A thought experiment on consciousness
arXiv Preprint Archive October 30, 2003
Summary
Could consciousness be more than just brain activity? A fascinating physics thought experiment suggests our minds may be intimately connected with the entire physical universe. By exploring what would happen if we could perfectly duplicate a brain, this analysis reveals that conscious experience likely emerges from extensive interactions between our brains and the surrounding physical world, rather than being isolated within our heads.
Abstract
The Mind-Body Problem, which constitutes the starting point for a large part of the speculations about consciousness and conscious experience, can be re-stated in an equivalent way, using the `brain duplication' argument described in this paper. If we assume that consciousness follows from a peculiar organization of physical matter and energy, namely that it does not transcend physical reality, then the brain duplication argument gives a possible interesting physical characterization of the mind: namely, a sort of extensive interdependence of the brain with the whole surrounding physical world in giving rise to consciousness.