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Alsadius comments on Stupid Questions December 2014 - Less Wrong
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Is it possible even in principle to perform a "consciousness transfer" from one human body to another? On the same principle as mind uploading, only the mind ends up in another biological body rather than a computer. Can you transfer "software" from one brain to another in a purely informational way, while preserving the anatomical integrity of the second organism? If so, would the recipient organism come from a fully alive and functional human who would be basically killed for this purpose? Or bred for this purpose? Or would it require a complete brain transplant? (If so, how would neural structures found in the second body heal & connect with the transplanted brain so that a functional central nervous system results?) Wouldn't the person whose consciousness is being transferred experience some sort of personality change due to "inhabiting" a structurally different brain or body?
Is this whole hypothesis just an artifact of reminiscent introjected mind-body dualism, not compatible with modern science? Does the science world even know enough about consciousness and the brain to be able to answer this question?
I'm asking this because ever since I found out about ems and mind uploading, having minds moved to bodies rather than computers seemed to me a more appealing hypothetical solution to the problem of death/mortality. Unfortunately, I lack the necessary background knowledge to think coherently about this idea, so I figured there are many people on LW who don't, and could explain to me whether this whole idea makes sense.
In order to provide a definite answer to this question, we'd need to know how the brain produces consciousness and personality, as well as the exact mechanism of the upload(e.g., can it rewire synapses?).
Not exactly true; we probably don't need to know how consciousness arises. We would certainly have to rewire synapses to match the original brain, and it is likely that if we exactly replicate brain structure neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse, we would still not know where consciousness lies, but would have a conscious duplicate of the original.
Alternatively you could hypothesize a soul, but that seems like worry for worry's sake.
The flip side to this is that there is no measurable difference between 'someone who is you and feels conscious' and 'someone who is exactly like you in every way but does not feel conscious (but will continue to claim that e does)'. Even if you identified a mental state on a brain scan that you felt certain that was causing the experience of consciousness, in order to approximate a proof of this you would have to be able to measure a group of subjects that are nearly identical except not experiencing consciousness, a group that has not yet been found in nature.