Sunyata

Interestingly, it may be that Heisenberg uncertainly requires that if you extract all of the information out of Riker in order to reform him, you must necessarily destroy the original Riker, saving you a bullet. (IANAP, _obviously_).

Some people have a weird condition where they remember EVERYTHING from a certain point in their lives, they never forget anything. I'm sure they have a finite amount of memory, but it's so big it's infinite in practice.

What puzzles me the most is the permanence of identity despite the siscontinuity of the conscious experience. Why and how am I still the same person in the morning than I was when I fell asleep?

One could argue that the abundant neural activity that happens during the night preservres yourself...

What about deep phenobarbital-induced general anesthesia, which induces a flat EEG? No more neural activity... Your self is preserved through the "structural" properties of your brain.

Which leads me to another point: the structure/function distinction is a false dichotomy, an artefact of the human thinking process. The concept isn't new for the many Lisp hackers around here, but the idea can be extended to the organisation of the universe. The (neuro)psychologist's structure is the neurologist's function. Recurse up to elementary particles whose dual wave/particle nature has been extensively documented.

Physics will not be complete until the nature of subjectivity is understood. It may never be complete, for that matter.

"For instance, the scientific article says, perhaps, something like this: "The radioactive phosphorus content of the cerebrum of the rat decreases to one-half in a period of two weeks." Now, what does that mean?

"It means that phosphorus that is in the brain of a rat (and also in mine, and yours) is not the same phosphorus as it was two weeks ago, but that all of the atoms that are in the brain are being replaced, and the ones that were there before have gone away.

"So what is this mind, what are these atoms with consciousness? Last week's potatoes! That is what now can remember what was going on in my mind a year ago -- a mind which has long ago been replaced.

"This is what it means when one discovers how long it takes for the atoms of the brain to be replaced by other atoms, to note that the thing which I call my individuality is only a pattern or dance. The atoms come into my brain, dance a dance, then go out; always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday."

Here's one that I've particularly enjoyed:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Eastern-Wisdom-Modern-Life-Collected...

It's a collection of lectures that he gave over a decade or so, in the 60s. It introduces most of the really important concepts of eastern philosophy.

This book provides a nice follow-up to the previous one, with a much more complete, detailed, academic view of the topics, which helps gain a better understanding of it all:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Way-Zen-Vintage-Spiritual-Classics/d...

And if you zoom in more, those atoms (carbon, hydrogen etc.) are just different configurations of electrons, protons and neutrons.

At the end of the day, string theory zooms in even more and says that those particles are made of just one thing - a 'string'. And the different particles are manifestations of strings vibrating w/ different energies and patterns (like how a musical instrument makes different notes w/ different vibrations).

That idea paints the universe as as one grand orchestra. Each string not really different from the next (fungibility) and somewhat interdependent. In short, Sunyata.

The obvious and meaningful answer is that the experience you have is of the total end of all further experience. Death. One or even a thousand completely perfect copies of you living onward in the universe is no comfort when the consciousness that started the whole game is not around to experience it.

Or in more simple form,

If you put someone to sleep, and haul them across a room, and then they wake up, this is totally different from writing down their entire molecuar composition, burning their atoms to a cinder, and then reconstituting said molecular composition on the other side of the room. What wakes up is not you. You are a burnt ash in the wastebin.

The truly fascinating question no one is discussing is: since our consciousness is made up of a vast combination of distinct physical parts, it could one day be possible to slowly replace those parts with artificial parts, with the transition from 100% original to 100% new parts being a transition in phases so small that the consciousness is never interrupted. The resulting being is YOU, but at the end, all of what was you is gone.

Addendum: People who have suffered severe trauma and lost large sections of the brain have managed to live. If the substrate of the mind in question was an artificial system that can deal with such traumatic removals of core pieces, is there some cross section of the constituent parts of the human mind that you could sever in half and end up with two distinct yet continuously conscious entities?

" You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_and_change

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