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Oh dear clone posted:Of course not, since my clone does not now exist. The point I was making is that the coming into existence of my clone after the death of this body would prevent grief at my death, which the coming into existence of my non-existent children would not. It is thus (among other reasons) false to suppose that if I want the former I should want all the latter. Children coming into existence would not prevent your loved ones from feeling grief at your death, of course. But they would most likely have their own lives and their own loved ones with relationships equally valuable to yours. This is why this is an essentially egoist argument, you are very concerned about whether potential people can help you and yours and apparently indifferent or unaware of how potential people could have their own value or provide it to others. Simply put, the coming into existence of your non-existent children would create a lot of human value whether it affects your loved ones or not, and if you believe in the value of potential people there's no reason not to value that beyond pure prejudice. Thug Lessons fucked around with this message at 01:10 on Apr 18, 2016 |
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Apr 18, 2016 00:57
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Thug Lessons posted:But what I would definitely argue is that you cannot use these identifications to do an end-run around moral laws. You cannot steal my car because it is identical to yours, you cannot press a button on a teleporter and kill me because it creates an identical clone. It would be amoral not because I am actually killing you, but because you would believed yourself to have been killed. Not unlike photographing someone who strongly believes that something is being taken from them by a camera. I can completely understand the intuitive sense behind it, but I don't think its a reasonable belief. It wouldn't be stealing your car if the end result is that you have your exact same car. Theft is morally wrong because it deprives someone of something.
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Apr 18, 2016 01:52
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Thug Lessons posted:Children coming into existence would not prevent your loved ones from feeling grief at your death, of course. But they would most likely have their own lives and their own loved ones with relationships equally valuable to yours. Which is completely irrelevant. The point is that no one suffers (to our knowledge) from their lack of existence, while people will most assuredly suffer from a sudden lack of mine. You're comparing apples to oranges, the direct comparison for your example would be a time machine that we could use to go back and prevent me from having been born which is... not really supporting your point here, and not relevant to the situation.
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Apr 18, 2016 02:04
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crowoutofcontext posted:It would be amoral not because I am actually killing you, but because you would believed yourself to have been killed. Not unlike photographing someone who strongly believes that something is being taken from them by a camera. I can completely understand the intuitive sense behind it, but I don't think its a reasonable belief. The car example does deprive me of a car though. You now have two identical cars, self-justified on the basis that the cars are physically the same, and I have none. It's an illustrative example because it's very that moral rules apply regardless of whether objects are physically identical, whereas in the case of teleporters it becomes divisive because people place an undue emphasis on their own view of identity.
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Apr 18, 2016 02:06
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crowoutofcontext posted:Theft is morally wrong because it deprives someone of something. No, it's also morally wrong because it innately deprives someone of their person-hood and rights in the name of your self-gratification. Who are you to say what you can and can not do with my car?
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Apr 18, 2016 02:07
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GlyphGryph posted:Which is completely irrelevant. The point is that no one suffers (to our knowledge) from their lack of existence, while people will most assuredly suffer from a sudden lack of mine. Actually I believe you'll find it is you who are comparing apples to oranges. No one suffers from the lack of unborn children's existence, and no one suffers from the lack of unmade clones' existence. We are all talking about potential value or detriment based on potential people.
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Apr 18, 2016 02:10
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Boogaleeboo posted:No, it's also morally wrong because it innately deprives someone of their person-hood and rights in the name of your self-gratification. Who are you to say what you can and can not do with my car? Yeah, as I said their is an ethical dimension of it that is inherently wrong, but I don't believe I'm depriving someone of person-hood or killing them in any meaningful sense. We obviously have different value-systems and I have yo respect yours even if I disagree with it. It would (sort of) be like if I was a doctor in charge of over-seeing an In vitro fertilisation to a conservative Christian couple that believed personal identity began with an embryo and they developed an emotional connection to the thing but I purposely destroyed and created a new one with some of the very same sperm and eggs just to prove to myself that I could screw with "God's plan", it would be a super dick move even if I didn't tell them and I wouldn't do it for the same reason I wouldn't put someone in a teleporter for no good reason. In both cases I would be accused of killing something when I don't think I have in any meaningful sense.
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Apr 18, 2016 03:05
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Thug Lessons posted:The car example does deprive me of a car though. You now have two identical cars, self-justified on the basis that the cars are physically the same, and I have none. It's an illustrative example because it's very that moral rules apply regardless of whether objects are physically identical, whereas in the case of teleporters it becomes divisive because people place an undue emphasis on their own view of identity. Not the best example because we both, I think, agree that the important part of the brain is its emergent properties, but you think the emergent properties are somehow connected to the fact that if the brain's particles are dissembled and re-assembled the emergent properties are experienced by someone new. It would be like if your big dream was to experience a cross-American road trip (Emergent property of the brain) in your Dad's Chevy 64 pick-up (Your Original Brain) and I put the pick-up through the teleporter the night before you left and you accused me of depriving you of ever having the opportunity to do the roadtrip in your Dad's Chevy 64-pick-up even if it was exactly the same vehicle, down to the scratches and microscopic details. I still think I would have done something wrong, but I wouldn't believe I "destroyed" the Chevy or the particular roadtrip either. crowoutofcontext fucked around with this message at 03:29 on Apr 18, 2016 |
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Apr 18, 2016 03:19
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crowoutofcontext posted:Not the best example because we both, I think, agree that the important part of the brain is its emergent properties, but you think the emergent properties are somehow connected to the fact that if the brain's particles are dissembled and re-assembled the emergent properties are experienced by someone new. To some extent that's justified. You did destroy my dad's 64' pick-up. But it would be somewhat weird of me to complain that you destroyed my dad's 64' pickup if you replaced it with something indistinguishable. But my attachment to the '64 pickup is sentimental in a way that my attachment to my subjectivity is not, because if I'm deprived of my subjectivity I no longer love, feel, desire, act, or experience at all. Your claims that I still exist because I live on through the clone will fall on deaf ears, because the person you are speaking to now is no longer around to hear them. My attachment to my life is sentimental at all, it goes to something at the core of my existence.
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Apr 18, 2016 03:52
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The Freezing problem looks like a simpler version of the Teleportation problem. Say there's a machine that can freeze each particle that constitutes your body, recording their velocities at the moment of freezing. (Yes that's impossible, just like teleportation.) After a time, the particles are jerked back into motion, so that your brain and body instantly begin to function just as before the freeze. I believe most of the anti-teleporter side would consider such freezing to be the death of a person followed by the creation of a new person who is an identical copy of the dead person. So there is not a belief about "something in the atoms", but rather, the belief that "consciousness is a continuous dynamic process only." The recording of velocities as information, the storing of velocity information in a machine (possibly printing it out for a time on ticker tape for storage) and reading the information back is an interruption of a dynamic process, whereas sleeping is not. Similarly, the changing speed of a pendulum during a swinging process is not an interruption of swinging, where as a recording/later readout is an interruption. So that doesn't seem to be a contradictory or incoherent idea. Which doesn't mean that it's right: I don't know why a conscious being would value non-interrupted continuity. But then I don't know why I seem to value my own conscious experience over someone else's either.
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Apr 18, 2016 04:52
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Thug Lessons posted:To some extent that's justified. You did destroy my dad's 64' pick-up. But it would be somewhat weird of me to complain that you destroyed my dad's 64' pickup if you replaced it with something indistinguishable. But my attachment to the '64 pickup is sentimental in a way that my attachment to my subjectivity is not, because if I'm deprived of my subjectivity I no longer love, feel, desire, act, or experience at all. Your claims that I still exist because I live on through the clone will fall on deaf ears, because the person you are speaking to now is no longer around to hear them. My attachment to my life is sentimental at all, it goes to something at the core of my existence. Your feelings, love, desires, acts and attachments all have come from your storied history all of which have an equivalent expression within the physical structure of your brain which still exists. Unless their is a metaphysical aspect of your feelings, love, desires, acts, memories and attachments than they should all still exist. You could say time itself is always depriving older versions of your current self of being able to "experience at all." Your seven year old self is unable to ever experience again but you could say they "live on" through you just as you said you "live on" through your clone. And you could say the same for your seven-second ago self. For me teleporting is doing nothing different from what already is going on. Its like how Calvin mourns his past self when he begins thinking about it as something that is no longer able to experience anymore which is the same counter-intuitive idea this hypothetical experiment gets us to think about. 
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Apr 18, 2016 04:54
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Thug Lessons posted:Children coming into existence would not prevent your loved ones from feeling grief at your death, of course. But they would most likely have their own lives and their own loved ones with relationships equally valuable to yours. This is why this is an essentially egoist argument, you are very concerned about whether potential people can help you and yours and apparently indifferent or unaware of how potential people could have their own value or provide it to others. Simply put, the coming into existence of your non-existent children would create a lot of human value whether it affects your loved ones or not, and if you believe in the value of potential people there's no reason not to value that beyond pure prejudice. Caring more about one's loved ones than others is not egoistic, it is intrinsic to the notion of loved ones. You are the one who thinks I should value everyone equally; I think that would be a miserable world, lacking the best things in life. In the teleportation case I am faced with a specific problem - my need to be elsewhere to do something - and a specific solution - to create a clone of myself in that location who can do it. I can value this solution because I have reasons to believe that it marginally improves the world, and no reasons to think it makes the world worse than it now is; it does not follow that I must value maximizing the creation of unknown people with who knows what problems and vices because they, too, will have things they want to do. They might be ardent torturers who make the world a living hell, for all I know. The salient feature is not whether they are now potential or actual, it is how well we can predict the total effect of our action in realizing them. Once again, you can have too much of a good thing. I don't feel obliged to make as many apple pies as I possibly can. This is not because I don't value apple pies, nor because I think the millionth pie would have less intrinsic value, as a pie, than the first. It is because there can be too many pies, because other people are producing pies, and above all because I judge that there are better things that I can do with my time than produce pies. There are things I can do that improve the world more than my producing children would (such as, looking after the ones I already have responsibility for). But this opportunity cost argument does not apply to teleportation at all. Teleporting will not prevent me doing things of greater value; on the contrary, it will enable me to do things of greater value, because I can move to where they are. Edit: Thug Lessons posted:Actually I believe you'll find it is you who are comparing apples to oranges. No one suffers from the lack of unborn children's existence, and no one suffers from the lack of unmade clones' existence. We are all talking about potential value or detriment based on potential people. This is false. The lack of the potential clone means I cannot teleport to do the things I would do in the improved location. The suffering of some childless people is real. And I am suffering from the lack of my sister's clone. Oh dear clone fucked around with this message at 09:50 on Apr 18, 2016 |
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Apr 18, 2016 09:13
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Thug Lessons posted:Actually I believe you'll find it is you who are comparing apples to oranges. No one suffers from the lack of unborn children's existence, and no one suffers from the lack of unmade clones' existence. We are all talking about potential value or detriment based on potential people. yeah no. If I was dead there would most definitely be a bunch of suffering that would be totally avoided, like every other consequence of said death, if I lived on through my clone. I really feel when I talk to you like the words you are saying are only tangentially related to the concepts you are trying to communicate. Its the only way I can rationize how weir and seemingly nonsensical your statements are. Like earlier when you were trying to argue valuing something more doesn't make it more valuable which is an inherently an absurd statement, and now you are doing it again by saying that all the suffering avoided through the creation of my clone after my own destruction somehow doesn't mean any suffering was avoided. GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 15:09 on Apr 18, 2016 |
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Apr 18, 2016 15:03
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GlyphGryph posted:yeah no. If I was dead there would most definitely be a bunch of suffering that would be totally avoided, like every other consequence of said death, if I lived on through my clone. Really? Are you sure people wouldn't subtly judge it for not really being you? Get stuck in a period of unending grief because you are both there and not there, and always and never will be? How can you say how they'd really value a clone version of you? Perhaps you dying and them just moving on would be the best thing to happen to them. Perhaps a 'new' you showing up would ruin their lives. Grief isn't logical. You can't assume it's a budget or something, and adding more "you" would balance things out.
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Apr 18, 2016 15:42
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Boogaleeboo posted:Perhaps you dying and them just moving on would be the best thing to happen to them. Oh, right, and perhaps losing my sight or my legs would be the best thing to happen to me, who knows? Banking on that would be idiotic, though. Most people find the death of loved ones pretty unmitigatedly bad.
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Apr 18, 2016 16:19
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Oh dear clone posted:Oh, right, and perhaps losing my sight or my legs would be the best thing to happen to me, who knows? Banking on that would be idiotic, though. Most people find the death of loved ones pretty unmitigatedly bad. Yes, but most people in this thread don't necessarily consider a clone the same person. What makes you think everyone that cares about you would just accept it? Because if they don't you haven't made their lives better, you've just added a brutal mindfuck to the already hard process of grieving a loved ones death. Or the worst outcome, some of the people that care about you do and some don't see it as you. Now your death hasn't just given them something to grieve about, it's actively driven a wedge between everyone that views you differently. And you can say it's basically you, but it's never going to be treated as just you. It's going to be treated like a you they've already lost once. You'll never get that old relationship back. And all that for what, so they can deal with you dying again? For a few more years? It's all well and good to fight the grim inevitability of oblivion, but at a certain point you should probably ask what you are even fighting for.
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Apr 18, 2016 17:44
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Boogaleeboo posted:What makes you think everyone that cares about you would just accept it? Personal experience of grief, and my knowledge of those involved. I could of course ask them, as well. Your family might be different, but that is not an argument against me using the teleporter.
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Apr 18, 2016 18:12
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GG, Wow, things happened in this thread. Yes, in a sense, identity is absolute and not a product of what we decide to call things. The plot of ground where my grandfather was first buried in 1990, for instance, is the plot of ground where my grandfather was first buried in 1990, and not some other plot or other sort of object. GG is you, the very organism that was spawned by GG's mother and father, who has had a history in spacetime corresponding to GG's history in spacetime, etc. That's a thing's numerical identity. Things can also be qualitatively similar - having the same properties - but qualitative similarity applies to classes of similarities. Cats and dogs are qualitatively similar in that they're both mammals. You and I are qualitatively similar in being humans (I assume), SA posters, men (?), etc. An object can only be qualitatively identical with itself, since to be qualitatively identical would require being numerically identical as well. Original GG and Clone GG can never be numericaly identical, and can only be qualitatively similar. So arguments about Clone GG's identity in either of those two senses are never going to resolve in favor of teleportation. But I think you're making a different argument and I'm just putting that out there to seek confirmation that we can move past formal arguments about identity. What I understand you to be saying is that anything sufficiently similar to GG, we could call GG with no loss to the world. In that sense your clone could equally be GG and who cares if a GG is destroyed by the teleporter as long as one is left? Is that a fair characterization?
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Apr 18, 2016 18:42
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Oh dear clone posted:Personal experience of grief, and my knowledge of those involved. I could of course ask them, as well. I have no argument against using the teleporter, if people want to kill themselves so that some theoretical version of them can realize Mars is a giant loving ball of orange-brown nothing? More power to them. Or so they can pretend that everything will be fine if some version of them continues on, or any other variation why someone would do it. Cool for them. I just doubt it'd turn out as well as they hope. Losing someone is terrible, but it's reality. Everyone will lose everyone some day. Ordering up copies of that person doesn't change that. Best case it's just playing for time, which is fine. Playing for time is a working definition of life in the first place. Worst case you've just created a new being whose entire existence is going to be judged against some idealized version of themselves they can never hope to live up to. The mechanics of grief do not require someone to die, they just require loss, and by definition a replacement clone is going to be ordered up in response to a loss. So making a new person doesn't provide you a perfect fix around grief, because the death isn't the point psychologically speaking. It's just the vector that delivers the loss. No matter what that clone will never be the person they could have been had whatever x event that took out the original not happened. That life that could have been is always lost, period. And through the eyes of grief, who is to say that even people that now think they'd be fine with it will really be able to accept some copy pasted version of their loved one? Creating people like therapy animals to help people get over a loss, with no real assurance that they'll have any quality of life to speak of seems....sketchy to me. It'd probably be many more times so in the cases of people that died of illnesses they are genetically predisposed to. Are you ordering up a new version of them to die the same horrible way again? Or will you just continuously euthanize the old versions when they start getting sick and order up new ones? I'm sure statistically speaking some people would end up fine with the whole thing, I just don't think it'd be a very common reaction.
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Apr 18, 2016 19:42
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Boogaleeboo posted:Worst case you've just created a new being whose entire existence is going to be judged against some idealized version of themselves they can never hope to live up to. I think all of the problems you are talking about arising here are psychological and social problems that stem from the belief that a copy isn't effectively the same person. I agree they might occur, but it would be because of people's erroneous beliefs and not anything more. For example, all the problems you listed would occur if someone was duped into believing they had gone through the teleporter even if they were the original. If people had a stronger sense of what constituted their authentic core self and the authentic core self of others (which IMO would be inside copies) the problems wouldn't occur. Boogaleeboo posted:No matter what that clone will never be the person they could have been had whatever x event that took out the original not happened. That life that could have been is always lost, period. That's literally true with any x event that doesn't happen. Lives that could have been are constantly lost.
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Apr 18, 2016 20:16
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crowoutofcontext posted:The new being isn't really a new being, they share the very same past what with all the important memories, life lessons learned, character developed, bonds formed. Of course it's a new being. It's the person that came out of the clone machine. It will also be judged against another new being, the version of you that never had to be cloned. That version only exists in someone's head, and it doesn't have to confirm to "reality" or "what you are actually like as a person". Good luck looking better than they do! quote:The idealized version of themselves would be no different to them than whatever idealized version the original would have had of themselves. You've misunderstood the conversation here. It's not having to live up to your own idealized vision of yourself, it's the vision everyone else has of you. quote:I think all of the problems you are talking about arising here are psychological and social problems that stem from the belief that a copy isn't effectively the same person. Nope, you've wildly missed the point of this tangent. It doesn't matter if you get into a car crash and live, say you break your leg and are in chronic pain that requires multiple surgeries and heavy medication for the rest of your days. Families in that situation still have to process the loss of a life: The person you would have been if you didn't get in an accident, and the life they would have lived. It's just as real emotionally as people's actual lives, and it needs to be grieved. It doesn't matter if your clone is you in every single way, they aren't changing that a loss has occurred to necessitate it's existence. And you can't predict how people will deal with it. quote:That's literally true with any x event that doesn't happen. Lives that could have been are constantly lost. You don't really process emotions the same way as most folks, do you?
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Apr 18, 2016 20:31
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Boogaleeboo posted:And through the eyes of grief, who is to say that even people that now think they'd be fine with it will really be able to accept some copy pasted version of their loved one? Creating people like therapy animals to help people get over a loss, with no real assurance that they'll have any quality of life to speak of seems....sketchy to me. Letting some superstitious nonsense about copying come between yourself and someone who loves you seems batshit insane to me, but it would not take long after teleporters were invented to find out how people react, I suppose. Oh dear clone fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Apr 18, 2016 |
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Apr 18, 2016 20:44
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Boogaleeboo posted:Really? Are you sure people wouldn't subtly judge it for not really being you? Get stuck in a period of unending grief because you are both there and not there, and always and never will be? How can you say how they'd really value a clone version of you? Perhaps you dying and them just moving on would be the best thing to happen to them. Perhaps a 'new' you showing up would ruin their lives. Grief isn't logical. You can't assume it's a budget or something, and adding more "you" would balance things out. First off - it doesn't matter. There are tangible benefits to my family and work from me sticking around and any benefit is enough for my point to hold. Also I asked some of them they said they would be fine with it so long as there wasn't some secret me still running around somewhere looking to surprise them. Most people are pretty practical in the face of direct evidence, and I generally don't hang around with bigots that would think less of me for having a copy of me that died.
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Apr 18, 2016 20:57
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Boogaleeboo posted:Nope, you've wildly missed the point of this tangent. It doesn't matter if you get into a car crash and live, say you break your leg and are in chronic pain that requires multiple surgeries and heavy medication for the rest of your days. Families in that situation still have to process the loss of a life: The person you would have been if you didn't get in an accident, and the life they would have lived. It's just as real emotionally as people's actual lives, and it needs to be grieved. It doesn't matter if your clone is you in every single way, they aren't changing that a loss has occurred to necessitate it's existence. And you can't predict how people will deal with it. Alright, I'm somewhat misconstruing what you are saying because reading back I see the genesis of this argument is the guy that is defending the teleporter as a sort of ethical choice. Your all justifying yourself from behind though. Your basically saying "The teleporter causes the death of the individual" and for evidence your displaying to me this grieving family who share your belief. I can write about a family who share my belief about clones and are unphased by the experience. Neither of these examples say anything about our initial ideas. I still don't see how this is not a purely psychological argument.As I've said before IRL i wouldn't take the teleporter because a few of my friends, family and partner are non-teleporter's who would go through the grief you described. I mean a devout Buddhist family might go through no grief if their five year old son started compulsively acting like their recently deceased grandfather, but if it happened to my son I might feel that he has a severe psychological problem and "mourn" the son I would have had if that never happened. Neither would I think my dead grandfather's core self has been reincarnated. We can argue about how people would react in these situations, and maybe it'd be more interesting, but I still think it would be straying from the fundamental problem on whether one believes their perceived, subjectively continuous existence is purely an emergent quality that would seamlessly continue after teleportation. crowoutofcontext fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Apr 18, 2016 |
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Apr 18, 2016 21:29
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crowoutofcontext posted:Your all justifying yourself from behind though. Your basically saying "The teleporter causes the death of the individual" Nope, again. I'm not justifying myself. I am, as you say quote:I still don't see how this is not a purely psychological argument making a purely psychological argument because quote:We can argue about how people would react in these situations, and maybe it'd be more interesting, but I still think it would be straying from the fundamental problem on whether one believes their perceived, subjectively continuous existence is purely an emergent quality that would seamlessly continue after teleportation. nobody will ever find out with any of the means discussed because they are physically impossible. I don't feel the need to focus on that particular aspect, because it's only one side of the equation, the physicality of self. Where it comes from. I don't know that it has the most value though. Say it is an emergent quality of mind that can be perfectly replicated. So what? People don't deal with....practically anything logically. What's it matter if we perfectly reproduce you and nobody cares? If we perfectly reproduce you, but the law doesn't recognize that you are still you? Good news: You don't have to pay "your" bills! Bad news: You don't have a social security number! Life is by definition in the living. If an arbitrary amount of your life doesn't get to be continued by your clone, is it less a version of you? I mean you admit you wouldn't do the teleporter thing because people in your life wouldn't accept the clone negating your death. I'm asking you how much of "you" is tied up in those relationships that define how you react to the world around you, and how much a perfect copy of your physicality that doesn't have those connections is still "you". e: The argument for what self is divorced from why self matters seems philosophically sterile, to me at least. Mulva fucked around with this message at 22:44 on Apr 18, 2016 |
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Apr 18, 2016 22:03
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Boogaleeboo posted:Nope, again. I'm not justifying myself. I am, as you say ...making a purely psychological argument. Yes, what I meant is your failing to justify your initial assertions because your argument is purely psychological. Boogaleeboo posted:
Alright, yeah I concede that if I stepped out of the teleporter I would possibly be a different legal entity and would definitely become a different social entity, which are all part of my core identity, so it would be right to say I'd be sacrificing myself in a sense. Then again I wouldn't teleport just to Boogaleeboo posted:realize Mars is a giant loving ball of orange-brown nothing? but we are opening a big canister of worms by going down this road. I mean if we are talking about hypotheticals like that there is a metric poo poo-ton of situations I can dream up of where I would willingly use the teleporter. Saving a loved one from a burning building, for one. If teleportation technology was slowly introduced into our world I think, for better or for worse, it would slowly be embraced. The camera and the voice-recorder also really hosed with our sense of self and self-autonomy. People were really loving uncomfortable seeing" two" of the same beloved person and came to conclusions that camera's stole their souls. I imagine if aliens introduced to humans a teleportation devices might observe the same existential crisis that must happen when you show some undiscovered tribes that you could replicate, duplicate and destroy copies of their images and voice that you "stole" from the past. Its not the perfect analogy, but I'm sure theres places where half the population is pro-camera and the other is anti-camera. Maybe it's more interesting to ask who would use the teleporter in private, knowing that they are constantly surrounded by loved ones who would find the fact unnerving? And is that ethical? Some people in this thread have said they don't associate with "anti-teleporter bigots", but I'm close to anti-teleport people and I don't know if I would be able to hang on to my sense of self around them if I were lying about something that important to them. By the same token, part of being a social creature is hiding things, or at least automatically fielding things, from people, including the people closest to you. I suppose people who already feel their hiding a lot on a day to day lives and keeping a sort of inner autonomy would be more comfortable using the teleporter in a word of non-teleporters than the more gregarious. crowoutofcontext fucked around with this message at 01:18 on Apr 19, 2016 |
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Apr 19, 2016 01:15
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crowoutofcontext posted:...making a purely psychological argument. Eh if teleportation were to actually be introduced it would be roundly despised because the inevitable errors and accidents that come with a new technology would result in a Cronenburg nightmare for all sorts of people. Now that is the sort of thing that permanently taints perceptions and makes for salacious investigative journalism.
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Apr 19, 2016 03:04
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A big flaming stink posted:Eh if teleportation were to actually be introduced it would be roundly despised because the inevitable errors and accidents that come with a new technology would result in a Cronenburg nightmare for all sorts of people. Now that is the sort of thing that permanently taints perceptions and makes for salacious investigative journalism. Maybe for personal use, for a while.It would be publicly slandered for a decade or a dozen years after Vice first releases its photo essay of smoky gore-smeared teleportation pods but theirs enough stubborn futurists among the global elite that the technology would never be phased out. No way massive shipping corporations don't find a way to use it, it wasn't too psychology jarring when Willy Wonka introduces the same technology for the sole purpose of broadcasting test samples of candy through people's televisions. Ultimately we would get used to the nightmare scenarios which would sandwich themselves comfortably between the more mundane horrors of school shootings and drug epidemics.
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Apr 19, 2016 04:26
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Nobody would use a "transporter" in shipping, because at the point you can put atoms together how you want you have a replicator. So, you know, global capitalism doesn't exist anymore.
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Apr 19, 2016 14:59
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Also are these hypothetical teleporters actually instantaneous because then we get to violate causality and come back infested by the Warp
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Apr 19, 2016 18:42
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wateroverfire posted:Yes, in a sense, identity is absolute and not a product of what we decide to call things. The plot of ground where my grandfather was first buried in 1990, for instance, is the plot of ground where my grandfather was first buried in 1990, and not some other plot or other sort of object. GG is you, the very organism that was spawned by GG's mother and father, who has had a history in spacetime corresponding to GG's history in spacetime, etc. That's a thing's numerical identity. My big effort post i made yesterday apparently got eaten by my internet without my realizing, so apologies in advance for not wanting to rewrite the entire thing and you getting this much shittier response that is still long but much more poorly written instead. Your understanding of numerical identity does not seem to match my own. Maybe my understandings are wrong, and you can set me right, or perhaps your own is. Either way, I'm honestly not convinced if the thing you seem to understand as numerical identity actually exists, since you seem to think of it as some inherent magical property that to me really feels like something sacrosanct the way you talk about it. So maybe we should talk about numerical identity for a bit. In what I see as the common understanding, numerical identity isn't a property of an object. Hell, it's not even about an object at all - it's a descriptive term for the relationship between an object and it's referents, and exists explicitly as a counterpoint to the reference framework of nominal identity. "Numerical Identity" is when people say "my mother" and "my wife" and "the baker at the bakery down the street" are all referring to the same person. That's three nominal identities, but one numerical identity. What numerical identity is not is something that describes what identity means or what a fundamental identity is. It is a linguistic term used to describe the situation where people use different concepts to refer to the same person. This does not mean the concepts themselves are identical - the image in the head of someone talking about "my mom" vs. "the baker down the street", the properties they are thinking of to define that person, are probably different. It just represents an understanding that the object we are trying to communicate can be more than the particular set of attributes we've given a particular name to, and our concern is less with those particular identifying attributes and more with the object itself. What it does not do is say anything at all about where objects end, where they begin, where they diverge, or where their boundaries actually lie. It is a tool of communication. Numerical identity is simply two different people pointing to what they agree is actually the same object. This numerical identity can obviously be preserved through use of the teleporter, for the exact same reason it can be preserved over time. (even when we change the nominal identity of the individuals involved as I did in my last example, for which Peta tried to call me out in the most nonsensical way) There's another possible understanding of numerical identity, of course - The strictest sort of numerical identity, used in logic, which follows Leibnitz's law. This sort of numerical identity is absolutely not something that can be applied to people, though! The me that is finishing this post is not the same as the me that started it - I have violated Leibnitz's law in several ways, and am thus no longer numerically identical. This "real" numerical identity only really works for timeless objects (or ironically enough precisely time-bound objects, such as the time-instanced nominal identities I used earlier), since the time at which we exist is in and of itself an attribute that changes. It has become increasingly clear that you are not in agreement with either of this two definitions - that you are using the term "numerical identity" to mean something quite beyond either the casual and linguistic use I'd originally assumed, and the strictly logical definition that as far as I am aware is the only alternative. So, uh - can you actually explain what you mean by numerical identity in relation to people? quote:Original GG and Clone GG can never be numericaly identical, and can only be qualitatively similar. So arguments about Clone GG's identity in either of those two senses are never going to resolve in favor of teleportation. GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 22:08 on Apr 19, 2016 |
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Apr 19, 2016 22:01
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The concept of there being a "self" that's separate from the universe somehow doesn't make any sense.
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Apr 19, 2016 22:17
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Lemming posted:The concept of there being a "self" that's separate from the universe somehow doesn't make any sense. It makes sense under a range of commonly encountered scales and conditions. Its extension to situations that involve certain sci-fi technologies appears to be non-unique.
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Apr 19, 2016 22:29
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Boogaleeboo posted:Nobody would use a "transporter" in shipping, because at the point you can put atoms together how you want you have a replicator. So, you know, global capitalism doesn't exist anymore. Boogaleeboo posted:It wouldn't exist in some philosophical space, it would be a thing made by the lowest price contractor and manned by the lowest cost least trained possible employees. You aren't handing your life over to an abstraction, you are handing it over to me. Or maybe the Russian Mafia, I have to imagine there's some really amazing grounds for blackmail and sex trafficking once you have a perfect copy of someone's existence to work with. Or maybe the government. Bet you'll feel a bit more patriotic after coming out of one. Or maybe the corporations. Now you really want a Coke. One question is certainly "Is a perfect copy of you you, or even possible?" but there is another question implicit to the reality of the choice: lol you were just freaking out about teleporters being used by corporations to sell Coke and/or being owned by contractors whose chief aim is maximizing profit. Doesn't sound like post- global capitalism to me. We already can convert light into matter in specific labs, chances are the first actual teleporters could carry very crude, simple materials and be used for shipping and nothing more complicated. But thats just me talking out my rear end, I have no idea how much heat is required to dissemble an object atom by atom is but google searches say billions of times more heat than the center of the sun so we are already back at square one. This whole line of conversation is absurd and dealing with too many wacky hypotheticals and unsaid premises that i fail to see what anyone will get out of it unless your a troll that revels in goalpost shifting. Also revolutionary technology never guarantees The Revolution. 
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Apr 19, 2016 23:09
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Boogaleeboo posted:
Someone here seems to process emotions in to pretty unique way but my bet is on the one using the logic of those who would mourn a child as if they died if they went out with someone they didn't like but was otherwise fine. This is you by the way, thats your argument.
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Apr 19, 2016 23:30
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crowoutofcontext posted:lol you were just freaking out about teleporters being used by corporations to sell Coke and/or being owned by contractors whose chief aim is maximizing profit. It's an exaggeration using common present terms to convey the idea in a usable sense: That is, people that don't have your best interests at heart having access to everything about you. I can't actually use whatever future groups would be relevant because I am not magic, and can not in fact see the future. quote:chances are the first actual teleporters There will never be actual teleporters. GlyphGryph posted:Someone here seems to process emotions in to pretty unique way but my bet is on the one using the logic of those who would mourn a child as if they died if they went out with someone they didn't like but was otherwise fine. This is you by the way, thats your argument. That sentence makes no actual sense.
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Apr 20, 2016 03:20
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Boogaleeboo posted:It's an exaggeration using common present terms to convey the idea in a usable sense: That is, people that don't have your best interests at heart having access to everything about you. I can't actually use whatever future groups would be relevant because I am not magic, and can not in fact see the future. I know, which is why I responded accordingly at the time instead of nitpicking. A normal person would have realized that between citing fictional children's hero Willy Wonka's use of replicators to sell chocolate, Vice's hypothetical teleportation gore-porn journalism and the curmudgeonly mention of school shootings an drug epidemics that my comment about shipping corporation's use the technology was probably not meant to be taken as a literal prediction, which is a fool's task. You were asking why pro-teleporter's were so comfortable stepping outside of the machine when their legal and social identity would be changed as a result of the technology actually being in the real world instead of the spergy vacuum of a philosophical thought experiment. I'm just throwing ideas about how radically our economic and political identities (arguably even more part of our core identities than our social selves) would change and coming to the conclusion probably not as much as one would think. Our political and economic identities are probably so cemented that something like a teleporter wouldn't immediately cause a complete identity overhaul. We'd still think and act like capitalists (for a while), part of our core identity. Boogaleeboo posted:There will never be actual teleporters. There are already actual working, albeit basic, teleporters depending on one's definition, but that is beside the point. Its what is behind quantum computing. crowoutofcontext fucked around with this message at 12:09 on Apr 20, 2016 |
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Apr 20, 2016 09:07
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Boogaleeboo posted:That sentence makes no actual sense. Mourning for the people we could have been is dumb, especially in a case like the teleport situation where we are still functionally quite capable of being that person.
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Apr 20, 2016 11:57
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crowoutofcontext posted:that my comment about shipping corporation's use the technology was probably not meant to be taken as a literal prediction, which is a fool's task. Nah, you talked about the 'global elite', but what they would even be in a post-scarcity environment is almost impossible to grasp. There's no rich or poor when everyone can have anything. There can still be the weak and the powerful, but it's hard to say what the metric there would be to judge between them. Influence over the government? Well what are they using for that influence? How do you bribe people when money isn't a thing? What are you trading, what do you offer? The questions of self that a teleporter would raise might not even be the most challenging issue they have on society if they were real. quote:Our political and economic identities are probably so cemented that something like a teleporter wouldn't immediately cause a complete identity overhaul. We'd still think and act like capitalists (for a while), part of our core identity. There is no capitalism. There is no capital. Anyone can make anything, for roughly the same relative cost and difficulty. You want a house made of diamonds? Go for it! Or conversely having mastered the awesome power requirements to make this technology practical, we've also handed humanity the ability to completely obliterate the planet in one go. Some nutter rejiggered a teleporter and now we are all dead. Either way life wouldn't get to go on as it does now. Too many of the fundamental assumptions are just gone. GlyphGryph posted:Mourning for the people we could have been is dumb, especially in a case like the teleport situation where we are still functionally quite capable of being that person. People are dumb, see: your posts, so what? Their stupidity does not negate their existence. You still have to deal with them. See again: your posts, that you keep making. Christ the guy I was talking to says he wouldn't do it because he has people that care about him that would grieve his loss, why are you calling them dumb? What did they ever do to you? You are not a nice person.
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Apr 20, 2016 17:59
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Boogaleeboo posted:Nah, you talked about the 'global elite', but what they would even be in a post-scarcity environment is almost impossible to grasp. There's no rich or poor when everyone can have anything. There can still be the weak and the powerful, but it's hard to say what the metric there would be to judge between them. Influence over the government? Well what are they using for that influence? How do you bribe people when money isn't a thing? What are you trading, what do you offer? The questions of self that a teleporter would raise might not even be the most challenging issue they have on society if they were real. I was assuming the teleporters would take X amount of capital and resources to run in the first place. Depending on the X it could be too expensive or take too much energy to replicate food all day long and end world hunger but enough to give the global elite a novelty to play around with. The whole "this thing doesn't pay for itself lets find a way to make profit" attitude. Or you could assume whoever has their hands on it has no interest in ending capitol, or thinks that would be a bad, chaotic thing. You could probably say the same thing about a lot of today's technology that people initially thought had the power to create utopias, end capitalism or herald new social orders. The internet, the telephone and the radio all had its evangelicals who dreamed that they would somehow help devolve our power hierarchies.
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Apr 20, 2016 18:37
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