Title: The Reality and Illusion of Digital Immortality: The Ethical Dilemma of Mind Uploading in Greg Egan’s Science Fiction

Abstract: With the advent of the data age, mind uploading has become a prominent theme in science fiction narratives. While offering the tantalizing prospect of digital immortality, it also raises a host of thorny ethical issues. Australian science fiction writer Greg Egan explores the ethical dilemmas brought about by mind uploading in many of his works. In Egan’s literary imagination, this technology disrupts the personal identity by challenging the continuity and identity of the self, and undermines traditional intersubjective relationships. Moreover, mind uploading may give rise to new forms of inequality and social stratification, posing a significant threat to social cohesion and order. Behind the promise of digital immortality lies a profound erasure of the meaning of life, along with a reshaping of human existential anxiety and conceptions of death. Ethical reflection on the multiple possibilities and consequences of mind uploading reveals the tension between technological rationality and human values, and highlights the inherent ethical complexities of digital immortality. Such reflection can also deepen our understanding of the boundary between technology and ethics and serves as a timely preparation for the ethical challenges that near-future societies may confront.

Keywords: digital immortality, mind uploading, Greg Egan, ethics

Author: Yinghe Niu, Ph.D. Candidate, School of Foreign Languages and Literature, Shandong University, Jinan, Shandong, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2025.03.005