About a month ago, I found a link to a post in a blog of IEEE in HackerNews. It discussed about the possibility of recreating one’s consciousness in a digital medium, after their death.

The topic fascinated me, and it lead me to think a bit about it. I felt that the topic is a sensitive subject, and there should be some rules in place to guarantee the smooth performance of such a system, should one is ever to be developed.

Here are some rules that came to my mind:

1. It must be decentralized and no single entity should have control.
2. I should be able to work after I die, and earn an income, paying for my hosting.
3. If one can make a digital copy of a biological brain, they can make multiple copies. To prevent that, ICANN-like organization should issue unique addresses. If I authorize a clone, the clone must be identified for what he is.
4. I should know that I died, and I am now operating in a digital environment.
5. I should be able to communicate with the both biological and digital humans.
6. I should be able to operate a surrogate mechanical body.
7. I should be able to have multiple surrogate bodies standby, but only one must be operating at a given time.
8. There should be a Matrix-like virtual reality for digital humans to hangout, when we are not interacting with the physical world.
9. I should be backed up every second, to prevent data lose due to technical issues. Rebooting after a backup-restore should be like waking up from a sleep, rather than resetting it to a past time like a game, because other (biological and digital) humans would have progressed through time, when I was offline.
10. Jurisdictions should make necessary amendments to grant digital humans necessary rights, if not all, including representation. Our income can be taxed. I won’t say no to some extra taxes to keep the Digital Consciousness Network (DCN) operating.
11. People should not be able to sign in to the DCN prematurely (Read: Before legal death.). Suicide should revoke the right to enter DCN, otherwise people may end biological lives just to enter the digital one. We may need biological humans around to make sure robots in charge of keeping the system running are operating optimally.