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Are you horrified, excited or both? There's more. Perhaps the most extraordinary possibility arises from the fact that, as Susan Greenfield, a neuroscientist, puts it, the self is simply the personalisation of the brain. You are the individual you are because of the unique set of connections forged in your cerebrum. This means you are like a piece of software running on an organic brain, but which could, in principle, be run on a silicon computer as well. Rather than being housed in a brain and body, you could in effect “upload” yourself to a computer and live there in a virtual reality.
Bostrom sees no reason why uploading human experiences into a virtual realm should present a problem, in principle. "We know the atoms of your body are swapped out over a lifetime,” he explains. “You wouldn't benefit if you could somehow wrap yourself up in plastic and prevent the atoms from being exchanged.” He suggests that the uploading scenario is not so different from an accelerated metabolic process, where the atoms in your body are substituted for other atoms. Indeed, uploading would have the advantage of conferring on you virtual immortality. As long as you made sure you were “backed up” often enough, it wouldn't matter if the particular computer you were running on broke. Your service provider would just reload you onto a new one and you'd pick up where you left off.
To show why we should not be alarmed by this prospect, Bostrom offers an analogy: suppose that last night, while you were sleeping, a scientist had replaced your brain with a computer that had been programmed with all of the information that was contained in your brain. When you woke up, you would have no idea that this happened. It would seem that you were the same person who went to sleep the night before. Whether your thoughts came from an organic brain or a computer programmed to behave like one, Bostrom says, “It's not clear to me how that would matter at all."
But wouldn't uploading flesh-and-blood humans into synthetic virtual worlds, where they would be turned into super intelligent fast-thinkers, transform us into completely different creatures? Would homo sapiens be replaced by homo apparatus? Bostrom is unconcerned. He reminds me that humans already undergo a “profound” transition when we age from childhood to adulthood. "We have vastly greater capacities as adults than as children,” he explains. “Our whole mental lives are different, our preoccupations.” Yet we don't view it as bad for a child to grow up, so perhaps we’re more open to radical transformations than we might believe.