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Yeah, it's interesting to think about. I've often wondered what would happen if a structurally identical configuration of matter and energy representing "me" manifested somewhere.

Taking it further, is the atomic world the only medium where this "me" could be represented? What if there were a perfect digital model of "me"? Would that be conscious?

What other mediums might be able to support something similar to our notion of consciousness?




> What if there were a perfect digital model of "me"? Would that be conscious?

If it is a perfect digital model of you, yes. Since you feel consciousness, the digital copy must also feel it. Otherwise it would not be "perfect".

In the case of the model, "feeling" means that some bits (probably a big number - billions or trillions) inside the model would flip their state.

> What other mediums might be able to support something similar to our notion of consciousness?

I believe that the mind is sustained by a particular set of physical atoms. A human brain is ~1.5 liters of water plus ~0.5 kgs of other stuff.

In theory you could represent consciousness using whatever else physical objects you wanted. In practice, the mind-bogglingly big numbers and processes involved that make it difficult. If you used grains of sand to represent atoms, each neuron would take ~450 liters / 16 cubic feet of sand to model, assuming that you can make each individual grain of sand act as an atom.

There's also the fact that modeling how atoms behave exactly seems to be extremely computationally expensive. Apparently Quantum Mechanics don't like being modeled on a non-quantum computer, and you rapidly reach the "you would need a computer the size of the whole universe in order to model that" limit very quickly. So your grains of sand would need to be Quantum-aware Grains of Sand.

You might end up needing a Jupiter-worth of grains of Quantum sand. I don't recommend using this approach. Definitely don't try to model the human brain using pebbles.




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