Just depends on where you stand on the question of duality. If you think the mind and brain are separate, than it can be passed from one form to another, but if you don't agree with that then it can't be passed as it IS the brain. Luckily that's a century old debate so there's enough literature to stand on. Unfortunately from what I see most stand on the side opposite of dualism.
Sorry for being so brief, I'm not well read on the matter. It's been about a year since I've looked into it so sorry if I muck up. Basically the question is "Where is the mind?" If you believe in a soul than you'd suppose that the mind is ethereal and only connected and communicating through the flesh of the brain. The other opinion that I know of is Naturalism or something to that effect, which states that the mind is a representation of physical states of the flesh. Just the same way that digestion is done by the digestive tract and not etherically linked to it. This is the opinion I hold simply since I haven't read a convincing argument against it. Unfortunately if the mind and brain are one in the same, it is impossible to transfer, and any attempt at doing so would just be making a copy.
Wait, isn't it the opposite? If the mind was ethereal, we wouldn't be able to reach it, let alone transfer it. I have no idea what I'm talking about, but maybe in the naturalist model it could be possible to transfer the mind by gradually switching off certain parts of the brain one at a time and maintaining the continuity of consciousness?Unfortunately if the mind and brain are one in the same, it is impossible to transfer, and any attempt at doing so would just be making a copy.
>I have no idea what I'm talking about Don't worry man, no one does, that's the point of phylosophy The problem is that if the mind and brain are one in the same, then you can't transfer it without transferring the brain. You can't take something out of it self, you know? If you think differently, prove me wrong, I don't want to be right haha The idea is that if dualism is true then we can model the states that link the mind and brain in a machine and link it to the mind. No one really seems to believe in dualism so it's a moot point either way.
I don't think it's quite that simple. I think there are naturalistic views about the relation between the mind and the brain (ie. the mind isn't made out to be a separate, often spooky, substance or property) that can allow for the possibility of mind "transfer" from biological bodies to electronic ones. Specifically, seems to me that you could think that mental states supervene on physical states (ie. there's no change in mental state without a corresponding change in physical state) and that the mind is not a separate substance from the brain, and still think that it's possible to "pass" a mind from one physical medium to a different one. There's an idea in the philosophy of mind (and probably related fields as well) called "multiple realizability" which basically states that the same mental state can be realized in multiple physical ways. So for example, if the idea is true, then my present mental state could be a result of the firing of neurons (as it actually is), but it could also result from, say, the passing of currents in a circuit (if the physics is in fact amenable). Now we know that minds can be "passed" from the one arrangement of atoms in the human form to another (the atoms in your body are replaced as you age, but you presumably retain the same mind, at least if skeptical arguments against personal identity over time don't hold), so given that the relevant mental states can be realized in some other form, I don't see any reason in principle why it would be impossible to pass a mind from a human form to an electronic one. I mean, there are still a bunch issues regarding personal identity in play here, but I'm not sure they aren't issues for any naturalistic view of the mind at all, regardless of whether it would be possible on that view to pass minds from brains to other mediums. The intelligibility of this entire issue may turn on a dubious understanding of what a mind is though (I'm personally tempted towards this view, but I'm too lazy to elaborate right now).
You know, given everything I've learned about how memories are stored somatic-ly (what IS the adjective) in the body, and how memories, emotions, perception, awareness isn't just brain, it's also sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system, it's muscle memory, it's hormones, it's adrenalin, it's proprieception and so forth. I'm not entirely certain that a brain removed and put onto a new body would be the same person, per se. I may be wrong and misunderstanding, of course. "The Body Remembers" is the primary book behind my guess.
Nice. Very relevant, and a good follow-up. If anyone else is interested, here's the wikipedia article on embodied cognition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition (One of those nifty wikipedia pages that branches off into many other interesting topics.)
The idea that the human body is an organism isn't problematic scientifically or philosophically, it's only a problem religiously. What is the brain of a computer? The CPU? The CPU and the GPU? The CPU, GPU, and RAM? etc, etc. It makes much more sense to assume interdependence in an organism than some sort of weird "operational independence" or however you'd like to phrase it. The computer as a poor analog is easy enough to appropriate to approach thought experiments.
Very good analogy, thanks. Much better way of framing what I said in my first comment. I'm thinking in future ages, people will look back at how primitive we were assuming that the pinnacle of human intelligence and personhood was contained in the brain. Much like we look back on people in olden times who thought emotions were situated in the heart.