ABSTRACT
Could we one day, by applying a naturalistic, reductionist and mechanistic world view, succeed in creating conscious machines or in uploading our minds to computers and thus escape death? The possibility of spiritual machines and artificial consciousness depends on some classic philosophical questions about what the mind fundamentally is and how it relates to the body. This chapter traces the attempts to answer these questions in order to give an overview of the philosophical difficulties that could stand in the way of the development of spiritual machines.
