[jakobe]

> It doesn't take much of a leap...

Do you have any clue about the current state of neuroscientific research? Scientists are struggling to understand a single neuron, there are no models that reliably predict networks of more than two neurons, and the current state of the art is recording partial signals from a few dozen neurons.

"Brain upload" is just the modern day version of the philosophers' stone. As more knowledge about the human brain will be taught in schools, and the current state of the art will become public knowledge, people will look back at the idea of "brain uploads" just like we look back on the idea of "turn lead into gold".

[hackinthebochs]

We have a poor understanding of the brain from a bottom-up perspective. But from a top-down perspective we are far from ignorant. We can be fairly confident that consciousness arises completely within the brain through material processes. If this is the case then consciousness is a function of information rather than matter. And of course, information is independent of the medium so uploading consciousness is in fact a small leap from the assumption of materialism.

[jakobe]

But information can not be transferred as we please. I believe that our consciousness arises from the information stored in the material structure of our brain. But there is no reason to believe we have any way of extracting or transferring this information to another place.

If you assume this step is a "small leap" you are entering the realm of science fiction. And that's okay, I greatly enjoy reading science fiction. But if you tell people that this might actually become reality in the future, they will rightfully be skeptical.

[hackinthebochs]

Transferring information within the brain is no harder than transferring a file across the internet. The hard part is decoding how information is represented within the brain.

We don't even need to do that though. The hard part isn't transferring information, but transferring consciousness sustained by that information. If you believe that neurons are the sole physical entity that makes up the brain, and that any one neuron has no significant effect on consciousness, then transitioning each neuron one by one is simply a logical deduction from the premises. I no more have to "believe" this than I believe in a given mathematical proof. If the premises are accepted then the conclusion of transferring consciousness is required.