Your clone takes over when you die. Is that you or not?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Let me throw this one into the mix. Let's say that the technology exists to perform a 100% successful brain transplant. Your brain is then swapped with another person.

Would you: -

(a) Wake up in a new body with your own memories intact?
(b) Wake up in your original body but with a completely different set of memories and convinced that you are person2?
(c) Wake up with awareness of both bodies?
(d) Something wakes up in each body but neither of them are 'you' - your soul/consciousness/self is gone?

Now consider that surgical techniques have moved on a little further still and it is possible to separate the two halves of both brains and join each to the other before replacement.

Where, if anywhere, do you wake up in that case? And what if four brains are recombined? Or 100?

Have any of you read I Will Fear No Evil?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

This 'self' exists conventionally, in the same way that all abstractions exist, such as love, the economy, justice, chair, etc.

Um, you expect us to take that on faith?

[Feck]

This is exactly the same as asking if identical twins are one and the same person. The answer is no.

I suppose if you're asking about the possibility of transplanting your brain into the skull of your younger clone, that might liven the philosophical debate a little...

Identical twins are not the same person because they are not identical they just share the same (mostly)genetics .
The question of would you be the same person if your mind were transplanted into a younger version of your body ......
it would get different sensory inputs so you would be a different you.

[Mallardz]

We're actually talking about exactly copying the brain, memories and all, then destroying the original.

In light of this;

Yes considering the body is made simply to keep the brain going and just the brain support system. It's just be moving ourselves to a new body like moving house, no?

[Horwood Beer-Master]

...The question of would you be the same person if your mind were transplanted into a younger version of your body ......
it would get different sensory inputs so you would be a different you.

Only in the same sense that if you were to receive some injury which altered the sensory inputs from your current body (say you were paralysed or something) you would be a different 'you', or in the sense that our continually changing circumstances mean we're always a 'different' person then we used to be.

In a much more fundamental sense, you'd still consider yourself the same person if your brain was in a new body - just the same person experiencing things in a new way.

[FBM]

This 'self' exists conventionally, in the same way that all abstractions exist, such as love, the economy, justice, chair, etc.

Um, you expect us to take that on faith?

No need for faith. Inductive reasoning will do the trick.

It's the self that is taken on faith, it seems. Few people ever question that they're the same person that woke up this morning or went to this or that high school a few years ago. However, when pressed to identify exactly what it is that has endured unchanged throughout that time, they are unable to produce any such thing. Yet they insist, against all empirical and rational evidence to the contrary, that something discrete and persistent really is there, something that isn't just an abstraction built on a perceptual illusion.

'Consciousness' is such an abstraction. There is what appears to be matter and energy, and we take the interactions between them to be a real 'thing': consciousness. However, if you look at it closely, this 'consciousness' is more like the sound of a beaten drum (or dead horse, in this case ). Each beat passes by and is replaced by another one. There's no individual 'thing', but a series of impressions that we reify.

Much the same can be said for sensations, perceptions, thoughts, cognition, memories, etc. Streams of fleeting impressions, inconstant and with no enduring, discrete identity.

If you take the self to be the aggregate of those things, then you're on even less stable ground, as since the particular constituent parts of the aggregate are always in flux, so must the aggregate be. This is where the Ship of Theseus allegory comes in.

[Sisifo]

Related to the things that are being said, can the subconscious be cloned in any way? Most of it is composed of very accidental combinations of physical experiences with endocrinological responses, that I fail to see how to replicate exactly.

I would say that I am 70% my subconscious and 30% my conscious, (and both are just an electrochemical system with an organic sine-qua-non substance)...

[Don't Panic]

Let me throw this one into the mix. Let's say that the technology exists to perform a 100% successful brain transplant. Your brain is then swapped with another person.

Would you: -

(a) Wake up in a new body with your own memories intact?
(b) Wake up in your original body but with a completely different set of memories and convinced that you are person2?
(c) Wake up with awareness of both bodies?
(d) Something wakes up in each body but neither of them are 'you' - your soul/consciousness/self is gone?

Now consider that surgical techniques have moved on a little further still and it is possible to separate the two halves of both brains and join each to the other before replacement.

Where, if anywhere, do you wake up in that case? And what if four brains are recombined? Or 100?

Have any of you read I Will Fear No Evil?

Yep, read it a few years back.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Let me throw this one into the mix. Let's say that the technology exists to perform a 100% successful brain transplant. Your brain is then swapped with another person.

Would you: -

(a) Wake up in a new body with your own memories intact?
(b) Wake up in your original body but with a completely different set of memories and convinced that you are person2?
(c) Wake up with awareness of both bodies?
(d) Something wakes up in each body but neither of them are 'you' - your soul/consciousness/self is gone?

Now consider that surgical techniques have moved on a little further still and it is possible to separate the two halves of both brains and join each to the other before replacement.

Where, if anywhere, do you wake up in that case? And what if four brains are recombined? Or 100?

Have any of you read I Will Fear No Evil?

Yep, read it a few years back.

R.A.H. proposed "something" that survives the death of the corporeal, a more detailed study than he did in Stranger in a Strange Land.

[FBM]

R.A.H. proposed "something" that survives the death of the corporeal, a more detailed study than he did in Stranger in a Strange Land.

Can I pester you to describe that "something"? It's a topic I've been interested in for a long time...I have a version of it, but it's unsatisfactory to most people.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

R.A.H. proposed "something" that survives the death of the corporeal, a more detailed study than he did in Stranger in a Strange Land.

Can I pester you to describe that "something"? It's a topic I've been interested in for a long time...I have a version of it, but it's unsatisfactory to most people.

Okay, it went like this.

Spoiled because you really should read the book for yourself first.

Trigger Warning!!!1! :

Rich old man devises way to commit suicide after falling under the thrall of his doctors, who won't let him die. He decides to have a "brain transplant". He gets a "donor", who just happens to be a young, beautiful woman he knew before she was killed by a mugger. As he's coming out of the void phase of the surgery he realizes she's still there. (Obviously, the brain isn't the sole place consciousness can reside, her brain's in a bucket someplace.) She helps him adjust to being a man in a woman's body. (The issue of whether or not she's just an illusion is considered, and, in typical R.A.H. style the reader is left to decide.) They have a mutual friend, his majordomo and her former lover. The gentleman dies of a heart attack and they "rescue" his "soul" (for lack of a better word) and bring it into the, hehe, commune.

Obviously R.A.H. can do a better job of telling this story.

[FBM]

R.A.H. proposed "something" that survives the death of the corporeal, a more detailed study than he did in Stranger in a Strange Land.

Can I pester you to describe that "something"? It's a topic I've been interested in for a long time...I have a version of it, but it's unsatisfactory to most people.

Okay, it went like this.

Spoiled because you really should read the book for yourself first.

Trigger Warning!!!1! :

Rich old man devises way to commit suicide after falling under the thrall of his doctors, who won't let him die. He decides to have a "brain transplant". He gets a "donor", who just happens to be a young, beautiful woman he knew before she was killed by a mugger. As he's coming out of the void phase of the surgery he realizes she's still there. (Obviously, the brain isn't the sole place consciousness can reside, her brain's in a bucket someplace.) She helps him adjust to being a man in a woman's body. (The issue of whether or not she's just an illusion is considered, and, in typical R.A.H. style the reader is left to decide.) They have a mutual friend, his majordomo and her former lover. The gentleman dies of a heart attack and they "rescue" his "soul" (for lack of a better word) and bring it into the, hehe, commune.

Obviously R.A.H. can do a better job of telling this story.

Hope so. I was hoping for more than sci fi. Thanks anyway...

[Gawdzilla Sama]

R.A.H. proposed "something" that survives the death of the corporeal, a more detailed study than he did in Stranger in a Strange Land.

Can I pester you to describe that "something"? It's a topic I've been interested in for a long time...I have a version of it, but it's unsatisfactory to most people.

Okay, it went like this.

Spoiled because you really should read the book for yourself first.

Trigger Warning!!!1! :

Rich old man devises way to commit suicide after falling under the thrall of his doctors, who won't let him die. He decides to have a "brain transplant". He gets a "donor", who just happens to be a young, beautiful woman he knew before she was killed by a mugger. As he's coming out of the void phase of the surgery he realizes she's still there. (Obviously, the brain isn't the sole place consciousness can reside, her brain's in a bucket someplace.) She helps him adjust to being a man in a woman's body. (The issue of whether or not she's just an illusion is considered, and, in typical R.A.H. style the reader is left to decide.) They have a mutual friend, his majordomo and her former lover. The gentleman dies of a heart attack and they "rescue" his "soul" (for lack of a better word) and bring it into the, hehe, commune.

Obviously R.A.H. can do a better job of telling this story.

Hope so. I was hoping for more than sci fi. Thanks anyway...

It's speculative fiction, you beerbarian.

[FBM]

It's speculative fiction, you beerbarian.

Oh, my bad.

And it's sojubarian, thanks.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

It's speculative fiction, you beerbarian.

Oh, my bad.

And it's sojubarian, thanks.

What? They stopped selling beer there?

(I could have called you gaijin.)