If you could see through other eyes, how long till you are no longer you?

I’ve been thinking a lot about what gives rise to our unique “I“ness or sense of self. Whatever the “soul” or awareness center is, it is the most ephemeral of things in a human being. It can’t be removed from the cranium and studied. When the body carrying it dies, or even ceases to have brain function, it seems to disappear without a trace. And yet for each of us, from our perspective, our “I“ness is the most real thing about us. It is us.

So here’s the thought experiment. Pat Gunkel coined the term telepresence and Marvin Minsky popularized it in the 1980s. It stands for technology that seems to transport you somewhere you are not, letting you experience things that are far from your body and brain.

Say in the future telepresence becomes a truly persuasive experience. Say a technology exists that can tap into another creature or human’s sensory system and beam all their neural activity to a helmet which lets you experience just what they do. Not only that, your thoughts about moving, blinking, eating, etc. are transmitted to the other being, who acts on them just as if them came from their own brain.

Let’s say an Orca is equipped with the sensor array, and you slip on the helmet. Your physical body is chemically disabled for the experiment, and you experience everything through the Orca. How long could you see through an Orca’s eyes, experience his delight in a fresh seal kill, sense everything he sensed before you were no longer you. How complete can telepresence get?