Hello everyone, this is my first post to this group
so if my thoughts are old (or dumb ;), please
bear with me.
When discussing transhumanism in general and downloading
in particular, one inevitably has to deal with
the nature of consciousness and 'I-ness', as shown by the
large number of posts about qualia and such.
I have some thoughts on the subject.
If we assume that consciousness is 'just' a large quantity
of complexly connected neurons, firing to and fro, then we
can safely assert that it is (as is any formal system)
independent of the media on which it is stored.
This means that I can take a brain and replace every neuron
by a small chip that behaves like a simple neuron (i.e it fires
when it has recieved enough signals to exceed its treshold).
Nothing novel yet.
But what if I make every chip record its own state and after
a while tell all my neurochips to play what they have
recorded. The result would be a real consciousness that
experiences something that has already happened.
Since each chip has a record of its own states, we can
actually cut the wires connecting them and still get
the neurochips to play its recordings like nothing
has happened, the consciousness would still be there.
This is a really strange thought, we can now, for example,
perform the same procedure with another consciousness
and we would get two sets of neurochips that needn't
be connected. In fact we could put them all in pile
and the two individuals would still be there, feeling.
But every linear combination of the two sets would also
be an individual, since it's not possible to say which
neurochip belongs to what.
Doesn't this thought-experiment in some sense imply that the
model is flawed, that the core of consciousness
(if one is a materialist, anyway) must in some
way involve effects of EM-fields?
What effect does this have on Moravec's downloading?
//David Fendrich
"I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself
than be crowded on a velvet cushion" -- H.D Thoreau
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