[feet]

I'm glad you brought this up! Every time the subject of transfer of consciousness comes up this is a drum I beat endlessly. We need physical continuity for any sort of meaningful transfer to happen.

I think that it actually could work as long as the parts that we are integrating into our physical brain are able to be integrated naturally by our neurons and glia and allow our networks to begin offloading computational work to the new parts. Doing this slowly over time to ensure full integration should work as long as the new pieces are designed properly. It's really a matter of how our brain would offload what it currently does to the new hardware, which we know it can do within itself thanks to the study of plasticity mechanisms

If we go the Ship of Theseus route, that should theoretically be a way to preserve our awareness, our "self"

Some sort of transfer of data or copy wouldn't work because our awareness is still with the original

[cwillu]

I've undergone some procedures such that I've been put under more than a dozen times in a short period of time. It really hammered home the point (to me) that… the continuity is an illusion in at least some situations. When you wake up, the continuity comes from memory. Fuck with the memory, and you really fuck with the sense of continuity.

[cwillu]

One example: at one point I woke up with utter certainty that nothing unusual had happened in the last hour, and I was rather peeved at how long it was taking to even start with the preliminaries. As in, my sense of continuity was from a moment significantly before the last moment I could later remember (!)

[feet]

That's only perception of continuity. I'm specifically speaking about physical continuity. Continuity of our physical system which has constant internal communication, this internal network dialog does not stop even when under anaesthesia.

Our continued awareness comes from being the same physical system when we wake back up even if you don't have memory of the events.