This is partially serious, I'm mostly trying to see how people view consciousness and life, but I also think the following questions are a decent spin on existing ones.
Suppose we reach a technological stage in which we:
A: Can actively and completely tap into the spinal column or brain and use it as a directed I/O interface, (Think The Matrix, but for all intents and purposes, your body is braindead, excluding involuntary impulses needed to survive.) perhaps through using nanobots to slowly build a tap somewhere in the central nervous system that siphons as much information from the brain as possible.
B: Have the ability to create a full map of the brain, and the ability to...
C: ..."translate" the exact image of every experience and memory you have to a computer that is at least equivalent to the computational power of one human brain within a reasonable span of time, not harming the body in any way.
My hypothetical questions are as follows:
1. You "flash your firmware", so to speak, back into the body. Bit for bit, it is "you", but for a little while, on a different medium. But would it be YOU upon return to corporeal existence?
2. If yes, then what if your complete brain map was decrypted and able to interact with the computer? (So, to effectively continue "thinking" or "interacting", but within a different "CPU", keeping self-awareness and sentience based on other hard data collected from your brain.) If the brainmap was altered according to the changes made with your interactions in a presumably TRONlike digital world, would what is uploaded back into your body be "you"?
3. What if you had a whole bunch of clones lying around, hypothetically, and you transferred or traded your consciousness to an exact genetic copy instead? How about other people?
Sorry if these are stupid or poorly worded questions as I have had a lot of tequila and I guess the tequila didn't keep me from thinking about shit like this. If so, feel free to disregard. I'm aware they're unanswerable, but I'd like to see everyone's take on it.
Edited by Lobotomy, 14 March 2014 - 07:15 AM.
