Thought experiment on the nature of the soul and/or existence:
Imagine a technology like the transporters in Star Trek could be used to create an exact replica of you, atom for atom, including their states and motions relative to one another. It’s hard to argue about whether a “soul” would be created or not since we can’t really measure or empirically detect souls, so let’s talk about it in terms of subjective perception. Would you perceive what your replica perceives? I would argue no, that such a phenomenon would be similar to having an identical twin. After all, how could you see through eyes that are not attached to your brain or hear through their ears? You are completely alike, but physically separate. It could be argued that if a sufficiently accurate molecular replica like this could be created yet it could not live or was not aware/conscious, then that would be strong evidence that a soul enters the body at some time during life and is responsible for our actions.
If you were then killed after your exact clone had been created, would you begin perceiving through him then? After all, the problem of dual perceivers does not exist anymore. Yet, you did not perceive through his eyes before, when you were alive, so how could we conclude that you would suddenly begin perceiving again? If we postulate the existence of a soul inside your body leaving and returning into the other body, what of the other soul?
So now consider a similar problem: What if you were to store your physical pattern, atom for atom as before, a split second before you died and then it were to be immediately recreated right after your death? Would you be alive again? Well, if we agree that your clone would be a separate entity, then the answer would apparently be “no”. Someone exactly like you would be alive, but it would not be the “you” that perceived through the destroyed body. Or, in essence, would you “come back from the dead”? If so, then how do we deal with the above elimination problem? If we are to argue that you *could* come back, presuming no clone had already been created at that time, but would *not* come back if the clone had already been created, then somehow there is a mechanism “keeping track” of these things.
Imagine that the changes in each atom of your body could be tracked in space & time – each of their positions cataloged. After death, imagine the normal processes of rigor mortis and all other signs of bodily decay proceeding until there was no question that the person in question was dead. Now, imagine that instead of recreating your body from scratch, imagine that this computer could take all the changed atoms, move them aside and replace them with the last atoms at their position, one by one, rapidly, until your body looked exactly like it did before death on the molecular scale. Would you become alive again? Intuitively most of us would think “yes”. But is this really any different from the recreation scenario above? So imagine now that you died, another body was created as described above starting with nothing, then the dead body’s atoms were reversed as described in this section. Where would *you* be perceiving from? The created body or the reverse-decayed body?
So what is it, then? If I took all the parts of the whole (i.e., me) and moved them across the room (e.g., by walking), that is still me. I am still perceiving/existing. Yet, if I were to be moved across the room by destruction/recreation, would it still be me? Would I still perceive & exist, or would something exactly like me perceive & exist? From an outsider’s standpoint, surely they could not tell. But what about me? Would my subjective perception continue or be gone?
Imagine a different sperm had reached the egg that led to our conception. We would still have half our gene set the same, but would be more like our brother or sister than our current self. Would we still be perceiving in the body conceived then? Imagine the change was not as radical, but just on the scale of a few base pairs. How many base pairs would have to be different before we would no longer be the perceiver born into that body? Or would we be born into that body no matter how many changes were made? Imagine that you could swap the exact sperm & egg that created you and your brother/sister, changing only the time of conception. In other words, if you were first born and them second, then this would be reversed. So would you still be you, just born at a different time or would you be perceiving thru your sibling’s body?
But this leads us to the conclusion that we are linked to the atoms that comprise us now, yet these atoms are in constant flux and turnover. We eat, our body catabolizes, anabolizes, destroying and recreating cells. I read somewhere that every 7 years, half the atoms in our body are replaced with new ones via these normal biological processes. If you were to engage in the thought experiment by Marvin Minsky, whereby you replaced each neuron in your brain with a mechanical circuit that recreated the exact same synaptic dynamics, one by one, including their potential to change, would you lose your soul or stop perceiving? Again, the answer is apparently “no” – just as we could replace any neuron with another identical one and not stop perceiving & existing, surely we would not lose ourselves if we merely substituted miniscule components of a larger machine for identical ones. The parts that make the whole might change, but the whole should remain. The caveat to this is that we are assuming consciousness takes place on a macromolecular level, rather than quantum. Quantum phenomena could not be replicated by computer circuits.