Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that human metamorphosis is extremely interesting, but this line I really don't get: > Consciousness is mortally bound to the physical body, and will die along with it regardless of how many mental copies are made. I don't understand how you can put out a statement like that, like it's taken for granted or something. It's far from granted, and I've never heard of something remotely approaching a proof for thi…
Granted that consciousness is not fully understood, can we not agree that it is entirely manifest in the brain? I mean, you don't believe that human consciousness somehow survives the body after brain death, do you? Even if the cloned memories could be streamed from your brain into a running simulation, allowing a memory of crossing the threshold from the physical world to the digital one to be created in the simulat…
Lack of continuous experience of an event does not mean you died, it is merely memory loss.
Assuming the very reasonable theory that consciousness is classical and emergent from the network structure and interactions of neurons and glia then it should be possible to encode this consciousness on a turing machine. If we go a step further and replace certain collections of simulated cells with black boxes that behave the same way given an isomorphic set of inputs then we can have consciousness even more cheaply.
Your idea is not necessarily more grounded. Assumptions you make are: the substrate does not matter as long as it is not digital, you assume the replacement material will not itself have effects that result in vastly divergent actions in the long run. Yet the perturbations a neuron suffers will differ from those of nanodiamodons, will this be significant? You also take for granted the new replacement brain will not allow a very large viewpoint shift due to the new complexities and speeds of thought possible. That some invariance of self remains from morphism to morphism. That there is more resemblance between you and the the final being than you and a lemur like ancestor.
It is likely that the beings of the future will have far more sophisticated definitions of self and identity.
I personally think that physical bodies will give way to digital minds and its only a matter of time. Whether linear time or log time I can't say. But physical bodies are resource hogs. Progress is energy intensive and so is ever more complex thinking. Imagine a being whose memory is so dense that its thoughts have a gravitational pull of their own and its mind risks collapsing into a blackhole... Eventually theres going to be a lot of pressure to compress thinking beings and squeeze as much thinking capacity from matter as efficiently as possible.