I must have said this before, but it still makes sense to me -- your current sense of self (whatever it is) -- would not be reproduced by a perfect copy of your brain.
You "must" have said it before? It's
all you've ever said before, and -- as usual -- without anything to support it in terms of materialism. You remain consummately arrogant in believing you can just ascribe to materialism doctrines it specifically rejects, just so you can pretend to have a basis for refuting it. And that it's your critics' failure of "understanding" when they rightly don't let you do this.
The whole point of materialism is that a perfect copy of the brain
must exhibit the same sense of self, because there can be nothing under materialism that doesn't arise from the matter. This is the prime directive of materialism. You don't get to just handwave it away because it doesn't behave the way you want it to. That's a very immature approach to proving a point.
Meanwhile, there is nothing analogous between the bread and its copy.
Wrong. You desperately
need there to be a substantive difference, but as your critics have eloquently pointed out, there is no substantive difference except for that desperate wish on your part. It's different, you say, because you say it's different. That's all your argument amounts to, all it has ever amounted to, and it's clear at this point it's all it will ever amount to. You have no argument that isn't simply various ways of cajoling and tricking your critics into appearing to accept any of several begged questions.
What you were supposed to learn from that bread-loaf analogy about materialism is that properties you personally hold in such awe and wonderment -- consciousness and the subjective impression of an individual self -- simply do not occupy an equivalently noble and special place in materialism such that they are a wholly different kind of property than any other you could name. There is nothing about consciousness as a property of a functioning human organism that is of a different class of nobility or cause-and-effect traceability than the property of the fragrance from a freshly baked loaf, or the crinkle of a properly formed crust. Those are ordinary properties of bread, and they will necessarily arise any time the bread is prepared. Similarly, consciousness is an ordinary property of the human organism and will necessarily arise any time the organism exists.
