[zoogeny]

As an aside, and more out of curiosity, I want to mention a tiny niche corner of CogSci I once came across on YouTube. There was a conference on a fringe branch of consciousness studies where a group of philosophers hold a claim that there is a qualitative difference of experience based on material substrate.

That is to say, one view of consciousness suggests that if you froze a snapshot of a human brain in the process of experiencing and then transferred every single observable physical quantity into a simulation running on completely different material (e.g. from carbon to silicon) then the re-produced consciousness would be unaware of the swap and would continue completely unaffected. This would be a consequence of substrate independence, which is the predominant view as far as I can tell in both science and philosophy of mind.

I was fascinated that there was an entire conference dedicated to the opposite view. They contend that there would be a discernable and qualitative difference to the experience of the consciousness. That is, the new mind running in the simulation might "feel" the difference.

Of course, there is no experiment we can perform as of now so it is all conjecture. And this opposing view is a fringe of a fringe. It's just something I wanted to share. It's nice to realize that there are many ways to challenge our assumptions about consciousness. Consider how strongly you may feel about substrate independence and then realize: we don't actually have any proof and reasonable people hold conferences challenging this assumption.

[amenhotep]

It's going to sound rather hubristic, being that I'm just a random internet commenter and not a conference of philosophers, but this seems... nonsensical? I don't understand how it isn't obvious that the new consciousness instance would be unaware of the swap, or that nevertheless the perspective of the original instance would be completely disconnected from that of the new one.

It seems to be a question that many apparently smart people discuss endlessly for some reason, so I guess I'm not surprised by this proposal in particular, but it's really mystifying to me that anybody other than soulists think there's any room for doubt about it whatsoever.

[glenstein]

Completely agree. I'm interested in the detour, perhaps as much fascinated in the human psychology that prompt people to invest in these debates as anything about the question itself. We have psychology of science and political psychology and so it seems like a version of that that attempts to be predictive of how philosophers come to their dispositions is a worthy venture as well.

[dsr_]

And then Marvin Minsky asked: what if you substitute one cell at a time with an exactly functioning electronic duplicate? At what point does this shift occur?

[jll29]

Related to that are Searle's "Chinese Room" argument and the question of "Mind uploading" (can you up/download mental states): https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/#ChinRoomArg...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_uploading and Chapter 8 about Mind Uploading in https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alfredo-Pereira-Junior/...

The related Reddit conversation https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/2ew9i2/would_it...

[zoogeny]

Sounds like an experimental question. Maybe 99%, maybe 1%, maybe never.

Can you suggest another way to answer your question other than performing an experiment? Can you describe how to perform an experiment to answer your question?

Would you agree to be the subject of such an experiment?