Preserving your brain might kill you, but it could help you live forever - Sensationalist Headlines

Oh we were getting somewhere, I asked you to describe consciousness itself in purely physical terms, specifically the sensation of existing, and that supposing a transference of the specific sensation of existence to be somehow making less assumption than the option of the creation of a new identical one seemed somewhat faulty logically to me. When the circles slowly get towards clarity of what each side of the conversation actually means I would hardly count it pointless.

What do you mean by "pause"? If you mean a brain ceasing all measurable activity (e.g. all cells in the brain cease metabolism), and then somehow restarting a while later in such a way that it can operate exactly as before, then sure consciousness is preserved. If you mean constructing a brain such that it is a perfect replica of another, then killing the original and starting up the copy, then no, because the original has clearly ceased to exist. Your proposal is the one that requires the existence of something outside of the material world such that consciousness can be transferred between physical objects.

I don't claim that something called "consciousness" exists. Why should I have to describe it? That's exactly what I'm asking you, and everyone else who claim transfer of consciousness to be an issue, to do. If you want to claim that consciousness exists, and isn't set outside of the material world, then you have to describe it in purely physical terms.

You would say then that you deny that you experience at all writing this post and simply being at any point of time? Is this an admission to being a philosophical zombie? Because other than you and me being of a completely different species I should not have to provide evidence for what clearly is self evident, I would need evidence to make grand claims however such as "oh this just doesn't exist, it's an illusion". That I am unable to describe this in physical terms means little, as I am not alone in this (which is why the concept belongs to the realm of philosophy for now) as the closest thing we currently having to measurement are neural correlates.

My brain processes inputs, is permanently or temporarily changed by them, and dishes outputs accordingly. That's all I can claim. You can call that me experiencing being, I guess that's an apt description of this physical phenomenon. Humans don't conceive the world without bias. To believe that there is something called "consciousness" that isn't simply the result of the material state of the body, without physical evidence to support it, simply because you "feel" it, is to embrace that bias. Humans are apparently wired to believe in the existence of superior beings or gods, too. Would you say that a believer saying that he "feels" god exists and that it is self-evident to him is proof of that existence?

But I am precisely saying that it is a result of the material state of the body, mental properties are direct results of physical substance. How is experience itself somehow on the same level of "feels" as feeling something vague and concluding with misplaced certainty that it is not only God, but a specific conception of God. Claiming experience itself exists as it is very obviously is experienced by just about anyone is making zero presuppositions as to what this experience is. I'm not saying it is a specific thing, making claims as to what it is, which would be interpretation I have no grounds to make, but merely that it's there - you're just saying it doesn't exist and once again list physical correlates, mistaking the map for the territory. I repeat as I have done elsewhere, why would an identical copy be the exact same thing rather than a different merely identical thing?

How is it semantics? You can say that two objects are indistinguishable in every way possible, but at the end of the day there are still two objects in existence. My point about the ship of Theseus analogy is that it is possible to do such a replacement in principle, but going from replacing individual molecules to replacing the entire brain, there comes a point where you cannot replace a part without disrupting brain function in such a way that it no longer works.

we already stop the heart during heart surgery, we don't really know anything about where conciousness resides now to say whether we actually ever stop it or simply reduce it. there's some new thoughts on the claustrum nerve and its unusual connections to most of the rest of the brain, but we don't know enough right now to say.

That has literally nothing to do with what I said but okay?

you were asking if we can replace things in our brain without sacrificing our conciousness, the same question was asked about heart surgery back in the day, we now routinely stop people's hearts "killing" them by older definitions, now we don't know enough about conciousness to say whether we could shut down the brain or the bits that generate our conciousness as would possibly be needed for such an operation to either scan it or interface with it.

Why? You have no basis to make this argument. We're talking individual molecules here. There's no reason to believe that changing a single molecule will impact the brain. The structure as a whole remains the same. The structure of individual neurons remains the same. Why would it stop functioning? And what if the "copy" is made after the "original" is destroyed? There aren't two objects in existence then. It's practically identical to brain activity being stopped, every molecule being replaced, then resuming activity. Why shouldn't consciousness be retained then?

I meant as one progresses from replacing individual molecules to replacing individual cells to replacing entire regions of the brain, at some point the disruption to brain activity becomes so large that it could very well cause the brain to stop functioning. As for the copy vs the original, they may be functionally identical but it is blatantly obvious to someone overseeing the whole process that one brain was destroyed and another created. This is ignoring the fact that physics itself sets limitations on how much of a brain we can actually copy (see the no-cloning theorem).

So there's no issue with replacing every single molecule in the brain with other, identical ones then? And that fact changes the experience for the subject undergoing the process? Does that mean the person remains themselves if they set up the experiment on their own, without anybody to oversee it?

You've yet to demonstrate that identical in physical property = same, the exact object, merely because we might not have the means to distinguish them. This is the basis of my disagreement with you. Am I to take it at your word? Also, whether experience is a concept that is man-made is irrelevant to the fact that what it denotes is undeniably real, and the assertion that you can just hand-wave away the constant empirical fundament that is experience, not just the obviously man-made formulation of it, is absurd to me. That the mental can emerge from the physical is not exactly a novel nor very controversial concept, and our main disagreement is on the fact that a copy would somehow have the same identical consciousness emerge rather than just an identical consciousness. The nature of consciousness, illusory or not, is not the real root of my disagreement with you, it seems.

if consciousness is an illusion then who the fuck is it tricking?

Then you've misunderstood my point. I'm not discussing whether it's possible to make an exact physical copy of someone from a practical standpoint. Whether the physical intricacies of what gets copied are distinguishable using human means is irrelevant to my argument. When I say physically identical, I mean physically identical, including every subtleties and particles the existence of which have yet to be revealed, or indeed will never be revealed. The only thing that wouldn't be from the physical plane are metaphysical concepts, like souls or gods, if they existed.

I think the important thing is that the information that makes up the person will always be there in the form of fact, but whether it is instantiated in a physical form is conditional and so, all else being equal, it would be better to have that person exist than not.

But the very act of copying creates a separate physical substance which is identical in such a scenario, why then would separate identical mental properties (read: a copy of you) not emerge instead of the same one (read: you at this point in time) somehow magically persisting as if reincarnated?

It's physically impossible to do that but sure let's roll with it. Replacing one molecule at a time slowly enough will probably allow the brain to continue functioning throughout, resulting in a continuous experience. Replacing the whole brain at once will probably result in a discontinuous experience, whereupon the old consciousness ceases to exist and a new one is created. To borrow a concept from thermodynamics, the former process is like a reversible process, while the latter is irreversible.

This argument boils down to "identical and the same aren't... the same", which is what I disagree with in this debate and is the crux of my disagreement, I think. From my point of view, two objects that are in all points identical and exist within different time frames are the same.

Then the problem here is that the language I attempt to use to convey what I mean is inadequate to say what I mean to, as in English indeed the two words share meaning. Kind of a bummer, really. In my view an object that shares physical properties is identical, but not the same in that it is a separate object if one looks at them comparatively (which can be done even if temporally they never coexist) which as far as I am concerned my subjective being as this current mental process belongs to as it is indeed a consequence of the physical alone, and that this distinction can be muddied and avoided by modifying and replacing parts of an existent substance rather than merely destroying one (or not) and replicating elsewhere. Whether this would be in any way different from merely instant, total replication is anyone's guess, but my experience (which may indeed be illusory in this regard) seems to suggest otherwise as the brain constantly goes such a procedure (although in very small scale). See? I guess we did get somewhere, even if it is agreeing to disagree.

I see. But how can copies that don't coexist temporally be looked at comparatively? It seems logical to me to think the world is agnostic to that sort of comparisons.

Yeah, I'm in agreement with you here. I mean, you can replace some absolutely minor parts, stuff that isn't vital to operation, but anything remotely important can't just br disconnected while the engine is running without causing damage to the system or injuries to your self. That's literally not what I asked at all but again, okay?

Why shouldn't it? Everything we know about the brain and consciousness points at consciousness being an emergent property of brain activity.... which has to do with the structure of neurons and the electrons flowing through them. Why wouldn't it be possible to "jump-start" a brain again if you were able to inject the exact state of the brain back into it? Obviously this is a "way in the future" scenario, but it doesn't seem impossible.

we do have a forum for automotive repair you know.

I see what you mean. Even assuming all physical data is preserved somewhere and we compare that to a currently existing copy we would have no way of seeing a difference. Yet for some reason it still seems strange to me that: Let 1 be the first (original) and 2 the second (copy) of any physical human brain, and let U be the mental subjective experience, even if we grant 1U and 2U are identical there is a clear difference in which is which, even if we lose the tools to differentiate them. I guess you had a point with mathematics being a tool for getting the world but it is still hard for me to wrap my head around the possibility that absent both of them coexisting, they are the same object separated by time alone.

You are significantly more dense than I originally gave you credit for.

Because we don't actually know that much about how the brain works. First, neurons don't transmit electrical signals using electrons, they use action potentials. Then there are neurotransmitters that relay signals at synapses. On top of that, there are all sorts of biochemical pathways that occur within neurons, interactions between non-neuronal brain cells, and possibly other things we aren't even aware of at this point. It's not so simple as "injecting the exact state of the brain back into it", because we don't know how to measure that state, or whether it can be measured at all. If quantum effects turn out to be important, the no-cloning theorem I mentioned earlier forbids making an exact copy of the brain. I agree that if such a perfect copy is made, then that copy will behave and appear to be exactly like the original. It will likely even believe itself to be the original unless told otherwise. But the fact remains that it is still a copy, and the original has ceased to exist.

I just wonder if the "2nd" you would behave and remember the last you, also if the original would play a part in it. Doubtful but I would not like to be in a position where I have the choice between a 2nd me and killing my original to extend life. I would rather just let nature take its course.

I'm always weirded out by the thought of technology evolving beyond my death so much that when I die I just jolt awake 3000 years later and am kind of confused and silently ask "...afterlife?" and get told "Nah, we are beta-testing this neat new software, almost at 1.0!" and go "Oh."