And what's running on the machine? The same program that was running in wetware is now running in hardware. Just because you port a video game from PC to Mac doesn't mean that the program itself must be fundamentally different. So now that you've ported from wetware to hardware, aren't you still you? The same program on a different machine?
This is one of the fundamental problems with trying to understand something as fiendishly complex as the mind. You say 'Wetware' as if it is a direct couterpart to 'Hardware'. Before computers, people thought of the mind as some sort of system similar to valves & transistors. It has always been seen in terms of the prevailing technology.
The minds ability to compute seemingly has little in common with current hardware, and our ability to upload it is absolutely zilch.
We may never be able to 'upload' it to anything else until we are in a position to actually grow our own organic brains. I suspect 'Hardware' will never do it.
See:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/02/070227105247.htmI have posted it on the science board. Brains are more chaotic than we previously thought.
And I'm sure we still don't have half the story.
Hardware will find it difficult to simulate the plasticity of the brain.
A blow to the hard materialist's view of the brain is emerging from Neuroscience:
"Collectively, the findings of the neuroimaging studies reviewed here strongly support the view that the subjective nature and the intentional content (what they are ?about? from a first-person perspective) of mental processes (e.g., thoughts, feelings, beliefs, volition) significantly influence the various levels of brain functioning (e.g., molecular, cellular, neural circuit) and brain plasticity. Furthermore, these findings indicate that mentalistic variables have to be seriously taken into account to reach a correct understanding of the neural bases of behavior in humans."
It seems that mental events are themselves somehow distinct from physical events and actually have the ability to alter the physical makeup of the brain.
How does hardware emulate that?
Blacknad.
