For me questions on the nature of consciousness have always been deeply connected to the question of identity. Specifically the following thought experiment: Wh

For me questions on the nature of consciousness have always been deeply connected to the question of identity. Specifically the following thought experiment: What if there was a machine that would read every atom of your body and recreate your body at a different location at a different time whilst destroying the original. Would the arising consciousness still be your own original consciousness or would it be a copy? What if we keep both, the original and the copy? Are there now two separate instances of your consciousness running? I guess the only answer in line with Koch is yes. Consciousness emerges out of a complex system. And I might add that consciousness is not a continuously working "state of mind". It fades in and out during our daily lives. The consciousness we had yesterday is lost today and replaced by a new one, which runs on a different chemical setting in your brain (albeit shares most of the memories of the previous one). I think that while I can "experience my own existence", this "existence" doesn't always refer to the same consciousness - one moment to the next the underlying system might have changed marginally or even substantially (in the case of being based on an entirely new set of atoms, which just happens to be in the same configuration as before).