> Consciousness is mortally bound to the physical body, and will die along with it regardless of how many mental copies are made.
Why? Can you explain more? I would believe that you can be a fully functioning human living in a simulated reality if we ever managed to fully simulate the human brain..
However, since our brain modules are so messily coupled I don't know if we can easily "delete" memories and not impact anything else.
Unless you accept dualism (that there is some 'you' separate from the wetware in your head) you are always going to have this problem. A copy of 'you' would only sync with 'you' for an infinitesimal amount of time before you both diverged. The two 'yous' both have valid claim to everything before the Split but afterwards you are effectively two different people.
This is where the following thought experiment comes in:
Imagine science advances to the point where medical science can replace individual brain cells with perfect robot replicas. These robot cells interact with surrounding cells in exactly the same way as the real ones and can be initialized with the state of the real cell they are replacing. They're small though, so all the real computation work they may need to do is offloaded to a computer (over radio signals perhaps, or whatever.) Perhaps we can even optimize their operation such that communication with other robot cells that may happen to be next to it takes place inside the computers modelling both cells, instead of actually firing off the connection "for real".
Preform this operation once, and few would argue that the mind in question has died, been replicated, ceased to operate and been replaced with another... anything. It's just the same mind.
If you are willing to accept that (and if you're not, we'll just have to disagree), then preform the operation again. And again. And again.
This is what sodiumphosphate was referring to by "metamorphosis", and it does not require dualism.
The difference is that the original you exists on a consistent space-time arc. Copy of you diverges from that, and becomes not you. To external observers, not you appears to be exactly like you but it isn't you because your mind is a process that is tied to that arc. Not you starts as you but then operates within alternate time-space arc.
In the case of metamorphosis there is only one "you" at any point in time. The concept of divergence doesn't make any sense if there is only one you. Diverge from what?
We all really want to accept this idea. It is inviting. Not accepting it has a lot of scary implications. If small changes in the matter that makes up my mind "kills" me, then what happens when my body naturally replaces parts. In neurons, the whole cell is rarely replaced, but all components of it all, none of the atoms are there forever, it is only a matter of scale to replace neurons with "working replicas". So, accept that somewhere along the way of "perfect replicas" I think you stop being the same person for any rational reason, then by scaling that reason down simply changing out atoms in the natural process of life kills "me" just as surely.
Replacement with the subtly different is interpreted by our minds as "change". You no more "die" when the cells or atoms in your brain are replaced than a river dries up when all the water molecules you could see at one point in time flow away.
Exactly. "You no more "die" when the cells or atoms in your brain are replaced than a river dries up when all the water molecules you could see at one point in time flow away." when we find a way to measure this little death relative to the bigger more permanent one we can make interesting arguments. My advice, assume the transporter/uploading-machine will kill you. You will use it anyway for the same reason you use a credit card at the grocery store or corner market, you will be worried that the people behind you will be annoyed by the delay caused from your hesitation and the person who comes out the other side will not begrudge you for creating them.
If you want to define change to be a type of death, go ahead. As far as I can tell your position is philosophically sound though I disagree that it is makes for interesting discussion.
It would need to be really exactly the same, otherwise it is actually just a damaged neuron and the rest of the brain will continue normally, working around it just as it would a normally dying cell. Until some tipping point was reached, and what would you be - perhaps a read-only version of yourself?
It hinges not on engineering (the mechanism for inserting an artificial cell and it communicating with an external computer) but whether consciousness is computable in a Turing machine. The new "you" might be deterministic.
Can a human solve the Halting Problem (without necessarily being able to express that solution as a program)? Does even recognizing the Halting Problem take us out of what is computable?
Show that a human can decide if an arbitrary program terminates. You are the one making an extraordinary claim (and make no mistake about it, the suggestion that humans can be used as oracle machines is an extraordinary claim.)
Simply assuming it is the case because you want it to be the case is not science, it is religion.
I'm just a bit skeptical since I have never encountered a program so far which I couldn't decide whether it would halt or not. You would completely convince me if you could describe such a program. Also, this is not an extraordinary claim. According to Wikipedia, it is an open question:
> It is an open question whether there can be actual deterministic physical processes that, in the long run, elude simulation by a Turing machine, and in particular whether any such hypothetical process could usefully be harnessed in the form of a calculating machine (a hypercomputer) that could solve the halting problem for a Turing machine amongst other things. It is also an open question whether any such unknown physical processes are involved in the working of the human brain, and whether humans can solve the halting problem.
When you do that you are doing nothing more than applying heuristics, preforming limited simulation, looking for repeated states. All of these things are things that may be preformed by algorithmic computation. That we don't have IDEs already doing all of this for us is a reflection of nothing more than the current state of machine learning and the relative computational densities of today's electronic computers and the human brain.
Being able to solve the halting problem for programs generally seen in real life programming does not imply in the slightest that you can solve the halting problem for arbitrary programs. Can you look at arbitrary Turing machine tapes (large enough to eliminate the possibility that you are simulating it without realizing it of course) and non-algorithmically decide if they will terminate? Can you in fact do anything non-algorithmically? That is in essence what you are suggesting, the non-algorithmic nature of the human mind.
You are of course not the first to suggest a non-algorithmic mind. The likes of Roger Penrose have also suggested similar things (see his The Emperor's New Mind and later Shadows of the Mind). His reputation is enough to give me serious pause, and the fact that he does not seem to be a dualist further inclines me to listen to what he has to say.
If you want to delve further into this subject I suggest you check out Penrose's work, then read the criticism of it from his peers. Penrose has mounted the most qualified defence of the non-algorithmic mind of which I am aware, but even so acceptance of his thesis is rather rare in academia. It is not light subject matter but the general consensus among experts in the fields which he touches is that in order to support his thesis he made numerous errors. In absence of their expertise, I must defer to their assessment of Penrose's work.
I have never encountered a program so far which I couldn't decide whether it would halt or not. You would completely convince me if you could describe such a program
Does this halt? Assume all variables are arbitrary precision integers.
Why? Can you explain more? I would believe that you can be a fully functioning human living in a simulated reality if we ever managed to fully simulate the human brain..
However, since our brain modules are so messily coupled I don't know if we can easily "delete" memories and not impact anything else.