4 ms·

The weird part is why you think you existed 10 minutes and why you think you will exist in 10minutes.

• perl4ever 9y ago
  Logically, there is no reason I can give why in 10 minutes, my consciousness and yours will not switch places. If it happened in the past, neither of us would know. Yet I still experience being me right now, just "because". Really, what we have here is a quasi-religio-philosophical argument for reincarnation. I'm somewhat sympathetic to the idea of reincarnation after death, in fact, but I think people who believe in uploading minds are implicitly pretending to have knowledge about the process that nobody has. Any rules for where your consciousness ends up in the next instant in the event of a discontinuity are made up based on your preferences and prejudices. One may wish to believe that a computer that stores the patterns of your living brain captures your mind after you die, but it's no more or less valid (i.e. probable, provable) that the cliche that you are reincarnated into some particular living entity as reward or punishment for how you lived your life. Reincarnation is, in my opinion, outside the realm of science, so I don't disbelieve in it, I merely doubt it is possible to know anything about it due to the impossibility of investigating scientifically. ...and "mind-uploading" is merely a subset of human invented systems of reincarnation.