deleted after the mission is complete.

In the 1982 novel Software, part of the Ware Tetralogy by Rudy Rucker, one of the main characters, Cobb Anderson, has his mind downloaded and his body replaced with an extremely human-like android body. The robots who persuade Anderson into doing this sell the process to him as a way to become immortal.

The fiction of Greg Egan has explored many of the philosophical, ethical, legal, and identity aspects of mind transfer, as well as the financial and computing aspects (i.e. hardware, software, processing power) of maintaining "copies." In Egan's Permutation City and Diaspora, "Copies" are made by computer simulation of scanned brain physiology. See also Egan's "jewelhead" stories, where the mind is transferred from the organic brain to a small, immortal backup computer at the base of the skull, the organic brain then being surgically removed.

The Cylon Sharon Valerii is quoted in Battlestar Galactica as saying, "death becomes... a learning experience". This perhaps best summarizes the ethnological and tactical benefits of mind transfer (BSG episode, The Scar).

[edit] Examples

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Mind transfer is a theme in many other works of science fiction in a wide range of media. Specific examples include the following:

  • Janet Asimov's Mind Transfer journeys through the birth, life, death, and second life of a man whose family pioneers human-to-android mind transfer. It also explores the ethical and moral issues of transferring consciousness into an android at the moment of death, and examines the idea of prematurely activating an android which has not yet accepted a human brain scan.
  • In Arthur C. Clark's novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, the beings controlling the monoliths were once alien lifeforms that had uploaded their minds into robotic bodies and finally into the fabric of space and time itself. The character Dave Bowman undergoes an uploading from the body of a human into a "ghost", as he is described in later books.
  • Mamoru Oshii/Masamune Shirow's Ghost in the Shell anime/manga - portrays a future world in which human beings aggressively mechanize, replacing body and mind with interfacing mechanical/computer/electrical parts, often to the point of complete mechanization/replacement of all original material. Its sequel, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence deals heavily with the philosophical ramifications of this problem.
  • The Cowboy Bebop Episode 23 of the science fiction anime/manga entitled Brain Scratch is about a cult dedicated towards electronic transference of the mind into a computer network.
  • The Yu-Gi-Oh! character of Noah Kaiba died in a car accident and his mind was uploaded to a super computer.
  • Roger MacBride Allen's The Modular Man portrays the interior experience of a personality (David Bailey) uploaded into a vacuum cleaner and his legal battle for recognition as a legal personality. See also Political ideas in science fiction.
  • Michael Berlyn's The Integrated Man, where a human mind, or part of it (or even just a set of skills) can be encoded on a chip and inserted into a special socket at the base of the brain.
  • Abduction by Robin Cook, where a group of researchers discover an underwater civilization which achieved immortality, by transferring their minds into cloned bodies.
  • The Simultaneous Man by Ralph Blum, where brainwashing and psychosurgery techniques are used to create a copy of the experiences and memories of one person in the body of another.
  • Kiln People by David Brin, postulates a future where people can create clay duplicates of themselves with all their memories up to that time. The duplicates only last 24 hours, and the original can then choose whether or not to upload the ditto's memories back into himself afterward. Most people use dittos to do their work.
  • Similar to Egan's "jewelhead" stories, Battle Angel Alita, also known as Gunnm, has a major plot point, in which a closely guarded secret of the elite city of Tiphares/Zalem is that its citizens, after being eugenically screened and rigorously tested in a maturity ritual, have their brains scanned, removed and replaced with chips. When revealed to a Tipharean/Zalem citizen, the internalized philosophical debate causes most citizens to go insane.
  • Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon and other Takeshi Kovacs books, where everyone has a "cortical stack" implanted at the base of their skull, soon after being born. The device then records all your memories and experiences in real-time. The stack can be "resleeved" in another body, be it a clone or otherwise, and/or backed up digitally at a remote location.
  • Garth Nix's Shade's Children, in which Shade is an uploaded consciousness acting in loco parentis to teenagers to help save them from evil Overlords. Shade contemplates at times how human he is, especially as his personality degenerates during the story; and whether or not he should have a new human body.
  • Charles Platt's The Silicon Man, where an FBI agent who has stumbled on a top-secret project called LifeScan is destructively uploaded against his will. Realistically describes the constraints of the process and machinery.
  • Where is the travellers home? by a Russian author Aleksandr Mirer describes a variant of the theory - a world where the minds are of three types and the more subtle level of minds can be uploaded to a body without removing the other mind it possesses - it just overrides some of its functions.
  • John Sladek's satirical The Muller-Fokker Effect, in which a human mind could be recorded on cassette tapes and then imprinted on a human body using tailored viruses.
  • Red Dwarf, where a person's memories and personality can be recorded in just a few seconds and, upon their death, they can be recreated as a holographic simulation. Arnold Rimmer is an example of such a person.
  • Tad Williams' Otherland quadrilogy, which focuses on the activities of a secret society whose nefarious goals are to create a virtual reality network where they will be uploaded and in which they will live as gods. Otherland contains a very hard SF approach to the topic, but balances the hard approach with fantastical adventures of the protagonists within the virtual reality network.
  • Iain M. Banks's Culture novels make extensive reference to the transfer of mind-states.
  • In the TV series Stargate SG-1, the Asgard cheat death by transferring their minds into new clone bodies. The mind of Thor, the high commander of the Asgard fleet, was for a time transferred into the computer of a Goa'uld spaceship. In other episodes, many of the main characters have had their minds transferred to computers, robots, and virtual reality, including one episode in which the primary characters temporarily switch bodies.
  • The television series Battlestar Galactica (re-imagining) features human-like androids which, upon the destruction of their physical bodies, transfer their consciousness into another identical body somewhere else in the universe.
  • Anne McCaffrey's Ship series is about children born with severe physical handicaps whose healthy brains are placed into spaceships and other mechanical shells.
  • In Carlos Atanes' FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions the Sisterhood of Metacontrol transfer Angeline's consciousness into the virtual world of the Réseau Céleste.
  • Robert J. Sawyer's novel Mindscan deals with the issue of uploaded consciousness from the perspective of Jake Sullivan: both of them. The human Jake has a rare, life threatening disease and to extend his life he decides to upload his consciousness into a robotic body; however things don't go quite as planned.
  • In The 6th Day movie, the contents of a person's brain can be downloaded via the optic nerves, and uploaded to clones.
  • In the Mega Man X video games, X's creator Doctor Light had uploaded his brainwaves into a computer before he died, and effectively "lives beyond the grave" as a sentient hologram that can communicate with X and Zero.
  • In Endgame novel which is the last part of Doom series by Dafydd Ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver the alien race known as Newbies attempts to transfer Fly Taggart and Arlene Sanders' soul to a computer simulation based on their memories. However, due to difference between "formats" of human soul and soul of any other being in the galaxy, they accidentally copied their soul, with one copy trapped in the simulation and the other left in their bodies.
  • In the PC and Mac game Total Annihilation, a multi-millennia war rages between a society mandating mind transfer, and a rebellion against it.
  • The computer game Independence War, in which the player is assisted by a recreation of CNV-301 Dreadnought's former captain, who is bitter about having been recreated without his consent.
  • Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom's plot is set in motion when the main character is killed and "restored from backup," a process which entails the creation of a clone and flashing the clone's brain with an image stored on a computer.
  • In the Rifts role-playing game Dimension Book 2: Phase World, a member of an artificial race called the Machine People named Annie integrates her consciousness permanently with a spacecraft.
  • In Heroes Unlimited under the Robot category, a human pilot has a transferred intelligence category that transfers a human intelligence over a distance into the body of a robot. This option is also available in Rifts Sourcebook 1. In either case it can be permanent.
  • In Mechanoid Space, the Mechanoids are a race of formerly biological organisms with psychic abilities who have replaced their bodies - excluding the brain - with mechanical ones. They have since become genocidal towards all bipeds.
  • In the Stargate SG-1 episode "Holiday" Dr. Daniel Jackson's mind in transferred into Machello's body and Machello's mind is transferred into Dr. Jackson's body. In the episode "Entity" Samantha Carter's mind in transferred into a computer. In the first 2 eps. of season 8, Jack O'Neal's mind is transferred into Thor's computer. In the episode "Life boat" around 12 minds are transferred into and then out of Daniel Jackson's body.
  • In the Marvel Comics universe, Adolf Hitler's mind was transferred into a cloned body upon his death; this clone became the supervillain called the Hate-Monger.
  • In the online collaborative world-building project "Orion's Arm" the concepts of mind copying and uploading are used extensively, particularly in the online novel Betrayals.
  • In The Matrix, the brain can be moved into the Matrix program, and sometimes overwritten with computer programs.
  • In the Noon Universe created by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, the Great Encoding of 2121 was the first known attempt to completely store an individual's personality on an artificial medium. The final stages of the Encoding are described in the chapter 14 of Noon: 22nd Century (Candles Before the Control Board).
  • In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, The Schizoid Man, Dr Ira Graves uploads his mind into Data's positronic brain. He later downloads his memories into the Enterprise's computer, although his personality has been lost.
  • In the anime/manga Naruto the Yamanaka clan specializes in mind body transfer based jutsus to infiltrate and take over a person's body.
  • In the computer game City of Heroes, the arch-villain known as Nemesis was born in Prussia during the 1700s, but has since then put his mind into a complex, steam-powered robotic body. Because of this, he has remained a threat to the heroes of Paragon City for close to two centuries.
  • The 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon features two episodes dealing with the subject. In "The Old Switcheroo", an accident in a cybertech laboratory causes Shredder and Splinter to switch bodies. This mind transfer leads to several confusions before it's restored. In "Raphael Drives 'em Wild", a mind altering device causes Raphael to switch mind with a New York City taxi driver.
  • In the Phantom 2040 TV series and videogame, one of its characters Maxwell Madison Sr., the husband of one of the series' main antagonists Rebecca Madison, is killed during a trainwreck with the 23rd Phantom and has his mind in form of his brainwaves uploaded onto a computer mainframe. Rebecca has plans to download his brainwaves into a living or artificial body to bring him back to life.
  • Several characters in Kyle Allen's The Archon Conspiracy are repeatedly killed, only to be resurrected in prosthetic bodies once a "pattern map" of their brains is recovered and hard-wired into an artificial neural net. The main antagonist uses a similar process to construct a memetic computer virus, in the process uploading the personality of a notorious serial killer into several thousand people.