With the
increase in
computing power,
eventually this may become a
possibility. What happens when you have the power to
simulate every
neuron, every
hormone, ever little
detail of a
human brain, and the
ability to
scan a living person for the state of their
mind, and use it as the
starting state for a simulation? (See:
brute force uploading)
Does this program have consciousness? Or is there something special about a person that the program can't copy but can pretend to have? If you ask it if it has consciousness, and it replies in the affirmative, is that good enough to say it does? Can you determine consciousness from external viewing? (For those curious, there is no known way to do so)
And can you then pause or stop the program, ethically? After all, if it is a perfect copy, then it thinks it's the person it copied, and aren't you then pausing or stopping a human consciousness? Is it ok to pause it, since you can restart it and it will never know? Or is the temporal shift considered harm? What if you just pause it, but never restart it? Is it dead?
The future may be strange and full of devious questions...
Woundweavr - I saw somewhere that they's pretty much proven that the neurons in the brain do not make use of quantum mechanics. Of course they're not 100% sure, but I saw something about it in sci.nanotech.