Thought Experiment II

Suppose we were able to design a computer that can pass the Turing test, and let us further suppose that it has awareness of self, although we really can't define it. At keast it reports that it has self-awareness, awareness of itself in time and space. Now let us suppose that at any given moment we can turn it off, "freezing" all the circuits as they are at that moment, and then at some later moment turn it back on.

When it is on again, it reports that there is no lapse of awareness, just a lapse in time. In other words, it experienced restarting as a simple continuation of its previous functioning. This experience and report is essentially identical to what we humans experience when we are anaesthetized. We "go to sleep", and when we recover consciousness, we don't experience a lapse of personal awareness, just a lapse in time. We become unconscious at 1 pm and recover our consciousness, little the worse for wear, at 5 pm. We are the same person we were when we became unconscious.

Now reconsider with me the previous "thought experiment". In it we considered the plight of a person who could (through some advanced technology) be completely deconstructed and destroyed, then rebuilt at another place and time exactly as it was when deconstructed. It was possible to conclude that there would be literally no way, even in theory, to reconstruct the experience of the person who was deconstructed. The replica or reconstruction would experience exactly what the person or computer in the first example might experience. It "went to sleep" and then "woke up" at a later time with no experience of lapse of selfhood. But the original, the one who was destroyed, might have experienced total and irrevocable death, and as a result there would be no way to recapture its experience of termination.

The problem seems to arise from the way in which we think of consciousness. We tend to think of it as a unique phenomenon, unique to each one of us, and not in itself replicable. However, we also know that every person (and probably some animals) experience their identical awareness as unique. So, is the reawakened or reconstituted computer or person experiencing the "same" or a "different" consciousness? When we think of the computer, replaced atom for atom, reporting in its reconstructed state that it is "the same" as it was before destruction, does that mean that somehow identity has been passed along with the sense of consciousness?

I think it begins to seem that we make a mistake when we equate consciousness with self-awareness. We think of self-awareness as unique to each of us, but consciousness is simply a kind of functioning that animals and people can have without requiring that self-awareness be part of that consciousness. In the original thought experiment, it was posited that the process of destruction of the original could fail, and as a result both the original and the reconstructed person/computer would be identical and in effect be the same person. This now appears to me to be a difficult concept only because we equate self-awareness with consciousness. Both the original and the replication would be conscious. Both would have whatever self-awareness that accompanies consciousness on that level. To consider which is the original person now becomes meaningless. They are both the original. They both are conscious. They both have self-awareness. Each awareness is immediately different from the other because each now has different input, so off goes their consciousness marching to a different tune.

I'm still thinking about it.