this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
166 points (95.1% liked)
Asklemmy
43381 readers
1630 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
No issue, I'm not confronting you.
imo we're having an interesting philosophical chat about a completely hypotetical situation, and I don't think there's a right or wrong. That's why I spread some "imo" around.
I just pointed out that if you consider that "you" didn't die because you are still the person on the other side, then when copies are made (something possible in that reality), then "you" become more than one person (split you, or split personality).
It all boils down to what we consider "I", I guess. It seems I consider "I" as a continuum from birth to death, a set of continuous conscience and experiences - if I'm braindead then start from scratch today, I don't consider that individual is "me" anymore; it's just my body, now belonging to another person. The previous "I" died, and even if others see that body as "me", for "dead me" that's not the case.
You on the other hand seem to consider that "you" are what you are at this moment. So the copies (or the single rebuilt if the transporter doesn't glitch) are not "you" anyway, because as you said, you are not the same person as a second ago, sitting in your couch. So dying here and being rebuilt there makes no difference.
Just different takes on "self" conscience.
I've been on the internet for too long, so based on experience I start vaguely suspecting confrontation in any exchange longer than two comments :)
The Riker problem is of course interesting and I don't know what I'd do in that situation ~~(other than make out - just like Will and Tom did)~~ or how I think I/we would decide who gets to be the "real one", for lack of a better term. I'm very glad I won't ever have to figure that out. But yes, that's probably what my view implies: there'd be two of "me", exact copies. Like when I copy a file to two different hard drives and then delete the source. There'd be no "real" one, they're both the same file, just in different places.
I'll have to think about your view because, I have to admit, I'm having trouble really seeing it and that's annoying me. It's just too different from how I think, I suppose. Thank you for giving me some food for thought then :)
Well thank you; we then exchanged good thought sandwiches.
I think what we are musing about with this impossible situation boils down to defining the nature of conscience (awareness of existence), which has been discussed for centuries with no absolute single definition. If we could prove with no doubt that any of us is right or wrong, we'd probably be the first to get a Philosophy Nobel prize.