Are you loading it into some sort of cyborg body like something out of Terminator or Ghost in the Shell? Or an identical clone like in The Sixth Day?
I have to say that for all intents and purposes, you are the same person, just as you are the same person with a prothetic leg or an artificial hip.
On the other hand you might become a different person. Not so much different maybe. You’re still you. You’re just now you with a metal endoskeleton that can rip a car in half. Hopefully “endo”. I wouldn’t want to be an armored freak like Robocop.
It would, in a sense, be like CREATING an identical twin. Which begs the question, what happens to the original? You wake up next to another you and someone tells you that only one of you gets to live. Is that essentially murdering the old you? Although I have to assume you would only transfer your brain if you either were already on your deathbed or just wanted to make copies of you for some reason. But now there are two of you and you would become two different people as your experiences diverged.
And I don’t even want to get into the assumption that if you can copy a brain of data, chances are you can probably add, edit and delete data. How does that change who and what you are?
Either putting the mind into a “cyborg” body or into some kind of mainframe, i.e. total replacement of the brain cells by computer chips (assuming of course that this is possible).
I agree that, for all intents and purposes, to other people, you would be the same. The question is whether you, your consciousness, would still be around to enjoy your life after your mind is transferred. I don’t think that you would.
Well, when the dust settled, there would be a person around who remembered being you yesterday - which is all you can say about yourself. The definition of ‘self’ is a strange one, which endures massive changes to the body and mind and physical location - it would surely survive falling asleep as a meat-machine and waking up as a fax machine.
If I knocked you out, dragged you two feet to the left, and then woke you up, would you still be you, in your own perception? If so, the copy will still be you, in its own perception. There will just be another person around making the same claim at the same time, is all.
I presume the two would remorselessly fight to the death.
It so happens that you are accustomed to a single continuous thread being used as a criterion for identity. The technology you mention would destroy this. But I think you make a mistake in supposing that it must therefore also destroy identity.
Let us consider a case of non-destructive cloning. Somehow, technology achieves something that can almost instantly reproduce a human without damaging that human. But the cloner wants to see what happens here: he knocks you out in a completely nondescript room and clones you, and the clone is placed in an identical nondescript room just across the hall from you. When you both awake, the doors open and the cloner wants to see how you will determine who the original is.
After cloning, both individuals will pursue different choices in life as they will face different events. Therefore, even though they are clones, they will no longer be identical. Nevertheless they share an identical past. One of these would still be “the real you” but it is not obvious what metaphysical or psychological benefit knowing this would yield. You are always surrounded by not-yous. The cloning case only seems special because it turns the idea of a continuous thread on its head. It is otherwise unremarkable.
Removing and replacing something as monumental as ones total memory to another embodiment, and still expect to be the same entity is unlikely. People with artificial or missing limbs struggle everyday with the state that they once were and what they are now. Reportedly, having the most strenuous time with the change (let’s exclude the missing finger tips and things not as large as a missing limbs.) Rarely are these individuals mentally the same as they were. So what is to be expected if you are inserted into something as artificial as a mechanical body?
Let me go to the other end of the spectrum and speak of flesh.
Imagine that your memory was uploaded to another body. Unless cloning can produce liefs experiences of the body. Do you think it would go unnoticed by the mind? Assuming that it is a brand new body of your exact likeness or anything other then the body the mind or information originally dwelled in. It would be safe to assume everything is anew. Physical sensations, smell, pains, scars, etc…would be different than what the memory expects. It would seem something like a scar or missing wisdom teeth would serve to be insignificant. But try imagining what you once knew, is now only a belief. Reality for the clone, would be turned upside down. This replica of you will be so shell shocked, the clone would immediately make the transition of *not *being you.
Would you not agree that your memory involves much of what your previous body went through? Dramatically take this away without being conscious of it and its pretty much left with uncertainty regarding its memory.
I don’t think we can know because we don’t know what it would “feel” like to wake up in a replacement body that is virtually indistinguishable from the original.
There are two reasons for this though. One, whatever experience they went through that caused the limb to be removed was likely terrifying and traumatic. And two, modern prothetic limbs do not have 100% of the functionality or asthetics of the old limb.
I disagree. I think it would be more akin to waking up after plastic surgury or having a cast removed from a busted leg once it healed. You would feel different, probably a little sore and your muscles might not work the way you expect them to, but you would eventually adapt.
By this logic, people would freak out after having plasic surgery; they would deny their past and identity after losing a limb, they would refuse to believe that their childhood pictures were of them. Changing their shirts would probably freak them out, and getting a new glasses perscription certainly would.
People are actually pretty willing to absorb differences in their appearance and physical form, at least with regard to maintaining a sense of identity. And, what you knew is now only a belief? A distinction without a difference. More importantly the person would recall their previous experiences, and thus associate them with themselves, and also associate their current experience with themself. People are pretty adaptable that way.
My…shirt…is…BLUE!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
There’s also the interesting question of if you can down/upload a person’s brain, presumably you can upload memories that don’t belong to them. Or upload a composit of memories and knowledge from a bunch of different people. THAT would be interesting.
I’ve read a few short stories lately which involved the notion of minds being uploaded and downloaded from biologically human brains.
I think practically anything, including this, is possible over the course of maybe hundreds of thousands or millions of years. This kind of “uploading” could be done if no way else then at least by brute force construction of brain portions particle by particle, and with enough energy, you can do that.
But these stories tend to be set sometime in the next few centuries.
Are there really mechanisms by which people think something like this could be done? I mean using some kind of signal jacked into a brain?
Aren’t we pretty sure that there’s no clear software/hardware distinction in the brain? Isn’t the mind constituted for the most part by the physical configuration of the brain, rather than by electrical signals that travel around between its parts? If I’m right in thinking that, then I don’t see how anything like an “upload” of a mind is possible.
Yes. While it may be difficult to visualize, our memories and experiences are shaped through synapses between neurons. Nothing less, nothing more. Because the brain is the seat of consciousness, the body is irrelevant as long as the brain - and its unique connections that underlie the individual’s memories and distinct personality - remain intact.
To put yet another new slant on the whole thing (not that my other attempts to do that got any takers), what about your brain being transferred into an identical cloned body? Would you then still be you? Is there any difference between brain transferral and mind upload (i.e. creating an exact copy of your brain)?
I do believe that this overstates. Our bodies play a role too. Our brains react to hormonal and chemical backgrounds and interpret signals (fast heart rate, etc.) from our bodies in a complex dance. The brain out of its context, out of its relationships to the world, and without the processing that occurs distal to it in the rest of the body, would be a different consciousness than within that context.
Of course the technology to do this is very much a fantasy. Of course the in the human the hardware is the software and the dynamic whirling vortexes of activity resultant of the hardware and the experiences that are any individual self are massively nonlinear and chaotic. Reproducing them? Storing them? Who is to say what someday might be possible but I cannot even imagine such a technology.
But the exercise of imagining it reveals the nature of how we think of our selves … and that is if not useful, at least a bit fun.
Here you could trace a continuity of “self” following the travels of your squishy grey matter, similarly to the way we trace a continuity of self from one waking moment to the next across spans of unconsciousness due to having the same body the whole time. Plus, of course, you would have no ‘other copy’ of you running around and disturbing your illusion of easy self-definition.
I would wake up the next morning in my brand new, custom built body and be quite happy with the results. You could come up and tell me that I’m not the original me, of course, but I would disagree, since quite obviously, I’m right here. That used up meatsack I used to wear is of no consequence.
Continuity of self is completely unharmed in the process, and any objection is just people hanging onto the outdated idea of a soul.
Ooh… I remember a good sci fi story now… They implanted a computer into peoples heads, which would learn to be them, copying what you do until its a perfect mimic, with some error checking gizmo to keep the two in line with each other. Then, when the computer brain and meat brain were performing everything equally, they would disconnect the meat brain, and let the computer brain take over.
Even better was that the changeover could be carried out while you were awake, and your thoughts wouldn’t even be interupted by the switch.
Sorry for resurrecting this thread but I’ve been meaning to start one on the same subject for some time.
Personally I’m closer to Vox Imperatoris’s view on the subject than any other. I especially find it difficult to comprehend the manner in which it is used in a lot of science-fiction.
For example, Bob undergoes a mind-upload process creating a copy of himself, ‘Bob-A’. This copy is placed in storage and not activated as a mind-backup. Bob then goes off and has the time of his life doing all the things he wanted to do but was scared of before incase something happened to him but its no problem now because, hey, he has the backup right?
Two months later Bob catches the wrong end of a nuclear explosion (it’s complicated) and is vapourised on the spot. Not a problem because he just comes back to life from his backup and Bob-A is now the new Bob, he gets up dusts himself off and while regretting the loss of two-months worth of memories goes on with his life.
Yes? Not how I can see it, it does Bob no good at all to have a backup, the instant he bites the bullet he’s as permenantly dead and gone as if he had no backup at all, his conciousness doesn’t magically leap back into Bob-A.
I can certainly agree that Bob-A is a version of Bob and in a sense the same person from the instant the backup is taken, but only from that instant the moment he is awoken and begins to experience sensory input he becomes a different person.
I didn’t explain that very well but hopefully people understand what I mean. For a particularly egregious example of this process in action read ‘Glasshouse’ by Charles Stross (a book I disliked in general and not only for this reason). Iain M. Banks also uses mind-backups in his novels but at least his characters question the usefulness of the process.
