In order to provide a definite answer to this question, we’d need to know how the brain produces consciousness and personality, as well as the exact mechanism of the upload(e.g., can it rewire synapses?).
Not exactly true; we probably don’t need to know how consciousness arises. We would certainly have to rewire synapses to match the original brain, and it is likely that if we exactly replicate brain structure neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse, we would still not know where consciousness lies, but would have a conscious duplicate of the original.
Alternatively you could hypothesize a soul, but that seems like worry for worry’s sake.
The flip side to this is that there is no measurable difference between ‘someone who is you and feels conscious’ and ‘someone who is exactly like you in every way but does not feel conscious (but will continue to claim that e does)’. Even if you identified a mental state on a brain scan that you felt certain that was causing the experience of consciousness, in order to approximate a proof of this you would have to be able to measure a group of subjects that are nearly identical except not experiencing consciousness, a group that has not yet been found in nature.
In order to provide a definite answer to this question, we’d need to know how the brain produces consciousness and personality, as well as the exact mechanism of the upload(e.g., can it rewire synapses?).
Not exactly true; we probably don’t need to know how consciousness arises. We would certainly have to rewire synapses to match the original brain, and it is likely that if we exactly replicate brain structure neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse, we would still not know where consciousness lies, but would have a conscious duplicate of the original.
Alternatively you could hypothesize a soul, but that seems like worry for worry’s sake.
The flip side to this is that there is no measurable difference between ‘someone who is you and feels conscious’ and ‘someone who is exactly like you in every way but does not feel conscious (but will continue to claim that e does)’. Even if you identified a mental state on a brain scan that you felt certain that was causing the experience of consciousness, in order to approximate a proof of this you would have to be able to measure a group of subjects that are nearly identical except not experiencing consciousness, a group that has not yet been found in nature.