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Comment by Sohcahtoa82 | Hacker News Reader

> Perhaps a "Ship of Theseus"-style approach would work — gradually replacing neurons one by one, or brain sections piece by piece.

You just blew my mind (no pun intended).

In this thread, we're basically alluding to the Hard Problem of Consciousness[0]. Consciousness is hard to define, and even harder to prove, and so conversations that talk about it become difficult.

There's certainly a certain subset of the brain you can take out and still have no effect on consciousness. Assuming you could replace small parts at a time, what would happen? At what point does the "mind", "self", or "consciousness" get lost?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

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> There's certainly a certain subset of the brain you can take out and still have no effect on consciousness

If we don't even know what consciousness is, how do you measure the effect on consciousness of removing arbitrary amounts of brain matter?

Doesn’t seem that hard to measure. It isn’t like the subject will become a mysterious P zombie, they will probably just become increasingly incoherent and then non verbal and then die.

Damage a brain enough and brain death occurs. By the same token, after a certain number of neurons are lost, there is no self. Whatever consciousness is, it can’t be sustained with a sufficiently compromised brain.

This is observable in late stage dementia patients, it gradually becomes difficult to think and in the final dire stages their sense of self degrades too.

> This is observable in late stage dementia patients, it gradually becomes difficult to think and in the final dire stages their sense of self degrades too.

At best, you can be an external observer. You can't truly understand what the person is experiencing.

A common thread I see among people with brain damage is that they don't recognize it. For example, with patients with hemispatial neglect [0], if you ask them to draw a clock, and then only draw the right-hand side of one with the numbers 12 through 6 and they don't draw 7-11, then try to ask them where the 9 is, they might insist it's there. If you ask them to point at the 9, they'll either point to the wrong number or not point at all. And if you tell them they're not pointing or are pointing to the wrong number, they'll insist they're right.

But even with all that knowledge, it's still hard to imagine what that person is actually experiencing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemispatial_neglect

That is the common way of current understanding. But there is problem.

So called 'terminal lucidity' exists sometimes.

One theory is that is enabled by the immune systems shutdown, so inflammation ceases to interfere for a short time.

The problem with that is it still fails to explain the few cases, where shortly post-mortem it is found that there is not much healthy/able to function somewhat normally brain left to speak of.

Rather 'spooky'.

The thing is, it's not about removing brain matter, it's about replacing brain matter (with a manufactured copy, for example), and applying the same process in a secondary location (physical or digital, I guess). Will 'you' at some point stop being 'you'? Will the secondary copy at some point become you?

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