Consciousness is more than being awake. It feels like something to be the
one experiencing or processing. There is something it is like to be you.
Detecting a colour or pain is more than just detecting. It becomes a value of
some kind to you. It touches who you are. It connects with who you are.
Thomas Nagel’s famous 1974 paper, What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, argued
that consciousness ie subjective experience, is fundamentally tied to an
organism's specific physical structure.
The author of the article,
writing for Skeptic Magazine argued for a brain-dependent dualism, claiming
that your qualitative consciousness cannot exist outside of your specific
neurochemical brain machine.
While this means brain death is the
literal end, it still risks downgrading the body. Analogy: the person always
matters not their crutch.
The ethical dangers of any form of dualism
are well known.
While we already act like ghosts or spirits in a
machine, we should not be taking on more encouragement to do so.
Consciousness is a detector. You both have and are whatever absorbs
information.
Consciousness is often defined by what it does (processing
and detecting information) rather than what it is made of.
Or one can
say it is what it does. That falls into the realm of paradox or mystery.
Perhaps an illusion is involved but there has to be some living entity there
to have the illusion.
If my consciousness could transplant into a bat
nothing would change. It would be noticed by nobody. Not even by me.
Assuming this is a supernatural soul makes no difference.
And/or if my
core awareness were mapped onto a bat’s nervous system, it would immediately
begin processing bat-level data (echolocation, night vision). Because the
faculty adapts entirely to its new instrument, you wouldn't retain human
memories or a human perspective to say, "I used to be a human." You would just
be the detection of that bat's reality.
Too many think this is
impossible for they cannot imagine how it could take place or if it has ever
happened.
In philosophy, this is known as an argument from incredulity
or an appeal to lack of imagination. Just because anyone cannot conceive of
how a mental faculty could be abstracted, isolated, and "transported" into
another medium, like a bat or a computer via whole brain emulation, does not
mean it is metaphysically impossible.
It might simply be a
technological limitation, not a fundamental law of physics. Even if there is
no power or machine that can do it or ever will be, physics may still make it
possible.
Conceivability does not dictate reality.
Consciousness in animals, humans or gods - if you like is a detection faculty.
The transfer of consciousness remains entirely possible in principle.
So I cannot know what it is to be a bat? Well in principle I can. What this
means ethically needs discussion. If my faculty transferred, is killing the
bat murder? What if some supernatural revelation told me transfers are
happening behind the scenes and raises a dead man to show it has the power to
know?
The primary argument against the transfer possibility relies on
our inability to imagine or explain such a mechanism. The hardware might be
changeable, even if the software alters its output entirely based on the new
machine it runs. If what makes me an aware being, can in principle be
put in a bat that shows what makes me exceptional is the kind of body I have.
I am not inherently made in the image of a God who supposedly is about a
divine-human engagement. This gives rise to questions about the true value of
humans and animals.