06/11/2024
My thought of the day:
There's talk that some day people can upload their whole mind to the internet. If this became possible and you did this, would there still be 1 of you, or would there be 2 of you?
In other words, would the you before the upload share the same conscious experience with the uploaded you? In other other words, when the body (and thus brain) of the original you deceases, does the uploaded you keep the original you's conscious experience going? Could the uploaded you claim that the original you is just a copy, and the original you is fake? What really ARE you, if you can be copied as a separate being that behaves just like you? Or, would the uploaded you really even think it is a different being than you? Would it consider itself male or female? Would it consider itself human? Would it know that it has a different medium upon which the contents of its mind is written?
This is all assuming that this type of thing IS possible to do, which assumes the human mind is merely a certain arrangement of physical material (protons, neutrons, electrons, energy, quarks, etc which can be accessed physically), but here we are assuming "yes, it's possible", and seeing where that goes. You might think it's a pointless, useless thought. It may very well be. But for now I think it's a kinda fun thought experiment that, in a way, if taken seriously, can help us consider what consciousness actually is.
What if the original you and the uploaded you were connected by some sort of computer/brain interface where perhaps all memories are not written in the brain, but are instead redirected and written in the digital media? Would both the digital you and the original you each experience the existence of a separate being with separate thoughts, or would the thoughts be of just one being that is part-brain and part-machine? And imagine if that went on for years, and then the original you gets older and dies. The lights go out.... or did they? Just before you die, the rest of the functions of your brain are somehow transferred (again, copying is the only way I can imagine, which is a problem because it would be 2 separate sets of mind contents) over to the digital so that the exact data and functionality of your brain before death is now in a digital medium. Would the digital you continue to have the very same conscious experience?
Should this digital you be recognized as having human rights if it identifies itself as a human being? If someone identified pieces of code in the digital you that would, if changed a certain way, alter the views, values, or personality of the digital you, would it mean that each human mind is simply a set of code or configuration parameters?
