RTP Discussions

[HarryStottle]

apologies for the delay in replying. My email notification got lost in a blizzard of trivia!

[HarryStottle]

greetings squeak.

You've made some extremely pertinent points above and are, imho, definitely asking the right questions. I particularly like the analogy(brain in stomach etc) and would draw people's attention to experiments like this one, in which we can make people believe that they're perceiving themselves from outside their own bodies; experiments which dramatically illustrate your point.

[squeakthedragon]

@Harry:

Thanks for the comments.

I do think, based on what we know at the moment, that a method of mind transcription involving a direct connection to the physical brain where functions are handed off one at a time to an external network has a chance of being the most "reassuring" method of personal continuance for most people.

One scenario for testing this process might, in time, come about from experiments with volunteers who have suffered physical brain damage and retain enough sound judgment to understand the risks. The damaged parts of their brains could be gradually supplemented with artificial components, and so forth. This might provide insight on how the mind exists within networked hardware. (Be that hardware organic or inorganic.)

Edit: I hit enter too soon! There was a bit more.

Another thought experiment struck me regarding the need for the brain to be "always on" or not.

The classic Star Trek question of "do people die in the Transporter" takes on a new spin if consciousness can lay dormant in the brain without destroying one's authentic personal continuity.

Let's consider for a moment that the Transporter is disassembling the traveler's molecules, moving them, and then reassembling them in a new place. In fact, by some authors' descriptions, the Transporter doesn't even do that. It merely reads the /pattern/ of a person's molecular structure and at the other end, "generic" molecules fall into place in the pattern.

If the human brain doesn't need to be in constant operation for "you" to survive, then despite the fact that the molecules have magically (with science!) jumped from one location to another, the traveler is still alive.

What's more interesting though, would be the idea that if the mind cares not for arbitrary molecular displacement, then what does it care for the nature of the displacement? Teleportation or physical death result in the same scattering of atoms. What matters is that they get reassembled at some point. And if the mind is depending not on a particular physical atom for its operation but only the pattern the mind is running on, then authentic resurrection of the dead might indeed be possible. (Authentic, as in the uninterrupted continuation of the original person's existence, and not an omortal "clone" however flawless the duplicate copy of the person is.)

I'm interested in questions like this because they challenge us to think outside the framework we're "built" to think in. It might seem counter-intuitive to visualize whatever it is that really counts as our personal sense of self being totally independent of the particular atoms our brain is made of, because a lot of traditional human thinking has had to come up with so-called supernatural explanations to support that idea. The stereotypical image of the "spirit", and so forth.

Ironically, the truth might be /far weirder/ than any past religion's idea of the afterlife or souls.
_________________
We're from Outer Space, every one of us!

[HarryStottle]

[HarryStottle]

just occurred to me to point out that I've begun to track the kind of developments I've just mentioned in my Stumble blog. If anyone's interested, this link will take you there...

[HarryStottle]

talk about good timing, in the context of neural implants etc, check this out...