Board Thread:Off Topic/@comment-26397825-20151211051732/@comment-24891101-20151229042709

Do note that while I agree with Phantom on the physical basis aspect (I'm not actually sure who developed the theory first), we disagree on the cause. I cannot attribute it to EM, because that can't affect things in the same way. Rather, I attribute to a new phenomenon emergent from the complex system, for reasons obviously unknown to us. Regardless, the only aspect of a person which pertains to the soul is the mind, which solely lies in the neural architecture. To affect the mind is necessarily to affect the soul; what is called the soul is generated and caused by the mind, which has its entire basis in the neural net. One cannot "only affect the mind" because the sum total of a person, their individuality, personality, nature, all the things associated with the soul, are shaped by the physiochemical actions of the brain, much of which is exclusively memory. To alter the memory is to shake their very identity.

As to the teleporter problem, it is very much killing the person. Would you say that a person assembled technologically from disparate matter from a detailed body and brain scan is the same person as the original, or it is just a clone with the same memories? Would you say that if a person walks into a device which scans their body and brain and then disintegrates them, then they are dead? I accept the continuity argument of the Ship of Theseus, but here there is no continuity.

A semblance with the ability to throw memories might be possible, because it is so much more limited. Potentially extracting certain memories is possible, but that runs the risk of mind-reading.