I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing. I'm not arguing if it's possible for consciousness to exist outside of my own. I'm arguing that insofar as we w

I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing. I'm not arguing if it's possible for consciousness to exist outside of my own. I'm arguing that insofar as we want to understand if it's possible to transfer the medium ones own consciousness "runs on" out of your own brain, it seems like experiments like the one I wrote may be able to provide some knowledge about the viability. It's still running on your brain of course, so it's not trying to actually do any real transferal, but it is showing the degree to which conscious experience can feel non-local, which is part of what would be needed to be a person externalized from their own brain. So it may not exactly provide evidence in favor or against transfer viability (though it might, since we may be able to see that it would result in ego death or some equally horrifying result) but it would provide evidence that the subjective experience of such a transfer has meaning, and what that feeling could be. Now, once we get a brain/computer interface, things get really interesting. Because you can start to link minds, and even at low bandwidth, it may rapidly increase our understanding of the boundaries of what a conscious mind "is" and how much we should care about the "death" or "merging" of such things. It would be quite impactful, to say the least, to see that if you connected a person's mind to that of a simple organism in a bidirectional interface, if over time they act as though they had a single consciousness (probably mostly represented by the person's prior self, but perhaps with characteristics of the organism leaking in the other direction as well.) The closest analog we have today is when one separates the left and right hemisphere of the brain, and that is a crude, fixed, and brutal methodology for such experiments, so it's only done as a way to treat people whose health it may improve, and is irreversible.