Thursday, November 10, 2011

Ctrl C, Ctrl V Consciousness

Consciousness is a tricky concept, we can only truly know it exists through experiencing it, thereby, several philosophical problems come up when we discuss transferring a mans consciousness into a machine. In computer lingo we must differentiate the problems between a copy and paste consciousness and a cut and paste one.

If a copy and paste consciousness is transferred this means that the individual will still live, experience, and die. The person is not saved from death, and their original consciousness will die. Effectively, the persona and their consciousness cease to exist as they are, yet their remnants will persist in a machine, or at least the experience of consciousness will be mimicked by the machine. A similar problem comes from a cut and paste consciousness, here it appears more as if the consciousness is truly transferred, yet we will never be truly sure if the individuals consciousness is transferred as they were, or if the culmination of information is simply processed and mimicked.

As Rene Descartes said, we can only truly be sure that we exist. Thereby, the concept of consciousness transfer would always be uncertain, most scarily to the robot. They would be unable to truly know if they were the persons consciousness, or if they just posses a data file of that person. They would not know who they are, simply that they exist.

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