Call for Papers

Special Issue of the

International Journal of Machine Consciousness

on

Mind Uploading

Edited by

Ben Goertzel (Novamente LLC & Xiamen University) and

Matthew Ikle' (Adams State College)

“Mind uploading” is an informal term referring to the (as yet hypothetical) process of transferring the totality or considerable majority of the mental contents from a particular human brain into a different substrate, most commonly an engineered substrate such as a digital, analogue or quantum computer. Alternate terminologies for mind uploading are “whole brain emulation” and “achieving substrate-independent minds.”

For more details on the general notion of mind uploading see the Wikipedia entry, or the sites minduploading.org or carboncopies.org. See also the Whole Brain Emulation Roadmap produced at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.

The notion of mind uploading raises a variety of issues touching multiple disciplines, among them philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, computing theory, computer engineering – and of course, consciousness studies.

For this Special Issue we are seeking high-quality academic papers discussing mind uploading in any of its aspects, and touching either centrally or at least peripherally on the relationship between consciousness and mind uploading. Papers on specific mind uploading technologies are welcome, along with philosophical treatments of the implications of mind uploading, formal models of substrate-independent mind, and anything else interesting, sound and pertinent.

The International Journal of Machine Consciousness (IJMC) is published by World Scientific, and is devoted to examining the theoretical foundations of conscious machines and analyzing current approaches to machine consciousness.

The paper submission deadline for the Special Issue is August 1, 2011. Paper length may vary according to contents, but 10-40 pages is the generally expected range. Please email submissions to ben@goertzel.org .

Final versions of accepted papers will need to be submitted in World Scientific's IJMC format, for which guidelines and Word and LaTeX templates may be found here http://www.worldscinet.com/authors/stylefiles.shtml . However, initial submissions need not be formatted in this way, pre-acceptance.