If I were to create a perfect digital twin of your brain, with every neuron mapped on a 1:1 basis, and continued to send it signals relating to a physical world and subjective experience in that world, it would presumably continue to generate the data related to your subjective experience of self in that emulated world.
If those neurons were to then degrade or simulate damage, your expressed ‘self’ would also degrade accordingly, yes?
But unlike with your biological brain, I could always restore a snapshot of that brain from a healthier period and put it in a very different emulated environment after its natural ‘death.’
So while yes, there is an apparent local dependence of the self on physical constraints, this is predicted on an assumption of physical primacy and disregards the possibility of secondary recreation of that physicality.
Given the rapid progress towards exactly those kinds of secondary recreations, the assumption of our own primacy seems to be more and more spurious with each passing month.
Particularly given we’ve been measuring for a century that our universe at micro scales converts from continuous behavior to discrete at the point of interaction and switches back when persistent information about that interaction is erased, but only for the past ten or so been using continuous seed functions to build out massive universes which then convert to discrete units in order to track state changes from interactions with free agents - a very similar paradigm in much more primitive form.
If I were to create a perfect digital twin of your brain, with every neuron mapped on a 1:1 basis, and continued to send it signals relating to a physical world and subjective experience in that world, it would presumably continue to generate the data related to your subjective experience of self in that emulated world.
If those neurons were to then degrade or simulate damage, your expressed ‘self’ would also degrade accordingly, yes?
But unlike with your biological brain, I could always restore a snapshot of that brain from a healthier period and put it in a very different emulated environment after its natural ‘death.’
So while yes, there is an apparent local dependence of the self on physical constraints, this is predicted on an assumption of physical primacy and disregards the possibility of secondary recreation of that physicality.
Given the rapid progress towards exactly those kinds of secondary recreations, the assumption of our own primacy seems to be more and more spurious with each passing month.
Particularly given we’ve been measuring for a century that our universe at micro scales converts from continuous behavior to discrete at the point of interaction and switches back when persistent information about that interaction is erased, but only for the past ten or so been using continuous seed functions to build out massive universes which then convert to discrete units in order to track state changes from interactions with free agents - a very similar paradigm in much more primitive form.