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."
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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