LogFAQs > #910427501

wolfy42 posted...

The longer you live, the more you see that a persons memories and experiences are what defines them.

What defines a person is their personality. And while memories and experiences certainly play a role in forming personality, biochemistry plays an equally important role (and arguably, based on what we currently know, quite possibly a much more important role). While we've favored cognitive or consciousness models of thought over the years, most of our current understanding kind of underlines just how much of who we are is programmed in via millions of years of instincts and minute chemical balances in our brains. It's not that hard to mess with someone's biochemistry and radically alter their personality on a fundamental level.

When I write my thoughts in a journal, the journal doesn't magically become ME.



wolfy42 posted...

This means that once you can actually down load a human brain, all the experiences and memories, everything that you use to make decisions and to shape who you are, then you are in fact immortal.

A copy of a thing is not that thing. It is merely a copy of that thing.

If you hand me a book, and I copy every single word from that book down into a notebook, you can read the copy, gain the same context from the copy, and understand the meaning imparted by the original via the copy - but the copy still isn't the original. Even aside from differences stemming from different inks, paper, handwriting, and other physical factors, the two books take up entirely different positions in space-time and co-exist with each other. No one would ever say that the copy was the same thing as the original. Now extend that metaphor to multiple magnitudes of greater complexity and difference with regards to a functioning human mind in digital form.

(And that's completely ignoring the potential for transcription errors, which grows dramatically the more complex a given data chain becomes - and the human mind would effectively be the most complex data chain we've ever modeled).

Even the most effective science we can even imagine as humans (let alone actually implement) would do nothing more than create a digital echo of your brain. A phantom after-image left behind after YOU have gone. No matter how complex we can make it, or how well we can program it to function, it will be an entity unto itself. It will NOT be "you".

(And incidentally, this is pretty much the literal origin and tech backstory for AI in the Halo universe).

Even if our scientific understanding advanced to the point where we can literally craft robot bodies entirely out of meat and chemicals, and then decant digital memories into the body in a way that makes it absolutely indistinguishable from the original it was copied from, it still isn't YOU. It's just a copy of you.

The only real way to maintain continuity from one system to another in that sense is to assume the existence of souls and essentially create technology capable of literally capturing and housing souls, and then deliberately linking that original soul to the replicated memory imprint. That would maintain identity about as well as it could ever possibly be maintained, in any sense we actually understand the concept of identity at all.


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