>>13954208No, they’re just retarded. What’s happening is they privilege consciousness as if it were some magical thing that doesn’t follow the rules of nature. Somehow, because consciousness is magical, making a copy of someone will actually be them even though the original still exists. Right.
If you just think about it, consciousness is what a particular brain configuration feels like subjectively. Taking this approach means we don’t have to fully understand how it works yet to realize that an identical copy would have the same subjective feeling of consciousness, but would clearly be a different individual.
Now maybe some of these authors truly don’t care that a mind upload based on destructive scanning (or similar technologies) would be a different individual, since it would have the same (initial) goals and outlook that they do. That’s fine if they feel that way, but they need to be clear that’s what they’re talking about.
So, teleportation or anything based on outright copying is out. The only thing left is a Moravec transfer: if you gradually replace each neuron one by one with a digital replica using nanotechnology, then assuming that there isn’t something special about the type of substrate consciousness needs to occur in, you should be able to actual transfer one mind, with continuity, to another substrate. If there is something special about substrates after all, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible, it just means you have to pick the new substrate carefully. Maybe you can only transfer to highly parallel neuromorphic computers of a certain type, rather than pure software. The other big advantage of this approach, besides the fact that it could actually work, is that you can feel that your consciousness isn’t disrupted while it’s happening so there’s no doubt it’s still you on the other side.
