We are not claiming they are entirely independent, quite the contrary. The mind is an emergent property of the body. Just like music is an emergent property of sound waves.
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.’
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 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.
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.
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.