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HungryHobo comments on Your transhuman copy is of questionable value to your meat self. - Less Wrong Discussion

12 Post author: Usul 06 January 2016 09:03AM

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Comment author: HungryHobo 11 January 2016 02:55:54PM *  0 points [-]

I define consciousness as a passively aware thing, totally independent of memory, thoughts, feelings, and unconscious hardwired or conditioned responses. It is the hard-to-get-at thing inside the mind which is aware of the activity of the mind without itself thinking, feeling, remembering, or responding. The demented, the delirious, the brain damaged all have (unless those brain structures performing the function of consciousness are damaged, which is not a given) the same consciousness, the same Self, the same I and You, as I define it, as they did when their brains were intact. Dream Self is the same Self as Waking Self to my thinking. I assume consciousness arises at some point in infancy. From that moment on it is Self, to my thinking.

Thought experiment for you, most of which may actually be physically possible:

Imagine that you went to sleep and someone anesthetized one hemisphere of your brain. Ignore any practicalities like interruptions to your heart and breathing, lets assume whatever medical support needed is provided.

"you" wake up running on only your right hemisphere.

This is possible and it happens to people who've had a Hemispherectomy. Is that consciousness you? it has a continuous line from your former self.

Next, you're put back to sleep and the other half of your brain is anesthetized.

"you" wake up running on only your left hemisphere with no memory of waking up as the right-hemisphere you (since any memories are in the right hemisphere). Left hemisphere you has no continuous line of consciousness with right hemisphere you that was awake a little while ago. There is no continuous line from that former self. They're running on 2 different chunks of hardware next to each other.

They could even communicate through letters or recordings. Should right and left hemisphere you care about each other beyond taking care of the body?

Should it matter that at some future point they might be merged back together into one?

What if they're reasonably sure they'll never be allowed to merge back into whole-brain you?

Comment author: Matthew_Opitz 13 January 2016 02:17:07AM 0 points [-]

Actually, you've kind of made me want to get my own hemispherectomy and then a re-merging just so that I can experimentally see which side's experiences I experience. I bet you would experience both (but not remember experiencing the other side while you were in the middle of it), and then after the re-merging, you would remember both experiences and they would seem a bit like two different dreams you had.

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