Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Locked thread
Shbobdb
Dec 16, 2010

by Reene
Phone auto-correct fail.

Since we don't have a mechanism/explanation for an enduring self, why wouldn't you think teleportation would create two new beings with the passage of time, in the same way the passage of time continually creates just one new being?

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Control Volume
Dec 31, 2008

What if you teleported yourself faster than light across worlds, and then teleported back, and somehow ended back up in time, only you haven't done this yet and future you is the one telling you to step in the suicide teleportation box and that you need to teleport or this universal construct will collapse upon itself. Would you go in the box?

Peta
Dec 26, 2011

Shbobdb posted:

As for perdurantism still needs a mechanism. Absent a soul, we're all just Buddha/Hume bits.

What needs a mechanism for what?

Control Volume
Dec 31, 2008

Control Volume posted:

What if you teleported yourself faster than light across worlds, and then teleported back, and somehow ended back up in time, only you haven't done this yet and future you is the one telling you to step in the suicide teleportation box and that you need to teleport or this universal construct will collapse upon itself. Would you go in the box?

Addendum: what if none of this happens and its just your boss telling you to teleport to mars for a seminar or you'll be looking for a new job

WampaLord
Jan 14, 2010

Control Volume posted:

Addendum: what if none of this happens and its just your boss telling you to teleport to mars for a seminar or you'll be looking for a new job

"Longer than you think, Dad!"

projecthalaxy
Dec 27, 2008

Yes hello it is I Kurt's Secret Son


If such a teleporter was available, I would not want to use it because personally the concept of getting into a box, being annihilated utterly, and then having some ghoulish thing made of spare atoms that didn't exist five minutes ago suddenly start thinking it had lived my life, walked my streets, and loved my family while I am slowly being mopped out of the box by some kid working for eleven future bucks an hour seems really existentially bad to me. If you want to think I'm some sort of backwards irrational morlock for not wanting to be annihilated and replaced by some meat-based automaton, then feel free!

Shbobdb
Dec 16, 2010

by Reene
What creates the illusion of the self? What connects the consciousness of one moment to the consciousness of the next?

wateroverfire
Jul 3, 2010

Shbobdb posted:

What creates the illusion of the self? What connects the consciousness of one moment to the consciousness of the next?

What does it matter?

Who What Now
Sep 10, 2006

by Azathoth

Control Volume posted:

What if you teleported yourself faster than light across worlds, and then teleported back, and somehow ended back up in time, only you haven't done this yet and future you is the one telling you to step in the suicide teleportation box and that you need to teleport or this universal construct will collapse upon itself. Would you go in the box?

What if your posting was good? :boom:

SHISHKABOB
Nov 30, 2012

Fun Shoe

Control Volume posted:

What if you teleported yourself faster than light across worlds, and then teleported back, and somehow ended back up in time, only you haven't done this yet and future you is the one telling you to step in the suicide teleportation box and that you need to teleport or this universal construct will collapse upon itself. Would you go in the box?



What happens if we have two ppl the same age: one sits on earth, the other gets on a spaceship and flies away at near the 4/5 the speed of light and then at some point 20 light years away they stop their space ship and turn around and fly back. Which person is older????

Answer: the person on earth. Proof left as exercise.

SHISHKABOB
Nov 30, 2012

Fun Shoe

wateroverfire posted:

What does it matter?

I dunno dude existentialism and angst and poo poo like that? What's my purpose! Why am I here! Is there no reason? Is there meaning to life? Even one that I can construct? How would I construct that meaning of life? How can I justify it? What justifies it? How can I justify a constructed idea if it came entirely from inside my mind? blah blah blah

Now shut the gently caress up and get me those TPS reports by next Monday.

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

Who What Now posted:

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.

They're not the exact same singular item, but only because they occupy different space and are made of different atoms. We occupy different space and remake ourselves from different atoms all the time. You're not wrong, exactly, but you're giving "the original" and "a replica" a significance that they don't actually possess.

A banana is a banana. For any purpose that you would need a banana, any banana will do. This might no longer be true if you're talking about a green banana vs. a rotten, slimy banana, or a banana vs. a plantain, in the same way that I wouldn't want my memories replaced with completely different memories. But a banana rots over time, and I'll have different memories as I age and experience new things. Once you apply this logic to each part of what makes us, us, nothing remains.

The only part of that statement that should be controversial is the "self" that experiences qualia, but that's what I was getting at in my original post. I don't experience my past in the way that I experience my present, I only have my memories, and only because they're physically accessible in the present. I don't experience my future at all, until it becomes present. So there's no reason to think that it's the same "self" experiencing those moments as the one experiencing the current one.

Consciousness is probably just a phenomenon or a force like magnetism that doesn't have any actual "properties" of its own and doesn't have particular instances. You can have "this magnet" but not "this magnetism." It just conceptually describes a process that happens when matter is arranged in a certain way.

If you toss me in the duplication box, both the people who come out are Tuxedo Catfish. Neither one is the other Tuxedo Catfish, but if you wait two seconds, neither of them is the Tuxedo Catfish that was there two seconds ago either. But they're still Tuxedo Catfish because, after all, I was Tuxedo Catfish when I was twelve years old and I'm still Tuxedo Catfish now because that's how we conventionally think of identity.

Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 17:15 on Apr 8, 2016

GlyphGryph
Jun 23, 2013

Down came the glitches and burned us in ditches and we slept after eating our dead.

wateroverfire posted:

If anything, this thread has highlighted for me how 1) smart people can get hung up on language in uninteresting ways and 2) smart people can reason their way into believing the absolute dumbest things in uninteresting ways.

This is basically you describing your own contributions to this thread so far.

Who What Now posted:

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.

This applies for physical objects. But not all objects are physical objects, and I think "persons" would definitely fall in the emergent category. It's more akin to "If I download a copy of a video game on my computer, and my brother does the same, and we play together... are we playing the same game?"

Assuming both games are unmodified, would you consider them to be distinct games or identical games?

Personally, I'd consider them to be the same game, in much the same way I'd consider an exact duplicate of myself to be the same person. Of course, we're talking about a system that changes itself over time (a game like Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup is a good real life example of this), so for people it would be more accurate to say they start out as the same game but quickly diverge... at which point yes, we downloaded the same game from the server, both are games are historically descended from the same game, but the games themselves are different.

GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Apr 8, 2016

skeet decorator
Jun 19, 2005

442 grams of robot

Peta posted:

Two indistinguishable objects are not the same object.

Except I'm talking about experiences not material objects. There's no way to distinguish between the experience of being cloned or not, just as there is no way to distinguish between the experience of feeling the pull of gravity and the force of acceleration. Would you argue that there is a fundamental physical difference between an object in an non-inertial reference frame and one in a gravitational field?

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.

Well I don't really think zygotes have a sense of "self", so I'm not sure how that's relevant to the cloning of an organism with a fully developed consciousness.

Piell posted:

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).

I see you've ignored my argument entirely. Why is it not possible for both clone and original to share a sense of self? If I surgically remove my hand, stab a knife through the now removed hand, and then reattached it I would surely feel like my hand was stabbed (although the whole amputation/reattachment thing might overwhelm that feeling). If I neglect to reattach the hand, but instead insert a device that transmits all feeling from my now unattached hand back to my brain, I would surely feel my hand die, just as I would if it was still attached and a blood clot instead of a saw cut off all blood flow. Sure, if you stipulate that my clone and I can not share experiences (through quantum entanglement or whatever imagined wizardry), then yes I agree, tautologically one of us is dead and one of us is not. But if my clone and I share all memories and experiences then I would not claim that my dead clone constitutes a dead unique individual just as I would not claim my dead amputated hand does.

Control Volume
Dec 31, 2008

Let's say a teleporter automatically activated at a certain atmospheric altitude. If you were to place the teleporter on an aeroplane, and the aeroplane was placed on a treadmill that had a reverse velocity to the velocity of the aeroplane, and you were in the teleporter during takeoff, would you be able to achieve total obliteration of the self?

Lt. Danger
Dec 22, 2006

jolly good chaps we sure showed the hun

Control Volume posted:

Let's say a teleporter automatically activated at a certain atmospheric altitude. If you were to place the teleporter on an aeroplane, and the aeroplane was placed on a treadmill that had a reverse velocity to the velocity of the aeroplane, and you were in the teleporter during takeoff, would you be able to achieve total obliteration of the self?

Does the teleporter create a 1:1 copy, or is it only 1:0.999...?

GlyphGryph
Jun 23, 2013

Down came the glitches and burned us in ditches and we slept after eating our dead.
Is telecloning the correct course of action if our original body is pushed in front of a tram to save the lives of six orphan children?

GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 17:40 on Apr 8, 2016

Peta
Dec 26, 2011

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

They're not the exact same singular item, but only because they occupy different space and are made of different atoms.

No, it's not just that they occupy different space and are made of different atoms. They also do not identically perdure through time.

quote:

A banana is a banana. For any purpose that you would need a banana, any banana will do. This might no longer be true if you're talking about a green banana vs. a rotten, slimy banana, or a banana vs. a plantain, in the same way that I wouldn't want my memories replaced with completely different memories. But a banana rots over time, and I'll have different memories as I age and experience new things. Once you apply this logic to each part of what makes us, us, nothing remains.

This isn't analogous. A very large number of people (I hope) would refuse to say, "My sister or any given replica of my sister will do." They will want the original, all other things being equal, because the original is the one with whom they have had an interpersonal relationship and history.

quote:

If you toss me in the duplication box, both the people who come out are Tuxedo Catfish. Neither one is the other Tuxedo Catfish, but if you wait two seconds, neither of them is the Tuxedo Catfish that was there two seconds ago either. But they're still Tuxedo Catfish because, after all, I was Tuxedo Catfish when I was twelve years old and I'm still Tuxedo Catfish now because that's how we conventionally think of identity.

That last sentence looks to me like a total non sequitur...?

Peta
Dec 26, 2011

skeet decorator posted:

Except I'm talking about experiences not material objects. There's no way to distinguish between the experience of being cloned or not, just as there is no way to distinguish between the experience of feeling the pull of gravity and the force of acceleration. Would you argue that there is a fundamental physical difference between an object in an non-inertial reference frame and one in a gravitational field?

Whether or not we can distinguish between A and B has absolutely nothing to do with whether A and B are equivalent.

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

Peta posted:

This isn't analogous. A very large number of people (I hope) would refuse to say, "My sister or any given replica of my sister will do." They will want the original, all other things being equal, because the original is the one with whom they have had an interpersonal relationship and history.

They want the sister who loves them, who remembers them, who will react the way they expect their sister to react, and so on. Talking about "the original" is a misconception because, as I've said, in the absence of a soul your consciousness springs anew from your physical characteristics from moment to moment. The things that make your sister your sister are much more specific and difficult to replicate than "a banana" but both "a banana" and "your sister" are actually categories containing numerous instances.

Peta posted:

That last sentence looks to me like a total non sequitur...?

It looks like one, but it's really just a poverty of language issue. We call the succession of many slightly different Tuxedo Catfish instances "Tuxedo Catfish" because, normally, that's less confusing instead of more.

GlyphGryph
Jun 23, 2013

Down came the glitches and burned us in ditches and we slept after eating our dead.
I feel like whether do you see people more as physical objects or systems analogs is what the debate ultimately comes down to.

Are we the game cd, or the piece of software on the game cd? The physical arrangement of atoms or the information that arrangement contains?

Peta, do you see multiple copies of software as distinct pieces of software or different instances of the same software? (Which I guess is asking if you believe the second category even exists whether or not it applies to people)

Agents are GO!
Dec 29, 2004

Another thing to note is that the truth only matters if you're aware of it. If I was to slip you a roofie, run you through the teleporter, then sneak you into your bed, you'd never even suspect, and it wouldn't matter.

Also: imagine four clones on the edge of a cliff...

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.
Basically, identity is very similar to magical thinking about cleanliness or hygiene. If I eyedroppered a single drop of urine into a swimming pool in front of you, nobody would want to swim in it -- because everything in that pool "touched urine" and therefore inherited its uncleanliness. Identity works the same way, just in a positive sense; the past me touched the present me, so I inherit that sameness.

In each case, though, it's only a very rough approximation of what's actually happening in the physical substrate. The truth, of course, is that you have pee inside of you right now and yet you're not "unclean" in that social-ritual sense, because cleanliness is really just a system of rules to protect your health, some of which are accurate, some of which work but not for the reasons we intuitively think, and some of which are completely vestigial or arbitrary -- and in any case, not an actual physical description of what you contain.

Who What Now
Sep 10, 2006

by Azathoth

Agents are GO! posted:

Another thing to note is that the truth only matters if you're aware of it. If I was to slip you a roofie, run you through the teleporter, then sneak you into your bed, you'd never even suspect, and it wouldn't matter.

Also: imagine four clones on the edge of a cliff...

I think it would definitely matter that you roofied someone.

GlyphGryph
Jun 23, 2013

Down came the glitches and burned us in ditches and we slept after eating our dead.

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

Basically, identity is very similar to magical thinking about cleanliness or hygiene. If I eyedroppered a single drop of urine into a swimming pool in front of you, nobody would want to swim in it -- because everything in that pool "touched urine" and therefore inherited its uncleanliness. Identity works the same way, just in a positive sense; the past me touched the present me, so I inherit that sameness.

In a way, the continuity people are using the same argument that homeopaths do - that "history" matters irregardless of an objects actual attributes...

Obviously a viewpoint with emotional appeal, but I can't see how the people supporting it can claim themselves to be the "practical" ones.

skeet decorator
Jun 19, 2005

442 grams of robot

Peta posted:

Whether or not we can distinguish between A and B has absolutely nothing to do with whether A and B are equivalent.

Maybe you should define what you mean by equivalent then, because the equivalence principal is a pretty central part of relativity. The experience of an object in a non-inertial reference frame and one in a gravitational field is equivalent in every single way. We can use the exact same formalism to test/experiment/make predictions with both situations, in every meaningful way the forces are equivalent.

If every single meaningful relationship between myself and its experience of "self", as well as between myself and the world around me is indistinguishable if I am a clone or not then what exactly is the difference between being cloned and not cloned? Other than your insistence that one is not the other. Do you imagine some sort of absolute reference frame, call it an "ether" if you will, that somehow keeps track of who is and is not a clone?

Just as scientists imagined an absolute reference frame in space and then proceeded to contort it to fit the problems that observation/experiment posed to it, we can do the same for your clone ether. But if ultimately both formulations lead to the same conclusions are they not just different ways of expressing the same thing?

Peta
Dec 26, 2011

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

They want the sister who loves them, who remembers them, who will react the way they expect their sister to react, and so on. Talking about "the original" is a misconception because, as I've said, in the absence of a soul your consciousness springs anew from your physical characteristics from moment to moment. The things that make your sister your sister are much more specific and difficult to replicate than "a banana" but both "a banana" and "your sister" are actually categories containing numerous instances.

No, I don't think you need a soul for it to work; you just need some sort of persistence.

quote:

It looks like one, but it's really just a poverty of language issue. We call the succession of many slightly different Tuxedo Catfish instances "Tuxedo Catfish" because, normally, that's less confusing instead of more.

Right, but my view is that they're not many slightly different Tuxedo Catfish instances. They're one Tuxedo Catfish perduring through time. But you don't perdure through the type of teleportation described in the thought experiment. I couldn't locate you anywhere in the region of time that follows your death, just like I couldn't locate Julius Caesar anywhere in the region of time extending onward from March 15, 44 BCE.


GlyphGryph posted:

I feel like whether do you see people more as physical objects or systems analogs is what the debate ultimately comes down to.

Are we the game cd, or the piece of software on the game cd? The physical arrangement of atoms or the information that arrangement contains?

Peta, do you see multiple copies of software as distinct pieces of software or different instances of the same software? (Which I guess is asking if you believe the second category even exists whether or not it applies to people)

Off the top of my head I'd say I see distinct objects containing the same (i.e., qualitatively identical) software. The same goes for humans.

My problem with accepting your sister's replica as just another version of your dead sister is that there's a fundamental delusion in the suggestion that the replica actually experienced the things that your dead sister experienced. Like, if I plant a memory of some experience that I've had in someone else's brain, such that they think that they've had that experience, I'm deceiving them - the fact is that they haven't had that experience. This territory seems ethically and aesthetically troublesome.

None of this is to say that you wouldn't or shouldn't love your sister's replica. The replica is a human being with human rights and human appeal all that good stuff. But you're loving her because she has the same qualities as your sister, not because she is your sister. Your sister is dead.

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

Peta posted:

No, I don't think you need a soul for it to work; you just need some sort of persistence.

I would consider the persistence you desire to be exactly the same thing as a soul. There's no physical basis for it, because we still call people in whom nothing physically the same persists, the same person.

Peta posted:

Right, but my view is that they're not many slightly different Tuxedo Catfish instances. They're one Tuxedo Catfish perduring through time. But you don't perdure through the type of teleportation described in the thought experiment. I couldn't locate you anywhere in the region of time that follows your death, just like I couldn't locate Julius Caesar anywhere in the region of time extending onward from March 15, 44 BCE.

How would you tell the difference? What measureable characteristics do I have that let you identify me as the same through all those years, but different after the teleport? What, exactly, persists?

GlyphGryph
Jun 23, 2013

Down came the glitches and burned us in ditches and we slept after eating our dead.

Peta posted:

Off the top of my head I'd say I see distinct objects containing the same (i.e., qualitatively identical) software. The same goes for humans.

But you agree that the software is identical, despite being numerically distinct. So it comes down to you thinking that the stratum the person exists in is integral to that person's identity and other people do not, but you agree that a copy of that person (by the attributes I and other on my side have been using to define "person") is in fact identical. The disagreement has nothing to do with numericality anymore, and is solely contingent on whether we consider the particular physical instance to be an integral part of the definition of person.

I would go back to split the organism - you said if it was split, and then re-assembled, it would be the same organism.

What if it was split for long enough that physical matter it was made of had largely changed (which can be rather quick in some species) and then re-assembled. Still the same living organism? How important is the phyiscal media to your perception of an organism's identity?

quote:

My problem with accepting your sister's replica as just another version of your dead sister is that there's a fundamental delusion in the suggestion that the replica actually experienced the things that your dead sister experienced.

How is this any more a delusion than thinking your living sister actually experienced the things her past self experienced? The only lasting mark is her memories. Why does she have any better claim to have experienced those things than the clone? Both of them carry the scars of their past equally, but neither are identical in absolute terms to the person that actually had those experiences.

quote:

Like, if I plant a memory of some experience that I've had in someone else's brain, such that they think that they've had that experience, I'm deceiving them - the fact is that they haven't had that experience. This territory seems ethically and aesthetically troublesome.
I'm not so sure it's that simple. think again about the split organisms, where you admitted that you can have partial identity. I'd argue those specific memories were a direct result of that experience, and that's the only true temporal continuation for a past experience. Those implanted memories would be genuine memories of that experience and even if the majority of the person was not the one that experienced them, some small part of them did.

GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Apr 8, 2016

deadly_pudding
May 13, 2009

who the fuck is scraeming
"LOG OFF" at my house.
show yourself, coward.
i will never log off
Existential dread Power Paragraph:

If you are physically annihilated without a trace, and instantly replaced by a perfect physical and mental duplicate who keeps in living your life exactly the way you would have lived it anyway, and nobody who meets that duplicate knows what happened, does it matter? Obviously, it matters to you, who got vaporized, but an individual is nothing if not completely insignificant before a broader universe, and absolutely nobody will realize that you are gone because "you" are still there among them. Or in other words, you no longer exist and therefore no longer perceive or contribute to reality, but "you" still exists and continues to do those things. It's sort of like the flawed "tree falls in the woods and nobody is there to hear it" scenario, but in this case it's, "If you die, and nobody has any way of knowing that you died because they continue to exist alongside what they believe to be definitely you, did you really die?"
Obviously, yeah, you died, but according to the entire rest of the universe, you did not die. Which one matters? You can get into some Phillip K. Dick territory here where you dissect in detail the difference between having the memory of doing something and actually having done it, but ultimately if a thing happened and you are the only person who remembers doing it, then anybody would agree that you must have done the thing.

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.
If nobody has any way of knowing you died, it's not obvious that you died. Maybe you did, but you'd better be able to define death in such a way that, once armed with your new definition, we can figure out whether you did or not. Otherwise it's nonsense.

The point of the tree in the forest thing is that "sound" actually describes two different and separate phenomena: the propagation of vibrations through physical matter, sound, but also the subjective experience of hearing -- which is also "sound." Language links them when they aren't necessarily linked, because if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, the first kind of sound exists, but the second kind doesn't.

Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 19:05 on Apr 8, 2016

SHISHKABOB
Nov 30, 2012

Fun Shoe
This thread reminded me of an episode of a tv show I like. The clip is about them replacing themselves in an alternate universe where they die, but then they pretend they are the alternate universe people, and the rest of the show continues without skipping a beat. Though Mr. Poopy Butthole is an enigma.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbzIgKRXUzc

deadly_pudding
May 13, 2009

who the fuck is scraeming
"LOG OFF" at my house.
show yourself, coward.
i will never log off

SHISHKABOB posted:

This thread reminded me of an episode of a tv show I like. The clip is about them replacing themselves in an alternate universe where they die, but then they pretend they are the alternate universe people, and the rest of the show continues without skipping a beat. Though Mr. Poopy Butthole is an enigma.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbzIgKRXUzc

They revisit this around the end of the of the first season, it's a pretty okay truncated version of this thread.

GlyphGryph
Jun 23, 2013

Down came the glitches and burned us in ditches and we slept after eating our dead.

SHISHKABOB posted:

This thread reminded me of an episode of a tv show I like. The clip is about them replacing themselves in an alternate universe where they die, but then they pretend they are the alternate universe people, and the rest of the show continues without skipping a beat. Though Mr. Poopy Butthole is an enigma.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbzIgKRXUzc

This happens in Eureka as well. A few times.

They don't worry about it nearly as much though.

wateroverfire
Jul 3, 2010

GlyphGryph posted:

This is basically you describing your own contributions to this thread so far.

This is identical to you not engaging with anything I've written. Whether it's because you're a poor poster or because you can't materialize a criticism is unknowable.

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.
Neither of the two common positions taken in this thread are dumb, because both sides rely at least a little bit on speculating about things which, presently and perhaps categorically, cannot be measured.

The whole thing is just "what happens after you die" rephrased and stacked on top of "hold on a second, there are gaps in how we define 'you' and 'die' that make it even harder to answer!"

GlyphGryph
Jun 23, 2013

Down came the glitches and burned us in ditches and we slept after eating our dead.

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

Neither of the two common positions taken in this thread are dumb, because both sides rely at least a little bit on speculating about things which, presently and perhaps categorically, cannot be measured.

I agree, thinking someone's position is dumb just because it's not yours is pretty silly.

GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 19:27 on Apr 8, 2016

Shbobdb
Dec 16, 2010

by Reene

wateroverfire posted:

What does it matter?

Basically because of GlyphGryph's comment about homeopathy. I'd fully expect the "me" that is thought to endure from one second to the next would endure the same way whether I was teleported or not. Other people seems to be reifying the self and consciousness. That's fine, but if we're going to treat them as real or fundamental in some sense we need to be able to describe them in some meaningful way.

Oh dear clone
Apr 8, 2016

Peta posted:

My problem with accepting your sister's replica as just another version of your dead sister is that there's a fundamental delusion in the suggestion that the replica actually experienced the things that your dead sister experienced. Like, if I plant a memory of some experience that I've had in someone else's brain, such that they think that they've had that experience, I'm deceiving them - the fact is that they haven't had that experience. This territory seems ethically and aesthetically troublesome.

If you plant a false memory in someone's mind, it will be false, yes; and until they discover that you have done so they will mistakenly believe themselves to have experienced something. But this has no relevance whatsoever to a the condition of a transported person, who will know perfectly well that they were assembled by the transporter and that all their memories dating from before that were experienced by a different set of atoms. There is no deception or falsity involved.

Moreover what matters to me, in my memory of some person or event, is the person or event, not the molecules I consisted of at the time. My memories of what happened , or who said what, would be just as true after transportation as before.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

SHISHKABOB
Nov 30, 2012

Fun Shoe

Oh dear clone posted:

If you plant a false memory in someone's mind, it will be false, yes; and until they discover that you have done so they will mistakenly believe themselves to have experienced something. But this has no relevance whatsoever to a the condition of a transported person, who will know perfectly well that they were assembled by the transporter and that all their memories dating from before that were experienced by a different set of atoms. There is no deception or falsity involved.

Moreover what matters to me, in my memory of some person or event, is the person or event, not the molecules I consisted of at the time. My memories of what happened , or who said what, would be just as true after transportation as before.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbVvF5wWqf0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szzVlQ653as

I love this show.

  • Locked thread