Alas, philosophers answer questions about the interrelation of minds, but not what a mind actually, chemically, is. They can extemporize at great length on the tendencies of a mind, the definition of consciousness, the value of thought, the many many vagaries of morality. They cannot, unfortunately, sit down and draw a picture of a mind. Many good and important questions can be answered by philosophers, but not every problem can or should be assessed with the tools they have.

You may be conscious, and you may have many long and deeply opinionated thoughts about what it means to be conscious, and how you can know that you are in fact conscious, but you cannot tell me what consciousness looks like. And to be perfectly honest, I don’t really care.

I don’t know if you’ve ever done this, but you should sometime present an engineer with the trolley problem. I’ve done this many times, and the invariable result is that they will ask endless questions to establish the parameters and present endless solutions within those parameters so that nobody has to die at all. It is, in short, a problem. Not an ontological tool for unlocking hidden understanding, which falls under the purview of your ‘philosophy’, but a practical problem. Like how you’re going to prevent some big mean mother-hubbard from tying you to the hypothetically metaphorical trolley tracks. And the solution? Is a gun. And if that don’t work, use more gun. Like this heavy caliber tripod-mounted little old number designed by me. Built, by me.

And you best hope, not pointed at you.

As an academic with a great deal of experience in this field, I can quite confidently say that it’s not a debated topic at all. At least, not among academics. We’re (somewhat predictably) called to debate it with representatives of the various religions and spiritual creeds on an almost continuous basis, though.

And it really isn’t academically debated - topics surrounding it, like the nature of the conditions leading to the formation of networks which form a ‘mind’ admittedly are debated, but the fundemental truth that a ‘mind’ is a holographic pattern arising from said network is quite a settled topic, and has been for thirty-some years now.

youre not wrong in that cloning you twice would immediately create 2 distinct entities. and their consciousness/brains would immediately differentiate. so? now theres 2 of you.

i dont see the problem with there being 2 versions of you instead of the 1 that was destroyed and recreated in a transporter. its the experience that makes the differentiation, and if there is only 1 of you at a time there is no differentiation. only one of you continues experience, there you are.

We see someone’s POV going through a transporter, you just see where you are, sparkles, and now you’re somewhere else. The unease probably comes from the uncertainty. The mere fact we can’t ascertain what really happens in a transporter to your consciousness is very suspect in a universe like Star Trek where we find science babble for everything.

Though, think of it for a moment. Your atoms are being torn apart and the structure is being rebuilt somewhere else. That totally just sounds like you die. I wouldn’t want to go in there either.

Ah, but it wouldn’t be a copy of the original. In a hypothetical star-trek transporter accident that results in a duplicate, there would be an instant of creation where the dupe and original would be truly identical - and then the question would be which one of those two is ‘you’? They’d be experiencing identical things, so how could you tell them apart? What would even be the point, they’re identical, there is by definition no difference between them. The differences would only come once the duplicate is exposed to different (for lack of a better term) ‘external stimuli’ than the original, like different angles of seeing the transporter room or the sensation of suddenly and rapidly growing a goatee. Your perception wouldn’t continue with the duplicate because your experience would be different than that of the duplicate’s (for example, you wouldn’t have mysteriously grown a goatee).

If you destroyed the original and then made the duplicate, it would start at that moment of total equivalence, but there would be no deviation. There’d just be one version, that was identical to the original, moving forward through time. ‘You’ would just go on continuing to be you. Consciousness isn’t a ‘thing’ - it’s not magic, its just a weird state that arises in sufficiently complex systems. You and I and everyone else in this thread aren’t special, we’re just extremely densely packed networks that have the ability to refer to themselves as an abstract concept.

It’s a similar thing to the classic “But how do I know that what I see as the color green is what you see as the color green” question. The answer is that the “color green” that we see isn’t real, ‘green’ is just a nerve impulse that hits a network. Each photoreceptor just sends a signal. If we were computers the world would be represented as an array of values, which results in the much clearer “How do I know what I see as G_101.34 is what you see as G_101.34” just isn’t quite as punchy a question.