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General Battuta posted:Now just crank this process up to 'really fast' and congrats, you have a teleporter. it is founded in the physical reality that i will die lol
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Mar 14, 2023 06:30
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mllaneza posted:All of this is pointless, you are conscious throughout the transport process. That just means all the different post-mes remember the process. It doesn't matter whether or not Theseus knows you're copying his ship; your copy isn't his ship.
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Mar 14, 2023 06:51
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Hobbes's extension of the experiment is the more interesting one at any rate. Not really applicable to the transporter paradox because it implies a transfer of matter over time instead of instantaneous copying.
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Mar 14, 2023 07:02
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Permutation City by Greg Egan has some really interesting things to say about the nature of consciousness and how it arises from the relationship and interaction of _things_. I DNF because I suffered a crippling bout of existential and philosophical dread. Depending on the specifics, I'd be ok chucking myself through a star trek transporter, but gently caress uploading my mind. I ain't doing that poo poo in this late-stage capitalist hellscape we live in.
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Mar 14, 2023 07:28
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TastyShrimpPlatter posted:but gently caress uploading my mind. I ain't doing that poo poo in this late-stage capitalist hellscape we live in. If you consider it as setting a time bomb for revenge, a last-ditch upload makes a lot of sense. If I can't bring the bastards down, someone who thinks they're me might.
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Mar 14, 2023 07:54
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Ooh! Ooh! Are we getting into Self and the Future territory? We gonna get to the part where we torture the hypothetical teleporter-copies to figure out how people really feel about them?Hieronymous Alloy posted:That just means all the different post-mes remember the process. It doesn't matter whether or not Theseus knows you're copying his ship; your copy isn't his ship. Funnily enough a sort of Ship of Theseus approach is the most compelling one to me for continuity of personal identity over time. But yeah all of this wool-gathering about exact-copy teleporters suffers from the same problem as the thought experiments philosophers use to think about this stuff: there is zero evidence that copying a mind or a body is even possible, and fairly compelling reasons to believe it never will be.
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Mar 14, 2023 08:01
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My favourite teleporter story is in Kraken, which is primarily an urban fantasy novel. One guy invents a magic teleporter (IIRC he was a trekkie and the device was powered by the intensity of his obsession with the show). Except, oops, souls are real in this world and now he's haunted by dozens of ghosts of himself.
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Mar 14, 2023 08:04
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Any book that can inspire dread sounds interesting! Added to the to-read pile. I remember Egan's short stories being solid but a little dry, so I guess I'll see how Permutation City compares Not quite sci-fi, but is Parfit's Reasons and Persons still relevant here? From half-remembered Phil 101 lectures I remember his intuitions about the usual identity thought experiments mostly aligning with my own, but 1984 was a while ago. Maybe there's a new school of thought in town?
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Mar 14, 2023 08:07
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Everyone posted:I'm just flashing back to West End Games Paranoia RPG when every player started with something like six clones because characters died quickly and horribly in that game. Paranoia was great for that. I used to GM it and played the Computer as the ship's computer from Dark Star. Although the chief skill required for a Paranoia GM is to not corpse during the mission briefing while explaining to a player that not only is the vital piece of mission information he has requested not available at his security clearance, he also isn't high enough security clearance to be told what clearance he requires.
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Mar 14, 2023 09:56
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Sibling of TB posted:I don't get it. Is that the rationalist meltdown? Yeah, that's Roko's Basilisk. It has to be explained with a lot of "no, really, it really is that incredibly stupid trust me you're not misunderstanding."
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Mar 14, 2023 11:21
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CaptainCrunch posted:I mean yes? I never claimed to be a being of pure logic and reason. I'll die no matter what I do, I can't change that. But I can avoid stepping into any transporters and dying then. Discussions like this always make me feel as if I'm being peer pressured into sci-fi transporter suicide. You're just being peer pressured into accepting the truth, the light and the way, physicalist monism. You can view any thought experiment of the form "I do something horrible, but an identical copy of me survives" as equivalent to "I survive, but an identical copy of me is forced to do something horrible". As you enter such a situation, ask yourself: am I comfortable with one of my causal descendants shooting themself in the head, knowing that me, my consciousness, is going to go forward and experience that—along one of the forks I'm about to create? If not, don't do it. quote:Instantiating a copy of me, after I've kicked it for whatever reason, is A-OK with me, because it wouldn't be me. It would be you. From your post-resurrection perspective you'd just have a gap in your memory. After all, the only reason we can claim to be the same people we were yesterday is that our structure today is deeply caused by who we were yesterday. The fact that some part of that causation is, say, a digital backup device doesn't change that. Doktor Avalanche posted:it is founded in the physical reality that i will die lol But you won't lol! The good news is here: if we get disintegrated and then put back together again we don't actually die. Because it ain't the disintegration that kills us, any more than it's the heart stopping or the head exploding or the skin turning to rhinestones. It's the staying that way which kills ya. Death is just irrecoverable loss of state. If the state survives, so do you.
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Mar 14, 2023 14:30
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Absurd Alhazred posted:I always thought consciousness was a thorny philosophical subject. Little did I realize that the leading minds in the field are right here in a thread about genre fiction, ready to educate me. Who else would care enough to have opinions, really
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Mar 14, 2023 14:30
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I would allow none of you around any of my causal descendants.
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Mar 14, 2023 15:07
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CaptainCrunch posted:I mean yes? I never claimed to be a being of pure logic and reason. I'll die no matter what I do, I can't change that. But I can avoid stepping into any transporters and dying then. Discussions like this always make me feel as if I'm being peer pressured into sci-fi transporter suicide. From the perspective of the "you" that would hypothetically be teleported, these conditions are identical, barring the heart transplant (which also isn't necessary for the hypothetical). From the perspective of you, now, they also seem the same to me. Your current consciousness will end on induction of the anesthesia. I'm really not seeing how they are different at all without there being some core essence that isn't just an emergent property of neurons and hormones. I don't know, maybe there is more to consciousness than that. Like...would you be somehow ok with this process taking place over days, with parts of you physically existing in both locations until enough of your new brain wakes up? You would have some degree of physical continuity there.
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Mar 14, 2023 15:10
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CaptainCrunch posted:There's is no amount of philosophical hand waving that is going to convince me that it's a-ok to vaporize yourself because a perfect duplicate appears somewhere else. The me of now dies. End of line. Yeah but in Altered Carbon people are aware of this but just don't give a gently caress and the main issue the Catholics have is over what happens to the soul. It is extremely easy to believe that smart marketing would quickly create a generation of people that simply do not care. In Peter F. Hamilton's books society is also totally A-ok with restoring a copy of themselves from old memory backups to the point where they'll go intergalactic thrillseeking totally comfortable knowing they'll probably die. This is maybe less believable but also in line with how a lot of people act even without the possibility of having a backup. Tiny Timbs fucked around with this message at 15:23 on Mar 14, 2023 |
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Mar 14, 2023 15:19
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I'm trying to piss of Roko's Basilisk so bad that it exclusively targets me. Yeah it sounds stupid and it is, but you'll all be calling me a hero in five million years when you're comfortably, blissfully dead and I'm stuck in an eternity of robot hell. Hey Roko's Basilisk, I could've invented you yesterday but I didn't. Soulless dumbass. You'll never understand music or properly taste a burger. gently caress you.
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Mar 14, 2023 15:21
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General Battuta posted:It would be you. From your post-resurrection perspective you'd just have a gap in your memory. After all, the only reason we can claim to be the same people we were yesterday is that our structure today is deeply caused by who we were yesterday. The fact that some part of that causation is, say, a digital backup device doesn't change that. This is where the irreconcilable differences hit me. It's not going to be my post-resurrection perspective, it'd be his. A perfect copy is still a copy. Hell, my perfect copy is goin to have the exact same opinion and will likely develop a fairly serious substance abuse habit post res. Still enjoy reading books about this poo poo tho! Read one, can't remember the title or author, where a guy with some incurable disease opts for an upload to robot procedure. It involves signing away your legal personhood, irrevocably, to the robot copy. The narrative shifts to the robot after that and he finds himself plagued by lawsuits from the flesh-him who, after a year or two in the hospice, was cured of the disease by a new treatment and wants his bank accounts and freedom back. Robot him just waits for the fleshbag to die of old age. There's also a primary plot that he's the only robot upload who can have concurrent running copies because of something to do with how the quantum dots of his consciousness (I forget exactly how the author handwaved it) and so he allows unactivated copies to be sent out on sub-light space probes to explore other star systems. I think he had telepathy with his copies too, because if entanglement?
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Mar 14, 2023 15:28
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Ravenfood posted:Now, I know there is some degree of consciousness during sleep, but let's take incredibly deep anesthesia for a second. We place you in as deep of an anesthetic coma as we can, do a heart transplant or whatever, and then move you somewhere else. You wake up. Funnily enough, there was a huge ethical argument over anesthesia when it was invented. https://daily.jstor.org/19th-century-anesthesia-and-the-politics-of-pain/
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Mar 14, 2023 15:30
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CaptainCrunch posted:This is where the irreconcilable differences hit me. It's not going to be my post-resurrection perspective, it'd be his. A perfect copy is still a copy. There's also, definitionally, no such thing as a "perfect" copy. The notion is oxymoronic, an impossibility. I'm standing *here*. My copy is over *there*. It takes up a different position in space and time. It has a different perspective. That perspective shift *by itself* voids the authenticity of the copy. All a human being is, end of the day, boils down to a point of view -- however limited, mutable, or frangible. And that's the one thing that can't be copied. If sheets of paper had sentience and you ran them all through a Xerox and printed the exact same thing on every page, each individual sheet would have an ever-so-slightly different view of the world. (click for big if you don't mind Sandman spoilers) 
Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 15:42 on Mar 14, 2023 |
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Mar 14, 2023 15:34
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:There's also, definitionally, no such thing as a "perfect" copy. The notion is oxymoronic, an impossibility. And in the case of brain upload, it’s not even close. No-one talks about how much the PNS and other non-neural parts of the body also affect someone’s feelings and personality. Futurist bros only think about the brain and how liberating it would be to shed their “meat” but what that might do to the mind could be totally horrific
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Mar 14, 2023 15:40
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Tiny Timbs posted:Yeah but in Altered Carbon people are aware of this but just don't give a gently caress and the main issue the Catholics have is over what happens to the soul. It is extremely easy to believe that smart marketing would quickly create a generation of people that simply do not care. John Varley did it first. Everyone has backups, and should they die the backup gets copied into a new cloned body and bingo. I can't remember which story it is offhand that has the protagonist dealing with murder attempts from an illegally-created clone with her memories who's knocking off every new her that's created in the hope of managing to take over (there's only one example of a person legally allowed at one time).
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Mar 14, 2023 15:45
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Runcible Cat posted:John Varley did it first. Everyone has backups, and should they die the backup gets copied into a new cloned body and bingo. That one’s actually free to read on his website https://varley.net/excerpt/the-phantom-of-kansas-full-text/
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Mar 14, 2023 15:48
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Ravenfood posted:Now, I know there is some degree of consciousness during sleep, but let's take incredibly deep anesthesia for a second. We place you in as deep of an anesthetic coma as we can, do a heart transplant or whatever, and then move you somewhere else. You wake up. Also, I only went through that to save my life. It's not something I'd do casually. Certainly not for lunch in Paris, etc. etc. Ravenfood posted:Like...would you be somehow ok with this process taking place over days, with parts of you physically existing in both locations until enough of your new brain wakes up? You would have some degree of physical continuity there. Tiny Timbs posted:Yeah but in Altered Carbon people are aware of this but just don't give a gently caress and the main issue the Catholics have is over what happens to the soul. It is extremely easy to believe that smart marketing would quickly create a generation of people that simply do not care. Oh absolutely. Look how many nitwits are excited to jam Musk's Patent Monkey-Murder Mental Machine into their heads so they can put their brain on the blockchain or whatever the gently caress. Marketing would absolute convince a large number of people that Stuporstar posted:And in the case of brain upload, it’s not even close. No-one talks about how much the PNS and other non-neural parts of the body also affect someone’s feelings and personality. Futurist bros only think about the brain and how liberating it would be to shed their “meat” but what that might do to the mind could be totally horrific I loved Altered Carbon, the existential horror was part of the ride for me.
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Mar 14, 2023 15:49
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Stuporstar posted:And in the case of brain upload, it’s not even close. No-one talks about how much the PNS and other non-neural parts of the body also affect someone’s feelings and personality. Futurist bros only think about the brain and how liberating it would be to shed their “meat” but what that might do to the mind could be totally horrific
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Mar 14, 2023 15:52
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Peter Watts would have the gut microbes running the show
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Mar 14, 2023 15:58
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https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6315
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Mar 14, 2023 16:02
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CaptainCrunch posted:This is where the irreconcilable differences hit me. It's not going to be my post-resurrection perspective, it'd be his. A perfect copy is still a copy.) A guy coming out of a teleporter is quantifiably much more you than the guy you're gonna be tomorrow (forgive me for assuming your gender, assume gender-neutral guy). But we don't have any trouble believing we're gonna become that guy tomorrow. Why? Well, because the media of transfer is familiar. We're comfy with our warm wet brains bubbling along. We know they'll carry us safely through the next 24 hours, barring any stroke or sudden stop on the sidewalk. Bring in a weird strange teleporter that vaporizes you and it's just unfamiliar. It seems spooky to not exist. Where we do go? What do we become? Well, the answer is unsatisfyingly simple. Nothing happens to you. You don't go anywhere. As long as that teleporter puts you back together again right, less has happened to you than during a drive to the store or a walk down to the subway stop. We know this because everything you are is physical, including your identity, your very perspective. And if we have a working teleporter, we can check, literally run on a diff on you before and after the teleport. Et voila: all is well. You have not been killed and replaced by a duplicate. You have been picked up, paused, moved, and restarted. In fact we can then use that teleporter to keep printing more and more of you, all of whom will correctly say they are the Real You, and all of whom will probably have strong opinions about who gets to sleep in the bed at night. This is where things get legally and morally complex. But not philosophically. Philosophically it's all simple as water.
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Mar 14, 2023 16:08
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Short version: if a perfect copy is still a copy, then you a Planck instant from now will just be a perfect copy of you right now, copied and pasted through the medium of matter. And I doubt anyone believes we die and are replaced by a duplicate every instant. Or if they do, it doesn't bother them.
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Mar 14, 2023 16:09
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Stuporstar posted:That one’s actually free to read on his website https://varley.net/excerpt/the-phantom-of-kansas-full-text/ That's the one! And has some good discussion about the various versions of Fox all starting from the same set of memories in different circumstances. Suing for "alienation of personality" when a murderer fucks up and doesn't delete your backup lmao.
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Mar 14, 2023 16:21
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don't kill yourself teleporting battuta, the machine will make a lovely copy and miss whatever makes you write good
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Mar 14, 2023 16:34
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I'm going to teleport to your mom's house and fail to fix her printer
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Mar 14, 2023 16:35
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I'm gonna hide a copy of Battlefield Earth in the teleportation machine before he uses it
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Mar 14, 2023 16:36
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CaptainCrunch posted:I've been through that, twice. And yes, I have struggled with the question of if I'm still the same "me" after each one. The fact that my brain is still "on"--there were wires glued to my head to prove it!--is what let me sleep at night afterward. Depending on how deep they were trying to put you, the wires weren't monitoring you being "on", but actually that you were deep enough. I've definitely seen EEGs so suppressed they were identical to a dead person's. I'm not saying that an EEG is the only (or even a good) measure of consciousness, but it is a measure of brain electrical activity, and thats as near to "off" as I can think of. Their brain tissue was preserved (as the isoelectric EEG was medication induced) and they were able to recover without issue. So, yeah. Don't know what that means for you, or what your monitoring was or what your sedation goal was. E: Stuporstar posted:And in the case of brain upload, it’s not even close. No-one talks about how much the PNS and other non-neural parts of the body also affect someone’s feelings and personality. Futurist bros only think about the brain and how liberating it would be to shed their “meat” but what that might do to the mind could be totally horrific Ravenfood fucked around with this message at 16:47 on Mar 14, 2023 |
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Mar 14, 2023 16:36
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Stuporstar posted:No-one talks about how much the PNS and other non-neural parts of the body also affect someone’s feelings and personality. Futurist bros only think about the brain and how liberating it would be to shed their “meat” but what that might do to the mind could be totally horrific
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Mar 14, 2023 16:42
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Tiny Timbs posted:I'm gonna hide a copy of Battlefield Earth in the teleportation machine before he uses it farrier hooking up baru to an e-meter
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Mar 14, 2023 16:58
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GB i appreciate your commitment to convincing people that dualism is for suckers.
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Mar 14, 2023 16:59
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General Battuta posted:Well, the answer is unsatisfyingly simple. Nothing happens to you. You don't go anywhere. As long as that teleporter puts you back together again right, less has happened to you than during a drive to the store or a walk down to the subway stop. We know this because everything you are is physical, including your identity, your very perspective. And if we have a working teleporter, we can check, literally run on a diff on you before and after the teleport. Et voila: all is well. You have not been killed and replaced by a duplicate. You have been picked up, paused, moved, and restarted. Ravenfood posted:Depending on how deep they were trying to put you, the wires weren't monitoring you being "on", but actually that you were deep enough.
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Mar 14, 2023 17:02
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People usually start laughing and owning on me when I ask this question (more so than before I mean) but I really do mean it seriously: why should being disintegrated kill you? This isn’t a rhetorical question, I actually specifically mean, why does having your body reduced to caroming vapors kill you? Ordinarily it does kill you, I agree, but why? Why is being disintegrated bad for you in a way that, say, getting a two degree fever isn’t?
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Mar 14, 2023 17:07
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teleported authors can tweet.
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Mar 14, 2023 17:10
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Just ignore me if you don’t want to talk about this any more; it’s my special brain worm
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Mar 14, 2023 17:11
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