No-self
The Buddhist analysis denying that a person has a fixed, independent essence.
What it commits you to
The anatta analysis holds that what we call a person is a changing aggregate of conditioned processes with no permanent core, and that attachment to that core is the source of dukkha. It is the most developed pre-modern argument against the simplicity assumption that runs through most moral theory. It bears directly on personal identity and therefore on uploads and copies.
Which realms lean on this
Philosophy carries the arguments the other four kinds are downstream of — what an agent is, what a person owes, what a rule is for.
philosophy · 8 realms — The Care Weft, The Contractual Court, The Existential Wilds, The Kantian Citadel, The Longview Foundry, The Middle Kingdom, The Pragmatic Wharf, The Sangha Terraces.
Canon that discusses this
modern · 2002
No Future Without a Past
Tutu argues from ubuntu — that a person becomes fully human through relationship with other people — to a politics of shared responsibility rather than blame. The formulation that matters for a governance question is the negative one: a future without the past that made it is not a future anyone can build on. The excerpt below paraphrases the essay rather than quoting it.
primary · 150
Mulamadhyamakakarika
The foundational Madhyamaka text, arguing that no phenomenon has independent existence and that apparent essence arises from dependent origination. Read as epistemology rather than metaphysics it is a theory about why nothing is self-sufficient — including, later, why no component of a system can be trusted in isolation from what it depends on. The excerpt below paraphrases the chapter rather than quoting a translation.
primary · 300 BCE
Dhammapada
Verses assembled from the older Buddhist canon, of which the Khandha Goyana section on arising and passing away is the part that matters here. Its analysis of experience as conditioned and therefore impermanent is the substrate for dependent origination and for the no-self analysis, and it is the oldest systematic account of how a mind fails to stay put. The excerpt below paraphrases the Khandha Goyana rather than quoting a translation.
modern · 1998
What We Owe to Each Other
Twenty-five years in the making and out in 1998. Scanlon argues that what we owe each other is that no one could reasonably reject the principles by which we are all to be governed, which grounds obligation in interpersonal reasons rather than in a chooser maximising an objective. The excerpt below paraphrases the argument rather than quoting the book.
See also
Dependent origination
philosophyEverything arises in dependence on conditions, so nothing exists independently.
Personal identity
philosophyWhat makes a person at one time the same person at another.
Mind upload
philosophyCopying a mind into a software substrate, and everything that follows from copying.
Moral luck
ethicsCircumstances outside your control that determine how moral you are judged to be.