this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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This question all comes down to your opinion of what makes a person a person, whether that means we have something greater than the collection of our atoms, or whether we are simply the emergent outcome of the complex arrangement of atoms. If you subscribe to the former then you also need to believe that this machine is somehow capable of either transporting/transplanting that "soul" for lack of a better expression. Where if you subscribe to the latter than this is most certainly a suicide cloning machine.
I personally subscribe to the idea that consciousness is an emergent property of complexity. Given a sufficiently large enough series of inputs you can observe new and unexpected outputs that appear to be on higher orders of complexity than their inputs. This response is an example of that, from electrons flowing through transistors we end up with operating systems, hardware IO, web browsers, networking protocols, ASCII standards, font rendering, etc. All of that complexity emerges from a massive amount of on/off switches arranged in patterns over time.
Following this chain of reasoning I believe that making an exact duplicate of me down to the state of each atom is no different than that entity being me, however as a conscious being with human ethics and morals I put value in the singularity of my existence, and so a plurality of Zetaphor is something I find undesirable as it fundamentally challenges my perception of what it means to be myself.
So assuming the entity leaving the transporter is me, there's two ways to approach the way a machine like this could operate:
That means one of two things, either there is a brief moment of time where two identical copies of me are in the universe, or there is a period of time where zero complete copies of me exist in the universe. So either I stopped existing momentarily and then was recreated from scratch (death and clone birth), or I existed in two places at once and then died in one (cloning and suicide).
Your original copy would die. Your life as you know it would end the moment you teleport.
Sure on the other end a replica would come out, presumably with all your memories etc intact, but it would not be you, you would not experience it. It would go on living your life, thinking it was you, everyone around it treating it like it was you, and presumably doing all the same things you would have done.
Except it is not you. Your experience ended at the teleporter. And many fools would never realize this, because the dead aren’t around to tell us.
If there's no break in consciousness, then there would be no death. I was simply encoded as bits of data and then decoded, a process that I would be conscious of and experience in some way, I assume. If when I get off the transporter at point B with a 1:1 memory of the experience like walking from one room to the next, in no way did I die.
Jacob Geller has a fantastic video covering this topic called “Head Transplants And The Non-existence Of The Soul”, it’s fascinating stuff
I'd say it's the second. I don't imagine any data movement that's not copy + delete.
One package drop and you could loose a finger or the ability to tie your shoes or the memory of your wedding day.
Yup. Something like that happens in Michael Crichton's Timeline, where the copy going back and forth in time is imperfect, with relatively low resolution, so things like capillaries sometime connect wrong and people has irrigation problems, bruises, and they even die.
The tricky part here is that technically this means you could do/think/say something that the new you won't remember, before the death occurs.
Unless there's some sort of induced coma(right terminology?) involved.
Exactly. But that would be the price of that kind of transport. See the short story "Think like a dinosaur" by James Patrick Kelly: that is exactly the situation. With very grim consecuences, in the particular case shown.
No worries, your duplicate would be more like a twin after a few hours.
You are changing the question to "is a perfect replica of a person considered the same person or not?". That is not the question.
What you experience by using a teleporter is you enter a room, and then you die. End of story. There being another replica of you somewhere does not change that you died. For an outsider they may argue whether or not you died, whether or not the replica is you, and so on. But from the perspective of someone who enters the teleportation room, it's over. Dead.