How do you solve the copied consciousness conundrum without killing anyone?

Question

What do digital immortality, teleportation, the show Doctor Who, and a horror game released in 2015 have in common?

The idea of copied consciousness.
Each of these examples relies on copying the brain in some way, shape, or form.

• Digital immortality involves copying the brain onto a computer
• Teleportation involves disassembling it and reassembling it in a new location
• Doctor Who involves regeneration, which transfers the old mind of a character into a new body
• The game SOMA features the principle of multiple copies of the same mind existing simultaneously

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The inherent problem with these methods can be summarized in one sentence:

"I don't want to go"

When you teleport someone, you're ending one life and creating an exact replica in its place with the same memories. When you immortalize them digitally, the organic copy will expire. In Doctor Who, The Doctor is reluctant to regenerate because the "old him" dies in the process. And finally, SOMA ends in the following way:

The main character uploads their mind onto a satellite with a bunch of other human minds, and launches the satellite into space - the legacy of the human race after the apocalypse destroys the world. However, they open their eyes to find they're still stuck on Earth - a copy is only a copy, they're still on Earth, and they will die an unsatisfactory death.

How can you copy a consciousness, while avoiding the "I wish it were me" problem, and without killing one of the copies?

Answer 1

You use centralized version control

The problem is akin to copying computer programs around - you must dissociate the physical substrate from the program. It is complicated by the fact that the program modifies itself, i.e. consciousness could be thought of as an executable database of some sort. However, we have lots of tools available to deal with this. Version control in software is the process of keeping a repository of a project where multiple programmers (in this case clones, teleported versions, etc) are working on different parts of the code (experience) and integrating their multiple copies into a unified whole.

To do this as a human, we would need to insert the human being's life into the version control as soon as possible - you could even start the life in the version control, then use it to generate a human baby. This is a paradigm shift of sorts in the concept of "consciousness" or "identity" - it being first and foremost a digital phenomenon, thus indestructible (given sufficient computing and backup capability), rather than being primarily a physical phenomenon which is simply "backed up" every once in a while. With this view, the concept of multiple bodies, teleports, etc, are not perturbing or unnatural or distressing - the physical is not the primary seat of the mind, merely a temporary vehicle. Thus destruction of the physical body is not "killing" - the mind cannot be killed as it is a digital phenomenon.

The physical implementation of such a system probably needs some sort of high-concept computing resources along with a permanent and unbreakable link from each body to the computer.

It also presents a unique perspective on "clashing code" - parts of the program where two programmers are working on the same part of the code. For this, our central versioning system would need some sort of "best integration" or "best outcome" metric, along with a facility to store, segregate and present the "other versions" as accessible memories that are kept separate from the "main branch".

Iain M. Banks' "Culture" series has a similar idea where people are backed up to a centralised computer system somewhere, particularly before they go off to do dangerous things. It doesn't quite have the same slant of "digital-first" consciousness, but there are lots of fantastic ideas on implementation. As mentioned by @Molot, the Night's Dawn trilogy also has similar concepts of centralized consciousness, although that goes further to have a centralized mass consciousness with which all minds eventually get integrated.

Answer 2

You don't

In the way you describe, any way of making original cease to function is killing it, so you simply can't do. There are few ways to go around it.

• StarTrek way — because original is disassembled when you're beamed up, and the mass is somehow transported, too, it was left to philosophers to tell if you are still you or just a copy.

• Safehold way — copy is just a copy and it know it is. But also it knows that after timeout it will be reintegrated into the main personality. Timer is set to a low enough time, and people are conditioned in a way that prevent copies to start to think about themselves as "self". Copy feels as a part of it's source, and if for some reason it starts to develop own ideas and refuses reintegration, time out and it's deleted.

• Safehold way two —

  Copy that will live totally in VR, indefinitely, but procedure kills patient so it's only allowed on patients that are already dying anyway.

• Night's Dawn way — Edenist's habitat keep memories of people, and when someone dies, last part of their memories and personality are transferred and activated. Everyone knows it could be done to a living human, too, but no one does it specifically to avoid "I wish it were me" issue. They are very careful about that.

Answer 3

Who can tell?

Once you've made the copy it opens its eyes and truly believes it's the original. Everyone around them believes and accepts them to be the original, how can you say it's a copy and not the original, to all intents and purposes it is.

The end of the story could have been taken from the other point of view, that of the copy, opening its virtual eyes and seeing the wide expanses of space that are now its home.

A copy is not just a copy, it's also the original and it sees its own continuity of existence which includes that trip. The reason you eliminate the original is to make sure there's only one continuous personal timeline, not multiple branching ones who become different people.

Who you are is made up of your memories, your accumulated experiences, the mere physical aspect is replaced every few years in a continuous cycle as cells die and are replaced. You're not physically the same person you were when you were born, all those cells have died and been replaced by new ones, you don't have the continuity problem from that, why should you have the problem when they're all replaced at once?

Consider my grandfather's axe(or Trigger's broom, depending on culture)

This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation . . . but is this not the nine hundred-year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y'know. Pretty good. - Pterry, The Fifth Elephant

You're simply doing the same with a body, your body is not you, your personality is you, your body is simply an avatar for the personality. The personality endures but the body can be replaced.

Just don't expect me to use a teleporter any time soon.

Answer 4

As Separatix alluded to, this is an age old question which has not had an answer which satisfies everyone for thousands of years. You won't solve it in a few minutes.

The name I have most often seen associated with this problem is the Ship of Theseus. It was reported by Plutarch in his writings, before 150AD. Even then, it was already attributed to "Greek legend" suggesting it is far older than that:

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places, in so much that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.

From this, philosophers have drawn up lines with fancy terms such as endurable and perdurable to try to capture this conundrum along side an acceptable solution. For years, they have failed. It got even more difficult when science came along and started suggesting that the human mind could be encoded (which, by the way, is an assumption on your part, so I'd recommend touching on it in the story).

If you do start from the assumption that consciousness can actually be copied, there are still many options. My personal favorite is to suggest that, after the "copying" occurs, it is not so much that you have a copy of yourself as much as it is that your body is now twice as big, and in disjoint places. One of the lessons of the Ship of Theseus is that its very difficult to isolate a definitive self when engaging in such copying. Why not simply declare the "self" to consist of two bodies?

There's some precedence for this. Simple precedence can be found in the reattachment of a finger. We keep the severed finger on ice, but never one is it questioned that "this is the victim's finger." It's part of their "self." So having a body in two parts is not inherently forbidden. There's even really strange verbiages which have to arise when discussing organ transplants such as "he's using my lung."

There's also some really really interesting precedence in the world of conjoined twins. The sense of self associated with conjoined twins has always been complicated. For example, Krista and Tatiana Hogan are a fascinating case of twins conjoined in the brain. Impulses from one brain transmit directly to the other. Because of this, there are times where their behavior is as though they are one individual.

Once you have this two bodied "self," obviously you will need to do something about it because the two bodies are likely to experience sufficiently different lives as to want to call them two "selves." This we also have a model for: divorce. In divorce, one takes a "unified body" and cleaves it in two, along with all of the property that body has attained. This process would have a natural corollary in the consciousness copying process. It even suggests a correct moral viewpoint for the clone killing problem. If the "self" agrees that one half of it should go away, who is to disagree. However, if the "self" is at odds with itself, the situation becomes less clear. Perhaps you have to send them to clone counseling, to come to an understanding of their greater self.

Answer 5

Gradually Replacing the Brain

Similar to Werrf's suggestion I'd go the gradual transfer rout, but I don't know what a "transfer of conscious processes" implies and I'm not sure that a "half conscious" brain would work. This is a more “materialist” approach.

Digital immortality: I would suggest gradually disassembling and at the same time reassembling the brain via nanomachines. Imagine a machine first replacing one neuron in your brain with a mechanical equivalent that can send the same impulses (but also has improved functionality). From your perspective there would be no way of telling the difference. It then spreads to the next neurons and so on. Why would this be any different than your brain cells replacing the matter that makes them up through normal metabolism? Do this however fast you feel comfortable with.

Of course the new neurons should have improved functionality, or this would be rather pointless, such as higher durability and, say, the ability to just speed up their functioning if asked to – useful when your robot brain is complete and you want to slow down time relative to your thought processes. Are you concerned that you don't get the full benefit of mechanical existence, because your mechanical neurons are still too similar to their meat versions? Just iterate the process. Or you could just gradually export the functions of individual neurons to be simulated in the cloud. Bam! You are now fully digital and you were conscious through the whole process and there was never a whole "you" that was destroyed.

Teleportation: Now it would seem that this doesn't lend itself to teleportation, but it could work. You'd need instantaneous communication though (i.e. an ansible).

You need a body identical to yours but without a brain and two exactly identical “teleportation rooms”. Your clone body is wired up and receives the exact same impulses that your primary body does and thus acts just as your primary body does (and also it doesn't, you know, die from lack of a brain). Enter the brain disassembling/reassembling nanites: At the same rate that your brain is scanned and disassembled, an identical copy of the individual neurons is assembled in the destination body. Their impulses are sent back to the origin brain and they receive impulses from the origin brain. This is why you need an ansible: Lag would mean death or at least madness and brain damage.

Where are “you” during a given point in the procedure? You don't know. Nor can anyone. To avoid the brains functioning differently the rooms have to be identical. If they aren't, it would get very...trippy, as perceptions intermingle in various stages of cognitive processing. Again: Do this however fast you feel comfortable with.

Pro: There is no "you" that is left behind by your digitization/teleportation. There is no ending of consciousness (probably).

Con: Nanomachines imperceptibly eat your brain and excrete another.

Answer 6

Check out the Old Man's War universe by John Scalzi. It involves, among other things, the transfer of consciousness between bodies.

Without getting too spoileriffic, in this universe consciousness cannot be effectively stored, only transferred. New bodies are carefully prepared, with matching genetics and underlying brain structure, memories, psychology and the like are imprinted onto it, then the consciousness process is transferred from the old body to the new via a bridge. The person being transferred is aware throughout the process; they don't go to sleep in one body and wake up in the other, they feel themselves gradually merging into the new body. After the transfer, the new body is awake and aware, and the old body is alive and undamaged but no longer 'awake'.

This has always struck me as an excellent way to avoid the problem of mind transfer, as well as an excellent definition of what consciousness is - it's not a thing that can be copied, it's a continuous process that can be transferred.

Edited to Add:

Thinking about this question got my writing spirit up; so here's something of how I would see it working.

The new body stared mindlessly ahead. I tried not to meet its eye – seeing myself as a mindless husk was always a disturbing sensation.

“Can you hear me?” the tech asked, pen poised over her clipboard.

“Yes,” I said, shifting my focus to her hip. It was much nicer to look at.

“What colour is a banana?” she asked.

“Yellow.” She nodded, made a note on her clipboard, and turned to the new body.

“Can you hear me?” she said again. The body said nothing. The tech nodded, apparently satisfied, and made another note.

“Are you ready, Mr. Werrf?” she asked, turning back to me. I swallowed hard, and nodded. She gave me a small smile – a moment of human contact before doing something so totally inhuman – then folded a screen down in front of my eyes. “Please recite the numbers you see,” she said crisply, all business. Numbers began to flash on the screen in red; 4, 9, 7, 13. I recited them as they appeared.

My skin began to tingle, as if my entire body had gone to sleep and was waking again to pins and needles. More red numbers appeared on the screen; 8, 12, 5, 6…

It was growing harder to say the numbers. My mouth felt numb, and I grew dizzy, as if I was floating away from my body. My tongue flopped out of control and I bit it; a moment of harsh pain. The numbers blurred in front of me…8 or 3…6 or 5…red or…blue? I blinked.

The pretty technician was still watching me, standing off to one side. Forget the numbers. I focused on her face and her hair, tied up in a neat bun with a few strands running down the back of her neck, and I realized I could see both sides of her at once. My head spun, and I tried to feel nausea at the strange sensation, but there was no body there to rebel against me.

For a long moment I stared at the room from two pairs of eyes; then…I don’t know quite how to describe it. That sensation when you’re pushing and pushing, and suddenly there’s no resistence; suddenly, with an almost tangible slithering pop, the strangeness vanished. Blue numbers flashed on the screen in front of me. 2. 7. 4.

I took a long breath. The pain was gone. The tightness in my chest just wasn’t there any more. I blinked, and realized that my vision was clear. Even the air smelled fresher.

The tech lifted the screen away from me and smiled again. I couldn’t help it. I smiled back.

“Can you hear me?” she asked, her voice light and musical. I nodded.

“Yes,” I said.

Across the room, two more techs recovered the mindlessly staring body that I had occupied for so long. For a moment, I caught my own eye; but it was as lifeless and insensible as the new body had been just a moment before.

Answer 7

There is no problem with two minds.

If I think about it from a perspective of "me, waking up being in two different bodies", I have a serious identity problem.

But this is the wrong perspective. Let's, for start, assume it's not me being copied, but you. Suddenly I don't have any problem at all anymore, there is just "you A" and "you B". I can talk with both, and everything feels quite normal. No problem at all!

Now, lets assume I am copied while sleeping, not knowing about it. "I, A" and "I, B" wake up in different locations without knowing about the other's existence. Both of me should not have a problem with that, it's just strange that I woke up in a different place than where I went to sleep, but, well, strange things happen. No big deal. I will still know my identity, I will be me, and be sure about it. This is true for "I, A", as well as "I, B", there's no need to distinguish them, everything is perfectly symmetrical.

So, the answer to your question is to not let them know about the copy, or, to at least prepare two distinct life paths without too much interaction. The worst is when they both claim the same life, like being in love with the same woman/man or being the father/mother of the same children. Or, copy them too!

Answer 8

I never got why people found this topic to have any difficulty, I just don't see it.

A person getting teleported from point A to B has all of their molecules scanned, the info stored and disassembled, to reassemble their molecular structure or remake it somewhere else.

Whether or not you make a copy is optional. If you do, you have, for the smallest of instances, two exact copies of one person. A few milliseconds later they already wouldn't be 100% the same anymore due to different environmental cues.

This whole notion of 'dying' when you step inside the teleporter is misleading. You don't 'die'. Dying is a human construct, and even then is poorly understood. Most people think death is instantaneous, or rather happens from one instant of time to the very next. Rather, it's a process that starts the second you are born, and ends quite a bit after you breathe your last breath.

Teleporting isn't dying, you just have your molecules disassembled, effectively disappearing from the universe entirely, or rather, you changed form to whatever code or database or pipeline you were 'stored' in. Once you're reassembled back exactly the way you were before, you're the original you again. Just in a different place. Because all that makes you you, is the exact composition of molecules you had before you stepped inside.

This idea of "I don't want to go" is just nonsensical. You don't die in that sense, and cloning aside, if you stepped into a teleporter, closed your eyes, got teleported, and tried to open your eyes again, you would find yourself on the other end of the teleporter.

In other words, the question of which clone is 'you' is flawed. They both are, exactly. All you would do is make an exact copy of yourself. One is in the place you were when you started making the copy, the other is on the other end of the teleporter/whatever device.

If both these copies started to live their lives, they would find themselves competing for their loved ones, possessions, and everything else they thought was theirs. There is no way to solve this imo but to never make the clone in the first place, only one copy can ever come out of either end of the machine.

P.S. sorry for the messy comment, went back and forth to edit and it just got messed up. I hope my ideas are clear though.

Answer 9

Obviously, you want the death of the original an integral part of the process without which the creation of the copy is incomplete.

This requires considerable handwaving, but we are in that territory anyway, so for example:

You can copy the body and brain, but the consciousness is a quantum mechanical process (some scientists believe so) and cannot be copied non-destructively. You can transfer it through entanglement or whatever (this is the handwaving part), it doing so disrupts the original, effectively destroying it. You are left with a zombie on the source end.

Answer 10

It seems like the transfer of a conscience is where the really problem is, it needs to be perceived by the person experiencing the transfer. Perhaps by triggering an "out-of-body experience" - when your "thinking essence" leaves the body and is able to "see" their body being left behind - we can then just "enter" another body.

(This reminds me of a story in "Red Dwarf: Better Than Life", where a character doesn't know they are in a VR system, but as they age in the VR world they decide to become younger by transferring their essence to a younger and empty clone of themselves. Obviously they are always connected to the VR system, so at some point they perceive themselves without a body)

In a Star Trek transporter perhaps we could leave the body before teleportation then reconnected afterwards.

Answer 11

Specifically for the teleportation case you may be able to rely on Quantum Mechanics. Quantum teleportation is the process of transferring the quantum properties of one particle to another, by using a set of entangled particles as well as a classic communications channel. Said quantum properties remain absolutely unknown in the process, so it is nothing like measuring them and then trying to copy then. Exact copying is actually impossible in Quantum Mechanics, it can be called the "no-cloning theorem". QM is weird like that.

[Tom touched on this aspect, but I don't think he explained it too well, so I had to give my go at it too. And nonsensical SE policies prevent me from posting this as a comment to his answer.]

You can probably apply this to mind uploads, if it uses a quantum computer and if you make quantum processes an important part of consciousness.

Personally, I do not believe in this theory, and I'm able to provide some arguments against it, but that is really besides the point. It is really your only way to achieve a no-cloning restriction on consciousness, along with some other benefits like indeterminism (useful as an argument for free will).

Answer 12

Bit by bit replacement.

I am working under the presumption that consciousness and who I am have no supernatural component whatsoever, but are an emergent phenomenon of the processing done by my brain. That is my belief; there is no ineffable part to worry about.

Neurons are biological and noisy. They fire spontaneously for no apparent reason; and can fail to fire when they usually would. It is nearly impossible to detect such errors in your own neurons. Usually these errors do not rise to conscious attention; if they do it is the common experience of a mental misfire, like "What is that thing you use, for eggs -- oh a spatula."

If each neuron in my brain were, one by one, replaced with a machine that did exactly what the neuron did, within some tiny margin of error, like 1/1000th of a percent, it would be too small for me to notice. You could replace all of them. The biological me is gone, the digital me has taken over, and neither of them ever experienced either death or birth or any moment in which they were not the one being duplicated.

The consciousness was indeed duplicated; the machined version may be far more maintainable, back-up-able, and have an effectively immortal existence (if destroyed, a backup stored off-site (including in another star system or galaxy) could be used to restore it).

Depending on how frequently changes to the machine are recorded (I am assuming it can form new connections and learn things, just like real neurons), the interruption may be quite minor; kind of like how the impact of a car accident IRL can cause people to lose the contents of their short term memory that contained the time leading up to the accident: They often report not knowing at all what happened to them in the five minutes or so before the accident, the last thing they do remember was routine driving a few miles away from the accident, then waking up in the hospital. IRL that doesn't cause them to question their existence, and neither would being restored from a backup.

As far as teleportation is concerned, the same philosophy could apply; there is one of you, disassembled and reassembled elsewhere. It is just another form of movement, philosophically speaking.

Answer 13

Imagine a world where it's widely accepted that we live in a multiverse where this sort of 'branching' already happens every moment, in every way possible, exploring the entire span of possible experience. Given this belief, the core philosophical problem goes away, as this is already happening.

Of course, you still have the "wish it were me" problem, as some timelines will inevitably result in horror and suffering. But now it's a psychological problem rather than an existential one, since the feeling of "wish it were me" is just as inevitable in the branching as other outcomes.

In this world, teleportation is just a more 'extreme' branch and for each case left behind, some will regret it and others will not. This then poses the ultimate question: is it fundamentally possible to be content when it is possible to imagine and contrast possible outcomes? Hopefully?

Answer 14

Consciousness-copying technology exists in the space simulation game EVE. The conundrum is solved this way: each player can have multiple bodies (called clones), but only one consciousness. This consciousness can be transferred between clones in one of two ways, depending on the type of clone you are talking about, and the event that transpired. The main difference with EVE is that you only have one active consciousness, though many clones may exist that are basically copies of it. All these other clones are dormant, and you never have more than one active at the same time.

Standard Clone

This type is used as insurance or as a backup in the event of you, the player, being killed in space. When a ship blows up in EVE, the player is still alive inside a mini-ship called a pod. When the pod is blown up, a neurotoxin is injected to instantly kill that particular clone (presumably since it would have died anyway and to spare it from the unpleasantness of a space death). Just before the neurotoxin is administered, the consciousness is transferred, presumably by some kind of space internet transmission system, to the backup medical clone.

Each player only gets one standard clone, and it sits dormant in your home system, never used except in the event of your death. At that time, a new clone is created and installed in place of the old one, which your transferred consciousness takes control of and begins using.

Jump Clone

A jump clone is used for instantaneous teleportation. These can be installed for a fee in any station with a clone vat, and also sit dormant. You can have up to three jump clones.

At the player's disposal is a console where you can jump to any of the jump clones that you currently have installed. This means your consciousness travels across space and ends up in the other jump clone, somewhere else. The previous clone (the one you just left) now goes dormant and you begin controlling the one you jumped into.

This is particularly useful when you have extremely expensive mind implants (which are common in EVE) that you don't want to lose while, say, doing a lot of PvP with an increased risk of getting blown up. So you can have an "empty" vanilla clone installed, jump over to it before doing your PvP, then later, jump back into your enhanced clone to make use of the implants and the benefits they provide, without fear of the implant-boosted clone being destroyed.

There is also a limit on how often you can jump between clones. This limit begins at 24 hours (one jump every 24 hours due to the stress of having your consciousness transferred), but it can be reduced by training a skill related to consciousness synchronization (called Infomorph Synchronization).

Skill Injectors

There are also skill injectors, which is a device that can extract knowledge from one character with the intent of moving it to another character, or even selling it. The injector is created by extracting skills from one character's mind, and the injector can then be used to inject those skills into a different character's mind. In EVE, you can actually make money by extracting already-trained skills, selling them, and then re-training them and doing the whole thing over again.

Answer 15

As of how quantum mechanics teaches, it is impossible to exactly copy an object.

Moreover, as Thomas Breuer has mathematically proven, from a point of view of any observer, a system properly containing him cannot be simulated by any turing machine even in classical mechnics due to inherently unknown initial conditions, and the result is stronger in quantum mechanics.

That said, it is impossible to upload consciousness into a (classical) computer or otherwise copy consciousness.

On the other hand, it is possible in principle to teleport a conscious object via quantum communication link. This may be radio waves or a fiber optics cable.

In this process the original object would disappear and its exact copy would be re-created at the opposite end.

Arguably, it would be exactly the same consciousness, because moving along such channel roughly amounts to quantum tunnelling and all quantum properties (such as subjective decoherence) should remain.

In short: copying consciousness is impossible. Teleporting (via a quantum link) is possible.

Answer 16

Assuming souls and that human sacrifices done by people like the aztecs and the norse worked:

One of the objectives of human sacrifice was to bind the victim's soul to the place where it was sacrificed. To do so they inflicted a lot of pain and suffering to the victim and as a result, it's soul binds, due to the psych trauma, to the location. Supposedly, that's the same principle governing ghosts (remember, i'm assuming souls, and that assumption brings a very big luggage), improved by the aztecs, norse and others.

So, the consciousness, being a function of soul, can be bound to the computer circuitry, if this boatload of assumptions hold. The scientists will have to learn and develop ancient cerimonial magic and combine it with circuitry, merging ritual and machinery, to bind the soul to the computer. Most probably it won't be pleasant to the one being bound but the person will achieve some kind of immortality.

Unfortunately, in this method, it's impossible to avoid killing someone, so part of your requirements wouldn't be honored.

Answer 17

This is a bit late, but an interesting nuance from the Iain M. Banks side of things - in the final two Culture novels, the overall system of "consciousness security" within society was refined and fleshed out further.

From the start, every thinking member of the Culture was defined as possessing a "neural lace" - hardware to allow direct synaptic connection to the Culture's entire data-sphere. This was always how "mind states" were transmitted or backed-up.

The further explanation was that every neural lace was in fact quantum entangled with the last data storage hub an individual had passed through, and this was always active. In the event of complete physical destruction, the entanglement collapsed, and the "point of view" of an individual snapped back to the data hub. All they lost where storied memories acquired since their last mind state backup.

Upon the individual's preference, they could instantly inhabit a virtual environment while waiting on a new physical body to be created. Or be kept unconscious until then. An interesting detail is that the virtual "waiting room" was constructed with specific features that demonstrated it was virtual, rather than being perfectly realistic. This was done to prevent confusion for the recently "deceased".

Banks drew a distinction in various books between this kind of true continuation of consciousness, and copies where an original mind had truly died - sometimes, an organic or machine member of the Culture would get into trouble under isolated circumstances, and suffer a legitimate death.

Answer 18

Cellular Regeneration

I don't have the rep to add a comment to Second to Last Unicorn's answer so I'll write my own.

You get bigger muscles by stressing the cells. If you kill them a muscle stem cell takes the place of the dead one. This replacement happens in the brain also. A new neuron must be retrained. What if the new neuron was silicon based?

http://www.research.ibm.com/articles/brain-chip.shtml

Let's say you spend some time slowly replacing each neuron with silicon and retraining the new silicon neurons. Most of you memories should remain intact because memories are spread over multiple neurons. You'll need to relive all of your memory's on a regular basis to help the training process. Also your neuron's collective voice will not have stopped during this process.

Now the hard part. How do you teleport? Simply making a copy doesn't solve the original problem even if you are silicon now. You now have to do the neuron replacement process very fast and at a distance. Disconnect a local neuron and replace it with a distant one and train the new neuron. Repeat this until you are in the distant location. Training won't be 100% but you could do a second pass and fix broken memories. I wouldn't want to do this. What happens if the link breaks? I also wouldn't be convinced that compressing the process would be able to really transfer your "soul" completely or as well as if you had time to adjust to the new neurons.

Answer 19

Shapeshifting

I've been working on a shapeshifting character that is currently very close to being able to do this, using shared consciousness. Every cell in the body is more or less functionally complete, and includes a neuron as well as all the other necessary systems. In order to enable shapeshifting into multiple pieces (such as a flock of birds) without becoming disoriented, communication between neurons is by way of radio waves. Thus, the brain is distributed throughout the body (or bodies), negating the need to kill anyone, and the consciousness can be shifted, splintered, and recombined at will, eliminating the "I wish it were me" problem. Of course, though by radio waves introduces other problems, which I'm still working on.

Answer 20

A Tree Falls in the Forest

I would argue that the context of experience is different for the original and the copy, and so neither can argue any longer that they are "the same." In some sense, this is related to the old conundrum "If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?", which is sensible only when we consider whether a "sound" is the physiological response of a listener to audible disturbances in the air.

"Identity" evolves in the context of our relationships. Each copy is identical only to the point of interacting with their environment. Thus one can only say "I wish it were me" in the same sense that I can say "I wish that I had married Grace Kelly," or oppositely "I wish that I wasn't a citizen of the Trump presidency."

Answer 21

Souls

...or "philotes" (if you're Card), or whatever you want to call them.

It's already unclear if genuine consciousness can be explained solely in terms of biological processes. If you assume (as some authors have already done) that there exists some "external" aspect of consciousness, then it becomes trivial to say that "the soul knows its body". Deconstruct the body in one location and rebuild it elsewhere, and the soul will follow.

This doesn't directly help with "digital immortality", but for that, see Geronimo's answer.

BTW, you might want to check out Quantum Vibe, which plays in some of these spaces, though I don't think they really answer your question.

How can you copy a consciousness, while avoiding the "I wish it were me" problem, and without killing one of the copies?

You can't. Your question describes a paradox. If you have a copy, you're going to have some degree of "copy resentment". The only way to avoid that is to:

• Never have copies. This implies that whenever a consciousness "moves" between bodies, or from a biological body to a digital system, the "old" body necessarily becomes an empty husk. (For bonus points, put it in suspended animation and allow the consciousness to transfer back and forth.)
• Ensure that the "essence" of the person is not physically bound to the atoms that make up their body. Considering that the Ship of Theseus problem already applies to biological bodies, this ought to be doable. See also the beginning of my answer.

Answer 22

All consciousness is the same

The Atman is the fundamental essence of the person - any person. If you cut a person's brain in half, which is him? Both! If it happens during pregnancy and you have identical twins, which is him? If it happens over history, and you have two people, which is him?

To quote some guy from the Wikipedia article, from 400 BC, who obviously is a step ahead of most of us here,

All living creatures are the dwelling of him who lies enveloped in matter, who is immortal, who is spotless. A wise man shall strive after the knowledge of the Atman. It is he [Self] who is the eternal part in all creatures, whose essence is wisdom, who is immortal, unchangeable, pure; he is the universe, he is the highest goal.

The original of the teleportation thinks he is not the copy. He also thinks that he is not the guy in the next room. In both cases he's wrong, because the fundamental phenomenon of consciousness is the same. Nonetheless, he thinks and acts more like his copy than the guy in the next room. The easiest way to visualize this is probably by comparison to the idea of ka and ba in Kemetism. The ka ("breath of life", same meaning as Atman) is the person's fundamental essence; but the sum of his memories and ideas and beliefs is the ba, his individuality. If you can copy the ba and rejoin it with a ka, then you are reenacting the ancient Egyptian goal of creating the akh, or in other words, creating an afterlife for the person.

To dig further into the nature of the Atman, it is necessary to understand its mode of operation, which is to say, the evolution of the ability of a neural cell to interpret traces of its future state by their impact on the past. Remembering the future creates a 'temporal paradox', revealing that causality actually flows from consciousness itself, as the boundary condition of the universe determined by which choice of cyclic paradoxical state is 'real'. This actual causality extends both forward and backward in time, rather than from some arbitrary combination of particles at a 'Big Bang' that occurred before an infinite number of particle interactions. The Atman, in choosing futures and pasts, both exercises free will and actually feels things. It exists in the dimension of time that stretches between universes, the dimension of time that distinguishes each parallel world from the next, in which their authorship continues to progress.