2021/08/09 [Xer 02-10 ] The man with two brains

[MT Hazard]

This has interesting philosophical implications. Also did they copy his brain over like a file, run them in parallel until his thoughts migrated to the new brain or something else entirely?

Its something I have considered before, if you needed to move a conscious mind over to a new brain, what would be the best way to go about it that wasn't just copying the mind into a new body and letting the original die?

[Kuzma Volkov]

This has interesting philosophical implications.

Yeah this has been something I've always wondered. I'm kind of all for us evolving our selves to non organic life. However the question of is the old you dead and you cease when it is copied over or hell uploaded from flesh. It is the one stopping point for me, that if it ever becomes doable and affordable in our lifetime would we first die before being reborn and that new us isn't a continuation like when we go to sleep at night.

[Raskahn]

Which version of Linux do you think Xerian is running on now? 

[Farry]

Ah ha ha ha. This one. Start with Googling "illusion of self". This basically says that when you wake up in the morning, the only thing that connects you mentally with yesterday's self is that you remember being that person and think like that person but otherwise you are a new consciousness. It's a disturbing concept for our minds that are genetically programmed for survival, but I personally think that it is certainly true given what neuroscience tells us about brain function and what physics tells us about how the universe works. It also seems to me to be mostly the consensus in the more educated scientific community that understand brain science, and indeed if you Google "illusion of self", the top hits include the New Scientist saying that it is true -- however I suspect that it is not the consensus in the wider scientific community, possibly because people just haven't thought about it enough, or at all, (or do you think that's patronising?) Now Google "branching identity" for bottomless existential crisis.

[AmigaDragon]

Ah ha ha ha. This one. Start with Googling "illusion of self". This basically says that when you wake up in the morning, the only thing that connects you mentally with yesterday's self is that you remember being that person and think like that person but otherwise you are a new consciousness. It's a disturbing concept for our minds ...

When you go to sleep, your thought processes aren't shutting down, they're entering other operating states (deep and REM sleep). Your conscious (waking) state stops but the being doesn't. Now you could say that being is constantly changing/evolving but that is a continual process, not a stepped (stop and start) process.

Now onto Xerian's situation, was his brain physically damaged by the magic "radiation" or just interfered? If he finds a way back to his home dimension, could his consciousness be transferred back? Could his new magitech brain operate in his home dimension for long?

[Farry]

When you go to sleep, your thought processes aren't shutting down, they're entering other operating states (deep and REM sleep). Your conscious (waking) state stops but the being doesn't...

Brain waves do continue when the brain is asleep, so that does lead one to think that maybe they somehow preserve a continuity of self when consciousness is not present, but then here's something to think about:

A technique called "hypothermic circulatory arrest" is routinely used for aortic surgery. The body is deliberately cooled to the point that all metabolic and electrical processes in the brain come to a complete halt. The brain is still alive in the sense that each individual cell remains viable, but the brain's overall function totally stops. This is necessary because the brain's normal electrochemical process produces toxins that must be rapidly cleared away by the circulatory system. With the production of these toxins halted, however, the
surgeons have up to one hour to operate with the heart stopped; the time limit now being depletion of the oxygen reserves in the cells.

When people recover from hypothermic circulatory arrest, they have full cognitive abilities as they had before with no detectable degradation of brain function. These people are clearly the same individual as before, no different to somebody that had a deep sleep as far as continuity of the self is concerned.

Re the story, Jacob mentioned "structural damage", so I think we can assume that Xerian's original brain is now physically damaged but that they were able to extract the personality and memories just in time. I'm not going to read the written story on FA because spoilers, but yeah, you would think that reversing the mind-transfer could be a problem.

[Tapewolf]

Well, old hands will hopefully remember that Josh, Dorcan and Seth have been through a similar situation.  Heck, with some of them, like Page and Dorcan, they didn't even have access to the original body.
So I hope people aren't too disappointed when Jakob mentions the m-word.

(FWIW I subscribe to the notion that consciousness may not be entirely contained within the skull, and that physical processes which we have not yet discovered may be involved, much like how radio would be inconceivable to someone from the 17th century.  This is certainly the case in the comic's universe)