CONCEPT
Patternism and the Reduplication Problem
Susan Schneider’s diagnosis of the tacit metaphysics behind the uploading dream—the view that a person is essentially an information pattern, so that copying it preserves the person—and her demonstration that this view cannot survive the reduplication problem: if the pattern can be copied once, it can be copied twice, and both copies have an equal claim to being you.
Patternism is philosopher Susan Schneider’s name for the working assumption that underlies the technological dream of digital immortality: the view that a person is essentially a pattern of information, and that preserving the pattern preserves the person. On this picture, you are not your particular brain—you are the organizational structure it implements, and that structure could in principle be transferred to a different substrate, silicon or simulation, without any essential loss. Patternism is not usually stated explicitly; it is the tacit metaphysics that makes uploading look like
consciousness preserved rather than consciousness replaced. Schneider’s intervention is to make the view explicit and then show that, taken seriously, it destroys the very notion of personal survival it was designed to support. The argument runs through what philosophers call the reduplication problem: any process that copies