The no-cloning theorem together with chaos theory suggests that cloning is fundamentally impossible. Mostly people will respond to this by saying "the brain isn

The no-cloning theorem together with chaos theory suggests that cloning is fundamentally impossible. Mostly people will respond to this by saying "the brain isn't a quantum computer", which is almost certainly true, but what is actually required for mind uploading is "the brain's behavior is not influenced by quantum phenomena at all", which is even more certainly false. Yet we're still obsessed with mind uploading. Why? I guess it's because, while we accept that life seems to have some "atman", a sense of identity, and quantum mechanics allows this in a very weak sense, it makes no sense that our perceptions would be at all influenced by quantum mechanics. Using the no-cloning theorem to resolve the problem of mind uploading seems like cheating, and we're all pretty sure that souls don't exist, so we tend to think that anyone who looks for something like a soul in fundamental physics must be pushing an agenda. But this latter reasoning is a fallacy; the well is poisoned when anyone who suggests that quantum mechanics might derail computational neuroscience must believe in some weird magical revisionism of ESP or hypercomputations occurring in the brain or whatever. But there's an easier culprit hiding in plain sight: the tendency of people to talk more about things they think they can understand, than things where they run a serious risk of being proven flat wrong. I could be flat wrong (but this is not my first rodeo); many posters in this thread as well as the blogger cannot. Loss aversion strikes again.