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The Ship of Theseus has a rather interesting application to this concept, explaining a way to do brain downloads without any risk of losing "you". We basically
by DarkShikari 18y ago
The Ship of Theseus has a rather interesting application to this concept, explaining a way to do brain downloads without any risk of losing "you".
We basically know for a fact at this point that the "soul" is not stored in any one brain cell--that is, you can lose any single brain cell and you're still who you are. Thus, if we take one brain cell, digitize it into some form in which it exactly replicates the function of the original, including ability to reconnect to other cells and so forth, it will continue to function as the original cell.
So you do this one by one for every single cell in the brain. In practice, this might be possible with nanotech or something of the sort.
Since no single cell can store consciousness, and you ever have one less cell than normal in your brain, "you" must logically be fine. Yet once the process is done, not an atom of the original "you" remains. The only way I've found to poke holes in this concept is the idea that there is something "not replicable" about brain cells, which seems unlikely--for example, it's doubtful that there is a significant quantum effect on consciousness. This would of course stop one from doing this, since quantum states cannot be duplicated.
See the last paragraph of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus#Other_examples http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus#Other_examples as well.
- rgrieselhuber 18y agoReminded me of Ise Shrine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise_Shrine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise_Shrine) and also Shirky's reference to it (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1TZaElTAs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1TZaElTAs). The point there is that function is also a meaningful definition of is-ness. Besides, aren't all of the cells in a human body replaced every x years already?
- DarkShikari 18y agoBrain cells aren't normally replaced regularly, AFAIK, so they're an exception to the rule.
- pfedor 18y agoOK so let's take out one cell of your brain and build two identical electronic braincell replacements (if braincells need randomness, let's say they're both connected to the same source of randomness, or use they same pseudo-random algorithm.) Let's connect them both to the remaining part of the brain, i.e., all the outgoing signals from the brain go to a switch that splits the signal and sends it to both electronic replacements, and all the incoming signals from the replacement cells to the brain go through a switch that asserts that the two inputs from the electronic braincells are identical and sends out just one copy to the original brain. Now let's repeat the procedure for every remaining braincell, with the correction when the two electronic braincells should connect to one another, we connect them directly in both copies, without going through the switch. In the end of this procedure we will have two identical electronic brains, connected to the same input from the senses, and the same source of randomness so they work identically. We can make them to two completely different persons by bifurcating the input at some point, then the two electronic brains' states will bifurcate too. Which of the two is "you"? They are completely symmetric. And if neither is "you", then how is it different from your thought experiment?