Consciousness Continuity Debate

You won't "migrate", it will just be a copy of you. Your conscious perspective will not transfer to the copy of you. You will still be bound to the original, even if a simulacrum of your mind is created.

The claim to the identity is not the issue, the issue is that the person who got copied will die and experience that death.The existence of a copy does not make the original person to resucitate or otherwise keep perceiving and thinking.To express it in a bad analogy: you can have a bit by bit backup copy of a harddrive, but when a power surge burns the CPU and the disk, you have to throw both away. You can buy a new CPU and place the backup, but the hardware is different, there is a shutd

My take is that the only reason we have a feeling of a continuing thread of subjective consciousness is due to memory. The cells in our bodies are continuously being replaced, and there are breaks in our consciousness when we are asleep (or otherwise unconscious). So if a being has an identical brain structure to mine and identical memories, it IS me as much as I am. If you simultaneously delete me and create this copy, it's as much still 'me' as if I'd simply moved my bod

I've been trying to argue that my "self" will think I've continued on living, I'll have my old memories, the happy and painful ones; I'll have the stuff I have in my agenda for next week, I'll have my likes and dislikes, the only difference is that they're stored in a different physical place (brain or SSD?). In that sense, did I die? I'll feel as content as my old self about the things I feel content about, etc, etc...I think the soul is just like

One version dies, the other lives on. The problem is that many people think only the one that dies deserved to be called "you".To me a copy that "believes it is the same person as you were" is as good as it gets. How would you tell the difference?Every morning when I wake up I am who I am because I believe so. If someone had scanned me last night while I was asleep and created a digital copy of my mind in a virtual, identical world, I wouldn't know. And if I was

If a "backup" is made of your brain before you died, and it's restored afterwards to a new body, wouldn't that new copy be totally disconnected from the original. The brain in the new body might behave identically to the original, but the entity (or "soul", for lack of a better word) experiencing it won't be the original. This is trivially demonstrated by using the same backup process to make a clone (ie. restoring the backup but not killing the original). Clea

Yes, of course both are. But still, you're only ever going to be conscious from the perspective contained within the original you. The copy may be mathematically identical, but it does not make sense that there would be any kind of a magical transition of consciousness from one to the other. The other "you" would have its own consciousness entirely separate from yours. I.e., if you copy yourself and kill the original, you will lose consciousness. You will not wake up.

I think we have a lot of clues (based on neuroscience), lay people just have trouble understanding them because they don't fit their preconceptions.Basically: you are (mostly) your brain. If there are suddenly two copies of your brain (whether meat or silicon), there will be two "you"s which will diverge upon receiving different sensory inputs. Both will be "continuous" with past "you" in that they will share memories formed prior to divergence. However without some kind of telepathic link, t

This sort of question about the difference between a copy of you continuing to exist, and you yourself (the original "copy") continuing to exist; whenever I see this question in its various forms, I wonder if the question is being truly sincerely asked.The obvious and meaningful answer is that the experience you have is of the total end of all further experience. Death. One or even a thousand completely perfect copies of you living onward in the universe is no comfort when the consci

I'm not quite sure. There's multiple scenarios here. If we upload your consciousness into a computer and you're still alive, then there's multiple entities. If we replace your organs with machinery over time, then there is only a single entity that is changing. The latter is like the ship, but the former is not.