My concern is in James positioning the transmission theory in opposition to the production theory of consciousness may lead one to inappropriately judge them as mutually exclusive by confusing the two distinct form of consciousness as the same in question. The metaphor improperly lends it to mistake this consciousness as of the same category as when we speak of the more specifically human consciousness. It is in this personally human kind of consciousness that we tend to take any psychological comfort in for our immortality and so relevant to why it matters to most of us. What we care about the theory is that it allows for the emotional attitudes of our personality and personal memories of our relationships with others to be concluded as surviving death.

My worry more exactly lies in one being misled by this metaphor to take that there are ontological claims that can then be deduced from taking of functional dependence of consciousness on the brain as not productive function, but a transmitting function.

One disadvantage of the James’ transmission theory is it lacks the ability to explain something that the productive theory can account for.
“If the human body corresponds to a colored glass … then the living personality corresponds to the colored light that is the result of the glass…. Now while light in general will continue to exist without the colored glass … the specific red or blue or yellow rays that the glass produces … will certainly not persist if the glass [is] destroyed” ( In The Illusion of Immortality, Corliss Lamont p. 104).

The ontology one adopts can be quite consequential. When determining between contending ontologies, I find Quine’s ‘What There Is’ useful and agree that we should accept the simplest ontology that fits our experience