The Composite Human

[Warning: this is a RANT, about a sci-fi trope 😆]

Mind swaps make no sense.

Neither does returning to a younger version of your body whilst keeping all your current memories. Y’know the brain is a physical thing, right? One that’s always changing shape, creating new neurons. And in each of these patterns of neurons are traits that make you who you are. Inhabiting another body would mean inhabiting a brain with a different neuronal structure. In other words, it’s like fitting a cube into a circle.

You can’t keep the host’s brain and simply transfer your consciousness into it. That assumes brains are computers and that consciousness is a simple file that can be sent or received—and that’s definitely not true, because it ignores the language centers and emotion centers and memory centers of the physical brain that are structured differently in each person.

And if your memories are in your physical brain, how can your consciousness access them if your consciousness is file transferred into another brain? It couldn’t. But, you would gain access to the host brain’s memories, until you swapped back your own brain… and swapping back to your own brain would give you your original memories back, but you’d lose the memories from the person whose body you swapped with. So essentially, swapping minds would do absolutely nothing.