K C Cheng wrote in message <36464E88.3E11 at postoffice.idirect.com>...
Savannah Hunter wrote:
>> Savannah wrote:
>> Is there an electronic device into which
> I can upload and therefore preserve
> my "conciousness", my "awareness
> of my own existence" before I die.
Re above:
That's rather futuristic. Recording your brainwaves and memories in
that way can be better done, I think, by preserving your own thoughts on
videos, etc.
Can never happen. Uploading your consciousness is predicated on the notion
that your consciousness is subject to laws which govern its very action. I
don't believe this is true. Even if one could develop a model of human
consciousness that was deterministic the problem is that the medium in which
consciousness exists is not regulated with respect to those processes. ie.
cells die, circulation\nutritional changes. As such, the stuff of
consciousness is subject to actions from the environment which it cannot
regulate.
Let's assume your consciousness was uploaded, the self that would evolve in
this situation would not be the same self or consciousness that would occur
in a messy wet brain. Divergence may be subtle at first, but eventually the
the preserved consciousness would drift far away from the consciousness that
would have evolved in a human body. (We're not even considering the effect
of sensory and somatic input here. Consciousness in this sense is
distributed throughout your whole body and possibly beyond. ) You cannot
separate consciousness from the medium within which it operates for then you
will create a new consciousness. And if you think about it, the idea of
storing consciousness is a subtle dualism, as is the Platonic world view in
a weird way (ie. mathematics = god = root of all stuff).
We are niether automatons or algorithms we are human beings.
John
johnhkm at logicworld.com.au