[coldtea]

I think whether it's "portable amongst bodies" is orthogonal. A specific consciousness of person X can very well only exist within the specific body of person X, and my argument still remains the same (not saying it's right, just that it's not premised on the constraint that there's a soul and it's independent/portable being true).

The argument is that whether consciousness is independent of a specific body or not, it's still of a different nature.

The consciousness part uses the body (e.g. nerve system, neurons etc), but it's nature is the informational exchange and it's essense is not in the construction of the body as a physical machine (though that's its base), but in the stored "weights" encoding memories and world-knowledge.

Same how with a CPU a specific program it runs is not defined by the CPU but the memory contents (data and variables and logic code). It might as well run in an abstract CPU, or one made of water tubes or billiard balls.

Of course in our case, the consciousness runs on a body - and only a specific body - and can't exist without one (same way a program can't exist as a running program without a CPU). But it doesn't mean its of the same nature as the body - just that the body is its substrate.