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The "what if you go to sleep" arguments are on the right track, but they don't go far enough. I don't live the experience of myself from a year ago, or even from a minute ago. A messy, somewhat inaccurate physical record of those events is all that is available to me. This is the constant, normal state of human consciousness. "Me from a minute ago" exerts no influence over my current behavior or thinking except in the form of this physical record. "Me from a minute ago" is pretty much indistinguishable from a dead person except that instead of leaving a corpse, he left me. You can get out of this by believing in a soul, if you want. That's totally legitimate, and seriously implicates the teleportation problem. In that case your identity exists outside your body, but what happens to your identity depends on what happens to your body. The problem is that unless you can detect and measure souls, you can only talk about this in terms of hopes and preferences. It lets you set any arbitrary standard you want. A guy with permanent brain damage whose personality completely changes afterwards is the same person, but an indistinguishable copy is a different one, a dead person still exists, recognizably themselves after death -- sure, whatever you like! But if we set that aside, identity can't be a property of particular bits of matter, since they constantly get replaced and any conventional definition of "you" includes people made of completely different matter at different times. The only other option is that consciousness emerges from the arrangement of matter in a particular relation to or pattern with other matter, in which case teleportation presents either no problem, or the exact same problem that happens every time a neuron fires -- that is to say, the pattern or relationship changes. So either you're dying constantly, or our concept of "you" is just a fiction riddled with inconsistencies to begin with. I don't believe in souls, so I'd totally hop in the teleporter. I'd even consider hopping in the duplicator, because it'd be cool to have a conversation with someone who had several decades of exactly the same life experience I had, and then diverged, although I'd want to know what rights and privileges the other me was going to get. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 00:31 on Apr 8, 2016 |
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Apr 8, 2016 00:26
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If permanent brain damage results in becoming a different person, is obeying a living will to remove life support still ethical?
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Apr 8, 2016 00:34
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Control Volume posted:If permanent brain damage results in becoming a different person, is obeying a living will to remove life support still ethical? Well, let me put it this way: if we can't ethically make agreements about what future us will do or have done to them, then promises and contracts aren't ethical either, or at least the difference is only a matter of degrees. That doesn't seem practical to live by. So, probably, the answer is that we can ethically make promises for identities who are so much like us that they remember making the promise. The fiction of "you" is still a useful fiction for an ordered society. For a living will, assuming you didn't change your mind leading up to it, the best we can do is trust the last thing "you" said on the matter. e: If I stopped having subjective experiences / were brain dead, but my body kept on ticking, I'm not sure I should have any say in what happens to it. It would depend on who would be hurt by keeping my body alive and sucking up resources that could go to conscious people, weighed against who would be more hurt by letting the last remnants of me go than my being brain-dead already hurt them. The dead have no rights, but the feelings of the living matter. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Apr 8, 2016 |
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Apr 8, 2016 00:38
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The Belgian posted:If you care about actual physics, you can just invoke the no-cloning and no-teleportation theorems to render the question void and be done with things. No cloning doesn't rule out destructive teleportation, which is mostly what's being discussed here. This also brings up the question of whether the human brain uses any quantum information stuff for anything (that would be "lost" if you tried to clone it), this is interesting because a) it's a real question that might have an actual answer and b) it has little or nothing to do with the mildly ridiculous notion that the brain is a "quantum computer" as compscis would define it.
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Apr 8, 2016 00:45
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Dzhay posted:No cloning doesn't rule out destructive teleportation, which is mostly what's being discussed here. Well yes but if you think the form of teleportation that isn't ruled ot by the no-teleportation theorem is worrysome, then it seems like doin anything, interacting with anything, moving, or just going forward in time would raise the same concerns about consciousness.
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Apr 8, 2016 00:54
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Arguing that an evolution through time is equivalent to death is super strange, because the process of thought is a, well, process, so it means that you don't consider 'thinking' to be something a living thing could ever do. If you're going that far, then you can't really consider anything alive or having self, in which case you might as well commit suicide. If that doesn't appeal to you, if you're rather be alive than dead, then there's clearly some kind of self that you are preserving.
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Apr 8, 2016 01:22
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rudatron posted:Arguing that an evolution through time is equivalent to death is super strange, because the process of thought is a, well, process, so it means that you don't consider 'thinking' to be something a living thing could ever do. If you're going that far, then you can't really consider anything alive or having self, in which case you might as well commit suicide. If that doesn't appeal to you, if you're rather be alive than dead, then there's clearly some kind of self that you are preserving. Not so. Thinking could be something the self contributes to and is modified by, a grand participatory process. What you're suggesting is like saying that because I'm going to die, the human race might as well go extinct, or that because I can't cram the entire history of philosophy into my head, the pursuit of knowledge is pointless. e: you might be on to something if "thought" and "experience" are identical, but I'm not ready to take that as a given. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 01:36 on Apr 8, 2016 |
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Apr 8, 2016 01:28
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rudatron posted:Arguing that an evolution through time is equivalent to death is super strange, because the process of thought is a, well, process, so it means that you don't consider 'thinking' to be something a living thing could ever do. If you're going that far, then you can't really consider anything alive or having self, in which case you might as well commit suicide. If that doesn't appeal to you, if you're rather be alive than dead, then there's clearly some kind of self that you are preserving. When Dzhay refers to destructive teleportation that isn't ruled out by teleportation, I assume he's talking about quantum teleportaion (correct me if I'm wrong). While it can be sensible to use the term destructive teleportation for some intents in quantum teleportation, I'd certainly be wary of conflating this with death.
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Apr 8, 2016 01:32
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That's a distinction without a difference, if your past selves are dead as soon as they change, that still applies to a 'grand participatory process'. Every moment you live is followed by your death, ergo there's no difference from your point of view in just killing yourself. Are you saying you'd still pull that knife across your throat if you could magic away any other external excuse (your parents/friends/family would worry, etc etc.)? Hell, is anything even alive under this framework?
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Apr 8, 2016 03:25
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rudatron posted:That's a distinction without a difference, if your past selves are dead as soon as they change, that still applies to a 'grand participatory process'. Every moment you live is followed by your death, ergo there's no difference from your point of view in just killing yourself. Are you saying you'd still pull that knife across your throat if you could magic away any other external excuse (your parents/friends/family would worry, etc etc.)? Hell, is anything even alive under this framework? If the "self," just the most bare-bones part of me that experiences things, only participates in thought, then it's the greater process that makes judgments, has values, has preferences, and so on. If it decides to preserve itself, my "self" that experiences is just along for the ride with that decision, and maybe making some incredibly minute contribution to the decision in the act of changing. Think of it this way: what we think of as a human being has a bunch of components that exist closer to or further away from that core "self," with some so far away you stop considering them part of the person. There's a difference between my car, my clothing, my arm, my eyes, my memories, my ability to perform abstract reasoning, and so on. A philosophical zombie could perform abstract reasoning, though, so flipping that around, you could conceivably have a self without any of those things. If you take away my car and give me a new one, I'm still me. If you take away my arm and give me a new one, I'm still me. If you take away my memories and give me my memories back, I'm still me. If I lose the ability to perform abstract reasoning and regain it, still me. The only question that leaves is "what is that innermost 'me,' and what sustains it, if anything?" The biological definition of life still applies in this framework with zero changes, so sure, things can be alive.
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Apr 8, 2016 04:14
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In short: the thing that you're afraid would get lost in teleportation is, in the absence of an eternal soul, fungible. People can still do all the usual people things without having the same one the whole time, although a person who didn't have one at all would be pretty weird and possibly not a person. I wouldn't kill myself if you cut off my arm and gave me a sweet robot arm to replace it. So why should I kill myself just because I have a different spark of consciousness than the one I did a minute ago? All of my memories, values, and the physical context in which the multi-layered system named Tuxedo Catfish exists are still there. e: I realize that "I" "me" "my" etc have like five different meanings over the course of a couple paragraphs here, but at the same time, that's kind of my point. This poo poo isn't unified, it's just bundled together for convenience. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 04:47 on Apr 8, 2016 |
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Apr 8, 2016 04:20
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SHISHKABOB posted:I think that pondering these questions can lead to a greater sense of connection with the world. Like I wanna say enlightenment basically. Thinking about those things and their relationship with the world, other people, and stuff, is good for you. Especially if you talk about it with people. As someone who digs the occasional quiet sitting session, I agree. GlyphGrip and Oh my dear have the best grasp of it. The self is an intersubjective phenomenon. If they make two copies of me, which one am I? Whichever one the world (those who know me and or have power over me) decides. What I think of as me might end up being the clone, but who am I to judge? I can't even conceive of a neutral reference frame whereby I would analyze who I am. This is philosophy so tautologies have their place, but is the self a good candidate for a tautology? Outside of Rand, I really don't think so.
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Apr 8, 2016 04:50
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I don't care if the world decides my clone is the real me. Or hell, even if I'm a clone myself and not the original. I don't want to be vaporized by your godless science machine. Even if its more convenient for society that a version of me gets to where I need to be quicker, or if my sister will still love whatever soulless beast wearing my face is around.
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Apr 8, 2016 06:11
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Who is you? What is caring?
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Apr 8, 2016 06:19
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What is caring?!? Maybe you should go to EN if you're going to depressed post. The continuity of consciousness and the biological being that possesses it is important when I am that biological being. Disruptions of that consciousness - such as when you sleep - are a normal function of living. There is a continuity of the body that insures that I am still me. And when the body is replaced, atom by atom, it is not replaced all at once, and there is a continuity of the consciousness while it happens. But to destroy the consciousness and the body at once, is the same as dying. Entering the machine is the same experience as getting shot in the head. One moment I am, the next I am not. I do not experience what my clone experiences. I do not share my consciousness with them, even if it is identical otherwise.
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Apr 8, 2016 06:29
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Do you need to be able to give rigorous answers to those questions to address him? The reason you know that you're still you with a robot arm, is that the arm is something you experience, not something you are. That analogy doesn't extend to neural firing patterns, because if I short circuit them, you are absolutely dead, because I've removed the ability for you to do anything you could recognize as constituting self. All you have done with your overarching system approach, is moved the problem of self onto an interaction between systems, in which case that is absolutely still destroyed by a teleporter. Self isn't fungible just because it's dynamic, that doesn't follow. Nor are memories, values or context the sole constituents of self or consciousness, because all 3 are replicable. If you meet someone else that had all three the same as yours, could you really say you were the same person?
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Apr 8, 2016 06:49
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Mantis42 posted:What is caring?!? Maybe you should go to EN if you're going to depressed post. I disagree, why should that be? Your argument seems to rest on "because it is natural" which is a pretty poor argument.
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Apr 8, 2016 07:17
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Here's another scenario I'd put before the Numerical Identity folks: what would you do if, through no action of your own, you woke up in the "output" room of the teleporter, with the certain knowledge that the "original you" has been destroyed. Would you consider you, you? Would you consider yourself a soulless monster, as mantis42 put it? What if you didn't find out for a while? A week, a month, ten years? What if its already happened? Also gotta say that I'm getting a chuckle out of Mantis42's violent hand wringing. I think we triggered him/her.
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Apr 8, 2016 10:25
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"Just because things are the same doesn't mean they're the same" -This thread
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Apr 8, 2016 10:58
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Whether or not clones have souls is a matter I'll leave to God (spoilers: they don't.) But two objects being identical does not turn them into one object. The same is true of consciousness. It is not possible for my conscious to be in two places at once. The teleporter is a lying murderbox that does not transfer anything, its just a cloning machine that doubles as a genocide machine.
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Apr 8, 2016 11:57
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The robot hand question is really dumb because consciousness doesn't reside in the hand. Venom Snake is still Venom Snake even after he gets a robot hand. But he is never Big Boss.
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Apr 8, 2016 12:00
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Agents are GO! posted:Here's another scenario I'd put before the Numerical Identity folks: what would you do if, through no action of your own, you woke up in the "output" room of the teleporter, with the certain knowledge that the "original you" has been destroyed. Would you consider you, you? Would you consider yourself a soulless monster, as mantis42 put it? The original, YouOriginal, has been destroyed. You are YouPrime. You could choose to take over YouOriginal's life, and you'd be YouPrime pretending to be YouOriginal. You could not find out for a month that YouOriginal was dead and that you're actually YouPrime, and you'd be YouPrime with the mistaken belief that you're YouOriginal.
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Apr 8, 2016 13:05
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Dzhay posted:"Just because things are the same doesn't mean they're the same"
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Apr 8, 2016 13:20
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This is probably dumb, but I'm going to take the position that not only is it my "self" or "consciousness" that comes out on the other end it's also the same biological organism. It seems to me that if we are grounding our hypothetical transporter in the laws of the universe (at least as we know them), then energy must be conserved. If we assume that the universe is a closed system then the energy that is lost (my rest energy) when my being is zapped out of existence has to go somewhere, and where else could that be other than where I'm zapped back into existence? It may seem problematic that the process is instantaneous and discontinuous, yet there is clear causality from my being in point A to point B.
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Apr 8, 2016 13:36
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If you shoot one body in the head does the other one die? No, because they're not the same organism.
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Apr 8, 2016 14:07
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Agents are GO! posted:Here's another scenario I'd put before the Numerical Identity folks: what would you do if, through no action of your own, you woke up in the "output" room of the teleporter, with the certain knowledge that the "original you" has been destroyed. Would you consider you, you? Would you consider yourself a soulless monster, as mantis42 put it? Uhh. If I'm the replica and I know that I'm the replica then I recognize that I'm still fully human and move on. That said, the dissonance that might emerge from my knowledge that my memories technically are not my own - i.e., do not coincide with past events that I myself experienced - might make me crazy. Shbobdb posted:I disagree, why should that be? Your argument seems to rest on "because it is natural" which is a pretty poor argument. I think perdurantism is a better way to look at it. I don't merely exist both spatially and temporally; I extend through both space and time. This explains why I don't die when I go to sleep or when my cellular makeup undergoes slight changes. When I step into the teleportation chamber, I cease to exist in all four dimensions, even as my four-dimensional replica emerges elsewhere.
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Apr 8, 2016 14:14
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All bananas are functionally clones of each other. Does this mean all bananas are one single organism? I certainly hope not, lest the worlds tropical peoples starve for want of fruit!
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Apr 8, 2016 14:16
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rudatron posted:Self isn't fungible just because it's dynamic, that doesn't follow. Nor are memories, values or context the sole constituents of self or consciousness, because all 3 are replicable. If you meet someone else that had all three the same as yours, could you really say you were the same person? My point is that if you take away everything about a person which is replicable, there's nothing left -- unless there's a soul.
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Apr 8, 2016 14:36
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:My point is that if you take away everything about a person which is replicable, there's nothing left -- unless there's a soul. That doesn't make a replica literally the original, it's still a replica. Otherwise you'd be saying that anything mass-produced in a factory is the exact same singular item, rather than distinct individual items that are identical in appearance and construction.
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Apr 8, 2016 14:50
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Piell posted:If you shoot one body in the head does the other one die? No, because they're not the same organism. That's assuming in the hypothetical I am cloned and not instantaneously zapped into / out of existence. In which case I would argue the two consciousnesses are one in the same. Who's to say the just because they're separated by space that they could not be entangled in such a way that the experiences of one are the experiences of the other. If one was shot in the head the other could still experience it, after which that part of me would cease being. Just as I can experience my hand being chopped off, yet after doing so the sensation of poking my hand is no longer part of my experience. A hypothetical for all those who argue cloning constitutes the creation of a new being separate from the original (that is, we take it as a given that the two consciousnesses are not entangled): Suppose our cloning / teleportation machine works one of two ways (with a 50/50 chance of either method being used): Method A: You are cloned and your clone pops into existence at the destination while the original is destroyed. Method B: The rest of your universe is cloned and then pops into existence such that your original being simply appears to have been teleported Short of an absolute reference frame, how can we distinguish whether it's clone me or clone universe? If there is no way to distinguish between the two, are they not equivalent? If you posit that they are not equivalent, then do you not have to similarly reject Einstein's notion of general relativity?
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Apr 8, 2016 14:55
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A hypothetical for all those who argue cloning does not constitute the creation of a new being separate from the original: Make two clones. Shoot one in the head. The other one is still alive, and thus we obviously have two beings (one dead, and one alive). Piell fucked around with this message at 15:05 on Apr 8, 2016 |
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Apr 8, 2016 15:01
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skeet decorator posted:That's assuming in the hypothetical I am cloned and not instantaneously zapped into / out of existence. In which case I would argue the two consciousnesses are one in the same. Who's to say the just because they're separated by space that they could not be entangled in such a way that the experiences of one are the experiences of the other. If one was shot in the head the other could still experience it, after which that part of me would cease being. Just as I can experience my hand being chopped off, yet after doing so the sensation of poking my hand is no longer part of my experience. Because that's not a thing that happens to identical twins, despite effectively being clones of one another. Nobody would seriously say that twins are actually one person in two bodies, but rather that they are two people in bodies that happen to be identical.
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Apr 8, 2016 15:03
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skeet decorator posted:That's assuming in the hypothetical I am cloned and not instantaneously zapped into / out of existence. In which case I would argue the two consciousnesses are one in the same. Who's to say the just because they're separated by space that they could not be entangled in such a way that the experiences of one are the experiences of the other. If one was shot in the head the other could still experience it, after which that part of me would cease being. Just as I can experience my hand being chopped off, yet after doing so the sensation of poking my hand is no longer part of my experience. Two indistinguishable objects are not the same object.
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Apr 8, 2016 15:04
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This is an aside, but I think this whole thread would enjoy the setting of the tabletop RPG "Eclipse Phase". It's about the last remants of humanity scattered across the stars after our civilization was destroyed by a crazed AI, in which many "humans" no longer have their bodies because they escaped Earth's destruction by transmitting their mind into deep space, and it's common to have numerous backup synthetic bodies that you swap between. A lot of the game's atmosphere relies on existential cyberpunk horror like what it means to have consciousness without physicality, or the effect it has on you when you upload your mind into a cyborg octopus, as well as the implications discussed here of having a "consciousness" that exists as a program that can be copied or backed up. There's a really decent & inexpensive FATE adaptation that's a bit of a lighter read now, too.
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Apr 8, 2016 15:28
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Piell posted:A hypothetical for all those who argue cloning does not constitute the creation of a new being separate from the original: I don't think people are genuinely confused about which entity is which; everyone knows there is a distinction between the original and the copy, even if we can't necessarily perceive it. The division is over whether it's significant, i.e. important enough to say "that's not my sister, she's made out of different atoms". I think largely this depends on what exactly you want out of the replicated object.
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Apr 8, 2016 15:30
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Lt. Danger posted:I don't think people are genuinely confused about which entity is which; everyone knows there is a distinction between the original and the copy, even if we can't necessarily perceive it. The division is over whether it's significant, i.e. important enough to say "that's not my sister, she's made out of different atoms". I think largely this depends on what exactly you want out of the replicated object. When that object is a person, perhaps the perspective of the person is more important? I mean, it may not matter to you whether you're living around your sister or a clone who is indistinguishable from your sister, but surely it matters to your sister.
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Apr 8, 2016 15:41
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I don't think anyone is arguing for people to be forcibly teleported against their will either.
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Apr 8, 2016 15:50
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Who What Now posted:Because that's not a thing that happens to identical twins, despite effectively being clones of one another. Nobody would seriously say that twins are actually one person in two bodies, but rather that they are two people in bodies that happen to be identical. Which twin is the original twin? They used to be a single organism and split. As for perdurantism still needs a mechanism. Absent a soul, we're all just Buddha/Hume bits. Shbobdb fucked around with this message at 16:27 on Apr 8, 2016 |
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Apr 8, 2016 16:01
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Lt. Danger posted:I don't think anyone is arguing for people to be forcibly teleported against their will either. I do. Pro teleporters should be sent to Mars.
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Apr 8, 2016 16:14
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Shbobdb posted:Which twin is the original twin? They used to be a single organism and split. I dunno, I don't know enough about fetal development off hand to say. If I had to give an answer, it would probably be that neither is the original, the original split into the two new entities. quote:As for perdurantism still needs a mechanism. Absent a soup, we're all just Buddha/Hume bits. What?
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Apr 8, 2016 16:25
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