Do you think your sense of identity could exist independently of the physical architecture it currently resides in?

I don’t know how computers and brains would work, but to everything else: no. I cannot sense anything other than my physical body.

Nope, my mind is my brain. No brain, no me.

@wundayatta Finally, someone who thinks like me! What a wonderfully descriptive way to express it. Yes, I think my “essence” exists independently of this “matter” we call our body.

A console game can be run without the actual physical console on a sufficiently powerful PC that emulates the console, so my consciousness and subconsciousness equally could exist within a brain emulator run on a PC.
Could it exist without any physical basis at all? Definitely not.

I’d be quite comfortable if I were to be somehow “housed” inside a vibrator, once I became accustomed to all that shaking & stuff, I imagine i’d fit right in…...which is nice.

O_o

jog on

@ucme
I would make sure that you would only be used anally, muharrharr

I guess maybe there might be a way to move our thoughts somehow. Move them to an artficial brain of sorts. Then it would be me, outside of my body. But, my body does contribute to who I am. What I can do physically, how I feel about my body. I think the brain signals the body, but the body also signals the brain. Feedback loops in the brain get alteres depending n our hysical experiences. So, I don’t think I would be completely the same independent of my body, but I would still be me to some extent.

For better or worse, my sense of self developed and continues to be shaped by the inputs provided by my physical body. Without proprioception and the senses of smell, sight, hearing, pain, heat and cold, taste and so on, my experience of self would be static and hollow existing in a simulator environment. It would not fit with my prior experience. That could be better or worse than the current experience but it would not be authentic,

@ragingloli I bet you would, you saucy mare.

I’m no Max Headroom. And even Max’s personality changed when he ended up in the computer. He became quite manic. The reporter he was spawned from was a much steadier sort of fella.

I do not think I would be the same, not just without a body, but without the life I have built up around me. There was a time when I lost everything [temporarily, thank god] and I felt totally adrift from my moorings.

@Skaggfacemutt What did I do? Please show me where I suggested a personal belief in my question? What was it made you think I felt the same as you?

I don’t. Most emphatically not. But I wanted to ask the question as neutrally as possible, that’s all. Why do people sometimes mistake my neutrality for taking a position of one kind or another? I’m just asking a question. Not stating a personal belief. Most certainly not stating a belief that is the opposite of what I think makes sense.

It is just about imaginable that what I think of as me, all my feelings, memories and thoughts could be duplicated in a super computer somewhere and that computer would then imagine that it was me. The computer would then have an identity but it wouldn’t be my identity, though it would be identical to mine.

Maybe you could go a step further and transfer the sense of self over as well, but it would be a lot trickier. I think it would require a physical connection between ‘me’ and the computer to make it work and like a skin graft it would take time.

What about the feedback from your arms and legs? Your sense of volition when you decide to go for a walk? Your sense of wellness that has everything to do with your body and how it affects your mood, emotions, and ability to think. What happens to all that feedback system if you move over into another architecture?

Would the new system be a simulator—providing you with fake input? Or would you have a robotic body to make move, and to gain data about the world through? I suspect that real input would be more convincing than a simulated environment. However, I don’t think it would be possible to provide the range of sensory input our brains are used to handling from the millions of nerve cells every second. We’d notice. At the very least, we’d feel very slow and that we were missing out on a lot.

But I’ll bet it would be much worse than that. I’ll bet it would be like sensory deprivation and that a person transferred to a robot or a simulated environment would go crazy in hours due to sensory deprivation. They would start hallucinating and soon would be unable to communicate, and have to be shut down.

I don’t think most of us have much of a clue at all how important the body is to our sense of identity.

@wundayatta That’s what I meant by a feedback loop. I just noticed there were a lot of typos on my answer, which would have possibly made my explanation unclear. The brain changes depending on what is going on externally.

I don’t believe so. Sense of self is an entirely neurological phenomenon, as far as we know. This doesn’t mean, however, that one’s identity is necessarily confined to the body, or to anything at all for that matter. The boundary of self is not fixed.

I can identify with this chunk of flesh, and consider everything outside its skin to be not-me; or I can not enforce that distinction, and allow the sense of self to expand outward, even infinitely (which is, I think, as good a definition of love as any). But even that expanded sense of self must include that chunk of flesh; the sense of self is rooted in it, even if it isn’t confined to it. The more the sense of self encompasses, though, the less significant the lump of flesh appears.

Er, hmm…is that even possible, short of being a mystic or like, some kinda brain ninja? The idea of souls and spirits might say yes, and I suppose that one could exist without the shell…if it’s technically possible to withdraw the consciousness from the envelope, and have it maintained as such. Like put it in a jar or something. Lol. By this I mean that if it’s technically possible and if consciousness could exist outside the body.

Vendanta teaches, “I am not this body, this body is not mine.”

As far as having a realistic experience in an alternate ‘architecture, I think It’s a matter of complexity of the system into which you were loaded…if it’s complex enough it could accommodate any experiences including feeling like a normal human.

After plowing through seven seasons of “Star Trek: Voyager” episodes recently, The Doctor comes to mind. He’s a holographic Emergency Medical Hologram, initially programmed with all sorts of medical knowledge and skills.
After years in the Delta Quadrant he had added several “subroutines” that included musical appreciation and even sexual activity. Clearly that paradigm accomodates the feedback and “feeling” that are typical to humans.

What nobody covers in the fiction that I’ve seen is a conceivable way to upload one’s consciousness out of you thoroughly enough to make the result work.

You should watch Ghost in the Shell then. All the main characters there had their brains replaced by computers.

Did they get into any detail about how the person/personality was extracted from the original brain in the first place? If so then I’ll check it out….

Let’s download “me” to Snooki and test.

“I” am the sum total of my experiences, ideas thoughts and memories, not the meat of my body. And I would be perfectly comfortable running on a mainframe or as an app on multiple mobile devices, so long as the system includes sensory input equal or superior to what I have now; and most critically, neural learning networks so I can continue to “grow” as an “I’ness”. If you port me to a mobile app, just make it run on 4G or better, please. Oh, and I would not just be “comfortable”, I would be ecstatic running a hot young body like Snooki has, or for that matter, port me to Chris Young. :-)

I don’t understand this brain/computer relationship: is it actually possible to somehow merge a human brain and computer together?

I don’t think it would be 100% me. But there would be some part of me in there.

I think another question would be at what percentage do you stop being you?

99.99%?
51%?
.00001%?

Is it a readily recognizable as you? Or is it some primal distillation of you?

@Blackberry Not at this time.

@Nimis You alone can answer that. How important is the look, the feel, the smell, all the sensory reality of your meat? It meat is primal to you, then no computer analog would be anything close to 50%. If, on the other hand, you perceive yourself more as an homunculus, or “that which is aware of being aware” then porting to a computer that did not intefere with that awareness process would be close to 100% you.

The whole percentage question is a good one because people feel they’ve lost themselves following traumatic injuries or illness, losing a limb to war, accident or diabetes, or losing a breast to cancer. Even changes that come with plain old ageing can make one miss the old ‘me’.

@dabbler That depends on the person. Personally, I don’t miss the old me, but I do miss being pain free.

I suppose if it ever did happen, it would be very gradual technological developments that make it happen. Like first we’d have memory modules that would “speak” the language our synapses speak, so they would respond in a way that mimicked the way we address any other part of our memory. We’d get used to adding more memory, and to the feel of hardware vs wetware memory.

Then people will build modules that help you use an artificial limb. It would mimic the feelings of a leg or whatever. Gradually these would get more and more sophisticated. Slowly more and more of the body would have software emulators, and the bionic person would become more real.

We’ll see then how hardware and software interface with wetware.

But if I had to place a bet, I’m betting it’s never going to happen. We need our bodies to experience ourselves. Without them, well, we aren’t there. I believe the body is integral to our thinking and identity processes. We just aren’t aware of that because right now we tend to die without our bodies.

@wundayatta Very interesting. You feel like you’re meat, or rather believe that you are whether you feel it or not. I think that I am thought. The meat is just the tool I use to think and sense the world.

And the bionic arms and legs are already out there functioning. They have limited tactile feedback as of now, but the best can be controlled by sensing nerve impulses so that they respond exactly like a real limb. The brave new world is dawning faster than you think.

Actually, I don’t think the meat and the thought are separable. People might think they are thought, but the thought does not happen without the meat. So they are one and the same.

@wundayatta On that, we agree. Just saying if I could be ported to another, better thinking machine, and had great sensory input, so much the better. Bye bye arthritis.