Some extra context for the curious: https://pdf.stafforini.com/parfit-1995-unimportance-identity.pdf
this post was submitted on 27 May 2026
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if you asked this question about an inanimate object the answer is much more obvious - if i 'teleport' a bicycle by grinding it into atomic dust, then use a computer scanner/matter replicator to create an exact copy of the bike i destroyed with a store of different atomic dust on the other side of the galaxy, is it the same bike? obviously not, even if it is functionally identical. the human desire to deny their own existence is so powerful that when it comes to the concept of consciousness we get confused on this point.
physicalist eliminativist accounts of consciousness essentially deny that it exists at all, reducing Qualia somehow to information processing despite no explanation for the experiential component of consciousness - why do we 'feel' our information processing when a calculator does not? what algorithm produces internal awareness in the sense of experiential existence? if we assume that consciousness is just another kind of information processing, what kind is it? how do we avoid slipping into pure animism, if any physical system can have 'consciousness' because it is simply a kind of information processing, how do we know that self-regulating, complex physical systems like stars, planets, galaxies, subatomic particles are not conscious in some way?
eliminativists argue that those that do not believe we already fully understand consciousness are unscientific or non-empirical, however in fact, Integrated Information Theory has already been used to develop successful clinical techniques to determine the level of consciousness in unresponsive patients, using the existence of Qualia as one of its fundamental assumptions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory
You have no way to know if the calculator does not
i asked it and it said
okay that's a lie it said 58008
that's exactly my point, if we have no way of knowing if a calculator experiences its information processing, we have no way of knowing a rock or a tree or the sun experiences something in some sense, and thus we have arrived at something like animism (an idea usually considered unscientific, mystical, or spiritual) via the unlikely and unintended route of allegedly scientific ideas like physicalist eliminativism - rather than 'explain away' the 'soul' as an 'illusion' they have created the potential for it to be everywhere! rather than admit that there is something we do not understand, whether about consciousness or something more fundamentally about information processing, the eliminativist would deny that qualia or experience exist at all. it is the height of anti-intellectualism and anti-science attitudes to believe that we already fully and fundamentally understand something when we clearly do not, and this attitude is especially common among so-called '''''AI''''' fans who think that we have already created AGI by badly simulating a fraction of a human's language processing center with simplified mathematical models.