The Internet As A Window To The Human Thought Process

By Author: Roy Fernandez
Total Articles: 9
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Considering what makes you an individual is the exact, particular information pattern inside your brain and you create an exact copy of yourself, for the very single first moment of creation both would indeed share the same consciousness, albeit as completely different persons (let's say the copying process is made in a blind process from which you don't know which one is the original, or even better, the first one is completely disassembled and two new ones are created - Then there isn't really an original anymore, though you BOTH would be the real deal at the moment of creation).

But then, one could argue the first action taken by any of the two (or a hundred) "YOUs" would be genuinely a representation of an action taken solely by your original self, since anything else was the same.

You can extrapolate from there, saying whenever you create an exact copy of you, it doesn't matter which one is you originally. From that moment on, you could stop being defined by the actions of one single person, but by the conjunct of actions taken by all of your copies, given ANY of those could likely be doing something ...
... you would do from that moment on. So, "you" stops defining a single entity, and now is a group defined by a universe of actions taken by your copies.

All that talk, of course, goes along with the "defining" characteristic of what makes you human, and raises a myriad of ethical questions. Could the whole group be held responsible for the actions of any of the copies? If one of you murders another human, or even another copy of yourself, everyone in the group should be held accountable, or just the particular organic instance of you that did it?

Now, of course from the moment of creation onwards all the copies would not be the same anymore, for their actions would diverge eventually. But any of those COULD be you. In a sense, since we can't define which one would be the real one, we would have to create a quantum like definition of a person.

Someone attaches a very powerful computer directly to my brain. I am able to use this computer to store memories and recall them. After using this computer for some time, I find that my consciousness (whatever that really is), can move over to the computer side. It seems to me that the man in the cabin is behaving like a computer. There seems to be no inquisitiveness, no desire to learn what the symbols mean. Personally, I would have wanted to know something about who or what was feeding me these symbols, and I would have tried to do so by working out what the symbols meant. I would have also wanted to know what lay beyond the walls. It's a bit like having no knowledge, looking at the stars and wondering who put them there.

Had Alan Turing being in the cabin I have no doubt he would have broken the 'code' in next to no time.
Any brain scan shows that there is little if any activity in my normal brain. Disconnecting the wires, it is found that my body is in a comatose state. Reconnecting, I can move back into my body at will.
At some point, I move into the computer, and perhaps the computer is attached to an artificial body. 'Mind' seems to be an artifact of an active brain. It is not in any one spot in that brain, nor any one organ. If the organic brain that I have now becomes less than 10% of my total working brain, I will barely notice when it stops functioning. This is of course a tremendous simplification of a hypothetical process.

If you are interested in such stuff, you can access the internet through popular service providers like Time Warner Cable and learn more about artificial intelligence and the human thought process.

Roy Fernandez is a freelancer and an active blogger. He enjoys writing about popular service providers like Time Warner Cable