> if they can shift their consciousness to a form of duality with a virtual agent by sufficient sensory override.

Can you explain what you mean? It seems we already have this with naïve use of consumer VR devices on most VR experiences.

For instance, while playing Richie's Plank Experience, the player already feels qualia due to:

1. virtual self in virtual world: looking down the plank in mid air where the plank is virtual and being in mid air outside a tall building is virtual

2. physical self in physical world: if a friend nudges you from behind (or out of sight of virtual self), or you have a fan blowing wind that would correspond to the breeze you would expect to feel in the virtual world, or you're walking on a real plank to which the virtual plank has been resized/calibrated (this one is a true hybrid real+virtual 'quale': you see the virtual plank but feel the real plank with your feet).

If you meant the virtual agent would have separate agency from the player, please explain as I don't quite follow.

Well, there are a variety of theses around if one could transfer ones consciousness into a computer. Presumably, if this were possible, it would also be possible to partially transfer ones consciousness into a computer. Now, this is going to be a subjective measure (at least for now, unless we find a way to measure consciousness.) However, if someone were able to self report that their consciousness were transferred into a computer, that would at least be something. So, inductively, if a person were able to self report that their consciousness were partially transferred into a computer, in some form or another, that would be some evidence a more meaningful transfer could occur. So the question reduces down to what mechanisms exist today that would potentially allow such a partial transfer.

I think a huge gate opens if you get a high bandwidth brain/computer interface. But until then, an experiment like the following may give us a glimpse of the tractibility of such transfer:

- First, you need a full audio and visual override of one eye and one ear (basically over-ear headphone in one ear, and over-eye VR goggle.)

- You also need to be able to track something on a person that a) is underutilized in the 'real' world and b) has sufficient bandwidth to convey some kind of agency of control over a virtual agent. For example, you could wire things up so a person's toe orientations could measured, or internal teeth motion, or subvocalization, etc. You could have dual-use mechanics, like a dedicated hand controller that still gives you freedom to use your hand, but I'd argue this might compromise the experiment.

- Combined with these two, with the hardware on and the inputs working, connect this person bi-directionally with a virtual agent in a simulation. (Basically a modern first person video game would probably suffice.) The video and audio feedback is obvious, you'd need to come up with a mapping of the inputs. Give the person some goals to accomplish in the simulation that are non-trivial and take concerted mental and physical effort to do.

At the end of say a months worth of this dual immersion in both the physical body and the virtual, have the person self-assess their conscious state. I think it's even odds that they feel like they are playing a video game still, or are actually manifested consciously as inhabiting two places at once, whatever the hell that means. The experiment is predicated on the idea that brain plasticity would start to allow the person to experience a level of conscious experience and control over the virtual agent similar to the physical world, since their sensory inputs and agency is at some level of parity in time and bandwidth between both physical and virtual. It's far from total parity, but it's well beyond what has been possible to do in recent history, so may be past the tipping point necessary for changes in conscious experience.

If the latter were to occur, and the person feels a duality of presence, the subjective experience of say, closing off the person's other remaining senses which are attached to the physical world (ie their free eye and ear, etc.) and waiting another month, may actually result in a representitive experience of what a consciousness transfer would feel like.

No you don't: Have you seen the TV show "Caprica" ? Part of the plot is that a girl creates an artificial afterlife by duplicating people upon their death from data collected during their life, ironically accidentally killing herself in the process. Technically that's a spoiler, but it's put sufficiently misleading I hope, plus it's revealed in the first 20 minutes of the first episode.

And this can work. You could copy a human merely by observing them. If you get enough data on a person (say yourself, so it isn't creepy), and train an algorithm. Once the algorithm is good enough at imitating you that your own mother can't tell the difference between a robot containing that algorithm and you, is there still a difference. And now every mathematician should say "No". After all, 4 and IV is the same number.

You don't need audio or visual override. You don't need to give any agency to any flesh and blood over a virtual body. Even the robot mentioned before is really more of an optional thing, you could eliminate it.

You could simplify further. You don't need to duplicate a human, you just need to provide them with "a kid". An algorithm that's purely virtual but that is sufficiently smart that humans can raise it to become part of human society. But it's mind can start out mostly empty. So you don't even need to duplicate anything, you just need a sufficiently complex learning algorithm and a way to interact with it, and a human (perhaps preferably a couple?) to teach it, if you're willing to give it a generation or two.

I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing. I'm not arguing if it's possible for consciousness to exist outside of my own. I'm arguing that insofar as we want to understand if it's possible to transfer the medium ones own consciousness "runs on" out of your own brain, it seems like experiments like the one I wrote may be able to provide some knowledge about the viability. It's still running on your brain of course, so it's not trying to actually do any real transferal, but it is showing the degree to which conscious experience can feel non-local, which is part of what would be needed to be a person externalized from their own brain. So it may not exactly provide evidence in favor or against transfer viability (though it might, since we may be able to see that it would result in ego death or some equally horrifying result) but it would provide evidence that the subjective experience of such a transfer has meaning, and what that feeling could be.

Now, once we get a brain/computer interface, things get really interesting. Because you can start to link minds, and even at low bandwidth, it may rapidly increase our understanding of the boundaries of what a conscious mind "is" and how much we should care about the "death" or "merging" of such things. It would be quite impactful, to say the least, to see that if you connected a person's mind to that of a simple organism in a bidirectional interface, if over time they act as though they had a single consciousness (probably mostly represented by the person's prior self, but perhaps with characteristics of the organism leaking in the other direction as well.)

The closest analog we have today is when one separates the left and right hemisphere of the brain, and that is a crude, fixed, and brutal methodology for such experiments, so it's only done as a way to treat people whose health it may improve, and is irreversible.

"Once the algorithm is good enough at imitating you that your own mother can't tell the difference between a robot containing that algorithm and you, is there still a difference. And now every mathematician should say "No". After all, 4 and IV is the same number."

I don't understand what you are talking about. Do you think identical twins share the same consciousness? Is a clone the same person as who it was cloned from?

It seems to me that "4" and "IV" are abstract concepts that have a basically unlimited number of relationships with the real world, like tentacles. The mathematical concept of four is just one of those linkages.

The point of the exercise was to prove that something non-human can be conscious at all. So if it "shares the same consciousness" that's great. If not, still good enough.

That’s an interesting experiment and thanks for writing it up in detail.

However I’m not sure what the VR really adds to it, above e.g. learning to shift the default point where most of us are conscious from (behind the eyes) to the lower abdomen as done in Zazen. We can similarly learn to shift this locus of consciousness completely into our FPS VR avatars but that doesn’t really make them ‘agents’ in the full sense of the term. The transfer is illusory.

This seems like confusing correlation with causation in an exquisitely pure sense. Maybe that extends to consciousness downloading as a concept in general.