I wonder…
Do androids dream of electric sheep?
Mmm, techno lamb.
cool, pretty soon they’ll have caught up with natural intelligence
And then they’ll demand rights, humanity will refuse, and there will be a war.
Fun times.
How about this; Tranquilizer shotgun. It fires a spread of low-dosage sedative darts, for use in riot squads for crowd control. Would be more effective than beanbags and less dangerous than plastic rounds.
It’s all anarchy and riots till someone takes a dart to the eye…
Tranquilizer darts don’t actually exist. The amount of sedative would have to be incredibly precise; if it’s too little it does nothing, and if it’s too much it can be fatal.
then how come i’ve seen people shoot animals with darts on tv (non-fiction obv)
There is a reason there is an entire profession of anesthesiology…it’s a very exact science. Drugging people and animals depends on many things, like body weight and temperament. Animals are often more difficult and dangerous to restrain and control so sometimes they have to use darts. But using sedatives like that on crowds of people is a big no-no. Like that one time in Moscow where they used “sleeping gas grenades” on the terrorists in a theater and ended up killing civilians.
It’s perfectly objective. Just because we don’t know how consciousness works doesn’t mean you can’t make the stipulation I made. The very thought experiment is designed to turn a question about consciousness into a simple question not dependent on understanding consciousness.
To start, here is what I’m claiming as relevant things we understand about consciousness:
It is not supernatural
It, in some way shape or form, “comes” from the brain (comes in quotes because it is very very loosely used)
For the thought experiment to be invalid despite the two previous claims, copying a brain would have to result in a link between the brains that allowed for a single consciousness to be tied to both brains. That would be a violation of what we understand outside of consciousness; that two masses of atoms and molecules won’t tie to each other wirelessly and accurately communicate information simply from the fact that one was copied from the other.
Just because you don’t understand what’s inside of a box doesn’t allow for something entirely nonsensical to occur outside of the box (the box being consciousness).
Of course it’s not supernatural, because supernatural is really just a catch-all explanation for unexplained phenomena.
Although consciousness clearly does have some connection to the brain, we can’t assume that the structure of the brain (i.e. the variations between individuals) is a determining factor.
Quantum entanglement is one example of how particles can be wirelessly connected, experimentally confirmed and established.
We don’t know what consciousness is, which means we also don’t know if there is such a thing as a “single” consciousness. It may be an emergent property that is more akin to a spectrum, having no clear boundaries or delineation.
You’re oversimplifying, which makes the baseless assumptions you’re making harder to detect. You’re placing a phenomenon which is not understood at all within the confines of mechanical physics, which is only a simplified working-model of underlying principles to begin with.
Your ideas are clearly influenced by the age-old model of a static, mechanical universe, which went out of date early in the 20th century.
Thought experiments should of course be simplified, but certainly not oversimplified.
Supernatural is usually just a phrase to explain made up phenomena.
I worded myself carefully because I’ve heard of quantum entanglement in this context before. It really wouldn’t explain consciousness in any way seeing as the rules by which it operates have no relation to consciousness and thus wouldn’t align to perfectly transfer information as consciousness would require. Nor is there a similar system that would emerge in the context of consciousness.
Singular consciousness shit has and always will be bullshit. Consciousness isn’t special. It’s complicated and hard to understand, but it’s not magic. It emerged from the same evolutionary process as the eye the arm the dick and whatever else you wish to name. And consciousness as we know it is simply a more advanced edition of that which dolphins, dogs, fish, all the way down to maybe even insects or simpler experience.
My use of older/common understanding of reality is safe because that very model was developed because it explains things on a common and simple scale and the experiment is designed to place things withing that scale.
The structure of the brain not being a factor is actually my point and my criticism of sci-fi understanding: a second perfectly identical brain being created does not, and in fact, will not, transfer the consciousness by my claims. Also I feel I can go beyond saying that consciousness comes from the brain. It is in fact LIMITED to the brain.
And here is my guess that moves beyond the thought experiment. I suspect that consciousness is quite boringly and simply tied to that PARTICULAR set of atoms. For example, to simplify things further, imagine a rock. Now copy that rock perfectly. Is the second rock the same rock? Of course not. You have two separate rocks, not matter how identical they are. Seems simple right? I believe that such a simple example can also explain consciousness. Copy a brain. Obviously you have two separate brains. Only because a brain, as opposed to a rock, is capable of observing and thinking, you get two consciousnesses. But the underlying logic is no different. The two objects are separate because they share a different set of atoms.
Interestingly enough, if this interpretation is right, this would suggest that if you took your brain, broke down all the molecules and then rearranged them to be a replica of someone else’s brain, you would retain the consciousness but change the person.
This unfortunately brings up A LOT of questions related to what happens when atoms are lost, replaced, or rearranged naturally?
You are making a LOT of assumptions about what consciousness IS, and how IT works, without knowing anything. Basically there can only be one awake consciousness per body, there can’t be two bodies with the same consciousness, because the bodies are experiencing different inputs (through their senses) and therefore storing different memories. This logic only works because you are assuming that there are particular consciousnesses per body or a ‘particular set of atoms’. No one can know what or how consciousness works, so we don’t know whether consciousness is an actual seemingly external physical thing/state (like a soul) that is attached to a body from birth, or if it arises from the physical way that information is in ultra order within a super complex and ordered object such as the brain. Both sound far fetched and both are related in that we can never reason or use logic to work out if either are correct, in fact, any explanation in between also cannot be properly understood because there is no way to know.
Guys, this thread is abut stupid ideas. Please stop dragging it off topic with your argument about the nature of human consciousness.
Off topic conversations are half the reason I come to these forums 
That whole discussion makes me think of the whole teleporter thing where it might kill the original person and make a clone but the clone would think they were the original, even though the person who went through is no longer living.
That would be scary if teleporters existed for people and they functioned like that because we’d probably never be able to tell they were a different person unless the original person didn’t get killed.
i used to have the same problem with sleeping
how do you know if you’re still the same you after a night of sleep?
“Supernatural” ceases to be so as soon as a person understands the workings of said item’s nature. Would a ghost continue to be supernatural if we were to understand the laws that could theoretically define them?
So here is a question, assuming life consists of nothing more than the physical, do computers have limited consciousness? As say, a lobotomy patient or dementia patient may have? In this same vein, are vegetables(people) real humans, or simply meat?
real humans = simply meat
Oh there’s a brain all right…it’s just that it’s made out of meat.
I don’t really understand that. By the same logic, how do you know you’re the same you were ten minutes ago? Someone could have replaced you with a robotic duplicate with fake memories, and be out there right now torturing the real you.
Now, what I do hate is how I can never remember going to sleep. I genuinely have no idea what it feels like.