What makes my consciousness mine ?

[fuzzyfelt]

Some years ago I was studying neuroscience modules during my Bsc whilst my partner was studying philosophy of mind. We had many conversations about qualia and how one cannot experience another persons experiences. To this I proposed that this may not always be true, if we could accurately map a neural circuit in one persons brain and cause the rearrangement of a circuit in another persons we could hypothetically transfer the experience.

If you went out and did something an then using our hypothetical advanced knowledge of neuroscience we recorded your thoughts/feelings/memories to my brain would I not have experienced your qualia?

Posts here, especially # 157, etc.
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=485718&page=10
regarding 'Phantoms in the Brain', Ramachandran, 1999

 

[yeshi]

(not sure if its allowable to ressurect threads that lay still for 3 months ? :) )

I think it makes sense to dismiss any definition of the concept of ‘me’ that we are so accustomed to.
There is no 'me', there is no single thing or substance that the 'me' is dependent on - the 'me' is only a pattern, the material for which is replaced regularly by the body's own devices.
DNA splits, and new cells are formed, while the material for the old cells is reprocessed or discarded.
We can replace the concept of there being a me or you with the concept of there being a phenomenon (or set of phenomena) that occur and is dependant on the material on which it occurs.
But the phenomenon is not anything more than that.
It is analogous to a wave on the ocean, moving along the surface, and constituted by all sorts of different molecules over time, but the wave is not dependent on a single set of molecules and does not exist separately from the water.
Other than the water, there are no substances, natural or supernatural, required to define the wave.

Nevertheless, though as rational naturalists we know universe is built from phenomena that are impersonal, this "illusion" of personal consciousness is THE base of our very existence, its main domain and the protagonist of all experiencing.

How or why does a "personal identity" get encapsulated into the body, why is it bound to this ever changing body and rebooted every day after good night's sleep?

If the laws of emergence of consciousness in gray matter are universal, and there is a physics phenomenon transposing neural activity (probably electrical field and resonance activity) into subjective experiencing (and therefore solving Chalmer's "Hard Problem of Consciousness"), what makes the illusion of MINE appear?

If it is a chance that "I, myself, me" appears in this body on waking up, does this incredible chance mean that "I, myself, me" will continue to appear somewhere forever, as no phenomenon in know universe is ever disappearing, but always gets transformed only?

NB the singular view of "mine consciousness" and the subjective experiencing is the only occurance of "individuality" that appears in nature, and since then we personify and ascribe it to many diverse phenomena around.