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?
"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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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".
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 pirate legally 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.
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.
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.
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!
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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
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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.
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.
Assuming no one stepped on the disk, why wouldn't I be?
You would be dead. A copy of you would exist.
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.
Again, how so?
Because any third party can see the difference. And you can rationalise the difference from understanding that third parties 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.
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?
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
My bus driver could stab me when I get on the bus too.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Defining originality is easy if you do not destroy the original.
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.
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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.
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How can someone die if they never perceive dying?
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."
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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.
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general anesthesia doesnt shut off everything, but a lot more than sleeping does
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.
I'm just waiting for a fly to hover in the machine with you.
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.