The Problem With Copying Or Uploading Consciousness

For decades now it has been a science fiction dream for many to have the ability to upload their consciousness onto the net. Whether as a way to preserve themselves forever, or just to have a copy of themselves for various future uses. However, copying oneself onto the net comes with a very unique problem which is the creation of a consciousness that will no longer represent you in the long run because of how it will react to influences you will never experience. Sure there could be a way to upload yourself at a set point in time, but the interesting part is having a consciousness that can still continue to grow forever.

The problem comes at the very moment you create the copy of yourself, when you suddenly exist in more than one place. The created version of you however will not have the consciousness that you are experiencing at this very moment. It will essentially be a copy of yourself that believes in every way that it is not a copy because it would have been a copy of you at that point in time. This is very complicated to explain, but essentially because you can’t actually control two conscious minds at the same time, what makes your consciousness “real” to you will never be able to continue on forever.

Even if you were able to upload your brain to the net, you would always die in one way or another. Making a copy of yourself, would only preserve a part of yourself, not let you live forever like many have hoped. That being said, after you die a consciousness based off of you would survive in the net, which could be put in some sort of human like container and give the illusion of living forever. In fact the consciousness in that container probably would think that it was the real you all along, but more likely than not, transferring actual consciousness would be impossible to do or even test. The reason is if you did an experiment where you copied someone into another body and woke both the real and copy up, both would be convinced they were the original.

Neither is a fake representation of you so to say, but they both have potential to develop into different people. If we accept the idea that most of the things that shape what makes us, comes from our experiences in life, even an exact copy of you would most likely end up as a completely different person given the freedom to live their own life. I imagine something would happen similarly on the net if different uploaded consciousness would be able to talk to each other freely. You in the real world would evolve in a different direction while your uploaded consciousness evolved in a different way.
Some of the best Scifi movies delve into this idea of consciousness, like the Matrix, Ghost in the Shell and even recent series like Black Mirror all put an interesting and unique twist on the idea. Each of them questioning what consciousness and existence is “real”. Personally it is Ghost in the Shell which intrigues me the most with the idea of being able to upload your brain and stick it in an android container that can be upgraded over and over again.

This puts an interesting twist on the whole uploading or copying your mind to the net idea. While you can be preserved at one period in time, even uploading your brain wouldn’t have you avoid death. More likely than not , your consciousness would disappear while the copy’s continues on. I don’t think that in my lifetime I will even see the ability for technology to even do this or be able to test how it works, but I am nonetheless very interested to see what would happen in that field. It is as far as a pipe dream can be at the moment, but pipe dreams sometimes do come true. Living forever is something many seek, but I believe it is mostly in vain unless you can actually sustain he survival of your actual brain without decay forever.

-Calaber24p