[extropy-chat] Evidence for the self surviving brain disassembly?

[Robert J. Bradbury]

As a suggestion to Brett and Eugen.  You might want to
place less emphasis on the quantum level.  I wake up
every day and am more or less "Robert".  Identity/self
is going on at the neurostructural and neurochemical level
not the quantum level.  My quantum state is very different
when I wake up from when I went to sleep.  I'm sure Anders
could comment on this to a degree if he is following the
conversation.

Having as a child watched the gradual decline of my
paternal grandmother into either dementia or Alzheimer's
and watching my father's gradual loss of memory (i.e.
in both cases a loss of "self" or "identity") combined
with what I know now about molecular biology and biochemistry --
it is *not* something going on at the quantum level.

Now precisely *what* you have to get right if you want to
transfer substrates is an interesting question.  For example
I would suggest that you could have entirely different processing
systems for video or audio inputs and you would probably still
consider your identity/self to be intact.  This is going to
create some interesting future questions.  Is a "Brett" enhanced
with the ecolocation system of a Dolphin still "Brett"?  Is
a "Harvey" with all of his knowledge of human security systems
replaced with the security systems knowledge of an abalone shell
still "Harvey"? (I'm making these up on the fly here so please allow
for some creativity -- nothing is meant by the examples.)

This goes back to the discussion I had a few weeks back
in which I was trying to get at a core issue of how much
of a person you had to recover to get them back both from
an external and internal perspective.  I think areas that
we need to look at here involve injuries like strokes and
mental illness to better understand this.

Robert