this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2026
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I know the theory your referring to, it grades the entire universes consciousness on a sliding scale from a neutron all the way up to a person.
But I don’t think that consciousness and memories are tied together at all. Consciousness is not well defined which makes it a fickle subject, but memories are a biological process that we can observe much more easily.
My understanding, based on a book I read once about neuroplasticity, is that memories are pathways that are literally burned into your brain by repeated sensory chemicals being sent to that particular part of the brain. As long as the transporter puts every single brain wrinkle back where it was and instructs the brain on which chemicals it sent down the pathways, you could probably put memories back into the head.
I wasn't referring any theory. While I am not delusional to think I am the only one, I came up with this entirely by myself.
Also, your "but" isn't a but. I was alluding to the same thing: memories is stored information, i.e. a structure like our brain growing.
Why I think the transporter might be catastrophic is because it could only reproduce the "software" accurately, the EEPROM-like memories. But the hardware might be all wrong.
Oh! Well the name that the other dude who thought about it gave it was Panpsychism, you might be interested to read about it.
But it is :P I’m saying that I think the hardware would be the easy part. Put all the same types of stuff in the same configuration, give it some instructions and you’ve got a fleshy automaton that should reasonably be able to recall the same things the other thing could. The “software” as you called it, would be more difficult I think.
We know what makes a memory, but we don’t know why someone makes a particular decision or what influences their personality to act how they do. Hell, putting two human beings right next to each other and stimulating them in the exact same way doesn’t even produce the same results between the two, so we couldn’t accurately instruct the new automaton on how to act like the old one
Panpsychism sounds a bit embellished, but I'll have a look. I think we have an analogy misunderstanding. I really meant memories etc as the software because it is "programmed" with our experiences. The hardware being the atoms that we can not accurately arrange in a copy because we have no concept of the conscience related property (e.g. conscience spin, for lack of a better word). It could be like trying to run little endian software on a big endian architecture: instant crash.