[NickM]

I used to buy into this kind of stuff, but I've become more and more skeptical of the idea that you would still be yourself if your brain could be preserved/emulated/transplanted/whatever.

Our nervous system extends into our bodies. We feel emotions in our bodies. People with certain kinds of brain damage that prevents them from feeling emotions normally also experience trouble making rational decisions.

More recent research has been hinting that we may even hold certain types of memories outside our brains.

Humans have always been drawn to neat, tidy ideas, especially ones that draw clean boundaries: it's an appealing idea that our consciousness lives solely in our brains, and that our brains could function independently of our bodies, but it seems unlikely that it's really that simple.

[etrautmann]

As a neuroscientist working on brain computer interfaces, it's painfully clear to me that we are absolutely nowhere close to understanding the full complexity of the human brain in a manner required to simulate or reboot someone's consciousness. It's not even clear yet what level of abstraction is required. Do we need to map all of the synapses to get a connection graph, or do we need to map all synapses plus the synaptic proteins to assign connection weights too? This is ignoring other types of connections like gap junctions between cells, ephaptic coupling (the influence of local electric fields on neurons firing), mapping neuormodulator release, etc. On one hand, it feels like irreduceable complexity. On the other hand, however, you can lose about half of your neurons to neurodegenerative diseases before you start noticing a behavioral effect, so clearly not every single details is required to simulate your consciousness. It would be a MAJOR leap forward in neuroscience to even understand what level of abstraction is necessary and which biological details are essential vs. which can be summarized succinctly.

Anyone claiming to take your brain and slice it up and have a working model right now is currently selling snake oil. It's not impossible, but neuroscience has to progress a ways before this is a reasonable proposition. The alternative is to take the brain and preserve it, but even a frozen or perfused brain may have degraded in ways that would make it hard to recover important aspects that we don't yet understand.

It is, however, fascinating to do the research required to answer these questions, and that should be funded and continue, even if just to understand the underlying biology.

[radarsat1]

In addition to all that we don't know about synapses etc, I've often wondered if even mapping all the "hardware connections" so to speak would even be enough. You'd have everything in the right place, but what about the "signals" running on it? Does a certain amount of constant activity on these circuits constitute signs of a "living" brain vs a dead one? How much of our consciousness is really in the topology of the circuits, and how much of it is simply defined by the constant activity running around in them? I assume neural circuits form loops that consist of synapses that reinforce or surpress activity. If these signals going around and around ever "stop", can they ever be started again with the same "patterns"? What if these patterns, the living "software", are at least partially what define you?

Well anyway that's my airchair crackpot neuroscience theory for the world to consume ;). I'm sure there must already be a name for the idea though.

[ImPostingOnHN]

This article [0] may help here:

Six of the sheep were given a single higher dose of ketamine, 24mg/kg. This is at the high end of the anesthetic range. Initially, the same response was seen as with a lower dose. But within two minutes of administering the drug, the brain activity of five of these six sheep stopped completely, one of them for several minutes – a phenomenon that has never been seen before.

“This wasn’t just reduced brain activity. After the high dose of ketamine the brains of these sheep completely stopped. We’ve never seen that before,” said Morton. Although the anesthetized sheep looked as though they were asleep, their brains had switched off. “A few minutes later their brains were functioning normally again – it was as though they had just been switched off and on.”

0: https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuroscience/news/sedated...

[johnea]

Just to add a current link to this conversation:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/consciousness-mig...

An article suggesting that consciousness is embodied in the active fields, not the synapses themselves.

[alchemist1e9]

Losing half neurons caught my attention. I believe we had a post about how LLM weights being trimmed by 1/2 still had them functional. Interesting.

[idreyn]

On one hand, I wonder if a gradual transition would work. Spend enough time over the years mirroring your conscious patterns onto a computational substrate, and they might get used to the lay of the land, the loss of old senses and the appearance of new ones. There might not be an ultimate "stepping in", but something like you might be able to outlive you, on a substrate that it feels happy and comfortable on.

On the other hand, the idea of "simulating your consciousness" raises questions beyond just cognition or personality. A mechanistically perfect simulation of your brain might not be conscious at all. Spooky stuff.

[belfalas]

Keying off your comment - in the field of neuroscience, is consciousness viewed as a kind of simulation?

(I'm just a programmer so it's fascinating to me to consider how actual brain scientists model consciousness in their work.)

[suzzer99]

Imagine the bugs introduced in trying to make a digital copy of a brain. Terrifying for the subject.

[scotty79]

There's gonna be million artificial minds of various levels of capacity before the first human mind is accurately simulated.

At that time we are going to be accustomed to glitching artificial minds creates, modified, bugged, debugged that current moral conundrums "is the copy me or not", "is it ok to create a hobbled copy of someone" are going to be as quaint bit akin to counting angels on a head of the pin. Mangled and molded consciousness will be as mundane as computation itself.

[latexr]

For example, it’s widely reported that organ transplantation, especially heart transplants, may cause personality changes associated with the donor.

https://www.mdpi.com/2673-3943/5/1/2

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31739081/

[everdrive]

Do we think the personality changes are due to the heart itself, or just due the minor brain damage accompanying an incredibly invasive surgery?

[SubiculumCode]

General anesthesia is not good for the brain.

[SubiculumCode]

replying to myself to provide more context.

In my PhD work, I helped conduct the human portion of a study on this topic, contributing to some discussions at the FDA [1]. The idea was a bit controversial then, and I've had a few anesthesiologists get mad at me for it, but the general pattern has now been replicated quite a few times now, such that the field has largely moved on from 'Is something bad happening?' to 'Why does it happen, and how do we prevent that bad thing from happening?'[2]. So it has been a gratifying excursion from my typical research before and since then.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4168665/

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9750936/

[everdrive]

Thanks. This is purely anecdotal, but we had a family member whose child was under anesthesia for a severe respiratory infection. He’s been severely developmentally delayed in his first year, and it’s unclear to us what damage done.

[SubiculumCode]

Thanks for sharing. It is difficult to know for certain. If the respiratory infection led to hypoxic damage, then that could also contribute. I have not kept up with the field, but generally the most sensitive period for anesthesia was before 4 years or so. As I mentioned briefly, most of my work is in different areas of research so I haven't kept up to date.

[xanderlewis]

The two sources you've given are both about general anaesthetic in infancy, though. Are you staying it might extend to adults?

[spondylosaurus]

Is there any reason to suspect that adults suffer the same effects as infants? (Not asking to be combative, just curious whether children are uniquely affected because their brains are still cooking.)

[SubiculumCode]

You and the other commenter bring up good points. Developmental neurotoxicity (with lesser or no effects in older children and young adults) is, I speculate, probably due to differential gene expression during early development versus later when genes related to development are suppressed and genes related to maintenance are more abundantly expressed. The developmental neurotoxicity probably works through different mechanisms than what is termed "postoperative cognitive dysfunction" in the elderly after general anesthesia dysfunction [1][2], which, all I know is that it is a thing. If I were to speculate it would be that in the elderly there are fewer redundant cognitive resources, and so detrimental effects to cognition are magnified. I know that it used to be thought that post-operative dysfunction is temporary, but it seems likely to me (again speculation) that there is both recovery and permanent dysfunction, but the dysfunction becomes a little more difficult to detect. Going back to my paper, where we used a method to disentangle two types of memory processes i.e. recollection (explicit recollection of experiential details) and familiarity (a general feeling of familiarity with things you've seen previously) which contribute to memory performance but tend to be differentially affected by neurodegeneration (recollection is more affected, and generally more hippocampal), so that sometimes, when not accounting for these processes, a memory test will fail to find differences because patients rely on familiarity to answer memory questions.

[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2020&q=postoperati... [2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_ylo...

[mrtesthah]

The mass-spaced effect in organ tissues may be one explanation of this: https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2024/novemb...

[hinkley]

Why would you want to go on in a world that has either left you behind or keeps making the same mistakes over and over in a cycle and won't listen to you because you're too old to understand?

And conversely, I think Kim Stanley Robinson puts it best in the Mars trilogy. Scientific progress often has to wait for the old guard to die so new ideas can be tried. Sometimes there are actually new things and they need to be allowed to cook.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

I think the idea originated with Max Planck:

German physicist Max Planck somewhat cynically declared, science advances one funeral at a time. Planck noted “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

[kiba]

A questionable assumption.

A scientist like Einstein experienced scientific revolutions within his lifetime. That's hardly going to be the norm in the history of science, and also a horrible assumption to think revolutions would endlessly be occurring and reoccurring.

Also, we know when we're on the edge of knowledge, especially in cosmology and physics. We're waiting for revolution there. There's dark energy and dark matter. It doesn't matter if you're old or young, you knew that your theories isn't good enough to explain whatever these are.

Scientific knowledge don't get swept away especially if they're rock solid. Newtonian physics still has a lot of relevance after all. It's just that relativity is even more accurate.

[hinkley]

Einstein and Feynman both supposedly struggled with unseating some of Dirac's ideas.

[giantg2]

Just imagine someone who died 50 years ago coming back and hearing skibidi toilet, no cap, ohio, etc. Then not being allowed to board a plane without a body scan, and not having money for a plane anyways since bread was dime and a gallon of gas was a quarter last you checked. You can't even get a job you're just a brain and all the knowledge work you could do is 50 years out of date.

[skeaker]

I gotta say, none of that would make me rather want to be dead.

[giantg2]

Everyone has their own idea of living hell. I'm sure there's a version for you if this isn't it.

[hinkley]

I'm still alive and this shit is already starting to get to me. This last round of inflation was a kick in the nuts.

[idontwantthis]

There’s a short story about uploaded consciousnesses being used as AI slaves. They go bad once enough years have gone by that they can’t speak the modern language anymore. Then they usually lapse into insanity or depression.

[anon84873628]

Reminds me of: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

[idontwantthis]

That’s the one.

[bee_rider]

I dunno. I’m a pretty open minded guy so if anyone is going to be immortal, might as well be me. I promise not even to shout at too many clouds.

Plus there are a lot of assholes in the world. Come on, there isn’t anybody you’d enjoy watching get Ozymandias‘d? I’d enjoy it.

[glenstein]

>Our nervous system extends into our bodies. We feel emotions in our bodies. People with certain kinds of brain damage that prevents them from feeling emotions normally also experience trouble making rational decisions.

I think that may be true enough, but it doesn't have the upshot you seem to think it does.

It just means that what we need to sustain not just a brain itself but the totality of the environmental conditions on which it depends. No easy task for sure, but not something that presents an in-principle impossibility of preserving brains.

I think there's a major philosophical error here in thinking that the added logistics present this kind of in-principle impossibility.

Also, talking like this starts to play with anti-science speculation a bit. Octopi actually have neurons extending through their limbs. We don't. So when we talk about consciousness being "embodied", I'm sorry, it's an attempt to romanticize the question in a way that loses sight of our scientific understanding. Consciousness happens in the brain.

Sure, the brain needs stimulus from its embodied nervous system, and may even depend on those data and interactions in significant ways, but everything we know about consciousness suggests its in the brain. And so the data from "embodied" nervous systems may be important but there's no in-principle reason why it can't be accounted for in the context of preservation.

[ninala]

> Octopi actually have neurons extending through their limbs. We don't.

You don't have neurons extending through your limbs?

[augusto-moura]

I don't think I agree with you. There are multiple examples in society of damaged nervous system connections with the brain, spine cord damage for example, where the personality of the pacient changes little. In the same sense, losing limbs or entire sections of your body (aside from psychological trauma and other psychological consequences) don't affect personality that much

Of course the nervous system is much more complex, but damage to the brain almost always result in some sort of cognitive dysfunction or personality change, see the Phineas Gage case for example.

[snakeyjake]

>In the same sense, losing limbs or entire sections of your body (aside from psychological trauma and other psychological consequences) don't affect personality that much

"There aren't any changes except for all of the changes, but those changes don't count because reasons."

I don't know how many amputees you know; you may know many. I was in the army for 10 years during the height of the global war on terror and know more than most. Not a single one is the same as they were pre-amputation. Could be the trauma that caused the amputation, could be the amputation. I'm not an amputationologist.

I do assert that a holo-techno-brain will need a shit-ton of e-drugs to deal with being amputated from its fucking body.

The bacteria in your butthole are a part of you just like your brain, maybe less, but they ARE a part of you.

[kelnos]

> Could be the trauma that caused the amputation, could be the amputation.

Given the personality changes seen in people who go off to fight in the military and who end up coming back fully physically intact, I think it's more likely that the personality changes here were caused by the trauma, not by the amputation.

I'm not saying the latter isn't possible, but absent evidence to the contrary, it doesn't make much sense to assume the personality changes occurred because of the amputation alone.

Also consider that amputation -- even ignoring whatever trauma precipitated it -- is its own sort of trauma. I imagine if someone came up to me, perfectly physically healthy, knocked me out, and cut off my leg, I would wake up and develop emotional trauma that would cause personality changes.

[whythre]

I see what you mean- but consider that the gut does seem to play a significant role in mood and mental health. The enteric nervous system may not hold memories, but it seems to have something to do with personality and digestion issues can have negative cognitive effects.

[augusto-moura]

Agree that discomfort can cause temporary problems, and sometimes chronic problems in parts of the body can cause life long cognitive impairment. But that is not to say that these represent "you" or your personality. You brain could still function perfectly without those body conditions.

And for the gut example the brain actually does work normally, stomach and instetines removal (and other related surgeries) are fairly common procedures and I don't hear of people complaining about personality changes. Of course, those types of procedures are extremely invasive in a sistemic way, and not only your mental state, but multiple other parts of the body need to re-adapt. But I truly believe "you" will be still be "you" inside your brain

PS.: I quoted "you" because discussions about the identity of one-self are much more complex, just regard it as the most high level definition of the concept

[seba_dos1]

The way various hormones influence the brain alone makes it pretty clear to me already that you'd be a completely different person when taken out of your body, and I'm pretty sure that's just the tip of the iceberg.

[Nevermark]

Coming back as a brain in a vat certainly sounds awful.

But I would assume that bringing someone back would be tied to a physical or simulated body that provided a compatible context.

Not a bad assumption to solidify in your brain preservation/restoration contract.

[Freebytes]

The 'people' that undergo this first will experience the most incredible pain imaginable if we do not figure out a way to block such pain first.

[Freebytes]

I consider that I have likely died more than twice in my lifetime already. And before this body gives up, I will have already died more times. Must simply enjoy the present and give gifts to my future self.

[namrog84]

There is a bit of research and effort into a head transplants. I wonder if and when that is successful to see how it impacts the individual. Possibly having memories of the body or changing personality.

[HideousKojima]

Can't wait for C.S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength to become a reality

[mannanj]

where?

[bookofjoe]

>HEAVEN: The head anastomosis venture Project outline for the first human head transplantation with spinal linkage (GEMINI) [2013]

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3821155/

...................

>World's first human head transplant successfully performed on a corpse, scientists say (2017)

https://nationalpost.com/health/worlds-first-human-head-tran...

.............

First Human Head Transplantation: Surgically Challenging, Ethically Controversial and Historically Tempting – an Experimental Endeavor or a Scientific Landmark? (2019)

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6511668/

..........

>No Doctor Has Ever Performed a Human Head Transplant. This Neurosurgeon Says He’s Ready to Do It. (2024)

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a62831709/human-hea...

[johnea]

I agree completely. This is unsubstantiated hype.

Transferring our consciousness into "the net", or some other fuzzy concepts are so far removed from reality as to be complete fiction. This includes freezing our brains and reanimating them later to resuscitate our lives.

They not only massively overestimate the functionality of today's tech to receive something like our consciousnesses, but even more so, by orders of magnitude, underestimate just how complex our living bodies are.

We only have the vaguest of ideas about how our physiology works (while we might be able to replicate flesh cells for "fake meat", we have 0 understanding or control over how those cells organize to form macroscopic organs). Applying this to the brain, our understanding is even more primitive. An example would be recent news that perhaps the brain is not sterile, but hosts a microbiome. Whether or not the brain hosts a microbiome is still "controversial".

We're still hundreds of years away from a comprehensive understanding of physiology.

But of course, we're never going to live that long, because we still believe (statistically as a species) in invisible guys in outer space that tell us we need to dismember people who believe in the WRONG invisible guy in outer space.

Our primitive violent ape species will extinct itself long before we ever have a comprehensive grasp of how life works, especially to the level of understanding consciousnesses...

[ashleyn]

I'm also skeptical of the idea that one can "upload" consciousness and it would still be "you". I suppose this is true in a philosophical sense, but in a practical sense, subjective experience of consciousness rules the roost. It's inevitably going to be a mere copy of you. You don't get to experience any of it. Similar to a software project which is forked, I think it makes more sense to classify it as an entirely different entity at that point.

I suppose there are valid use cases for this, but I'm not that narcissistic to think the world needs eternal copies of me.

The continued subjective experience of the original consciousness is where I believe the real value lies. Digitisation of consciousness, assuming it has any sound scientific basis in the first place, would practically need to look more like the gradual replacement of brain (and bodily) matter with something more durable, enduring, and controllable. A slow process in which carbon is exchanged for silicon, or cellular damage is continuously reversed and aging kept at bay.

[svara]

As long as you believe that any theory of subjective experience will ultimately be physicalist, this argument doesn't really work.

There is no continuity of subjective experience even within the same brain, you can be deeply unconscious for extended periods of time and come back.

[sdwr]

Yeah, you can argue the same thing about going to sleep, there's no guarantee that the same "you" wakes up.

From the outside, an "identical clone" is indistinguishable.

On the inside, the clone feels exactly how you would feel.

The only problem is the "I don't want my 'me' to die" feeling.

I bet most people would be fine with death/rebirth teleportation.

[dinfinity]

> It's inevitably going to be a mere copy of you. You don't get to experience any of it.

You can make the same argument for 'you before you went to sleep' and 'you after you woke up'. The only real link you have to that previous consciousness are memories of experiences, which are all produced by your current body/brain.

Think about this: For every consciousness (including you right now) it is _impossible_ to experience anything other than what the thing producing that consciousness produces (memories, sensations, etc.). It doesn't matter whether the different conscious entities or whatever produces them are separated by time or space. They _will_ be produced, and they _will_ experience exactly what the thing that produces them produces.

With an analogy: If you drop pebbles in either the same pond at different times or in different ponds at the same time, waves will be produced in all cases. From the perspectives of the waves themselves, what they interact with is always _exactly_ the stuff that interacts with the water they're made up of. To them, the question of identity or continuity is fully irrelevant. They're just them.

Similarly, it makes no difference whether you only have the memories of the previous conscious experiences, or if 'you' really experienced them. Those situations are indistinguishable to you. The link to future consciousnesses inhabiting your body is effectively the same.

[geye1234]

>> It's inevitably going to be a mere copy of you. You don't get to experience any of it.

> You can make the same argument for 'you before you went to sleep' and 'you after you woke up'. The only real link you have to that previous consciousness are memories of experiences, which are all produced by your current body/brain.

Except I know, empirically, that people go to sleep all the time and wake up, and remain the same person. And I know (for practical purposes) I do the same. I -- my mind/body composite -- lie down, and get up the next morning. I remain the same person.

Simply 'copying' or 'uploading' my consciousness, like a computer file, is impossible even in theory, because I'm not just a conscious mind, but a conscious mind which is also a body. Consciousness cannot be split from the material body, even in theory. Somebody upthread said that he'd seen many amputees undergo personality changes as a result of their operations -- this is an informative (if very sad) example.

[dinfinity]

> that people go to sleep all the time and wake up, and remain the same person

You have absolutely no way of knowing that last part is true. You can only see their behavior, which is identical whether they are the same consciousness or a different one from the one it was yesterday. You don't even know whether they have any conscious experience at all.

> And I know (for practical purposes) I do the same.

You do not. The "for practical purposes" points at your _body_. There is no evidence that an organic body is in any way special. If you upload your consciousness and the resulting computer 'body' works as a normal body, it _will_ generate a consciousness and that consciousness _will_ feel that it is 'you' (itself). Note that we're talking about hypothetical practically perfect computer bodies (which may be completely virtual, as longs as its sensors and actuators live fully in that virtual world).

You can spin the illusion of a continuous conscious experience every way you want. It is still just that, an illusion.

[geye1234]

> You can only see their behavior, which is identical whether they are the same consciousness or a different one from the one it was yesterday.

The first clause of the sentence is true, but the second is not.

You never directly see a thing itself, you only ever see its effects on the world. You rationally postulate the presence of water because of its clear colour, its hydrating effect on you, its tendency to become a gas at 100C, its tendency to dissolve salt, and so on. Similarly, you rationally postulate the presence of the same person, at 10pm on Monday and 7am on Tuesday, because he has the same personality, the same look, the same eye and hair colour, the same body shape, etc. We know about the presence of a thing from the presence of its effects and behaviour. If these remain the same, it is rational to believe that the person remains the same.

> You don't even know whether they have any conscious experience at all.

Again, knowledge of effects leads to knowledge of the thing causing said effects. I am aware of my own conscious experience, I see Bob affects the world in ways that are very similar to myself and other human beings, and so I rationally postulate that he is a conscious, rational being like I am. You never see a person's mind directly, but you see the effects of the person's mind the whole time. You see such effects through their body. If the effects remain the same, or change only in certain, limited ways, it's reasonable to believe that the cause remains the same (and frankly crazy to believe otherwise).

> The "for practical purposes" points at your _body_. There is no evidence that an organic body is in any way special.

The mind and the body form one substance. The idea that "my mind is one thing, my body another" has been tried and failed as a philosophical idea several times in history. It raises far more problems than it purports to solve. I know I continue through time in part because my body continues through time. You say the body isn't "special"; I don't know what this means, but I know my body, and other people's bodies, are different from other things, because they walk, talk, reason, sense, desire, and so on. (Once again, the effects and behaviour of a thing lead us to knowledge of that thing.) The idea that consciousness or self can be 'uploaded', even in theory, is pure fantasy. You and your body are one thing.

> You can spin the illusion of a continuous conscious experience every way you want. It is still just that, an illusion.

If this is so, explain how rational thought is possible. Given that rational thought involves you reasoning from A to B to C through time, how is this possible if there is no continuous 'you' that is going through time?

[jaco6]

Very well, you think that preserving the brain, or even preserving the nervous system, is futile. But what of total biostasis, preserving the entire organism, just like the archaebacteria that live for thousands of years in ice or other extreme environments by slowing their metabolisms to a crawl?

To me, excessive negativity about the possibility of immortality smacks of weakness and defeatism. You either love life and want as much of it as possible, which makes you a friend of humanity, or prefer death, which makes you an enemy of humanity. I take a stronger line than the neuroscientist in the article. “Death positivity” like that of Viktor Frankl, anti-natalism, even faith in magical spiritual resurrections—all are anti-human viewpoints, only excusable in the past because they were copes with the inevitability of death. Now that we have reason to believe it can be averted, we owe our potential future selves every possible effort to save them from oblivion.

[bee_rider]

I’m not sure I actually believe in quantum immortality but I think it is slightly suspicious—out of all the people you could have been be born as, you just happen to be born in a timeframe where brain preservation might be possible before you die?

[prettyStandard]

I see what you're saying...but...

Most people are alive right now. The population historically has been much lower, so odds are you would be born around the time high technology would support a high population.

[bee_rider]

I think that “most people are alive now” is not true (although it is often repeated).

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16870579

> So what are the figures? There are currently seven billion people alive today and the Population Reference Bureau estimates that about 107 billion people have ever lived.

> This means that we are nowhere near close to having more alive than dead. In fact, there are 15 dead people for every person living.

So it is not wildly impossible that you’d be alive now, but it is fairly unlikely.

Also, hard to say what’s in the future of course, but even if population growth levels off, you’d expect to be born in the future, right? Which brings up another question, why not?

If we are going to go along on the fully ridiculous implications here and reinterpret all probabilities as conditioned on your immortality, why weren’t you born in the far future? I’d expect people born in the future to have easier access to immortality.

Maybe birth rates will go way down if we discover immortality (lowering your odds of being born later). Or maybe pre-immortality minds will be seen as more interesting and worth preserving (increasing your odds of being kept around).

[seba_dos1]

Even if being born right now had an astronomically low probability, someone would still be lucky enough.

[rekabis]

> More recent research has been hinting that we may even hold certain types of memories outside our brains.

Not just hinting - the evidence is strong and accumulating rapidly. The gut, in particular, has so many neurons that it is considered the body’s “second brain”, to say nothing about the impact that gut bacteria have on your mind.

If you really wanted to create a copy of your “mind”, you’d have to image every neuron in your body for a thoroughly accurate copy. And then accept the fact that your entire behavioural profile is then missing the input of your gut bacteria, which appears to have a significant and non-trivial impact.

[kh_hk]

In terms of computing (one that we do not understand), it would be like cloning a live machine by taking the CPU dye only, or maybe the hard drive. How many parts you need to take away from a computer for it to be the same machine? It's easy though with a VM, or a kernel that supports many hardware. Kind of a digress, but I liked this idea.

[kelnos]

I don't think this is a great analogy because computers don't have consciousness (yet).

But I usually move the hard drive (or at least its contents) between machines when I get a new computer, and that's enough for me to think of it as the "same", even if I reinstall the OS on the new machine and just copy my home directory onto the new one.

[dyauspitr]

If it was preserving my original brain it would definitely still be me at the core. Would everything be exactly the same? Probably not but that paradigm is more than good enough.