What really gets me is:

If everyone exists using the same rules (regardless of whether you're considering agreed-upon physics or not), regardless of the mechanism of how thoughts form and memories are stored, if I can't experience other people's lives from their perspective, how can I possibly be experiencing my own?

Checkmate, everyone ever.

The teletransportation paradox questions whether or not you are still you after being atomically decomposed on Earth and reconstructed on Mars (or if you are just a copy with identical memories, and the original died), and it is in fact trivial to answer—it shouldn’t be such an imposing thought experiment at all.

You are only composed of atoms, and not only do individual atoms not have identifiable information (a single atom has no information in it that relates specifically to “you”), but all of the atoms in your body are completely recycled every 5 years. In this sense, we have already answered the question: If you are not a new person every 5 years then you wouldn’t be a new person after going through the machine. They are both you.

What if we said that you are a new person every 5 years, or that you are a new person every single moment. That you are a near-infinite collection of moments which are all separate and the fact that you experience them as a flow of time is just an illusion...
Then the whole "I am me" statement just becomes nonsense not worth debating, because it takes an uncountable number of moments for that phrase to even be uttered. I imagine this would lead to a philosophy of altruism, as your "future self" and "past self" are just as external as other people are, so there's no point acting specifically in their interest.

It usually follows as a 2nd thought experiment that the machine is upgraded so that it can keep printing atomically identical copies of you, and the question is posed, “Which is the real you?”
Answer: All of them. We are so used to living as a pair of connected brain halves that it is extremely difficult to understand how this works, but it is the correct answer.
To make it simpler to grasp, consider people who have had their brain halves disconnected from each other. Is he now 2 people? No, he is still a single person.
Now take his left brain and put it into its own body, and put his right brain into its own body (assume they are both properly connected to control their bodies, each body being only able to move one side). Has he become 2 people yet?
No, he is still a single person, now in 2 places.
His 2 parts can’t see what the other is doing, but that type of communication problem existed even when they were both inside the same head.
You can continue to take this thought experiment further and further until it becomes clear that if the machine kept making copies, the copies would all still be you.

Same conclusion that all the copies are you... but what if you took the example of one person bisected and given two bodies, decided that yes, those two bodies are still the one "I am" even though there's no data/memory link between their brains any more... and then took the leap that perhaps all people are the one "I am", that there is only one consciousness., and we're all just fragmented parts of it experiencing our own delusion of being a separate "I am" due to the lack of ability to share memory/experience directly between our brains.
This is something that's expressed by many religions - that god pervades everything/everyone and everything/everyone is just a fragment of god, and that the higher plane of existence is achieved when your own delusion of being separate ends and you rejoin the whole, singular consciousness.
Again, this would lead to a philosophy of altruism, as you are every person.

If everyone exists using the same rules (regardless of whether you're considering agreed-upon physics or not), if I can't experience other people's lives from their perspective, how can I possibly be experiencing my own?

Depends on what you define as "you". If you define yourself mechanically then it's pretty easy to answer.
If there's multiple tape-decks in a room, each playing a different tape, and each sealed so they cannot be opened without damaging the tape... then it's obvious that each tape deck can only play the tape that's been inserted into it. It's absurd to ask, "if a tape deck cannot play other tapes, how does it play the one that's inside it?"...

If you define yourself as some kind of ghost/spirit/observer/god thing, then perhaps you are experiencing every life in turn, but from your current viewpoint of a meat-sack robot with a wet tape deck of a brain, of course you can only experience what's being fed into that machine.

If a god were to collect up every single moment of human experience that has ever existed, like cells of an animation, throw them all into a sack, jumble them up, and then decide to experience all those cells/moments one at a time, it wouldn't change anything. We wouldn't know. Say you are a spirit observer, experiencing the moments of a human meat suit -- if you decide to experience those moments out of turn, there's no way for the human to know. The human's experiences are dictated by all the information present within that single moment, that single frame in time. Each frame is self-contained, containing enough imprints of the past (in the form of recordings/memories) that within that moment, the human can feel as if they exist in time and are actually travelling forwards in time - but that's just an illusion. Time need not even be flowing. If time wasn't flowing in either direction, and every moment of your life eternally existed on a spiritual bookshelf for a god to flick through, they could watch the moments of your life in reverse, from death to birth, but the experience of living those moments would be the same you have right now. Each moment contains memories of the "past" (direction towards birth) and no memories of the future, so even if played backwards, you'd experience the feeling of moving "forwards" (direction towards death).

Personally I don't like the whole arrow of time debate and instead choose to believe that time does not flow in either direction, just as space does not flow left. It just is, but logically we experience an emergent and illusionary arrow of time.

Men wrote viruses, AI get sick and loose (: Also, Homo Sapiens has an incredible imagination when he needs/wants to be sadistic.

Well, let's just acknowledge that we do not understand what consciousness is truly about. And I'll take a more general approach and describe it as the ability to question your & others existence.

Some physicists believe that the modern brain takes advantage (Evolutionary path) of certain quantum events, such as superposition, which on it's own increase the neural complexity by a huge factor. Others believe it's the unique properties of the particle wave duality (Let's not get into the quantum field theory for now), which allows for neural activity to interact with itself which would (again) add another extremely large layer of complexity. A test of this interaction was performed on a nano truncated icosahedron (Football) in its particle state, and it did indeed interact with itself (Interference).

And I could go on, the issue is all of these are valid but extremely hard to test and also abstract in nature, and honestly it may just end up the brain taking advantage (Evolutionary Path) of all of these quantum events.

But, I have my own little theory with next to no proof. I believe that this level of consciousness that humans seem to express comes from the delays between the neurons. Most applied neural network simulations work in passes such as training, feed forward, etc... However (I'm not downgrading the work done, just my opinion from my own work) where is time? A brain never stops the execution of the electrical signals (And whatever goes on behind the scenes), it's constantly "processing". And at given moments we sometimes have little to no stimuli, then we question our surroundings, "create" the stimuli, including asking existential questions. And going back to the simulated neural networks, we've not (From what I can see) tried to create a neural network which has the possibility of next to no new data whilst running (Real-Time, not passed). Add the neural delay on top of that, and a neural architecture (The architecture is a whole other topic) similar to that of a brain, I believe that I'd eventually run into the same issues as we face (The actual representation of the same issue may be different). Of course then you could say, how would we know? That's another problem.

And that's just my 2 cents on this widely debated thing. I truly believe that what we call consciousness is created from the lack of stimuli in a real-time neural network with neural delays (I like to call it the neural symphony).

If everyone exists using the same rules (regardless of whether you're considering agreed-upon physics or not), if I can't experience other people's lives from their perspective, how can I possibly be experiencing my own?

Depends on what you define as "you". If you define yourself mechanically then it's pretty easy to answer.
If there's multiple tape-decks in a room, each playing a different tape, and each sealed so they cannot be opened without damaging the tape... then it's obvious that each tape deck can only play the tape that's been inserted into it. It's absurd to ask, "if a tape deck cannot play other tapes, how does it play the one that's inside it?"...

Let me rephrase slightly. We have human beings A, B, and C. Do I need to be human being A for human being A to exist? No. Neither do I need to be human being B nor C. They all exist fine without one of them needing to be "me", and all of their properties and behaviors work fine whether I happen to be one or not. So what mechanism or reason is it that "I" *am* in fact any one of those human beings?

There is no way of knowing whether there is an entity inside the Chinese Room, or *nothing at all*, if you cannot look inside. We can only make guesses based on what we have experienced in reality and measured about it. Literally all of reality is an assumption.

If you define yourself as some kind of ghost/spirit/observer/god thing, then perhaps you are experiencing every life in turn, but from your current viewpoint of a meat-sack robot with a wet tape deck of a brain, of course you can only experience what's being fed into that machine.

BUT, if this is the case, there could be other ghosts/spirits/observers/gods which I can or cannot detect, and then, similarly, why do I exist at all as any given one of them (or perhaps the only one, in a swapping-between-them analogy?) If I am the entire universe, WHY?

I can't see how any layer of abstraction built upon the underlying observations could avoid this issue.

I think that we just have to define this as an axiom of existence, because there is no way to ever measure a layer of abstraction higher/lower than the one you're on, and the current layer has insufficient grounding to answer this.

One ramification of this view is that we have no true way of measuring whether *anything* has any specific mode of experience or not.

We can't rule out inanimate objects like rocks or hydrogen atoms. We can observe what they do in relation to us - they don't have properties like intelligence, sure, but who can say whether or not they are observers?

An abstract observer has no measurable properties. Therefore it is indistinguishable from nothing.

This is why I don't think people should ever argue that machines can't be conscious - we literally have no way of ever knowing this. We should instead be focusing on what their measurable properties and behaviors are. And I believe there is nothing limiting them from becoming as human as us, if their properties and behaviors become indistinguishable from ours.

Men wrote viruses, AI get sick and loose

AI destroy men. Women inherit the earth.

Let me rephrase slightly. We have human beings A, B, and C. Do I need to be human being A for human being A to exist? No. Neither do I need to be human being B nor C. They all exist fine without one of them needing to be "me". So what mechanism or reason is it that "I" *am* in fact any one of those human beings?

Well this line of questioning makes an implicit assumption that you are separate from one of those human beings in the first place.
In the tape deck example, I could've put any tape into any deck, but each deck does have a specific tape in it. Tape deck A might have a single of the 1990 hit, "Ice Ice Baby" in it. When tape deck A commands all the other tape decks to stop, collaborate and listen, it's an emergent behavior from interaction of both deck and tape.
Sure, you could put a different tape into the deck, but it would change it's behaviors, it would no longer sound like we expect deck A to sound. We could also remove the tape completely and it would continue to exist, but it would just sit there, comatose and silent.

If *you* are an emergent properties of your meat-sack, then yes, your meat sack does need you to exist in order for it to exist as a person -- or more to the point, your meat sack actually has no option but to project you into existence. If it's not projecting you into existence, then something must be wrong with it. To expel *you* (an emergent property), would require damaging the parts of the meat-sack that cause this property to come into being, e.g. brain damage.

Or in simpler terms, if we just say that *you* are the brain, then human being A pretty much does need brain A in order to exist.

BUT, if this is the case, there could be other ghosts/spirits/observers/gods which I can or cannot detect, and then, similarly, why do I exist at all as any given one of them (or perhaps the only one, in a swapping-between-them analogy?)

That's why it's a good thing that we can talk about consciousness these days without resorting to magical dualism It's accepted that it's an emergent property that can arise without the need for magical explanations such as spirits and gods.
Modern methods for detecting consciousness (which can differentiate between a brain-dead patient and a lock-in-syndrome patient, or between an unconscious patient and a dreaming one) are based around measuring the ability for a lump of matter to integrate information and differentiate integration. If both abilities are present in the right quantities, the subject is said to be conscious. Work is being done to expand this from being a human-specific metric and expand it to other living creatures. Eventually, similar metrics could be used on AI's too.

In the realm of spiritual discussion though, I do find that the idea of there being a singular spirit a lot simpler (and therefore more likely of being right) than explanations that have complex organizations of many different spirits. I find explanations such as found in some Abrahamic religions that contain hierarchies of angels and spirits and gods to be the least palatable kind of ideas in that space. I found hinduism interesting that they did create a complex array of deities, but decided to nest them like a babushka doll, ultimately all inside of an everything-spirit that simplifies and unifies the scheme.

We can't rule out inanimate objects like rocks or hydrogen atoms. We can observe what they do in relation to us - they don't have properties like intelligence, sure, but who can say whether or not they are observers?

Yep. A rock may have consciousness. Many religions do talk about this. When you become one with the singular consciousness, you become aware that there is no difference between your body and all the inanimate stuff in the universe either. It's also a common experience for LSD users, etc - for the boundary between the self and everything else to melt away

If human experience can be broken down into individual moments, where there's an arrangement of information that causes consciousness to arise, then it's possible for other physical hosts to contain similar arrangements of information. A mountain may have moments of consciousness embedded in it, but it obviously would not be able to think / the moments would not evolve into new states very quickly...

Methods for measuring the ability to integrate and differentiate information could in theory be applied at a geological scale to measure this, but would also have to be observed over a geological timescale!!

We could also remove the tape completely and it would continue to exist, but it would just sit there, comatose and silent.

So here's where your statements diverge from what I'm attempting to state. I'm defining "me" as the abstract-observer-that-has-no-properties-who-is-reading-the-tape, NOT the tape itself.

I can't measure why I exist. I only have immediate read access to what's in my own brain. I *don't* know whether I have write access, or if it's my brain going about this on its own.

I've experienced Depersonalization/Derealization. Imagine your normal everyday life is a game, and you "put down the controller", figuratively speaking, and the game keeps playing itself *exactly how you would*. That's what it's like. Thankfully I've only had this happen for a few seconds EVER, but it gets you thinking about things a bit differently.

So here's where your statements diverge from what I'm attempting to state. I'm defining "me" as the abstract-observer-that-has-no-properties-who-is-reading-the-tape, NOT the tape itself.

Yeah, so you're making an implicit assumption that you are separate from one of those human beings in the first place.
That's fine if it's a discussion about spirituality or magic, where we're happy to accept an initial axiom that magic exists beyond the physical world.
But if you're actually trying to scientifically investigate consciousness and the nature of the self, you can't start from that position.

In the magical discussion, I would say that there's only one "me", as that's the simplest explanation. We're both the same spiritual-observer "me", commonly called "God". Choosing a system with multiple spiritual-observers is adding unnecessary complexity, which should be avoided in any theory. You're not aware that you're actually observing all humans, because while observing you have no physically detectable presence, which means you can have no state (as you put it - you have no write access). The only knowledge and memory you have available to you is what you observe via experience, so you-as-observer obviously cannot remember the time that you observed me-as-human's life.

...but, you have a memory of your experience of derealization -- which means that the 'you' that had that experience was writing memory to long-term storage, so that particular 'you' still wasn't a completely non-physical observer so does not require a magical explanation.

[edit]

Now, if you could disable the memory part of the brain, so you could have experience without memory, that would let you feel as god for a moment, but you would not be able to discuss it afterwards

[time travelling edit]

Sorry, I keep editing my posts after you start responding

me too...