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thisimpetus t1_j24roa0 wrote

Reply to comment by alcatrazcgp in 11 years ago Michio Kaku talked about mind upload into Machine - Big Think by keghi11

Well "moving it" isn't a meaningful thing to say, there is nothing to move, structure and data aren't material things. You're literally constantly changing, there is nothing static about you. You are the information in motion; where it is and by what means it moves doesn't mean anything. Copying a PDF doesn't physically relocate parts of your drive to another location, it represents that information identically somewhere else. So too your consciousness; just as reading the same song from different devices changes absolutely nothing about the song—and just as a song has to be happening in time to actually be the song—what makes you you is the data structure connected in real time to the environment, not the medium.

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alcatrazcgp t1_j24uot7 wrote

no, your consciousness is not the same as digital data, you cannot have 2 copies at the same time, you can only control one, you cannot control 2 different "you"s in different places, thats not how it works

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thisimpetus t1_j24vor3 wrote

Well, I'm no expert in this field but I do have a little academic training in it and I'll tell you that these claims you're making are very, very big claims that a great many PhD's have debated and I think if you're really interested in this subject you might consider getting into some of the reading.

Because the thing is, I don't think you'll find much agreement with your position at the top of the game, but that's because these are really, really hard questions and our intuitions about them tend to be really bad. That makes a lot of sense; we certainly can't expect ourselves to have an evolved understanding of these ideas. But all the same, if you're really interested, there are some fundamental ideas that you're challenging and I'd wager you might reconsider some of them if you got some exposure to some rigorous investigation of them. It's very interesting stuff, I know my thinking was forever changed by it. D.C. Dennet is a great place to start because his writing is enjoyable in addition to being top-shelf cognitive philosophy.

Best.

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