The unending quest to explain consciousness
This is one of the many reasons why I love science fiction.  Many of my favorite novels center around consciousness and the related technology to assist&#x2F;enable&#x2F;enhance it.  Reading these in my younger years, many of these novels have shaped my life, especially my career.<p>I may be confusing my authors, but some of the more recent novels I&#x27;ve read (from about 10 years or so ago, it&#x27;s been a while), I think from Alastair Reynolds, have a wide range of ideas.  Some center around the same kind of thing that Elon Musk talks about with Neuralink.  Others take a wildly different path... putting an extant brain in a box or cabinet on wheels.<p>On this topic I used to be a huge fan of the concept of <i>uploading</i>.  But then I formed the opinion that, if all we&#x27;re doing is <i>copying</i> state, then the new instance is not the old ins<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rudyrucker.com&#x2F;wares&#x2F;tance" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rudyrucker.com&#x2F;wares&#x2F;tance</a>.  It&#x27;s just another instance with its own state from that point forward.  I think it&#x27;s also a Reynolds  book where a person creates a copy of their consciousness and puts it into a very physically small spacecraft in order to travel a maximum speed to a very distance place (I forget the intended task).  But upon return the two instances and ended up becoming antagonists due to their different experiences in the meantime.<p>Likewise, I want to say it was a Rucker book, a person is copied, and the copy <i>is not them</i>, just a new instance.<p>That kind of soured me on uploading.  However, at the same time, it seems to me that can be akin to giving birth to the next generation.  A gift of sorts.  Maybe we ourselves can not directly enjoy the benefits, but possibly we can gift that possibility to our descendants.<p>I am particularly fond of old cyberpunk takes on this topic.  Gibson and his wild cyberspace characters... the Oracle and Papa Legba, the self-aware <i>pimpmobile</i>, and the end of the one book where entities jumped out of all the fax machines around the world...  good times.<p>Also Asimov and his robot-focused series.<p><i>I digress</i>