It's like the star trek transporter problem -- if all the transporter does is break down your body into energy, beam it somewhere, then turn it back into matter and reassemble it, is it really you?
Yes.
Maybe your experience of consciousness would be interrupted when your body was ripped apart, and it wouldn't "pick up" again when the machine gets rebooted planetside - that's a NEW experience of consciousness, and the old you is dead.
It's not though. We experience that every day when we go to bed. Your consciousness is interrupted for a couple of hours, then you get something similar to consciousness, then you stop existing again, then you approach consciousness again, then you disappear again and then you alarm clock goes off. For most of those 8 hours you may as well, from your own perspective, be dead. The only difference is that you can vaguely experience things and maybe as a survival instinct become conscious again.
Of course, there's no way to know, because the new person inherits all of your old experiences and perceive a continuous stream of consciousness. (I think there's a TNG episode about this, no? Where an copy of Riker created by a transporter error has been stranded on some planet for 10 years, and he thinks he's the real one ... or maybe he IS the real one)
Yes. He ended up going by Tom Riker (William Thomas Riker) and becoming a Maquis, comically ripping off fake cheek hair in a dramatic moment on Deep Space Nine in order to somehow demonstrate that Commander Will Riker somehow didn't change his facial hair in the past 24 hours. Actually I watched that episode with Villager and she and I cracked up laughing. She because she forgot about the TNG episode and thought he was from the Mirror Universe, and me that she would assume that, and the ridiculousness of the whole scene as one thing.
There are characters in Transmetropolitan that do that too - transhumanists who upload their consciousness into a swarm of nanobots which can assemble themselves into any form. Then the body dies. So is the swarm the same person as the one who died? Is the person really dead or not? It's all tangled up.
I agree that the interruption in consciousness would really make me hesitate to get on that ride.
But imagine this -- what if they could digitize your brain one piece at a time, so the experience of consciousness was never interrupted?
Nanites crawl through your brain and slowly replace each neuron with a mechanical one, one by one. You might be awake the whole time.
If the essence of "you-ness" is connected to the uninterrupted experience of consciousness, would THAT be you?
If so, then the question about whether or not life can be digitally augmented, perhaps into immortality, is not really a philosophical problem, but one of process.
Again, you all go to sleep right?
The other thing too is that you are a pattern. What defines you is that pattern. Your body, on a cellular level, is constantly changing. Your cell membranes behave like a really fucking fast liquid. The whole objection with the transporter thing is that you disappear and stop existing for a few seconds and then reappear but is it you. Yeah. It is. You aren't your constituent atoms which are quite frankly constantly changing. Typing on a keyboard? Sorry, your atoms actually just went all over the place just to type "Typing on a keyboard." If you want your chemical structure to remain exactly the same, then you prefer death with no decomposition. So, what matter is it where those atoms happen to be? You're not even made of the same atoms that you were when you were born. The big problem there is well, photocopying photocopies of photocopies.
It's basically a question of the nature of consciousness, or the "soul" -- is your soul simply your ability to process information, or is it your awareness that you are processing information? I think that question may be reading too much into it, though I'm not a neuroscientist so I can't be sure. Maybe human self-awareness is just an artifact of processing information the way we do.
In a way it is. Consciousness is an emergent property. And that property emerges as a result, as I understand it, of how much and how efficiently neurons are communicating with each other. Here's a question. Where do we go between being awake and dreaming? We're out for a whole 8 hours during sleep, and we only approach consciousness for a few minutes here and there within that time.
My concern is more about using AI to extend individual life, and whether the replacement is the original in terms of continuity of consciousness. I suppose it would be good enough if the experience of moving into an artificial was at least as smooth as the transition from wakefulness to sleep to wakefulness again. But how do you prove that's what has happened?
Replacement is continuity. Which I will get to.
I really like Cram's idea of replacing neurons and synapses one at a time using nanites.
This was also touched upon, briefly, and without proof of concept, in TNG. It was the episode where Data and Lore teamed up with the Borg liberated by Hugh and wanted to research how to perfect the Borg so that they would be totally mechanical and not organic at all. The experiment was going to be done on Geordi and he successfully appealed to Data's new found emotions to spare him.
