> Ziana Astralos
> With scanning, in its various
> implementations, you have the problem of potential
> loss of important information, as well as that pesky
> problem of whether your consciousness will also
> transfer when your scan comes on-line, and if not,
> then where is your consciousness going to end up, in
> the original body, or your uploaded data?
You're sounding like a dualist here. Consciousness is not some magic thing
which floats around waiting to be embodied in one brain or another. It is a
result, in your current organic brain, of a set of neurons performing some
operation. Both your scanned brain and the new non-original brain, if they
meet the right conditions (that is, perform the right operations), will
produce consciousness.
The real problem (which you might have been referring to) is the notion that
we want our consciousness to feel continuous during the upload procedure.
So that you feel like you have actively migrated to the upload computer, not
like you're still sitting in the operating room watching your new copy run
off having a great time. The soft slow replacement method that Mike
mentioned would appear to give us the former. A scan of some sort would
seem to result in the latter.
The problem, though, is this: does it matter at all. If a brain is scanned
and the process which is consciousness is the same in both brains then both
will consider themselves to be the same identity. Both will claim to have
been (and one will claim to still be) in the original body.
The one in the original body really can only say that his instantiation has
no causal relationship to the new one and therefore his awareness never
migrated. Scanning does not constitute a causal relationship because it
requires no involvement of the actual process of consciousness. He might go
on to say that having multiple instantiations does not imply that all
instantiations have the same status. One might have been running for twenty
years as a human brain; another might have been running for five minutes
after an upload procedure.
But this is immaterial; a process is a process, regardless of where in its
lifetime it is started and for how long it has been running. This reminds
me of the philosophy of mind notion of intensionality, which I never
accepted as it seems to claim that past causal relationship has something
important to do with current process.
As far as I can tell it seems that the way to feel that your awareness is
continuous is to use a replacement method.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:04:08 MDT