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Comment by robbomacrae | Hacker News Reader

That all makes sense. But let's run with this way beyond the foreseeable tech. What if you can replace each neuron in situ one by one up to X%. Then what if it was reversible (the neurons were initially just bypassed, commented out). Someone could then dial it up to 5%.. 50% and if they still felt the same throughout and then went up to 100%. In that scenario would they have copied themselves?

I find it fascinatingly coincidental that neurons are the only cells in the body that don't rejuvenate unless there is some sort of injury [0].

[0]: https://www.dzne.de/en/im-fokus/meldungen/2021/neurons-able-...

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You're asking a question that we've asked ourselves for a millennia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

Technically, we are not the same people that we were when we were born. The cells in our body have one by one been replaced with new ones and the old ones have died off. The things that make up my body are 100% different than when I was born, so I literally am not the same person, physically.

Maybe this is an indicator that there is more to what makes us, us, than just the physical assembly of atoms in our bodies. There are things I don't know that we'll ever get a full understanding of.

Categories, numbers, logic, grammar, etc. all map onto physical systems, but aren't necessarily directly linked. This is "metaphysics" in philosophy, and is essential in order to even reason about physical systems. Just the concept of a "physical system" is actually metaphysical, but without metaphysics, you can say nothing to anyone about anything. Metaphysics is just generally taken as a "given", but is worth evaluating itself.

Then you'll run into the "realism" vs. "nominalism" debate and you'll understand the philosophical underpinnings of the current culture wars in America.

Perhaps but with a modern/futuristic twist.

The cells in our body have one by one been replaced with new ones and the old ones have died off.

This is not the case for our "talking" neurons which is what I was trying to limit this thought experiment to. I think a lot more folks would be ok with preserving their biological brain as is within a robot/clone if that was the only option and understand the body gets (mostly) replaced. Although a few in this thread have alluded to the fact we might be missing important relationships with the rest of the body such as the nervous system and gut biome.

If you further develop this thought, systems might be capable enough to implant core desires into you before transferring the copy into your new body. "You'll love Coca Cola no matter what, and capitalism".

The above scenario is if you get re-implanted into a self-evolving, autonomous biological entity, unlinked again from the system. If this is not feasible and the only solution is to embed you into a robot with an uplink to the internet, because "why not?", then my biggest issue with a digital self is that there are no guarantees of having a proper firewall, which would equal to total surveillance:

  Thoughts are free, who can guess them?
  They fly by like nocturnal shadows.
  No person can know them, no hunter can shoot them
  and so it'll always be: Thoughts are free!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Gedanken_sind_frei

That's still a copy, just one where both copies remember their life before being copied and equally think they are the original. The original will still experience aging and death.

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