/qa/ - Question & Answer

note: i'm not actually seeking to discuss if it would be ethical or not, just if it would be possible

>The key to Immortality
Heaven

>>868616
perhaps for you. i personally have very different views on the concept of an afterlife. not to say i'm an atheist or buddhistcuck but it's not as simple as the millenia old religions are telling you

>what do you consider of the concept of a "soul" or consciousness?
it depends on your beliefs. if youre religious then you (probably) believe that it is something outside of this realm that is kind of "connected" to the physical body. if youre an athiest then you would probably think of the soul as some property of the brain that we haven't fully comprehended yet.
>so would it be possible to transfer that consciousness elsewhere?
if you believe that the soul is a physical property of the mind then yes BUT you would run into the same issue as teleporting. is it REALLY (You) when you dont share the same brain?
>you forget about everything due to your brain degrading but it's still you in there.
so its not you in there? what do you mean by degrading?

>>868614 (OP)
i think, that conciousness is tied to your brain, it just makes sense. After all, we're all just a meatball made out of fat that controlls a big ass organic mech

>>868618
>it depends on your beliefs. if youre religious then you (probably) believe that it is something outside of this realm that is kind of "connected" to the physical body. if youre an athiest then you would probably think of the soul as some property of the brain that we haven't fully comprehended yet.
indeed, and i would like to bring up the simulation theory, which could explain the paradoxicality of a chunk of matter being able to perceive the world. there definitely is some truth to the concept of a "soul" as the chances of you being "born" into a human body rather than the trillions of insects or whatever is next to none
>if you believe that the soul is a physical property of the mind then yes BUT you would run into the same issue as teleporting. is it REALLY (You) when you dont share the same brain?
it is an identical issue. we still haven't learned how to transfer the consciousness, so such a process would essentially result in the death of you and the creation of an artificial "being" which can "think" but doesn't (necessarily) have a soul of its own.
>so its not you in there? what do you mean by degrading?
have you seen how alzheimers patients behave? their mental abilities literally directly degrade, they can barely live on their own and most of the time they need help from other people. but their consciousness still presumably resides in their brain, even after forgetting how to do anything at all
>>868622
indeed it is tied to your brain, but my questions are: does the consciousness actually physically exist or is it just an illusion? and can the consciousness be transferred to a different brain/computer?

>>868639
>and can the consciousness be transferred to a different brain/computer?
nigga, you're not turning yourself into a murder drone 💔💔💔

>>868641
ok bro
and what happens to you when you inevitably die within the next 100-150 years? are you not bothered by the fact all the current religions had their core ideas formulated long before the age of information even began?

>>868644
Carpe diem, or something along those lines

>>868645
>Carpe diem
that's bullshit. why be content with living happy for 100 years when you can pursue immortality and potentially live in bliss forever?

>>868646
What if time ends

>>868646
Why bother living forever? That feels more like a responsibility, than something benefitial

>>868646
immortality is a curse. everyone knows this.

>>868649
>>868650
>>868651
the curse you are all thinking of is enforced immortality. this does not apply in the real world where you can ack like a tranny, and i would be content with acking myself or at least putting myself in statis once i've exhausted all that there was to do

GET THE FUCK OUT OF THIS SITE
>Muh arrow

>>868657
you mentioned immortality. what youre describing is just using technology to extend the length of your life which isnt as bad.

>>868662
yeah, extending your life indefinitely is a form of immortality

>>868667
Not really. You can extend your life to X years, and after that you can continue extending, or stop, but when you're immortal, you're immortal. I don't think you can just stop being immortal and instantly die at the age of thrembillion years old

>>868671
perhaps so but let's keep the discussion on track, this is another topic entirely

>>868678
Alright

in the show, the worker drones are smaller than humans afaik. a human brain likely wouldnt fit inside one of their heads. a custom computer would be even worse.
maybe a murder drone would be large enough but nigga.

>>868695
cut the brain until it fits then

>>868695
not what i am talking about award
also just make the head larger lol

I think that the most likely thing is that consciousness is just an illusion created by the brain. You wouldn't be able to transfer consciousness unless you actually transferred the physical material of the brain. Any other method, like making a digital copy of the brain, might transfer the person indistinguishably to an outside observer, but (You) the person being transferred wouldn't experience it.

>>868738
i wonder what happens when you get a lobotomy
are you splitting the consciousness into 2 inhabiting the same body, or are you handicapping 1 consciousness?

>>868746
well yeah, it is 2 consciousnesses. there's a reason why in people who have their brain split their left hand moves independently of their right hand.
It's not as much of a shocking leap as you think when you realize that you are already a product of multiple 'consciousnesses' working in sync to produce the illusion of one consciousness controlling everything. Your left hemisphere and your right hemisphere communicate and coordinate but they do thinking essentially separately.
People who have their right side of their brain cut off will even receive hallucinations where their right brain 'talks' to them.

I find it funny that even self-purported atheists automatically assume that there is such a thing as a soul. What reason is there to believe that? Has there ever been any documented case of a person's consciousness persisting outside of their body after their brain has been destroyed? If you cannot come up with a single legitimate one (and indeed, there is none) then there is no reason to think that the concept of a soul exists besides wishful thinking.
It seems that most atheists today are really religious, but they don't want to admit it. They believe in a soul and they believe that their 'humanity' is something special and mystical that could never be replicated or replaced by an AI. And it's all wishful thinking because if they don't feel special, that makes them feel bad. And they're also afraid of death, of course. Imagining an immortal soul is comforting.

>>868759
i also theorize that the frontal lobe is the essential part responsible for projecting the consciousness. think the ceo whereas all the other parts of the brain are middle management.
it shouldn't be hard to move the brain to an artificial vessel in the future, the technology for this is already slowly being developed, however the main problem with this is that the brain is still organic, it decays and will eventually die no matter what. some figures i heard were 200 years to reach the "memory cap" of the brain and 4000 years for actual maximum life before it irreversibly deteriorates. as such, it's essential that we develop the technology to relocate the consciousness, preferably with memories intact. moving the brain itself to an artificial vessel could be a middle ground until we develop the technology for the ultimate goal

>>868776
and i have to agree with you.
what makes ai different from humans, really, besides one being organic and the other artificial? soon enough ai will effectively behave indistinguishably from a random human you'd find on the street. does this mean the ai has a soul/consciousness? or receives one when it reaches a certain stadium of development? i haven't got a clue.
i personally suspect simulation theory has some truth to it. in my eyes it's the only way to rationally explain the existence of a consciousness derived from a blob of inorganic matter arranged a certain way. how likely is it that you were specifically "born" into a human body and not a random insect or whatever?

>>868799
I think that 'relocating' the consciousness is a futile endeavor because it's a phenomenon created by the brain. It dies with the brain.
The best you could hope for is a Ship Of Theseus situation where you slowly replace the brain with new, fresh cells over time to essentially turn it into a new brain with the consciousness intact. That's plausible because our brains are already constantly replacing cells that have died, so it would make sense that you could still experience consciousness after that.

>>868831
>how likely is it that you were specifically "born" into a human body and not a random insect or whatever?
This is fallacious. You're born as a human, so you are the end result of that and you only experience the timeline where it happened. There's no possible way for you to know what the chances were, and, more importantly, whether there was any sort of chance involved. Is there any reason for you to believe that a consciousness existed before, and then was "born" into a body? Even if such a consciousness existed, is there any reason to believe that it would have an equal chance of being "born" into any living creature?
These are all things you're assuming.
I don't understand what kind of logic leads you to think that us being in a simulation somehow explains consciousness the best. If consciousness is just an illusion created by the brain, as it seems to be, it doesn't need any special explanation. We are the illusion. We do not exist as something special outside of the world, we are a part of the world like any other and subject to the laws of cause and effect. Our consciousness is an effect.

why are zartycucks ruining the catalog

>>868837
with this you run into the issue of "are you really the same person as you were a year ago?" which cannot be proven or disproven because you only experience the now. however i do think you are right here. and perhaps, like you are saying, it would be eventually possible to fully replace the brain with a computer while keeping the consciousness intact in this exact way
>>868901
you would be correct in assuming i am being fallacious here. there indeed is no way to prove what actually happens to your "consciousness", if anything, before you are born. still, it's a thought to keep in the back of your mind
at the same time, how does the brain project a consciousness at all? why would it even do that? in my eyes, it is effectively the same as thinking a rock is conscious, because it really is - you are made out of the same materials as that rock, just that the rock cannot think or anything but you have the necessary arrangement of inorganic matter (brain) to be able to reply to me. but why does the brain even have a consciousness? there is no cause for the effect of a consciousness manifesting, there is no reason whatsoever for the illusion to EXIST.
in my opinion, it's something that is given to you by some higher force. or perhaps just to me and everyone else is a shell walking around. same could be applied to you, you could be the only conscious being in the entire world and i'm just a can typing this shit out (read about solipsism). for me personally, it's the only way to rationalize the existence of a consciousness, you could disagree with this and that'd be perfectly fine, but i see no other reason for it to exist without delving balls deep into religion

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mono brim

>>868976
>at the same time, how does the brain project a consciousness at all? why would it even do that?
Consciousness and a illusion of a unified single controller is useful for navigating the world, from an evolutionary perspective. It allows for forethought and organized planning.
As for how it is projected at all, how do any senses operate? Even in the most simple creatures with sensory organs, the organism 'feels' things in response to stimuli. It's a chemical function.
>in my eyes, it is effectively the same as thinking a rock is conscious, because it really is - you are made out of the same materials as that rock, just that the rock cannot think or anything but you have the necessary arrangement of inorganic matter (brain) to be able to reply to me.
So the rock isn't conscious. I don't understand this logic. The illusion of consciousness is something that can only be produced by that necessary arrangement of inorganic matter which forms the brain. This is like saying that iron ore must produce steam because it's made of the same material as a steam engine. Makes no sense.
>there is no cause for the effect of a consciousness manifesting, there is no reason whatsoever for the illusion to EXIST.
Again fallacious. Just because you can't think of a reason for the illusion to exist doesn't mean there isn't one. As I already said, evolutionarily having the illusion of consciousness is advantageous to survival.
I think that 'manifesting' is a misleading word to use here because it seems to imply that it's something separate being created, when there's no reason to believe that the foundational experience of existing is anything other than a byproduct of neurons doing their job.

>>869103
perhaps the issue is with you misunderstanding what i am referring to when i am speaking of consciousness. as an example i'll bring up a smoke detector that beeps when placed in a nigger's house. it detects that there are niggers living in the house it was placed in. does that make it conscious? no.
my definition of consciousness is the thing that sees, hears, feels things the way it does, then acts upon these depending on how the brain's neural pathways are arranged (to clear this up, for example a psychopath if insulted kills the guy, whereas a regular person just gets angry. and this is not the consciousness acting, the brain of a psychopath physically differs from the brain of a normal person). this also raises the question of what the consciousness is supposed to do exactly but i'll tackle this in a bit
>consciousness (…) allows for forethought and organized planning
no it doesn't? the brain would be perfectly capable of that on its own without a consciousness. as an example, ais could very well be programmed to have forethought and organized planning. we are just not at that technological level yet, they still suffer from long term memory issues, but give it enough time and a lot of processing capacity and they'd be able to plan things on the same level as humans and likely even further ahead. the ability of forethought and organized planning does not define a consciousness, any sufficiently advanced brain/computer has that ability, even if not conscious.
or are ais conscious because they're able to make plans? i really don't understand your definition of a consciousness, that being an evolutionary advantage which allows the brain to plan ahead, because the brain can plan ahead completely on its own (or at least should in theory, but here we are running into the same issue of "is anyone except you actually conscious?" which is why i brought up ai instead)
perhaps now you're feeling an urge to express your "free will". that also is you (the consciousness) sensing your brain thinking that thought, as thoughts are physically defined - they're just impulses. so where does the consciousness even fit in here? i've pretty much reduced it to a passive observer of the brain's actions.
>The illusion of consciousness is something that can only be produced by that necessary arrangement of inorganic matter which forms the brain.
and how do you know that exactly? how are you sure that rock is not conscious? if you were to agree with my previous points, then you'd see that the consciousness does absolutely nothing whatsoever and is just a passive observer of everything the brain itself does. same way the brain observes other people doing things on their own. so who are we to say that rocks aren't conscious? maybe they have consciousness but just can't think or feel or do anything whatsoever.
>This is like saying that iron ore must produce steam because it's made of the same material as a steam engine.
rearrange the elementary particles that compose iron ore into fuel and water, then you'll be able to produce steam with the steam engine made out of iron ore. the logic is the same with the brain.
>As I already said, evolutionarily having the illusion of consciousness is advantageous to survival.
read the prior points
>there's no reason to believe that the foundational experience of existing is anything other than a byproduct of neurons doing their job
and this point i would agree with you on, as the idea of the consciousness being something external could very well just be reduced to a comforting thought. after all, why does the consciousness even exist if its not responsible for anything the brain does? and yet it does.

Shit nophono cares fan about, ywnbaw nigger

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