/**
 * file: journal_karbytes_21january2025.txt
 * type: plain-text
 * date: 20_JANUARY_2025
 * author: karbytes
 * license: PUBLIC_DOMAIN
 */

karbytes_0: “What I fundamentally am (at the most reductionist level of what a human individual SELF is) is the electricity flowing between the neurons in my brain; not any of those neurons nor all of those neurons.”

karbytes_1: “According to me, you appear to be implying that you are not the electricity which flows through any piece of matter other than your brain (and perhaps, also, your SELF included the electricity which flows through your brain’s larger encompassing nervous system which extends outward from your brain and down your spine to the ‘two-dimensional’ spatial boundary which is your skin (and perhaps your notion of your own SELF also includes the electricity which flows through brain-to-computer interfacing hardware which is fused to your brain’s neurons directly (and directly communicating with those neurons in a feedback loop between your brain and some external computer) or perhaps even through wireless electromagnetic signal transmission).”

karbytes_0: “You are right to suggest that what you suggested is indeed what I mean when I consider myself to be the electricity which flows through my central nervous system (with my brain being the ultimate ‘central processing unit’ of that self). I should also specify that my SELF (at time_t) is the configuration of every electron (or quantifiable electrical charge) which is spatially located inside of the ‘three-dimensional’ region referred to be us as my central nervous system precisely at time_t.”

karbytes_1: “According to empirical data gathered from measuring your central nervous system’s electrical configuration using special instruments which scan that entire central processing nervous system’s localized voltage levels across multiple successive snapshots within a finite yet non-zero-length time period, your notion of your SELF appears to be a virtual object (which, by definition of being virtual rather than physical, does not exist at any particular location in space but can be described as a software object bound to a specific region of space-time in which your central nervous system is a medium through which a particular pattern of electrical signal transmissions between brain cells occur) whose constituent states necessarily change as time elapses within that space-time continuum. Are you fundamentally changeless or do more than one of such non-identical snapshots (occurring in linear, unidirectional temporal order) need to exist in order for you to exist?”

karbytes_0: “According to my current knowledge, what I am is time-bound rather than existing completely inside of a single timeless snapshot of all the electrical charges within the ‘three-dimensional’ region which is my central nervous system.”

karbytes_1: “What happens if your central nervous system is cryogenically preserved such that there are no measurable electrical signal transmissions between neurons in that system (and then your central nervous system is taken out or cryogenic preservation such that blood is reintroduced into that system and it’s cells start to become metabolically active after having been completely metabolically inactive during the cryogenic freezing period)?”

karbytes_0: “If no damage occurs to the material structures which comprise my central nervous system during the revival process following a period of cryogenic freezing of that central nervous system, then I presume that my self awareness will resume after having been paused during the brain freeze. My sense of time might seem distorted in the sense that I would presumably have no feeling of any significant amount of time passing since my brain was last metabolically active enough for me to be in a normal waking state like the one you and I both appear to be in now. Some people might argue that the hypothetical scenario we posited results in there being two separate selves arising from the same hardware apparatus but such that those selves arise inside of non-overlapping and non-contiguous time periods. Other people might argue that only one self would have arisen in this scenario (but that self was temporarily switched off during the cryogenic brain freeze phase). Regardless of which argument is preferred, I think it seems logical to assume that those two selves would functionally appear to themselves and to other selves to be the same person because the memories of those two selves would be presumably identical if the last (timeless) snapshot of the old self is compared to the first (timeless) snapshot of the new self. That is because the (objective) states of the hardware which underlie those two electronic and neuronal snapshots are measurably identical at the ‘level’ of atoms (but not necessarily also at the ‘level’ of electrons or of electrical charges). Maybe it is better to think of my SELF as a discrete piece of information rather than as a chronologically linear set of electron placements within a neural network.”

karbytes_1: “Okay! Well, with that last premise you suggested (that you are merely a finite (yet changing and possibly growing in terms of (present-moment if not merely cumulative-across-your-lifespan) DATA size) piece of information in the form of a software object), you seem to be implicitly suggesting that what you are is entirely abstract rather than any percentage physical. If that is the case, could I simply make a sentient clone of you and/or conjure up the original you after your brain is completely dematerialized through vaporization by pulling up a digital replica I made of your brain (down to the precision of every brain cell (and possibly also of every electrical charge or electron in that brain)) before your brain was vaporized and use that digital clone of your brain to print a new physical brain (out of human stem cells or more elementary matter) which is functionally indistinguishable from your original brain and such the literal you I am talking to now arises as an emergent property from the electrical activity which arises in that new brain and which correlates with ‘you’ waking up ‘in’ your ‘new’ brain?”

karbytes_0: “My initial hunch is no. That is because I feel that a non-zero percentage of what I am is PHYSICAL (i.e. substrate-dependent (if not substrate-equivalent)) and also that a non-zero percentage of what I am is ABSTRACT (i.e. information which is unconditionally representable as a particular linear sequence of binary states). I would like to insinuate that there is further nuance in what I mean by the term ‘abstract’ by saying that VIRTUAL is the most concrete (i.e. physical (i.e. unique in terms of there being exactly one non-overlapping and cohesive allocation of space-time and mass-energy)) level of abstraction. Therefore, if what I fundamentally am is entirely virtual, then I could say that I am some finite piece of information and some finite piece of matter simultaneously and such that the information piece and the matter piece interact with each other in a timelessly causal way (such that the two components of that mind-brain duality, at least macroscopically, change at the same time (or maybe, at least some of the time, there is some kind of delay in which mind changes before brain does and/or, at least some of the time, there is some kind of delay in which brain changes before mind does)). I would assume that highly abstract mental phenomena occur as a result of those mental phenomena’s underlying physical brain first undergoing mass-energy changes within a non-zero space-time interval. I would also say that a feedback loop can occur between qualia emergence and respective hardware state changes which appear to make it such that a change in qualia ‘backwards propagates’ an ’emergent property’ in the form of computational hardware state change.”