I'm so glad I settled into Marxism as a philosophy nerd. It means you don't need to think of dumb shit like this. Is God dead? Who cares? Why am I paying rent? Now that's something Incan bother giving a shit about.
Do we live in a computer? Maybe, but I still gotta work in a toll booth.
If the result is the same why does it matter if the process is different? Does my brain work in the new head? I'm that case the new head is simply an aesthetic change like a nose job.
This line of reasoning also leads to some pretty transphobic logic which I'm sure isn't the intent, but claiming you aren't the same person for having parts removed or replaced has implications.
Then you're both dead people. That's not a thought experiment it's just bad imaginary surgery.
Yeah, sure. I'm Giygas. If I can get from one place to another instantly and suffer no noticeable material consequences then I'm getting in the teleporter. You're leaping to a lot of conclusions and seem to have way bigger of an investment against teleporters than I could possibly fathom. I think just no one would give a shit and would just get from place to place faster.
You're coming off super unhinged here.
It's not. Teleporters don't exist and won't for any foreseeable future.
Okay, I'm done. Read back that sentence and tell me it makes any sense at all
Cause there are none cause it has never been done. Literally no one knows.
Consciousness is a flowing system. It can react easily to small changes over time, but such a huge change at once 100% kills you
libs: "noooo, you can't do a revolution"
we’re all ships of theseus whether we use teleporters or not
You can dry dock and refloat a "dead" ship a lot easier than a dead person. Humans spend their whole lives changing, adapting, and ultimately decaying. We're nothing like the Ship of Theseus.
the thought experiment that asks whether an entity maintains its unique identity despite having all or most of its parts swapped out for new ones
Specifically, identical parts. The thought experiment effectively posits "Is a perfect copy the same as the original?"
Creating an identical replica of a boat is hugely different from a replica of a human being, even before you get into the question of consciousness.
The ship is just how the question is presented.
The statement "We are all Ships of Theseus" doesn't make any sense, as humans going through life don't have anything in common with the thought experiment.
We aren't identical replicas of our prior selves. We undergo significant changes over time, becoming very obviously distinct from our past incarnations.
my own cells i’ve done shat out
"my cells" you mean the oppressed workers who under the dictatorship of the
bourgeoisiebrainstem?
why are two weirdos having a teleporter struggle sesh bro i gotta pay rent
nah this still brings me dread for a future where :melon-musk: and :lord-bezos-amused: replace all public transport with these
The Self is a lie. A data pattern that calls itself "you" walks into the machine, a data pattern that also calls itself "you" walks out of it. There is no distinction between these patterns besides their position in time and space.
Also how do I know you won't shut down the teleporter when I'm halfway through and chop my arm off?
in TNG you maintain a stream of consciousness, so no, its still you if you have a constant stream of thought
Can't be "still you" if "you" don't really exist as a concrete entity.
"You" exist as a concrete entity enough to discuss whether or not the version at one end of the teleporter is just a replica of the previous data pattern with the original being destroyed or whether it has been exactly the same.
For "you" to be the same I contest that the "teleportation" method has to function like in the game Portal or Stargate, not like a Star Trek teleporter. "You" must exist simultaneously in two locations of space time at once and transition between the two in one unbroken motion.
Nobody would debate that the Portal portals are creating replicas, because at no point is a human being having their body temporarily removed from existence.
at no point is a human being having their body temporarily removed from existence.
This seems to be the thing that a lot of ideas forwarding the existence of persistent self come back to; the apparent dissolution of the body or brain. But this same idea rests on the implication that an entity can somehow experience non-existence; that a person who went through the teleporter would perceive the brief picoseconds when they were Not. Even leaving aside the technical question of whether the teleporter can dissasemble, transport and reassemble you faster than the sensory input of being dissasembled can reach your brain, this implication is shaky at best.
Things that are Not cannot experience their Notness. Thus, I'd say that from the perspective of the teleported person, there would be no time at which they were Not. Their brief Notness would be a quality only tangible to outside observers.
The experience of “notness” would be eternal. Though, as you said, inpercievable
How would you reconcile this paradox? And what, if the original person is no more, do you say to the being that it insists it is the original person?
dont fucking build a "disassemble human atom by atom" button, shoot any :melon-musk: type who attempts to build such a button
i would love a story about someone who botches their teleportation and their clone becomes their mortal enemy on a hunt throughout the universe
I don't agree that the "self" is stored in the brain. The body, the whole entire body, is an system of parts. Our gut is as responsible for how our brains function as our brain is responsible for the words that come out of our mouths. If the bacteria in our gut can cause depression then you literally can't remove the gut from the brain without affecting the personality of the human.
Given this, my conception of the "self" is of the body and its connection to the brain. If you cut a off my leg you have affected my self. I am now 1 legged and will take that into my sense of self presumably after a period of significant distress at the loss of a piece of myself.
This seems to be the thing that a lot of ideas forwarding the existence of persistent self come back to; the apparent dissolution of the body or brain. But this same idea rests on the implication that an entity can somehow experience non-existence; that a person who went through the teleporter would perceive the brief picoseconds when they were Not. Even leaving aside the technical question of whether the teleporter can dissasemble, transport and reassemble you faster than the sensory input of being dissasembled can reach your brain, this implication is shaky at best.
Things that are Not cannot experience their Notness. Thus, I’d say that from the perspective of the teleported person, there would be no time at which they were Not. Their brief Notness would be a quality only tangible to outside observers.
Ok so. If I copy you onto a data disk right now, then shoot you with a disintegrator gun. Then reconstruct you in 5 years time. Are you still the same person?
No of course not. You are a replica of the person that I shot in the head. You inability to experience your "notness" in the 5 years interval is meaningless to the discussion.
If I copy you onto a data disk right now, then shoot you with a disintegrator gun. Then reconstruct you in 5 years time. Are you still the same person?
Assuming no one stepped on the disk, why wouldn't I be?
I still don't see how you can meaningfully distinguish the two.
Do you also have a hard time distinguishing between identical twins? Come on.
Identical twins have different experiences. Their identities, even their biological makeup, diverge based on those different experiences. If you took a being and replicated it, then when their experiences diverged they would become functionally different beings. But if they both remember being the "original," both have an equally valid claim to that title.
I don't think many identical twins remember being the same zygote.
Remembering being the original and actually being the original are different things.
Because any third party can see the difference. And you can rationalise the difference from understanding that third parties can see the difference.
Because any third party can see the difference.
That's a non-falsifiable statement. And even if we assume it's true, do third parties' perceptions of a being matter more than that being's own self-definition?
I think so. Isn't our ability to understand the "self" at least in part governed by our ability to zoom out and look at ourselves from the third person perspective?
We do the mirror test on animals to measure their ability to understand their sense of self. This is literally about test their ability to view from a third party perspective.
To some extent our idea of the self is attached to our ability to perceive that perspective.
Isn’t our ability to understand the “self” at least in part governed by our ability to zoom out and look at ourselves from the third person perspective?
Yes, but that means there would be a tension in calling a being that percieved itself as original, "not original." It thinks of itself as the original, even if now there are two of it. Who are you to tell it that it's wrong? Do you have the right to deny it that identification?
I don't think it would identify as the original if it rationalises the situation correctly from a third party perspective. It would recognise that the original is dead, and that it is a replica.
What this would then do to a person's sense of self is... Uncertain. I would very much be concerned about the mental repercussions that occur and think it would require advanced study to see whether it causes mental illness. I would not be surprised if the body rationalises this as a trauma and a sense of physical dysphoria begins to occur.
That kind of thinking is entirely theoretical though given that we don't have the technology to test it and might never.
There would be tension though. The third party would perceive the originality of the original vs the replica-ness of the replica. As soon as this is brought into focus for the replica what you are going to get is some sort of internal tension and crises about the self. Potentially manifested in denial, or it may manifest in other mental issues.
If both beings are identical and both have the same memories up to stepping into the teleporter, then "replicaness" or "originalness" is a purely theoretical label that can only be applied by outside observers, and even then only if one steps out of the teleporter before the other, and even then - as with this discussion, probably not without a lot of disagreement.
IDk, it all just seems to reinforce to me how "originality," like the idea of The Self itself, is a very flimsy concept.
How do you define original if I'm functionally the same (and perceive myself as so) coming out of the disk as going into it? Am I not the same because the literal matter composing my body may be different? But the matter that composes our bodies changes daily. Minute-by-minute even. So that doesn't really hold up.
If you destroy a body in one place then recreate it perfectly in another place, then the "destruction" and the "death" are the silly abstract concepts. It's just movement.
If I'm upsetting you though, apologies. That wasn't the intention. I won't respond past this.
The human still exists for the whole process. All of the information has to be present at each stage, or else you couldn't have people walking out of the other side. The pattern that makes up your existence shifts from being expressed as organic molecules, to excitation of the sensors and memory circuits, to a stream of particles through space, back to organic molecules. The person does literally get transported through space, unless you think that who a person is is defined by which specific carbon atoms are present in their body.
The human in most teleporters does not exist for the whole process though. Most teleportation devices essentially deconstruct the human in one location, convert them to data, transfer the data to the next location, reconstruct the human there.
Assuming you are not conscious of your "self" while in data format you are essentially dead. What comes out the other side is a replica of what you were, not you.
Assuming you are not conscious of your “self” while in data format you are essentially dead.
Does this also apply people in comas or, staying in sci-fi, hypersleep? Teleportation briefly freezes a person in time, but there are many situations where this would happen. Are they all instances of one person dying, and another replacing them?
The point I am getting at here is awareness of the transition of the self between states of being. If you change your "self" then it is possible to accept the change and take it into your conception of what your "self" is as long as awareness exists throughout the transition.
For example if we do the ship of theseus to my body, remove my leg and replace it with a robot leg, remove my torso and replace it with a robot torso, arms, etc. Then piece by piece replace the brain with new parts piece by piece.... The change becomes a gradual one. You become capable of accepting this change in your sense of "self" by having self-awareness. If instead I knocked you out, changed literally all those parts of you while you're unconscious, like for like, the exchange is identical but we do the entire process with no in-between, your concept of self is shattered due to awareness and no ability to accept the changes as a new sense of self.
I am certain that this "awareness" is a key part of our sense of self.
The difference I see is that with the robotic parts, presumably the reason that they need an acclimation period is that they operate at least a bit differently from the original they replace, and it takes time for the other pieces to change how they interact with it in response. If it was a perfect replica, indistinguishable from the original, what would make an acclimation period necessary.
Trying to understand your point better, what would happen if you knocked me out and replaced everything part by part with a robot, but, when you finish, you swap the original pieces back in one by one until all the robot parts are gone. In your opinion, did I die in that scenario?
If it was a perfect replica, indistinguishable from the original, what would make an acclimation period necessary.
Self is a function of awareness. Awareness is an experience of time. Without experiencing awareness you can not experience self-awareness and therefore can not accept it as your "self".
In the same way, if you just put that perfect robotic replica next to the original and didn't swap anything, it would not replace the self. It would be a separate self. The merger of the two requires a the function of time and awareness.
Another interesting scenario to consider here is what if we place this robot version and the human version next to each other and wake them both up at the same time? They are now two selfs with two separate experiences. Ok, so what if we now merge them together? Piece by piece, allowing them time and awareness of their merger of parts? This would essentially form a merged self. Neither would have died in this scenario, despite the fact that both original "selfs" actually no longer exist.
Trying to understand your point better, what would happen if you knocked me out and replaced everything part by part with a robot, but, when you finish, you swap the original pieces back in one by one until all the robot parts are gone. In your opinion, did I die in that scenario?
Wouldn't this just be going to sleep and waking back up again? That one's a doozy, I don't like it. It makes me viscerally uncomfortable.
That one’s a doozy, I don’t like it
Okay, let me rework that,
What if you used the transporter, but you didn't go anywhere, you beam right back into exactly where you left from. We could also say the machine is set to reuse the same set of matter-energy to rebuild you. In this case, there would be no change in your state of being to bring into your sense of self.
I'm trying to figure out if it's just the halt in brain activity that's important, or if there's something more specific to the process of teleportation.
what if the teleporter operator just says sike and doesnt rebuild u on the other side? or he rebuilds you twice for shits and giggles? no fucking thanks
Then it was built wrong. It's a thought experiment not a practical concept for a real invention.
the concept itself is based upon being "built wrong" the type of teleporter were talking about has these problems innate to it, that the body created at the destination is separate from the body at the start, their fates are separate, and one does not necessarily need to die for the other to be alive.
Wait, when did that become a rule? I'm going by Star Trek rules where during transportation you atomic pattern is stored in a computer buffer before reconstruction.
at "atomic pattern" is a computer file, named funnily because no one was familiar with computers when the show aired. there is nothing magical about a computer that makes it special or really you. This "atomic pattern" with the right encoding scheme, could be written in plain text by monastery scribes, shipped across the continent by horseback, and fed back to another teleporter machine. The caravan could be stalled in the wilderness and never make it to its destination, it could be tamered with by some drunk guy who thought it funny to add "and absolutely swimming in leprosy", so much can go wrong in the middle.
Unless star trek intends to ignore the laws of physics, the information has to travel by some medium, and while the medium of electromagnetism holds some fantastical properties in the minds of 1960s TV viewers, it is not fundamentally different than my medieval metaphor, perhaps even shakier, as now the information is at the mercy of random space phenomenon as well as just anyone with a radio dish pointed the right way, or anyone with a a strong transmitter shouting "print thousands of eternally tormented beings 1011100010101101010101010101110"
Once again it's a thought experiment not am engineering project. The thought experiment assumes it works perfectly. Shrodinger's Cat isn't actually about cats either.
But schrodingers cat describes a real phenomenon, just one which the cat is an analogy for, so that laypeople can understand a discovery, the cat is pop science. I dont see any real phenomenon which justifies this strange and unsettling metaphor that involves boiling people for a magic trick.
Okay, Schrodinger's cat is a scientific thought experiment, this is a philosophical one. About how comciou does or doesn't relate to the physical being. It's not about the teleporter it's just there to make you think about stuff.
The operator could convert your pattern into a form that couldn't be converted back to an organic mass. They could also convert your pattern into a form that has a phaser hole through its heart when you walk in the transporter room. You probably shouldn't piss off the transporter operator, but that doesn't change the philosophical implications.
Also, if you try to bring the sci-fi into real world physics at all, the 'make more copies' option turns out not to be possible.
but the bus doesnt disassemble you with knives, slide your sliced salami body through its mail slit, and rebuild you in your seat
If it did so and rebuilt me instantly at my destination with no pain then I'm fine with it.
why wouldnt making more copies be possible? you scan the original, then radio the data across to the other side, the teleporter would have to have enough material to function more than once, why couldnt it run the same data twice? why couldnt it store that data and make copies arbitrarily at a later time? even interception of the original data could be possible, and some sideshow bob type intercepts the data to build his very own bart simpson to torture and kill at his leisure.
If you start from driver's license details, height, eye color, hair color and such, you can print out an endless number of humans who match all of those details, but everyone would be able to tell that they were different people. If you add in centuries of sci-fi tech, you can get extremely detailed descriptions of the person, down to "this particular cell is at these exact coordinates". But, if you want to have what comes out the other side perfectly match what went in, you have to capture the exact state of all the particles that make up the person, and how they are interacting with each other. At this level, you have to deal how information actually exists in the universe, rather than how humans describe their observations, like with eye color. This is where observing the state of something, i.e. trying to make it fit into a human description, alters it.
You can't make a copy because when the process is done correctly, it necessarily involves a transmission channel that no one knows the contents of. You can't make a second copy, because the contents of that unknown channel are gone. It could be intercepted, but if it was, nothing intelligible would come out at the intended destination.
so then it is impossible to truly copy someone, because that information must be sent between places in some form, which necessitates transforming it into some human invented abstraction of information. You have already read it, translated it through different forms, and tainted it with some sort of observation before it even arrives at its destination.
No, this is something that we are currently capable of doing, and do semi-regularly. For example, say we have an atom A in some unknown state. We can have a photon interact with it, then fly through space to some other atom B. Because we didn't know the state of A, we can't predict the state of the photon, but with some preparation, we can set it up so that when the photon interacts with B, it will put it into the same state as A originally was, without anyone observing it. Also, once you've set the state of B, both the state of A and the photon have been scrambled by their interactions, so there's no way to spit out a second copy of B.
yes but now you know B and can reuse that as much as you want, and if you cant, you still have the same problem you did with A and nothing has been solved.
You don't know B, all you know is that it's the same state that A was before you started. The goal wasn't to learn what B is, but we now have a particle in a new location (potentially a space ship vs. the ground) that behaves exactly like the original would have in any test you do on it. If you can do this to all the particles in a person's body with no errors, you've teleported that person, and there's no possibility of making a second copy, or forgetting to throw the original in the dumpster.
We can tell the difference between people because of the differences in how their carbon atoms are arranged. If hypothetically someone had the power to swap a million carbon atoms (of the same isotope, electron configuration, spin state etc.) between two people, there would be no way to tell that anything had changed, and we wouldn't consider the two people be 'mixed' or anything. The transporter perfectly replicates the arrangement of the carbon atoms, which is the only thing we can actually interact with.
It's not what carbon atoms but how they're arranged. It's a pattern which can theoretically be stored and reconstructed. If your precise chemical construction is reconstructed exactly the same there is no difference.
If my stream of thought is totally uninterrupted then for all intents and purposes I am the same being on the other side of the teleporter
what about when scotty was stuck in the teleporter buffer for 100 years
star trek is not consistent about teleporter technology :ohnoes: one episode has a first person pov of Barkleys stream of consciousness unbroken in the buffer
but to be a super nerd you could argue that transporter tech changed over the 100 years Scotty was stuck in the buffer
Except the idea behind a teleporter like that is to essentially clone you in the other location then destroy the original you. If we skip that last step we have two separate data patterns that call themselves "you" with one clearly being the "original".
If they both concieve of themselves as "you," then the question of who is the "original" is meaningless.
Not if you don't destroy the original.
What you have is not a transportation device but a replication device that is imitating transportation by replicating an object and then destroying the original. If you turn off the "destroy the original" part of the device the illusion of teleportation breaks down and the horror of what it really is becomes apparent.
If all those copies' perceptions begin at the point when someone stepped into the teleporter, and all of them have the recollection of being the person who stepped into the teleporter in the first place, then the idea of who is the "original" is still meaningless.
It's like when you
piratelegally download a movie. The idea of there being an original when both datasets are identical doesn't track. It's really only useful to those who want to claim ownership of the dataset.I don't think it's meaningless to the original, which no longer exists and is now functionally dead.
If the original is really dead, then necessarily everything is meaningless to it. It still doesn't address how you can define "originality" amid however-many functionally identical beings that all see themselves as the original.
Forcing someone into the teleporter adds another layer to the question and one I never brought up. I don't think anyone would dispute it's wrong to force someone in that doesn't want to go, but that wasn't really part of what I was talking about.
Obviously if you want to go there then yes, forcing someone into the teleporter would probably generally be bad, for the same reason that forcing anyone to do anything they don't want to do is generally bad.
I wouldn't say so. Nothing exists ex nihilo, everything is derived from what surrounds and precedes it. Is Morroccan Arabic not "original" Arabic because it has Berber influences? Is Modern Standard Arabic "original" Arabic because it comes (mostly) straight from Quranic sources, despite it being a younger spoken language than many colloquial forms?
This is silly semantics. You understand the concept of one having existed for longer than the other. This difference is factual and is never removed in the process of replication. It defines a difference between the two things that we call original and copy.
You still haven't said how you define "original" and "copy" though. Is it really just one having existed for longer than the other? But if the one is identical to the other, then the difference between them is what is just semantics.
It is. And it is an important difference. Our sense of the self is inextricably linked to time. "Awareness" is a function of the experience of time passing and thus self-awareness can not be separated from time.
Yes I agree, but you can't perceive the passage of time that you don't exist in. If a being exists for a time, then gets copied, both still have the perception of time having passed.
Yeah but as I said elsewhere in our other back and forth in this thread, as soon as that being gains awareness again they will zoom out to ask questions about their "self" from the third party perspective. At this point they will gain awareness of whether a third party would perceive them as the original or as a replica.
But that perception is academic unless there's some concrete difference that separates the two beings at the exact moment of replication. And not even then, really. If I woke up tomorrow with gills, my first thought on regaining conciousness wouldn't be "oh I must be a copy because I know I don't have gills," it would be "oh I guess I have gills now glub glub I'm choking."
Point being, the two might see themselves as different beings as they accumulated different experiences, but neither loses the claim to call themselves "original." And that in turn just points out ephemeral the idea of originality is.
Given my own experience of dysphoria and its effects on the sense of self I'm not convinced that the brain would accept it so simply and without longterm repercussions. But I usually hate bringing in anecdotal things like that into discussions like this because it feels like cheating.
They would only perceive themselves as discreet entities starting at the point where their experiences diverge. But even after that divergence, if both came from the same place, both could feasibly call themselves the "original." And because you now have two separate entities both calling themselves the "original," the very concept of originality becomes moot.
humans are not just a file, more a running program, they cant just be treated like a stored file.
But even a running program can be paused and restarted. The only perception of a break between the start and stop exists outside the program.
And since as of now programs are not sentient being with rights, that is fine. To "pause and restart" a human would be quite an unethical act, if you never again hit play, is it murder?
I think that gets into whether you think murder implies intent or not. What if someone hits "pause" with the paused person's consent and every intention of hitting "play" sometime soon, but external forces somehow prevent them from doing so? Is that a murder?
Even for some modern medical procedures, there are times when doctors induce a brief state of reversible clinical death. Sometimes shit goes pear-shaped and people don't wake up. Is that murder?
it may not be murder but it is unquestionably death, also clinical death doesnt mean everything is dead, and the definition of "dead" continues to receed as our medical capabilities advance, the brain is still doing stuff as you lay there "clinically dead".
But we only define it as death because, assumedly, that person can't be woken back up. And given that the universe still has a couple gugolplex years to go, even that may not be true in the long run. Who knows? Maybe in a few thousand years people will figure out how to resurrect the dead from their point of death. If you don't perceive the time between when your heart stops and when it restarts, even the idea of death itself may become obsolete.
Considering the dead people get consumed by worms, their matter gets integrated into the worm, the worm gets eaten by a chicken, then the chicken again consumed by a human, most are probably unsaveable, as reversing that much entropy would probably require more energy than contained in the entire universe. Even in cases where the body isnt scattered to the wind, were once again arriving at the scanning and copying, which isnt really medicine anymore, and now its not only the problem of getting an infinitely perfect copy, but also the problem that we now need to edit that copy to be alive again. Luckily, we lost the ethical dilema of killing the original, since incinerating a corpse would be fine even if youre not teleporting it.
You never know. There's an interesting idea I've read about that posits that a society with sufficient predictive technology would essentially be able to recreate the past by analyzing all the forces acting on a particle, then tracing those forces back to their origins, which are probably other particles, and so on and so on.
that sounds like a lot of computing to do, uh oh all the stars are gone and im not dont yet
Black holes bro. They last a real long time and generate tons of energy.
they only make as much energy as matter fell into them, still finite, youll run out of that too, another problem is that the longer this calculation takes, the further into the future you are, the less energy you have left, and the more past you have to simulate to recreate it all perfectly. The 14 billion years so far is nothing compared to how far along youll be by the time you gotta sip energy off a black hole.
I'm just saying, if I die and then wake up in 3000000 years and some guy is doing a Futurama-esque "WeLCoME tO ThE WoRlD Of ToMOrRoW!" Shtick above my regen-pod, I'm just gonna think, "called it."
but say the copy is made first, you could easily not kill the original. and what if you killed the original not with instant vaporization, but with a fucking bat?
its two separate actions to do a "teleportation" magic trick, step one: scan and build the atomic human lego set, step two: heat our lovely assistant to the boiling point of human and tada!
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Not being glib, I genuinely don't understand.
It doesnt matter which is original, you could kill the one thats been around a while, you could kill the fresh one, its still murder. This whole idea is an illusion cooked up by a science fiction show to explain why their characters jump between different tacky sets so quickly, a 6 month voyage across the solar system doesnt make for good TV.
Well I don't disagree with any of that, but I still think it's an important idea to sus out. How we define ourselves, especially our "originality" or "authenticity," gets to the heart of a lot important topics: gender identity, cultural affiliation, spirituality and religiosity, and of course the really Big Ones, aging and death.
If you insist that there is an original, authentic "you," who are you when you're not that? How do you become that person? Why do want to become them? When your perception of what is "original" or "authentic" in you inevitably changes, how do you reconcile those concepts, which by their nature imply stasis, with the fact that we are constantly changing all the time?
I think the exploration of who we really are as changing beings is somewhat hampered by the human vaporization present in the metaphor
I don't think so. We're constantly destroying who we are. The teleportation metaphor just takes what is usually psychic background noise and forces you to look at it. "We" end, and get restarted, every morning. We constantly rearrange ourselves, psychologically and biologically. There is no point in the arc of our existence that you can pick out and say, "that's the original me," just like there's no point where you can say, "well, that's just a copy."
The reason you cannot distinguish an original you is that there is no breakpoint, it is all the original you. Even as you sleep you are concious on some level, and sleep is not an abrupt moment where you are suddenly different, in the gradual transition from drowsy to tired to falling asleep to dreaming, there is no point where you yourself can identify as when you fell asleep, try writing down the exact time you fell asleep, you cant really.
general anesthesia doesnt shut off everything, but a lot more than sleeping does
there is no point where you yourself can identify as when you fell asleep
Yes, exactly. And in the same way, no one can identify when they die. Experience is all we can experience. Which mean theoretical breaks of time or space to that experience are meaningless.
Yes, there's problems with that in several episodes where people get cloned, personality split cloned and two people merge into one. But it's like, something or someone has to fuck up for that to occur.
I'm pretty much with that. The self is what you perceive it to be and if your perception is the same then you are still yourself. Get on the pad, Barkley.
Brb turning myself into a brundlefly so I can get dope fly wings and just hover everywhere
Fly is transported harmlessly alongside you according to Trek rules. Viruses and bacteria and shit that can cause disease gets blasted out during transport though.
I'll say two things about transporters:
-Gene Roddenberry came up with them because they hadn't the time or resources to film travel scenes and everything else is ex post facto justification for the sake of narrative.
-Tuvix deserved to die.
They also didn't have the time or resources to create transporter special effects so they had to invent them for real.
Roddenberry died in a transporter accident on the set of TNG because he was too lazy to walk ten feet to his mini-fridge for treats. Hubris kills all the greats.
No, it wouldn't be me, but new me would have the satisfaction of saving five people from a gruesome death, so I'd say its worth erasing myself. :expert-shapiro:
This assumes the teleporter functions like in the game Portal, a gateway that can be transitioned in one unbroken motion allowing for only parts of you to pass through it.
If the teleporter functions like a Star Trek teleporter this isn't possible.
honestly im just at the point where i dont give a fuck? like shit if theres teleporters im gonna use them, even if "oh damn im subjectively dead woooOOOoo scary" happens then there's still gonna be me running around so whatever im cool with Myself-2 existing in my stead
like the first time would be scary but every time after that whatever comes out the end of the teleporter whether its you or Basically-You, you're gonna have the memory of entering the portal making every other trip a piece of cake
still better than driving a car either fuckin way damn
That analogy doesn't apply at all. I'm pretty sure a teleporter would be used to move people further than they can walk. People thought trains would drive you insane because the human brain couldn't process speeds so fast and here we are. You can't die bumping into a person like you can a car crash and people drive every day. Even if it was an apt analogy people sacrifice safety for convenience all the time and think nothing of it.
The train thing wasn't an analogy, people thought that would actually happen. People think similar things to any technology that comes along. Non teleporter users would be seen as 5g weirdos.
As far as energy goes, you do know that it's a philosophical thought experiment and not am engineering project right? Schrodinger's cat is about uncertainty principle not actual cats.
I'm not defending any technology dangerous not cause it literally doesn't fucking exist. The thought experiment is about conciousness and its relationship to the physical form and there are no morally correct answers. This is like someone discussing the ship of Theseus and you're talking about how the boat could possibly sink, it's not the point.
Okay, I don't want to carry on a debate after we've ended it but I wanted to reassure you here.
Yes, it's correct that we have the ability to use the principle of teleportation, but at the level we're talking about, it's like saying that people have been putting feathers on arrows for thousands of years, so they could have used principles of aerodynamics to build 747s. There is a MASSIVE gap between the technology we have and the practical engineering that would be required. There will definitely not be human teleportation in your lifetime, or the lifetime of anyone currently alive. I strongly doubt there would be anything anywhere near star trek teleportation in the 24th century. It is a story telling device. You can worry about the philosophical issue if you want, but you absolutely do not need to be worrying about this actually affecting real people.
statistically the car is gonna do me in anyway, id rather just teleport around and save countless hours and stress
also drinking poisoned water doesn't leave behind another you so not a great analogy. im not gonna die teleporting and even if my subjective pov ends during the process im not gonna notice it so meh
yeah but its not similar, it's an identical "you"
experience may be shafted but there would still be a "you" continuing on the exact same thought patterns, there would be no material difference between the person that entered and exited the teleporter
not sure why you're posting someone trying and failing to explain star trek with modern day physics that don't apply to the show's universe, but whether or not the sender portion of the teleporter disintegrates you is irrelevant as long as the information is saved
and even with the ridiculous amount of transporter accidents they show in star trek, it's still statistically less dangerous than a car and will have less information scrambling too :shrug-outta-hecks:
i mean the whole subjective viewpoint thing is just kinda moot to me, first it assumes that there even is a subjective continuity of existence that would be disrupted by spacial information transfer, and second it wouldn't matter to the person using the teleporter: even in a worst case scneario their experience would end without them noticing, and they won't notice it on the other end either
THE PERSON WHO ENTERED THE TELEPORTER WOULD BE FUCKING DEAD
you're making a bold assumption that the person who entered the teleporter isn't already subjectively dying in every instant of time, and only thinks that they aren't. we can prove "I think therefore I am", but we can't prove "I think therefore I am" five seconds later is the same uninterrupted "I" from before :shrug-outta-hecks:
BECAUSE IT IS NOT AN IMMEDIATE PROCESS
ALLOWING YOU TO PRETEND YOU ARE NOT DEAD
not sure how slow replacement vs instant replacement matters here, either what makes you "you" is the material information and the exact atoms that comprise it doesn't matter (allowing for like, aging), or the matter that does comprise you is important to what makes you "you", and we subjectively die all the time without noticing making this teleporter conversation kinda moot to begin with
then there is no reason, fundamentally, for me to not kill myself.
The illusion of continued existence is the only thing keeping me alive.
??? yeah im not seeing it lmao, you could literally use that argument with or without subjective continuity, 80 years is literally a picosecond in comparison to existence, we already exist in a relative "moment", what's the problem with existing in a moment? if in each moment "I" already "feels" that they're a continuity, and can experience the present, remember the past, and imagine a future, what does it matter if it TRULY is real? Within every moment you're still "You", and within every moment life is still meaningful.
my only point is, if this were true, then hopping into a teleporter wouldn't be any different than the shit we go through every second. it wouldn't devalue life at all
The only reason to not purposely end the perpetuation of these clones is out of a idealistic, misguided notion that existence is inherently good.
The only reason I don't kill myself now, subjectively feeling like I do exist in a span of eighty years, is because I have a "idealistic" "misguided" notion that existence is inherently good. Get the fuck out of here with your nihilism. Even life in just a single moment is worth living, someone who dies young doesn't have any less of a meaningful life.
You’re voluntarily ending that moment
In the case of the theoretical illusory continuity that we're talking about, it would be impossible to end a moment, since every instant of time is another "you" that can't be disrupted by it. It wouldn't matter if continuity was objectively illusory, because it would be subjectively real to "you". In fact it would allow the "You" you've had your whole life to continue past even a worst case pure disintegration, as long as the information is preserved. The saved information would be all that would be needed to effectively continue subjective continuity on the other side.
But regardless, it's not the thought experiment that makes me uncomfortable (if it were true, I would have died a near infinite amount of times while subjectively feeling just fine).
It's more of your choice of words on life in general (and on transient life).
If I were given a single moment to live, and told that my moment of living would give birth to another being who would remember me, I wouldn't feel horrified, I would feel glad in that moment. Glad I got to exist, if even for a second, glad I got to impact the future, and remember a past. It would be meaningful because I subjectively gave it meaning. In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god's blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my intelligence.
but that aside I do not have the professional qualification to respond to suicide ideation, I'm out and I hope you feel better :mao-wave:
None of them are problems. Boat-who cares, trolly- least deaths, teleporter- once again who fucking cares? Teleporting is cool. None of these are interesting questions.
How? I'd say it's pretty boring. It happens to everyone and no one knows for sure if anything happens after. Case closed. I have no power or responsibility related to it aside from not murdering people.
Die from what? If it's the teleporter then i stick with who cares
No it's not. They walk in voluntarily and are reconstructed on the other end with their memories and conciousness preserved. Coming out with a cloned body that's the exact same and your mind unchanged means, yes it doesn't matter if some concept of the original technically dies.
Comparing it to not caring about a homeless person dying is not only absurd but frankly fucking offensive to me. But I guess I'm a sociopath anyway.
It's not suicidal because you are reconstructed as a living thing. I have maybe .1% percent of the same cells that i did at birth. Does that make me a different person? What if I needed a transplant and that .1% was no longer there? Does that mean my infant self is dead and I'm a different person? Draw the line.
Also please tell me the things we know about conciousness that contradict it. You will be a highly regarded philosopher if you can manage.
Good. We put a permanent fix to identitarianism by using identity theory.
There is somewhat of a solution, but it involves dismantling your concept of self and individuality.
Focus on what is good, what is right. Focus on what you love, what links your "self" with others and with the world. This will make you feel better, whereas trying to simply gratify your Self will make you feel empty. Many religions understand this and retain an emphasis against self-focus.
Liberalism gets us to chase after the embellishment of our individualized identity. This is a trap. The universe is made up of things coming together and cooperating to form a higher or more complex level of being. The tendency toward each other is an eternal truth. This is why communism will win.
I hope you're understanding that the closer you look at "I" and "me", the harder it is to make sense of these things. The self is one of many things where the closer you peer at it, the hazier the concept becomes, and you can only define it easily with a simplistic, almost childlike understanding of it. Much like "happiness", "peace", or "leadership".
Most of what you've described is maybe half of an existential crisis I had not too long ago. I won't share the other half. But I am very much at peace with the idea that I am part of a massive continuity, and that just as my individual neurons are part of the consciousness that my brain has, so too am I part of something bigger.
It's uncomfortable that we require time to experience things, yet time alters us. Time itself involves all kinds of paradoxes. My best answer to it is that rather than death being a sleep, instead life is analogous to a dream. Sorta like the Dreamtime concept that Aborigines have.
jokes on you. I have anxiety and because of that, I already spent hours this week angsting over this exact philosophical quandary.
(warning people is cool tho, jokes aside.)
