How to Survive Death: Moral personhood and the limits of the continuity-of-consciousness argument

Justin Smith-Ruiu

University of Paris

October 22 2025

7:00 pm, Foege Auditorium (3720 15th Ave NE)

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Philosophers habitually speak of consciousness-uploading and self-uploading as if these were the same thing. In so doing they take for granted the correctness of a broadly Lockean account of personal identity, according to which I remain the same person from moment to moment, or perhaps someday from eon to eon, in virtue of the continuity of conscious memory. Woody Allen, too, was following in Locke’s footsteps when he joked: “I do not want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen, I want to live on in my apartment.” But is ongoing temporal duration from a distinct node of subjective experience really the only way to keep on being a person? Cross-cultural considerations show that many human groups make use of extremely low-tech devices for personhood-uploading —effigies, story-boards, tree-trunks—, and they hardly expect these objects, after the transfer of the deceased kin’s identity into them, to pass the Turing test or to display any observable signs of consciousness at all. “Yes, but they’re just imagining things,” you’ll say. Fair enough, but perhaps we are as well. If we are ever going to succeed at exploiting substrate-neutrality to evade or postpone mortality, it will be necessary not only to follow the right roadmap towards whole-brain emulation in effecting a high-fidelity transfer of consciousness from one substrate to another. It will also be necessary to examine our longstanding presumption, these days proliferated almost entirely without argument, that personhood and consciousness are identical. In this talk I will make a first stab at just such an examination, drawing in particular on the work of Bostrom, Chalmers, Parfit, and Charles Taylor, as well as on what I take to be salient examples of radically different conceptions of personhood from the ethnographic and historical record of human representations of reality and of our place in it.

The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI

Cory Doctorow

December 4 2025

7:00 pm, Samuel E. Kelly Ethnic Cultural Center Theater (3930 Brooklyn Ave NE)

RSVP required

AI can’t do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that fails to do your job. Being a smart AI critic requires that you distinguish between these two cases, because otherwise, you’re just gonna help that fast-talking sales person to put you on the breadline and screw over everyone who relies on your work.

Bio: Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, and journalist. He is the author of dozens of books, most recently ENSHITTIFICATION: WHY EVERYTHING SUDDENLY GOT WORSE AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT (nonfiction); and the novels PICKS AND SHOVELS and THE BEZZLE (followups to RED TEAM BLUES). Other notable books include the solarpunk novels WALKAWAY and THE LOST CAUSE; the tech policy books THE INTERNET CON and CHOKEPOINT CAPITALISM; and the internationally bestselling YA LITTLE BROTHER series; and the picture book POESY THE MONSTER SLAYER. He maintains a daily blog at Pluralistic.net. He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is an AD White Professor at Cornell University; an MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate; a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Open University; a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of North Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science. He co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. In 2022, he earned the Sir Arthur Clarke Imagination in Service to Society Awardee for lifetime achievement. In 2024, the Media Ecology Association awarded him the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity. York University (Canada) made him an Honourary Doctor of Laws; and the Open University (UK) made him an Honourary Doctor of Computer Science.

Elusive Cures: Why Neuroscience Hasn’t Solved the Mystery of Brain and Mental Illness

Nicole Rust, University of Pennsylvania

October 1 2024

K069, Health Sciences, 7:00 pm

Understanding the human brain is one of the great scientific challenges of our time. Progress in brain research has been accelerating rapidly for decades, following breakthroughs in biotechnology and artificial intelligence. But the translation of discoveries about the brain into treatments and cures for brain and mental disorders has not happened as many expected. What’s been missing?

In this event, Nicole Rust will take us on her personal journey to find answers. Drawing on her decades of experience on the front lines of neuroscience research, she will reflect on the history of our quest to understand the brain, how far we have come and what remains to be discovered. She will argue that treating a brain or mental disorder is more like redirecting a hurricane than fixing a domino chain of cause and effect, and that only by facing the brain’s complexity head-on will we have any hope of finding better treatments and cures. She will profile the pioneering ideas about the brain and mind that researchers are using to tackle this complexity, and the reasons we can be optimistic that the next few decades of brain research will be more impactful than the last.

Theatre of Thought

May 14 2024

As part of the CoNectome 2024 meeting, we screened the Werner Herzog documentary Theatre of Thought, followed by a Q&A with Rajesh Rao, moderated by CoNECT.