• abbenm
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    4 years ago

    Thing is, it’s impossible to know if your consciousness will remain after a process or if you will die and a new consciousness that thinks like you created until you try it.

    Wait, what? I think there are some cases where it’s pretty obvious your consciousness wouldn’t be transferred. If your brain is (say) scanned and recreated digitally, and your original brain is destroyed, it stands to reason there wasn’t a transference.

    I think you may be right that there’s an open question if you were to do a gradual, bit-by-bit transference, maybe. But as a matter of principle, we should hope that we know enough about how consciousness works to say something meaningful about it, and not just declare that by “its nature” or by “definition” it can never be known but from the inside.

    If you continue existing, then great, but if you are replaced by a replica, anyone observing you has no way of knowing because the replica will think that it existed prior to its creation.

    That’s a question of who knows what, which should be distinguished from the underlying question of whether or not a genuine transference actually did happen.