Unless I misunderstand the confusion, a useful line of thought which might resolve some things:
Instead of analyzing whether you yourself are conscious or not, analyze what is causally upstream of your mind thinking that you are conscious, or your body uttering the words “I am conscious”.
Similarly you could analyze whether an upload would would think similar thoughts, or say similar things. What about a human doing manual computations? What about a pure mathematical object?
A couple of examples of where to go from there: - If they have the same behavior, perhaps they are the same? - If they have the same behavior, but you still think there is a difference, try to find out why you think there is a difference, what is causally upstream of this thought/belief?
Unless I misunderstand the confusion, a useful line of thought which might resolve some things:
Instead of analyzing whether you yourself are conscious or not, analyze what is causally upstream of your mind thinking that you are conscious, or your body uttering the words “I am conscious”.
Similarly you could analyze whether an upload would would think similar thoughts, or say similar things. What about a human doing manual computations? What about a pure mathematical object?
A couple of examples of where to go from there:
- If they have the same behavior, perhaps they are the same?
- If they have the same behavior, but you still think there is a difference, try to find out why you think there is a difference, what is causally upstream of this thought/belief?