Our consciousness is what we are, how we are and who we are. Our consciousness is being we. So if we would be capable of maintaining our ...
Our consciousness is what we are, how we are and who we are. Our consciousness is being we. So if we would be capable of maintaining our consciousness in time, if our consciousness would not cease with the end of our body, we would have eternal life. The simple way to have eternal life is to preserve our body. But even if our body repeatable, still the death coded in every cell. Theoretical possible to preserve our body for a long time, still our biological body imperfect and do not fit in any environment. How we can maintain our consciousness and reach practically eternal life not continuously fixing our biological body?
Cloning consciousness
If we could duplicate all of our brain functions to a similar or different material structure, then it would mean that our consciousness would be duplicated too. So we would be two. The two of we have the same consciousness so the two person are the same at the time of cloning. Is it solved the eternal life? No! Because even if the two person are the same they consciousness are separated and the two has its own subjective experience. Even if they are the same but they are separated from their own subjective worlds. Even they are the same, the original consciousness does not extend to the new. So if the original dies its consciousness dies with it. Even if the new consciousness lives toward and the new consciousness is the same as the original, the original consciousness does not extend to the new one. Either consciousness can experience death and if dies then die its subjective experience with it. No escape from death with cloning consciousness. You can have many of you but they are all independent and own entities.
Transferring consciousness
A more promising solution to eternal life if we could transfer our consciousness to another physical entity. But if we examine this process closely we can see, this method won't work either. The main problem with this method that consciousness is not a thing that we can take out and put in. Consciousness is tied to a material structure. So when we want to transfer the consciousness to the other entity, we really must do cloning first and secondly destroy the original. We saw the problem with cloning before and do not need to mention the destroying side effect, which is death.
The other solution to transfer consciousness is if we transfer consciousness with its carrying substrate, which would mean in human's case, to take out the brain and install it to another entity. This would carry and transfer consciousness but would not solve the problem, the brain as any carrying substrate has a limited lifespan.
Smooth-maintain of the system
This method means a continuous renewal of the system. Small parts of the consciousness system can be replaceable without losing or changing the consciousness. Like how we are smoothly maintaining our consciousness now. Our body continuously renews, our matter is continuously renewing but keeping the structure, and our consciousness intact. At least we wish to because our biological renewing system has a built-in degradation process (resulting death) which - in our case - needed to provide evolutional adaptation on the level of the race.
This method, however, won't mean that we couldn't change our carrying substrate to be changed to another kind of principally different substrate. Only need to realize, that the new substrate has the same functionality as the old one and can interact with the old and still remaining substrate in the same way as it was. A new kind of interaction can be introduced if the whole system has been changed to the new carrying substrate.
Our consciousness is equal to us. If we are seeking eternal life, we do not want to experience cease of consciousness, we do not want to experience death, the smooth transition of the system looks as the only way to reach that.
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