[booleandilemma]

I think this might be false.

I imagine some time in the far future we'll have some kind of nanotechnology that will be able to replace our biological brain cells with "nano cells".

The process will be incremental. It will start with converting a single biological cell into a nano cell and continue from there (maybe exponentially). A nano cell will behave exactly like a biological cell in every way as far as i/o goes.

At a certain point your entire brain is made of these nano cells, you have a robot brain, basically. From there your consciousness can be copied, uploaded, whatever. You wouldn't be human anymore, but you'd still be you, and there wouldn't be any ship of Theseus conundrum.

[mah4k4l]

I think you have a fallacy there concerning consciousness and life being transferred into it's cyborg enhancements and then as if animating them. Consciousness and life are equivalent to me, and if you would disagree with this premise you could of course reach different conclusions and be intellectually coherent. Like I said I think your fallacy concerns your consciousness = life being transferred into your cyborg enhancements in the first place. You are not your eyeglasses, right? And you are not your exocortex of the internet. Therefore you also are not your not - living brain cell prostheses although your living system would be kind of tricked into believing so. Therefore as the last vestige of living tissue dies in Major from Ghost In A Shell, she dies and is no more and there will be only a lifeless machine left. That's my perception of the matter based on my premises.

[Edit] Of course in GIAS - universe there would still be the ghost of Major left in the spirit world. But she wouldn't link with the machine, only the life, I think. I think her ghost would essentially simply be her psychoplasmic material life autonomized from it's infrastructural base the physical body, as what comes to the ugly scientific basis for the process.

And anyway, even if by some kind of wetware - extension the original life would come to animate and interface with the synthetic, then it would still be trapped in it's that body and it's copy would simply be another separate although exactly identical individual.

[tboyd47]

How exactly would you upload the consciousness of a nano-cell-converted individual without shutting those physical nano-cells down in some way?

On a larger issue, does having a non-human organ affect your legal status as a human? Are people with pig heart valves not human anymore?