Aberatii intelectuale

Back in March 2021 I wrote about the Hard Problem of Consciousness which I consider to be the greatest mystery of all time . In that article I talked about what the hard problem of consciousness is - how can the physical brain produce a subjective experience, qualia ? - and proposed a (speculative) mechanism by which the brain does it - the Chorus Hypothesis - just like in an orchestra or a chorus where the chorus is the combined result of the voices of the singers, subjective experience or qualia is the combined activity of the neurons which sync with each other and produce a pattern of waves - the brain waves. These waves do indeed vary by the state of consciousness (they are different in awake vs asleep individuals, for example). So there is at least that association, if not more. My hunch is that the subjective experience itself is the product of these brain waves (Christof Koch is also interested in this waving patterns in what he calls the local field potential ). I think that t...

 One of the topics I've always stayed away from is the topic of personal identity - this is a notoriously difficult thing to talk about: what makes you you ? This question has been haunting me for quite some time so I decided to finally take it head on and see what I can come up with, if anything. The premise that I'm going to work with is the idea that the only thing that gives us our personal identity is the current configuration of our brains - the way the neurons are interconnected and the information in this network is how our personal identity emerges - no soul or "magic substance" behind all of this. Of course, this is pretty much the established view in the scientific community, although there are exceptions. So the question is - what can we say about the personal identity starting from this premise? What are the implications? Can you be cloned? Copied? Re-instantiated? Is the copy of yourself also you ? Imagine the following scenario: Alice is a murderer. She...