But if your mind and self is formed by and dependent on your body, how can you transfer it to a bodyless existence without losing that self?
The mind as an emergent property of the body is also not an established philosophical or scientific fact, and is quite dependent on positivism, which has plenty of issues.
It seems to me that at best, you’re creating a surface-level copy, but one inherently limited to contemporary scientific knowledge. Not to say that this isn’t interesting or useful, but it’s certainly not the same ‘self.’
The notion of self is an illusion the mind creates. (There are many benefits for doing so, not least of which is self-preservation which is helpful to producing progeny and so therefore is selected for during natural selection.)
To answer your question directly: one can transfer an emergent property of a system to another system by sufficiently transferring the mechanism that produce that emergent property in the first place. A good analog would be emulating the hardware of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) entirely in software [1].
The self is far more complex than the simplistic positivist notion of it. And again, this only works if you assume that at the time of the mind creation, your knowledge is complete. That seems fairly ignorant considering the history of science, not to mention the inherent limitations of empirical knowledge.
The NES example is not really a good one because it’s a created object and knowledge of it is complete, therefore replicating it is possible.
Even then, assuming all of this didn’t matter- I still don’t see how the mind maintains itself in a new body. It’s not as if a human mind is a static entity-it constantly comes into contact with the world through its embodied form and this reinforces and extends this notion of identity. Assuming you could emulate it on a computer, it would seem logical that the mind would change to adapt to its new body, thus no longer being the same self.
Ultimately any “transfers” will actually just be the creation of new minds, which IMO is more interesting anyway.
> The NES example is not really a good one because it’s a created object and knowledge of it is complete, therefore replicating it is possible.
One could replicate the NES hardware without any knowledge of how it was built by reverse engineering it
> Ultimately any “transfers” will actually just be the creation of new minds, which IMO is more interesting anyway.
I actually agree but in the same way that you have a "new mind" when you wake up in the morning. The continuity of self is an illusion. "I" would be very happy to one day wake up having been transferred into a non-biological system the same way that "I" would be very happy to wake up tomorrow.
>One could replicate the NES hardware without any knowledge of how it was built by reverse engineering it
Not sure if one could do that if that person is not very familiar with similar projects. Give the NES system to a scientist from 1800 and tell me what they could conclude.
Sure but the mind is reinforced by its constant embodiment. If you woke up in another body, or with no body, then that identity would seem difficult to maintain.
"The self" is just a other way of saying "the unified stream of experience". It is not an illusion, just a fact. No one has ever experienced two consciousnesses. The term "the self" is simply a way of stating that fact.
That's the whole mystery right there isn't it? No one has ever had a solid explanation for the apparent unity of the stream of consciousness. I suspect it has something to do with the composition of oscillatory patterns, similar to a sound wave being a combination of many individual sounds which get combined through wave interference into a unified pressure wave. But that leaves many questions unanswered. Better to be puzzled by this than assume we should know the answer right now. We just don't.
The mind as an emergent property of the body is also not an established philosophical or scientific fact, and is quite dependent on positivism, which has plenty of issues.
It seems to me that at best, you’re creating a surface-level copy, but one inherently limited to contemporary scientific knowledge. Not to say that this isn’t interesting or useful, but it’s certainly not the same ‘self.’