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A Very Silly Discussion About [Matter Teleporters]

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  • ronyaronya Arrrrrf. the ivory tower's basementRegistered User regular
    ronya wrote: »
    ronya wrote: »
    very tempted to theseus-ship this line of attack, but that's not very productive

    I am willing to accept any degree of matter duplication that bumps up against the no-cloning theorem as one which lays a claim to continuity of material process across teleportation, myself, but that gets in a mess of trying to squash classical intuition into a nonclassical underlying physical reality

    I would buy a ship of theseus argument. This doesn't even try to go there. It's just "we killed you, but now there's someone just like you somewhere else

    no, it's an argument that you weren't killed, it's that we actually teleported you and then left some debris where you used to be

    It begs the question of what is meant by teleport, and what is meant by debris.

    When this has been describes earlier, it's that the theoretical teleporter figures out how you are built, and then simultaneously builds you somewhere else while destroying the template, the ashes of which constitute the debris. There's no piecemeal replacement, the new parts never come into contact with the old. There's also no equivalent of the Old Man's War spoiler from above.

    Unless we're positing some sort of machine that bends space to just make the same material form suddenly just be somewhere else, and then for some reason poops debris from a nearby fireplace onto the teleporter pad for aesthetic reasons. I could get behind that.

    yes, exactly. Hence the mess of classical-quantum intuition

    insisting that "you" are the same as your materially-continuous bits isn't quite mappable on the question of whether "you" are the same as your qubits of your electrons

    aRkpc.gif
  • TheOtherHorsemanTheOtherHorseman Registered User regular
    edited December 2013
    Lucid wrote: »

    In the sense of the term that some people seem to be using, it's more like "well you're both the same so what does it matter if one of you dies!" To which I would reply much as someone did above. I'd care the same way I care now in a reality without teleporto-clones. I'd be dead, and wouldn't be particularly comforted by the fact that someone just like me would be around. When my heart stopped beating, and my neurons began to starve of oxygen, my consciousness wouldn't zip over to that other body. It'd just turn off forever.

    What makes you TheOtherHorseman as opposed to the duplicate, why doesn't it get claim of ownership of the identity or selfhood of TheOtherHorseman?

    We can both call ourselves that. But I use the pronoun "we" because we are both two discrete entities, observing and interacting with reality independent of one another. This isn't a matter of identity or self-hood, who gets the dog in the divorce, or what it truly means to be human. If the original iteration of myself, which is the discrete entity I have continued to be even after being copied and pasted, dies, then that's that. I do not persist as a conscious being.

    A separate conscious being identical to me persists.

    I'm not trying to get into a round of intellectual masturbation here. I'm saying that I died, the end. The teleporto-clone can claim whatever it wants. I'm just trying to explain why this a shitty method of routine travel.
    How are you defining your self exactly in this discussion? You mentioned you are your brain, can you do some further unpacking of that notion?

    Consciousness is an emergent property of the brain. It is, effectively, a physical process. If we have two separate physical brains, they do not share a single consciousness. They independently produce separate ones, even if the brains are identical and the methods by which they generate the consciousnesses are themselves identical.

    TheOtherHorseman on
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  • LucidLucid Registered User regular
    edited December 2013

    Consciousness is an emergent property of the brain. It is, effectively, a physical process. If we have two separate physical brains, they do not share a single consciousness. They independently produce separate ones, even if the brains are identical and the methods by which they generate the consciousnesses are themselves identical.

    This seems more like a definition of consciousness. Is it different than self to you, if yes how so? We weren't discussing separate brains, were we? I thought we were getting at destruction of one while the same is immediately constructed.

    Going back to the destruction of the iteration of TheOtherHorseman in the transporter, why exactly is it that continuity is paramount? Presumably a primary reason people fear death is because they as a self won't be around anymore, but if their identical self appeared after death, it seems possible that people may fear death(or at least 'natural causes') less.

    Lucid on
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  • MorninglordMorninglord I'm tired of being Batman, so today I'll be Owl.Registered User regular
    edited December 2013
    Every day.

    I wouldn't bat an eye.

    First I would like to know what the charcoal residue is about tho. And I'd want to know information about how likely accidents are, but if they're less than any other form of transport I wouldn't care.

    Morninglord on
    (PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
  • KamarKamar Registered User regular
    edited December 2013
    This has always felt intuitively 'okay' to me, which seems to be the opposite for most people.

    If Kamar-1 dies instantly and Kamar-2 comes into existence with what feels like a seamless consciousness, I am comfortable saying that me stepping in and me stepping out are both fine with what happens in between. If we count child-Kamar as the same Kamar as Kamar-1 despite him being composed of different matter and no doubt having a few (thousand) gaps in his consciousness, then surely Kamar-2 is the same Kamar as those two.

    If a glitch occurs and Kamar-1 does not die instantly, well, shit. We have two distinct entities now--they have experienced different things, they are both equally Kamar, but they are not the same Kamar. They are Kamar-A and Kamar-B, who were both child-Kamar and the man named Kamar who stepped into the teleporter.

    They will have to split their assets and have some strange conversations with their loved ones. They'll probably be living large off a teleporter-company insurance fund for this sort of thing.

    random sidenote: I'm not sure why, but my sister was really opposed to the concept of this or brain uploading until I used the metaphor of moving a file from one hard drive to another with cut and paste, at which point she became cool with it. People are weird.

    Kamar on
  • ThirithThirith Registered User regular
    @Kamar: So you're basically saying that in this case the murder of a conscious, living human being is okay, provided it happens quickly enough?

    (Being an ex-Trek fan, weirdly enough I seem to be okay with it too.)

    webp-net-resizeimage.jpg
    "Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
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  • redxredx I(x)=2(x)+1 whole numbersRegistered User regular
    Think about it this way. I will teleport. Milions of other people people who are also qualified to do you job will also teleport.

    We will do your job for less.

    I doubt most people would have all that much choice.

    They moistly come out at night, moistly.
  • AustralopitenicoAustralopitenico Registered User regular
    This is an awesome thread. I like to see this thing from both sides. Provided you know how the teleport machine works.

    1- As the man who enters. Unless you believe in a soul that somehow gets transferred, you go into the machine and you know that you are going to die. There is no arguing for this, it can be fast, it can be painless, but we know that the machine makes a copy that can coexist with the man who enters if the "waste disposal" fails. This means that the man who enters dies, and the man who leaves is a different person, it has a different stream of consciousness and although it's certainly very similar (at first) to the one from the man who enters, it's not the same.

    So as the man who enters you know you are going to die, there is no consciousness transfer, it's just black out and ceasing to exist forever. In the mean time, the new guy created at the other end is going to do your job, fuck your wife and go around enjoying life, and you are not going to enjoy any of that. Cause you are dead, dead as fuck. So, as the man who enters, I would not enter the machine.

    2-As the man who leaves the machine you know that your physical form was just created. You weren't born, you didn't meet your mother, you didn't grow up and learn, you were created from a container of assorted matter to match a template. It was "you", but it could have been someone else.

    You emerge out of the machine in a home that your memory tells you is yours, you meet a woman that your memory says you should love. But nothing in this life is yours. You may or may not agree with the template's choices, but the fact of the matter is that, whatever life you had, was built by the template, not by you. It was a totally different person that made his own choices, but you have to live out the consequences, and why? Fuck your template, fuck this woman, you clearly remember that the template only chose her because Wanda from high school had to move to Europe. Fuck this job, the template always wanted to work on something else but thought this was safer. Fuck this whole life, fuck being a slave of a template that does not even exist! And fuck going to work tomorrow, you don't want to die like your template.

    The conclusion is that this machine is bad for everyone except for shrinks, who would be working forever solving the problems of people who know that they were created yesterday into a life they didn't choose and that they will be killed tomorrow in their way to a job that was given to them at birth.

  • Atlas in ChainsAtlas in Chains Registered User regular
    edited December 2013
    An exact atom for atom replica of me would not be me, and it wouldn't be recognizable to my loved ones as me. This is because, as soon as I "teleported," new me would realize that all the former decisions of his life were made by old me. He would reject all debts and he would be guilt free for all mistakes old me made along the way. He might even be a better person than old me, what with the weight of all that worry off his shoulders.

    *edit Somehow I missed Australopitenico's post directly above mine, which says exactly the same thing in a clearer fashion. Bro-fist.

    Atlas in Chains on
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  • AustralopitenicoAustralopitenico Registered User regular
    An exact atom for atom replica of me would not be me, and it wouldn't be recognizable to my loved ones as me. This is because, as soon as I "teleported," new me would realize that all the former decisions of his life were made by old me. He would reject all debts and he would be guilt free for all mistakes old me made along the way. He might even be a better person than old me, what with the weight of all that worry off his shoulders.

    *edit Somehow I missed Australopitenico's post directly above mine, which says exactly the same thing in a clearer fashion. Bro-fist.

    How do you know this didn't happen to you when you blinked 2 seconds ago? Do you feel different? Or see above vis-a-vis Poincare recurrence. Why do you think this life is so much more important then all the others or all the future ones?

    Overall we can be pretty sure we don't die and are replaced by an identical but different person every time we blink. And if that were the case then I'd rather not blink.

  • zagdrobzagdrob Registered User regular
    edited December 2013
    spool32 wrote: »
    Old Man's War spoilers
    Getting consciousness transferred into the soldier body has this feature, and if I remember right it can cause mental issues if you get a look at your old body...the characters themselves are kind of unsettled by what they're doing and not sure about the answer to the OP's question either.

    So, the teleporter as originally proposed (the 'Prestige' method, so to speak) would be a solid 'no' for me. Fuck dying for some other asshole pretending he's me.

    However, I think you're slightly incorrect about the 'Old Man's War' method.
    In that book, when he was transferred from his old body into the new soldier's body, the two bodies were sitting across and looking at each other. He saw the new body - basically in a coma with his personal 'factory default' consciousness based on the imprint they had been taking of his brain the previous week or so, then they linked the two brains together so his consciousness existed in both brains at once. I remember the book explicitly saying he didn't recognize his old body for a moment, then he was fully switched over to the new body. Then, after his consciousness was 'moved', they shut his old body down. I remember because one of the last things he did before they wheeled the old body off was taking his wedding ring off the old body.

    If there was some method that 'transitioned' my consciousness - such as being an incremental teleport where my body / consciousness smoothly transitioned from one point to another, or existed in both places momentarily while my old body was shut down (or disintegrated), I think I could stand for that. It's really no different than the method in Old Man's War.

    I will note one point where I wouldn't particularly give a shit - if I was old and on my deathbed, and I could be teleported into a new fresh and healthy body. Fuck dying when I can go for a whole new round. All the philosophical concerns go out the window when my 'old' self is going to be dead anyway.

    I mean, eventually given enough time I'm going to get to experience death, so might as well try to cheat it as long as possible.

    zagdrob on
  • TheOtherHorsemanTheOtherHorseman Registered User regular
    edited December 2013
    Lucid wrote: »
    Consciousness is an emergent property of the brain. It is, effectively, a physical process. If we have two separate physical brains, they do not share a single consciousness. They independently produce separate ones, even if the brains are identical and the methods by which they generate the consciousnesses are themselves identical.

    This seems more like a definition of consciousness. Is it different than self to you, if yes how so? We weren't discussing separate brains, were we? I thought we were getting at destruction of one while the same is immediately constructed.

    We are our consciousness. To preempt a possible question, a consciousness has levels and does not cease until a brain dies. And we are discussing separate brains: two distinct lumps of matter. Just because one is destroyed as another one is constructed de novo on mars doesn't make a difference any more than separating those two events in time by 5 seconds, a hour, or twenty years would make a difference. They are separate physical constructs. How would the timing do anything to create a meaningful linkage between the two to anyone but an outside observer?
    Going back to the destruction of the iteration of TheOtherHorseman in the transporter, why exactly is it that continuity is paramount? Presumably a primary reason people fear death is because they as a self won't be around anymore, but if their identical self appeared after death, it seems possible that people may fear death(or at least 'natural causes') less.

    It is possible, but if an identical self appeared after death, the entity that died would not realize it. Let's imagine this like creating a biological cylon version of someone without any hidden programming at the exact moment we destroy, I don't know, kill Gaius Baltar, the original. We have killed the Gaius Baltar that has experienced Baltar's life first hand. That distinct entity has died. The new distinct entity is, for all intents and purposes, Gaius Baltar. That is true whether or not you created 1 or a thousand of them at the exact moment you murdered somebody with a machine. It doesn't make a difference to the entity you murdered. That person just died. They will not be awake tomorrow. Continuity would be important for that person in advance, but it would not be afterwards because that person has now been killed.

    I don't know, I guess I don't understand why people don't grok this the way I do. This isn't the equivalent of going to sleep and waking up. This is the equivalent of going to sleep and never waking up, but someone else wakes up on Mars with your memories uploaded into them.

    The argument that is actually thrown around pretty regularly "But what if this happens every time we blink or sleep?" just sort of demonstrates a shaky grasp on what blinks or sleep are. It doesn't shut off the brain.

    TheOtherHorseman on
  • Regina FongRegina Fong Allons-y, Alonso Registered User regular
    Everyone in this thread has seen The Prestige, right?
    Because that's just a Star Trek transporter that doesn't do the courtesy of cleanly disposing of person #1

    Apparently untrue:
    star trek transporters disassemble the person by turning them into a beam of energy and then project that beam to the destination before turning it back into matter

    Not that I'd be terribly comfortable with that either.

    That doesn't even make any sense and also it's terrifying.

    "Sorry, sir, there was some unexpected interference and we lost your kidneys in transit."

  • TheOtherHorsemanTheOtherHorseman Registered User regular
    Everyone in this thread has seen The Prestige, right?
    Because that's just a Star Trek transporter that doesn't do the courtesy of cleanly disposing of person #1

    Apparently untrue:
    star trek transporters disassemble the person by turning them into a beam of energy and then project that beam to the destination before turning it back into matter

    Not that I'd be terribly comfortable with that either.

    That doesn't even make any sense and also it's terrifying.

    "Sorry, sir, there was some unexpected interference and we lost your kidneys in transit."

    They get weird with it, and there's at least one episode where someone is conscious as a hyperspace energy beam.

  • zagdrobzagdrob Registered User regular
    Everyone in this thread has seen The Prestige, right?
    Because that's just a Star Trek transporter that doesn't do the courtesy of cleanly disposing of person #1

    Apparently untrue:
    star trek transporters disassemble the person by turning them into a beam of energy and then project that beam to the destination before turning it back into matter

    Not that I'd be terribly comfortable with that either.

    That doesn't even make any sense and also it's terrifying.

    "Sorry, sir, there was some unexpected interference and we lost your kidneys in transit."

    I'd say that compared to the issues / accidents that seem to occur in 10-15% of teleporter use in the Star Trek universe, and the quality of their future-medicine, just losing your kidneys would be a relief.

  • rockrngerrockrnger Registered User regular
    edited December 2013
    Lucid wrote: »
    Consciousness is an emergent property of the brain. It is, effectively, a physical process. If we have two separate physical brains, they do not share a single consciousness. They independently produce separate ones, even if the brains are identical and the methods by which they generate the consciousnesses are themselves identical.

    This seems more like a definition of consciousness. Is it different than self to you, if yes how so? We weren't discussing separate brains, were we? I thought we were getting at destruction of one while the same is immediately constructed.

    We are our consciousness. To preempt a possible question, a consciousness has levels and does not cease until a brain dies. And we are discussing separate brains: two distinct lumps of matter. Just because one is destroyed as another one is constructed de novo on mars doesn't make a difference any more than separating those two events in time by 5 seconds, a hour, or twenty years would make a difference. They are separate physical constructs. How would the timing do anything to create a meaningful linkage between the two to anyone but an outside observer?
    Going back to the destruction of the iteration of TheOtherHorseman in the transporter, why exactly is it that continuity is paramount? Presumably a primary reason people fear death is because they as a self won't be around anymore, but if their identical self appeared after death, it seems possible that people may fear death(or at least 'natural causes') less.

    It is possible, but if an identical self appeared after death, the entity that died would not realize it. Let's imagine this like creating a biological cylon version of someone without any hidden programming at the exact moment we destroy, I don't know, kill Gaius Baltar, the original. We have killed the Gaius Baltar that has experienced Baltar's life first hand. That distinct entity has died. The new distinct entity is, for all intents and purposes, Gaius Baltar. That is true whether or not you created 1 or a thousand of them at the exact moment you murdered somebody with a machine. It doesn't make a difference to the entity you murdered. That person just died. They will not be awake tomorrow. Continuity would be important for that person in advance, but it would not be afterwards because that person has now been killed.

    I don't know, I guess I don't understand why people don't grok this the way I do. This isn't the equivalent of going to sleep and waking up. This is the equivalent of going to sleep and never waking up, but someone else wakes up on Mars with your memories uploaded into them.

    The argument that is actually thrown around pretty regularly "But what if this happens every time we blink or sleep?" just sort of demonstrates a shaky grasp on what blinks or sleep are. It doesn't shut off the brain.
    So what about people who have zero brain function and come Back to life?

    rockrnger on
  • Regina FongRegina Fong Allons-y, Alonso Registered User regular
    Right, wasn't it in like Star Trek II where the Enterprise goes to beam up the new science officer and he and his assistant wind up a puddle of still-living meat-goo on the launch pad when the transport fails?

    Fuuuuuuuuuck that send a shuttle.

    I'd rather die in a space vehicle accident (or any vehicle accident) x50,000 vice dying in a transporter accident.

  • zagdrobzagdrob Registered User regular
    rockrnger wrote: »
    Lucid wrote: »
    Consciousness is an emergent property of the brain. It is, effectively, a physical process. If we have two separate physical brains, they do not share a single consciousness. They independently produce separate ones, even if the brains are identical and the methods by which they generate the consciousnesses are themselves identical.

    This seems more like a definition of consciousness. Is it different than self to you, if yes how so? We weren't discussing separate brains, were we? I thought we were getting at destruction of one while the same is immediately constructed.

    We are our consciousness. To preempt a possible question, a consciousness has levels and does not cease until a brain dies. And we are discussing separate brains: two distinct lumps of matter. Just because one is destroyed as another one is constructed de novo on mars doesn't make a difference any more than separating those two events in time by 5 seconds, a hour, or twenty years would make a difference. They are separate physical constructs. How would the timing do anything to create a meaningful linkage between the two to anyone but an outside observer?
    Going back to the destruction of the iteration of TheOtherHorseman in the transporter, why exactly is it that continuity is paramount? Presumably a primary reason people fear death is because they as a self won't be around anymore, but if their identical self appeared after death, it seems possible that people may fear death(or at least 'natural causes') less.

    It is possible, but if an identical self appeared after death, the entity that died would not realize it. Let's imagine this like creating a biological cylon version of someone without any hidden programming at the exact moment we destroy, I don't know, kill Gaius Baltar, the original. We have killed the Gaius Baltar that has experienced Baltar's life first hand. That distinct entity has died. The new distinct entity is, for all intents and purposes, Gaius Baltar. That is true whether or not you created 1 or a thousand of them at the exact moment you murdered somebody with a machine. It doesn't make a difference to the entity you murdered. That person just died. They will not be awake tomorrow. Continuity would be important for that person in advance, but it would not be afterwards because that person has now been killed.

    I don't know, I guess I don't understand why people don't grok this the way I do. This isn't the equivalent of going to sleep and waking up. This is the equivalent of going to sleep and never waking up, but someone else wakes up on Mars with your memories uploaded into them.

    The argument that is actually thrown around pretty regularly "But what if this happens every time we blink or sleep?" just sort of demonstrates a shaky grasp on what blinks or sleep are. It doesn't shut off the brain.
    So what about people who have zero brain function and come
    Back to life?

    I'd say that coming too from a seizure is about as close to a full on reboot of the brain as it gets. It's not zero brain function (quite the opposite), but it pretty much kills any 'threads' you've got going on.

    Similarly, waking up from general anesthesia. Or, if you haven't had general anesthesia, like waking up from being really, really blackout drunk...just 'huh, it's morning now'.

    Even if your brain isn't actually shutting off, it's a distinct break in your consciousness. If someone were to switch your brain into another (perfect copy) of your body while you're under general anesthesia / having a seizure / blacked out / etc, is there any way you would ever be able to tell? It would be indistinguishable from being in the same body, so unless there is a soul or something, aside from the actual violation nothing is really different.

    How about this - what if your consciousness was moved to another body, then returned to the original one? Like say Avatar, except when you're in the new body you are completely disconnected from the old one? Fundamentally, the only difference between that situation and the teleporter Ender proposed is that there is no old body to return to.

  • TheOtherHorsemanTheOtherHorseman Registered User regular
    edited December 2013
    rockrnger wrote: »
    So what about people who have zero brain function and come Back to life?

    Depends on what you mean by zero brain function. If they return to their normal self, their brain cells didn't die or suffer significant injury, so they maintained perfusion. Memories are intact, so no sub-cellular structural abnormalities are mucking around with things. Their personality is the same, so the frontal lobe wasn't injuried. They respond in emotionally consistent ways, so things like the amygdala and hippocampus were never truly harmed.

    If zero brain function means "the level of consciousness seemingly possessed by a log", that might just be the reticular activating system going on break, essentially just being comatose. If zero brain function means "an EEG gets only background blips", that's just a reduced level of activity rather than a lack of it. An EEG is a transcutaneous study and doesn't pick up everything.

    There's still something.
    Similarly, waking up from general anesthesia. Or, if you haven't had general anesthesia, like waking up from being really, really blackout drunk...just 'huh, it's morning now'.

    Part of that is they give you agents that cause amnesia. You were likely zipping along for part of that time in some impaired way, you just weren't storing the memories.

    TheOtherHorseman on
  • Evil MultifariousEvil Multifarious Registered User regular
    "Moving consciousness to another body" doesn't make any sense. The mind exists as the structure of the brain. We can't transfer consciousness because if isn't, as far as we can tell, a substance.

    The conceit of sci fi involving mind swapping is that, in some sense, a soul exists.

  • DiannaoChongDiannaoChong Registered User regular
    edited December 2013
    One thing that freaked me out about stargate is they describe it as destroying you while recording data about you, and transmitting the data because thats quicker, and reassembling you on the other side. One episode they basically notes that you die when you go through and are rebuilt on the other side, and they hand wave and run away from it as fast as possible as an idea, as they are trying to restart a stargate to get a member who didnt make it before it shut down, rebuilt on their side.

    I would not want to take part in such a device, but it would be a great way to move objects and animals.

    The copy coming through would be as good as 'me' that would exist within a few moments anyways, however, I would not be entity existing then, so fuuuuuuuuuuuuck no I enjoy existing in my current state. It gets funky when you realize you can philosophize that you only live in the moment and then no more, and your body maintains memory of previous moments and you constantly only exist in said current moment.

    DiannaoChong on
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  • ElJeffeElJeffe Registered User, ClubPA regular
    edited December 2013
    Winky wrote: »
    Winky wrote: »
    Lucid wrote: »
    I think that people wouldn't be okay with these scenarios because they involve violent action. If you're stepping into a transporter there's a disconnect, if the the duplication occurs instantly as you are being vaporized there's not much break in continuity. Perhaps it's like going to sleep of your own accord versus having someone come and knock you out, both involve you passing out for a time but the former isn't threatening.

    No, there's a break in continuity. You die and cease to exist completely. A copy of you will traipse around, but you won't know or care because you have been vaporized and consigned to oblivion. The copy of you will be pretty certain that teleportation works, though.

    Yeah, but if you die then who cares that you're dead?

    The people having this discussion about continuity of self, mostly.

    I suppose what I'm trying to get at is that there would be no difference whether you somehow transferred a continuous conscious to your new self or not. Your clone would not know the difference. You would not know the difference, as you'd be dead. Your friends and family wouldn't care, as the new you would be the same thing as the old you. There's just no one who could tell the difference to care about it.

    We can mostly accomplish that sort of thing with today's technology, though.

    Take some guy with your same build, give him cosmetic surgery so he's indistinguishable from you, brainwash him to believe he's you, let him learn all your memories. After he's ready, someone slips you a poison that painlessly kills you.

    You won't know better, you're dead. The clone won't know better, because he's been built not to. Your friends and family won't know the difference. So you'd be cool with this, right?

    (Also, you know that your "Who knows the difference?" argument can be applied to someone finding a hobo with no connections and killing him in his sleep, right?)

    ElJeffe on
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  • zagdrobzagdrob Registered User regular
    "Moving consciousness to another body" doesn't make any sense. The mind exists as the structure of the brain. We can't transfer consciousness because if isn't, as far as we can tell, a substance.

    The conceit of sci fi involving mind swapping is that, in some sense, a soul exists.

    My understanding is that while it's not completely determined, the consensus is that the 'mind' is an emergent property of the brain structure combined with electrical and chemical impulses.

    We have the crude ability today (using stuff like MRI machines or electrodes) to both read and 'write' (manipulate both the chemical and electrical state of the mind). It's not entirely implausible that 'sufficiently advanced technology' would have the ability to duplicate the structure of an individual's brain at an atomic (or quantum - my understanding is the jury's out on that) level. Using the ability to read the current state of mind, a complete picture could be developed - in real-time - of the current state of mind / consciousness. This is barring the conceit of a 'soul' or other supernatural component for consciousness.

    From there, it's a small leap to connect one reader to a 'manipulator', which would 'write' the current state of the source brain - and thus the consciousness - to the 'destination' brain. This would or could - in theory anyway - result in a 'fork' of an individual's consciousness as soon as the link was disabled and the 'destination' brain was allowed to operate without manipulation. This brain would - again, in theory, maintain all of the memories of the original, and if the quality of the transfer (and the 'destination' body) was sufficient, would likely not be able to determine if it was the 'source' or 'destination' beyond external factors.

    The entire conceit of this thread is the ability to perfectly (or sufficiently perfectly) transfer the structure / state of the brain and body.

    Arguing that you couldn't create a perfect copy of a conscious mind by determining state accurately enough is a conceit arguing that there is an additional component to the mind. Which for all we know could be the case (my money is on 'no') but in sci-fi land there's no reason we have to make an assumption either way.

  • rockrngerrockrnger Registered User regular
    edited December 2013
    "Moving consciousness to another body" doesn't make any sense. The mind exists as the structure of the brain. We can't transfer consciousness because if isn't, as far as we can tell, a substance.

    The conceit of sci fi involving mind swapping is that, in some sense, a soul exists.

    Well no, the conceit is that consciousness is somehow software which runs on the brain, rather then being directly represented by it mechanically.

    It's not really clear which of these is going to turn out to be true yet, since while we can link personality change to brain damage, its not clear that personality and memory are directly connected to brain structure.
    And both positions take for granted consciousness is important to brain function and not just an byproduct.

    rockrnger on
  • AustralopitenicoAustralopitenico Registered User regular
    rockrnger wrote: »
    "Moving consciousness to another body" doesn't make any sense. The mind exists as the structure of the brain. We can't transfer consciousness because if isn't, as far as we can tell, a substance.

    The conceit of sci fi involving mind swapping is that, in some sense, a soul exists.

    Well no, the conceit is that consciousness is somehow software which runs on the brain, rather then being directly represented by it mechanically.

    It's not really clear which of these is going to turn out to be true yet, since while we can link personality change to brain damage, its not clear that personality and memory are directly connected to brain structure.
    And both positions take for granted consciousness is important to brain function and not just an byproduct.

    I don't know how important is it for brain function, but it is VERY important for me. You can argue all day whether a copy of you is an equally valid "you" or not, and although that can be a worthwhile argument, the fact stands that when you are incinerated the part that's "you" for you, whatever is perceiving and processing reality, is destroyed and your stream of consciousness terminated. The other person will be a perfect copy for all external observers except for you. Because you will not be an observer anymore. Because you will be dead.

  • LucidLucid Registered User regular
    You're taking a third person perspective to delineate events which happen to you in the first person - you imply "you" end, but don't give a compelling argument as to why the recreated physical process isn't just as you.

    Yes, this is the line of inquiry I was looking to interrogate. The matter of what consciousness is doesn't seem to really have total linkage to what self is. If one consciousness ends and another identical conciousness arises forming the exact same 'you', then why isn't this also you?
    rockrnger wrote: »
    "Moving consciousness to another body" doesn't make any sense. The mind exists as the structure of the brain. We can't transfer consciousness because if isn't, as far as we can tell, a substance.

    The conceit of sci fi involving mind swapping is that, in some sense, a soul exists.

    Well no, the conceit is that consciousness is somehow software which runs on the brain, rather then being directly represented by it mechanically.

    It's not really clear which of these is going to turn out to be true yet, since while we can link personality change to brain damage, its not clear that personality and memory are directly connected to brain structure.
    And both positions take for granted consciousness is important to brain function and not just an byproduct.

    I don't know how important is it for brain function, but it is VERY important for me. You can argue all day whether a copy of you is an equally valid "you" or not, and although that can be a worthwhile argument, the fact stands that when you are incinerated the part that's "you" for you, whatever is perceiving and processing reality, is destroyed and your stream of consciousness terminated. The other person will be a perfect copy for all external observers except for you. Because you will not be an observer anymore. Because you will be dead.

    Right, but what is 'you'? It seems odd to just use it as a synonym for consciousness.

  • AustralopitenicoAustralopitenico Registered User regular
    Lucid wrote: »
    You're taking a third person perspective to delineate events which happen to you in the first person - you imply "you" end, but don't give a compelling argument as to why the recreated physical process isn't just as you.

    Yes, this is the line of inquiry I was looking to interrogate. The matter of what consciousness is doesn't seem to really have total linkage to what self is. If one consciousness ends and another identical conciousness arises forming the exact same 'you', then why isn't this also you?
    rockrnger wrote: »
    "Moving consciousness to another body" doesn't make any sense. The mind exists as the structure of the brain. We can't transfer consciousness because if isn't, as far as we can tell, a substance.

    The conceit of sci fi involving mind swapping is that, in some sense, a soul exists.

    Well no, the conceit is that consciousness is somehow software which runs on the brain, rather then being directly represented by it mechanically.

    It's not really clear which of these is going to turn out to be true yet, since while we can link personality change to brain damage, its not clear that personality and memory are directly connected to brain structure.
    And both positions take for granted consciousness is important to brain function and not just an byproduct.

    I don't know how important is it for brain function, but it is VERY important for me. You can argue all day whether a copy of you is an equally valid "you" or not, and although that can be a worthwhile argument, the fact stands that when you are incinerated the part that's "you" for you, whatever is perceiving and processing reality, is destroyed and your stream of consciousness terminated. The other person will be a perfect copy for all external observers except for you. Because you will not be an observer anymore. Because you will be dead.

    Right, but what is 'you'? It seems odd to just use it as a synonym for consciousness.

    "You" or "me", or "a given individual" is a specific assemblage of molecules on a stable form. The molecules change periodically but the form remains. A living being is something very similar to a whirlpool.

    All the parts of the specific individual form the individual, it's even dubious you could separate the "mind" from the "body" and preserve identity, since even the gut has a very large neural system that feeds back into your brain. Personality as software running on a hardware is something that is within the realm of possibility, but probably not what's happening in the brain.

    A perfect copy of you will be a different person since the very moment of its creation. Different body, different molecules, different whirlpool. The fact that it's very similar does not mean it's the same. And for an all-knowing observer the original is very easy to distinguish, since it will have existed for longer.

    So you have a perfect copy of "you" and then you have "you", those two are clearly different and arguing that if you destroy one nobody will notice the difference does not change that one bit.

  • TheOtherHorsemanTheOtherHorseman Registered User regular
    edited December 2013
    The problem with your position is you presuppose someone can tell the difference in duplicated agents. You sitting here ascribe importance to the cessation of continuity, without a particularly strong argument IMO as to why - which seems particularly unconvincing if we're determining consciousness as a physical process, because physical processes are duplicable, haltable and recreateable.

    It can be duplicated, which we presuppose in this scenario. That merely means we have a second distinct physical process. It can be halted, yes. Depending on the manner in which we halt, we are likely talking about death or torpor. Can it be recreated? Yes, that is being duplicable.
    The term "teleport" is used in virtual machine lingo for when you switch a VM between physical hosts, and it is an appropriate analogy here because computer code execution is also a physical process - 1's and 0's being represented by electrical signals in transistors. Yet at the important level - software execution - we can halt, pause and restart and duplicate such processes trivially.

    Have we "moved" the virtual machine in any real way, or just made a copy and eliminated the original? More to the point, does it matter because it is just a computer program. Nobody cares, not us or the machine. That's what makes it a bad analogy for this, because I'm presupposing some sort of inherent value in a human that I don't ascribe to killallnerds.exe or a cup of pudding I'd be willing to pop into a teleporter.
    You're taking a third person perspective to delineate events which happen to you in the first person - you imply "you" end, but don't give a compelling argument as to why the recreated physical process isn't just as you.

    I've said this already, but let's assume the input isn't removed, let's also assume that the output is multiplicative and 100 people who are me get shat out everywhere. How is my experience altered? It is not. I am still a singular awareness. I do not become a hive mind simultaneously commanding a swarm of bodies. If I were to leave that matter transmitter with that replication thusly completed, and someone shot me, I would die. I would not close my eyes while bleeding out and then immediately open them on Mars, where one of my duplicates was released. That's because a discrete and autonomous consciousness identical to but completely distinct from my own and the other 99 was created.

    What do you think about individual consciousness if the only thing separating a long distance biological 3D printer churning out a theoretically infinite number of clones from a method of transportation is a disintigration murder-beam aimed at the outgoing transporter pad?

    TheOtherHorseman on
  • LucidLucid Registered User regular
    When you say 'The molecules change periodically but the form remains', what is the form here, can you elaborate?

    Isn't the premise in this thread that the newly formed copy will, for the sake of argument, be the exact same molecular composition?

  • KamarKamar Registered User regular
    I feel like people are ascribing some sort of magic to 'self' that just doesn't exist. You are data, like a text file on your computer. Like that data, you're the expression of something held in a physical form, but there is no reason you can't cut and paste your data across space as easily as you could a text file from one hard drive to another. The physical basis changes but the data remains the same.

    If you consider yourself the same person, or rather the same 'self', that you were as a child--despite any physical and temporal distance and the fact that all your bits are different bits--I don't know why you wouldn't consider post-teleport you to be you.





  • TheOtherHorsemanTheOtherHorseman Registered User regular
    edited December 2013
    I think there's some slippery language here. Is a perfect copy of me "me"? For the purposes of this conversation, it seems like a lot of philosophical wankery about the nature of identity conducted for its own sake. Sure, we are both "me" if we assume TheOtherHorseman-hood consists of my accumulated memories, tendencies, hopes, dreams, and preferences for certain kinds of pastries.

    If we have a pair of me, a dozen of me, a million of me, each one located on a different planet, that doesn't impact the awareness of any individual iteration of TheOtherHorseman. We wouldn't be aware of eachother. We wouldn't be able to psychically drift between the bodies to sight-see the worlds inhabited by other iterations of TheOtherHorseman, but if we were that would make a strong argument for this duplicate business being a mode of travel. In fact, it would be a slam dunk.

    We're just separate meat piles with identical settings. Killing one of them just ends that single life. It doesn't transport it. Even if you shit out another intact body from some far-distant TheOtherHorseman-o-matic.

    TheOtherHorseman on
  • AustralopitenicoAustralopitenico Registered User regular
    edited December 2013
    Lucid wrote: »
    When you say 'The molecules change periodically but the form remains', what is the form here, can you elaborate?

    Isn't the premise in this thread that the newly formed copy will, for the sake of argument, be the exact same molecular composition?

    Yes, but the molecules themselves will not be the same, as indicated by the fact that you could have any number of copies you want in the same room and make them fight to the death.

    Australopitenico on
  • TheOtherHorsemanTheOtherHorseman Registered User regular
    edited December 2013
    Kamar wrote: »
    I feel like people are ascribing some sort of magic to 'self' that just doesn't exist. You are data, like a text file on your computer. Like that data, you're the expression of something held in a physical form, but there is no reason you can't cut and paste your data across space as easily as you could a text file from one hard drive to another. The physical basis changes but the data remains the same.

    If you consider yourself the same person, or rather the same 'self', that you were as a child--despite any physical and temporal distance and the fact that all your bits are different bits--I don't know why you wouldn't consider post-teleport you to be you.

    I think the two keys to understanding my perspective are, let's assume that the teleport makes the new you at the destination without eliminating the original.

    Let's then assume a scenario where it simultaneously makes new yous in a thousand places, again not eliminating the original.

    How does this change your thought exercise?

    In my mind, I am picturing hearing a whirring sound as the teleporter activates and then nothing happens. I say "huh" and go home. I do not realize there's another me somewhere thrilling that teleportation technology worked and oh my gosh amazing. Or a thousand versions of me. There's no shared consciousness where I am being puppetmaster to multiple bodies.

    Now imagine that same scenario, except this time the disintegration ray isn't on the fritz.

    You still don't share consciousness with the distant bodies, except this time you're atomized and don't get to say "huh" or anything else.

    TheOtherHorseman on
  • AustralopitenicoAustralopitenico Registered User regular
    Kamar wrote: »
    I feel like people are ascribing some sort of magic to 'self' that just doesn't exist. You are data, like a text file on your computer. Like that data, you're the expression of something held in a physical form, but there is no reason you can't cut and paste your data across space as easily as you could a text file from one hard drive to another. The physical basis changes but the data remains the same.

    If you consider yourself the same person, or rather the same 'self', that you were as a child--despite any physical and temporal distance and the fact that all your bits are different bits--I don't know why you wouldn't consider post-teleport you to be you.





    You are not the expression of something held on a physical form. You are not a soul, nor a computer program. You are your physical form. The fact that said physical form is more a slow flow of matter than a piece of matter does not change that.

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