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this post was submitted on 09 May 2026
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We don't know what consciousness is, that's my point. It's called 'the hard problem of consciousness' for a reason, there is no consensus.
That's why I said current best guess. If we have no idea at all, this entire discussion is useless and OP should delete.
What you're saying isn't the 'current best guess' though, it's a fringe theory which relies on some incredibly speculative concepts with no evidence to back them up (i.e. the assertion that, if you created another brain with the exact same configuration as your current brain then, your conscious experience would automatically transfer over to it. We have absolutely no reason to believe this is true, whereas the concept that the destruction of your brain results in your death is well supported by the available evidence).
The current best guess about what consciousness is is that it's what the brain does, the processes happening in the brain, full stop. Of course nobody knows what would happen if one were to "transport"/beam/teleport a brain and the surrounding human because we know no mechanism to do that. In the OP's hypothetical scenario where we have found a technological mechanism to teleport living beings, if said current best guess approaches reality, I think it's at least a valid hypothesis that you'd also copy the contained consciousness (ie the processes happening in the brain) and it would continue on as before because what you're transporting is physical matter, probably as energy. That's what I'm saying.