
Originally Posted by
sunshinewarrior
These are interesting philosophical questions. I follow Dennett on this one and propose to you the following:
If your consciousness is completely replicated digitally such that there is no difference in its functioning, then there will exist a digital "you" whose existence would seamlessly transfer from biological to digital, and continue to be immortal. You would, therefore, continue to exist, but with the added benefit of no longer facing the prospect of senescence. It isn't just others who would find you immortal, but you yourself who would find it so.
What makes you think the biological 'you' is the 'real' you? As a thought experiment (and I've stolen this from Dennett - see, perhaps The Mind's I, a book co-written with Hofstader, in which he has a couple of essays about this issue), consider that a neuron in your brain can be replaced, in all its functionality, by a transistor (microchip, whatever digital entity of your choice), such that you cannot tell the difference in any way. Now simply consider replacing each one of you neurons, one by one, in such a way. At what point do 'you' cease to exist?
Thanks for the lecture, Professor, but dressing it up in cliched expressions and pretension doesn't make your proposal amount to more than "your spirit lives on in an entity if it is similar enough to the original," which is completely fucking stupid.
I'll take from this that there is no aspect of the theory that I am missing, and that people believe there will be some supernatural connection between your digital and biological forms? My goodness, that is dumb. More irritating than the belief itself is that there would be no way to debunk it, even once such technology is invented. The digital copy would feel like it was a transfer since it has all the memories up to the point of the procedure -- it would seem to the digital copy that it had underwent the procedure as a regular human, then had awoken as a digital entity. From the testimonies of those digital copies, people would idiotically conclude that this is a manner of transfer rather than replication. The only people who could testify to the opposite would be the biological originals who experience true death some time later. They'll have a tough time testifying, though, since they will be dead.
That, or you simply made the same mistake everyone else has made in confusing subjective and objective perspective, thinking that if it seems to everyone else that you are immortal, you must be. It is the same issue that is presented in the scenario of a string of clones, one being produced once the previous has died. It isn't that one entity is living forever, it is that an endless sequence of identical entities are being produced. In the case of digital immortality, it that just one identical entity was produced, but the same issue presents itself.
As for the hypothetical that you provided, it is an entirely different scenario. That is gradual physical metamorphosis on a microscopic level, and I don't have the knowledge of neuroscience to answer it -- my guess is that it would be a slow and imperceptible death, the end of which would occur once the last neuron was replaced. It would be imperceptible because your brain would be supplemented and the damage obscured by the technological replacements, but once that last neuron is extracted, I would imagine an abrupt end to perception. The similarity to digital immortality would lie in the fact that your image would live on in the eyes of those close to you, but image is not identity, and your consciousness does not transfer to something simply because it is similar to the original.