I can suspend belief enough to enjoy time travel, hyperspatial travel, and parallel universe travel, but not upload/download or body-switching premises 🤔
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Arguably they’re all the same premise (consciousness reconstitution with a different set of atoms) but upload/download transits through a digital representation and dammit I believe in the hard problem of consciousness and don’t think that’s meaningful.
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Body switch is just plain incoherent.
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Upload download is like believing you can construct a 100% accurate map with less than 100% of the quantum information content of a lukon of matter, and then regenerate the territory from it.
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I’m not a materialist, but I’m a material irreducibilist. I can sort of believe you can reproduce subjective consciousness if you do somerthing like quantum entanglement of indistinguishable atoms. But “scanning” a brain at the “neuron” abstraction level is just too leaky.
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Yes but I can’t thinking any good fiction that exploits that besides perhaps Stepford Wives
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Huh, the Altered Carbon books are indeed a non-example. They have an interesting ontology where transferred consciousnesses(?) are sort of quasi-immaculate, though bodies can have idiosyncrasies and animalistic subliminal memories and reflexes. (iirc)
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The book “Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle” does really interesting stuff w this, the somatic effects of the body on filtering and bending the consciousness within it. (Same guy wakes up in 7 different bodies over the course of the story)
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