If a method was invented that could allow for the uploading of your consciousness to a digital format and had been proven to work,
How could it possibly be proven to work? You can't prove to me that a flesh and blood human being talking to me is conscious. How do you intend to prove to me that a software copy of that human being is conscious?
Or do you mean, after it happened, the
behavior of the software entity was indistinguishable from me by a third party? Umm, no. I recall reading a few weeks ago about a subscription service that scans the email and social media of a dead person, and then continues to produce online content based on that history. Is a piece of software churning out pattern data "you?" Even if the content it produced was "indistinguishable from" what you produce, would it be you?
I don't think so.
Unbroken chain of consciousness is a dumb idea. For real. There is no reason to think that matters.
It's all in the memories m8.
A video tape contains memory. Is it therefore conscious?
In that case, a mechanical process that slowly replaces the entirety of your organic brain with a machine one would be indistinguishable.
Imagine going into a doctor's office. The doctor saws off your foot and replaces it with with a cybernetic replacement foot. You're still ok. Then he saws off your hand and replaces it with a cybernetic replacement hand. You're still ok. Next he removes your heart and replaces it with a mechanical heart. Yep, still fine. Next he cuts off your head and...oh, now you're dead.
Apply this general concept to your brain. Replacing parts might be perfectly fine...up until it's not.
In response to slow nanite replacement and a theseus ship sort of thing, sure, that'd work, but I don't believe that the thing we're presuming to preserve here actually exists. I guess the best way to explain what I'm trying to say is that I don't think Theseus's ship is preserved if you replace its boards one by one.
The
Ship of Theseusis a bad analogy for this topic. Yes, if you replace one board at time, most people would agree it's still the same ship. But that's
not what we're discussing here.
Imagine if instead of replacing the Ship of Theseus one board at a time, you instead dismantled it one board at a time, and every time you removed a board, you wrote down a description of where it was and how it connected to other boards, and then burned it. And then once the entire ship was a pile of dust, you threw the dust away and handed the description to somebody else and asked them to make a CAD file of it on a computer.
Would that CAD file be the same ship?
I don't think the question matters. I think it's just a certain arrangement of boards and that the designator "ship" has no immanent value, so asking if the "ship" is preserved isn't really asking anything.
Whether you are or aren't a
zombie, I can't know. I'm not you. But I do know that
I'm not a zombie. I may be
observing a "certain arrangement" in the form of memories and behavior patterns, but
observation is occurring. I empirically know this, because "I" am observing it. I might be fuzzy on what the "I" is who is doing the observing, but the experience of observation is definitely being observed.
Suggesting that reproducing the brain state being observed would necessarily therefore re-create the observation of that brainstate and that that observing entity would therefore be me, makes about as much sense as saying that making a digital copy of a painting and sticking it on a computer would therefore result in the same subjective experience as a human being looking at the original painting in a gallery.
Even if it works, there are still a bunch of issues. Who controls the computer you're on? What happens when they die or their company is bought out? What if somebody decides to make copies of the 'you'' and use them as slave labor? If you really think it's you in there, that's potentially a concern, isn't it? What if people at the computer decide to alter your memories, or feed you pleasure/pain data until you submit to doing whatever they want? Or save an original copy and use you until you finally break, and then restore from the save and use you again, forever?
Great big can of worms here.