Ghosts in the machine

As part of a series of more general comments about the singularity, Stross makes the following comment about the religious implications of uploading:

However, if it becomes plausible in the near future we can expect extensive theological arguments over it. If you thought the abortion debate was heated, wait until you have people trying to become immortal via the wire. Uploading implicitly refutes the doctrine of the existence of an immortal soul, and therefore presents a raw rebuttal to those religious doctrines that believe in a life after death.

Which is exactly how Richard Morgan plays things in Altered Carbon. When Kovacs arrives on Earth, after a lifetime in the Envoy Corps bringing shock and awe to the extra-solar colonies, he's surprised by the large numbers of Catholics. When he asks Ortega about it, she explains that because of their commitment to dualism, they can't accept than an uploaded mind is the same as the original person and this makes it impossible for them to travel via DHF — essentially just an upload, an FLT transmission to another planet, and a download into a new body — that everyone else uses to hop from one place to another.

In response to Stross' provocations Scalzi notes that if you're committed to something as crazy as two substance dualism, you might as well go the whole hog and say that the soul — or whatever you want to call the non-extensible component — is associated with the software not the hardware and allow it to migrate with your mind as you transfer yourself to a new platform — something that, at a first guess, I suspect might be compatible with occasionalism, epiphenomenalism, etc.