“What does it really mean to upload your consciousness into intangible space? »
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In Every version of youthe characters are faced with an impossible choice: upload their minds to a virtual utopia or collapse into the abandoned physical world.
Mind-uploading is familiar to us as a science fiction trope, often anchoring relationship dramas and philosophical inquiries. But what does it really mean to upload your consciousness into intangible space? Can mechanics be extrapolated from our current science? And if you could do it, would You?
At the heart of my novel, beneath the tender romance and brilliant technology, lies a theoretical and philosophical problem: the paradox of Theseus’ Ship. The version recorded by Plutarch in the 1st century asks whether a ship completely replaced, piece by piece, remains the same ship. In subsequent centuries, philosophers drew inspiration from the 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 Theseus’ true ship? The paradox forces us to make a distinction between the material essence of a thing (planks of wood, neural circuits, molecules, etc.) and our conception of its totality, of its truth.
In Every version of youmy character Navin, who decides to download himself to Gaia, a virtual utopia, is our vessel. Navin is at a crossroads. At the time of downloading, his physical body and the downloaded one are theoretically identical. But from that point on, the two potential Navins diverge and take different paths. Virtual Navin is not what “Meatspace” Navin would have been if he had survived.
I had to reverse engineer the science of downloading to make this seem somewhat plausible. Some stories ignore the mechanics in order to highlight other important elements: the relational, the philosophical, the satirical. The subject can place a device on their head or run an infusion through their veins and find themselves magically lifted out of their body into “the cloud”. Other stories approach science in a rigorous and visceral way. The representation of a brain consumed by laser scanning, slice by slice, in the television series Pantheonleaves no ambiguity about the destruction of the embodied self.
By exercising my privileges as a writer, I have bounced back from the neuroscientific foundations to put forward numerous hypotheses in the field of science fiction. At the time I was developing the novel, I was working on several neuropsychiatry units and studying for my psychiatry exams. (The recent edition of New scientistIt is How to think series, exploring theories of consciousness, would certainly have been useful to me during my research!)
After reading about neural networks and connectomes, I began to imagine consciousness as an incredibly complex network of activities, with activation patterns varying from individual to individual. If these connections and their activation patterns could be reproduced by a sufficiently advanced computer, then perhaps a copy of the mind could be created without any attachment to a physical body. The other side of the coin, of course, is whether we will ever have computers advanced enough to manage the human mind without loss or degradation of information.
When I gave the first manuscripts of Every version of you For my friends, what struck me was the range of reactions to the download. Some were horrified. “You mean they killed the originals?!” Others have naturally adopted a more detached and philosophical orientation: if there is continuity of substance and subjectivity, how can we say that the person downloaded is not the same person?
Would I upload to Gaia? My answer is not simple. In our intellectualist society, we sometimes forget that we are not just detached minds controlling fleshy appendages. We forget that the mind and body are woven together in an intricate tapestry – and more often than not, the body leads the dance. The intestine, heart, skin, glands and vessels are in constant conversation with the brain.
Beyond that, we are shaped by our external environment, by our attachments to others, by our relationship with nature. Psychoanalyst Esther Bick has written about how our “psychic skin,” the container of our internal sense of self, arises from early childhood sensory experiences. Separate our minds from our bodies, and something will be lost.
In Every version of youdownloading forces us to consider the insidious way technology consumes us. We let technology into our lives – into the intimate spaces of our homes, our bodies – because it is convenient, brilliant, fun and exciting. But who owns what we entrust to technology? Who would our downloaded minds belong to? I hope that I will resist going online for a long time, to find another way of living on Earth. But I can’t say for sure what I would do in the end. If all my loved ones were in Gaia, it would be hard to resist the lure.
Grace Chan is the author of Every version of you (Verve Books), November 2025 reading for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up to read with us here.
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