The above image is not Keanu Reeves. With this statement I don't mean that the photo above is actually the late 19th century actor, Paul Mounet. (Or IS it?!?) I mean that Keanu Reeves is a human man who lives in Los Angeles, while the image above is simply a photograph of him.
However, you may argue that it is a photo of Keanu Reeves, so in a sense it IS Keanu Reeves, and you would also be correct.
How can the image both NOT BE Keanu Reeves, and yet BE Keanu Reeves at the same time?!? Has the camera somehow imprinted a small piece of Keanu Reeves' soul onto the photo? No, because detailed drawing of Keanu Reeves could be just as much "Keanu Reeves" as the photo above. I could even DESCRIBE his face to a talented enough police sketch artist and she could produce a drawing that would ALSO be "Keanu Reeves" despite perhaps never seeing him in her life.
The thing the human man named Keanu Reeves and the photograph/drawings share is the same likeness. A "likeness" is another way to say that the sizes of his features and their location in relation to each other produces a quite unique and complex pattern. This pattern of Keanu Reeves's face is present both the human man's Keanu Reeves face AND the photograph's Keanu Reeves face. So they are both Keanu Reeves.
This idea, that a generalized object, such as "an apple", or "red", or "a pipe", goes back to ancient times with Plato's Theory of Forms, where he postulates that there is a idealized version of everything in the world (called "Forms") which things in the real world are simply imperfect versions of. What he was referring to is the way we can have an idea in our heads of something like "red" but then recognize many things that are "red" but that may have slightly different tint or shades as each other but still represent the idea of "red" in our minds.
The artist René Magritte famously made this point in his painting, The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe) in 1929.
Magritte beautifully and simply illustrated the difference between a thing and it's likeness. There is no pipe anywhere in the painting. It is not made from pieces or quanta of pipe. There is absolutely nothing that is "a pipe" anywhere on the canvas. Getting closer to the painting, touching it, smelling it, will give you NO further information about the "pipe." In fact, if you look too closely there is no pipe at all. It is only when looking upon the full piece that you can see the pipe. And notice that it doesn't matter if this is the original painting, a photo of if, or some other reproduction. You could make a cope of this on wood, or etch it in glass; you could arrange single electrons to reproduce the photo or you could re-arrange all the galaxies in the universe to reproduce it - and never would you get any more or less information about "the pipe." Because the medium doesn't matter, it is the pattern.
This is the same as human consciousness. There is no "divine material" that makes up our minds, no incorporeal specter residing inside us giving vigor to our bodies. Our brains are made from atoms, molecules, and proteins. The synapses of our neurons fire across voltage differentials a thousand times a second processing inputs from our senses, thoughts in our consciousness, and reductions of incredibly complex coordinated motions of nervous impulses and muscle movements for us to understand and interact with the world around us.
This pattern is complex, but recognizable. We don't just recognize our family, friends, and acquaintances by their faces and voices alone, but the manner of speaking, the subjects they talk about, and the way they convey their thoughts.
If your best friend or significant other had their mind transferred to a complex virtual mind inside an interactive robot or a computer simulation and the contacted you, it would be relatively easy for them to convince you it was them. They could simply tell you a piece of information that only you and them would know, but you could also simply have a conversation with them and you would recognize it was them after a short time.
Human consciousness is a pattern made of changing electric fields, chemical reactions, and protein filaments. Consciousness is not the brain any more than Magritte's pipe is flecks of paint or Keanu Reeves face is pixels on a computer screen; but it is also not an otherworldly construct of quintessence. It is something that we can detect and record, and someday it will be something we can copy and preserve.
There is no reason the pattern of human consciousness cannot be transferred to another medium - such as silicon or qubits and to exist in an artificial or virtual body. It probably won't happen in my lifetime - scientist have to decode the pattern and engineers need to build computers several magnitudes more complex to adequately reproduce it - but it will happen someday and we need to start preparing for how this will change human society, and affect how we think of ourselves in the universe.
