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There's a whole section in here about how people do stuff while being transported, and then about energy beings. This is just fiction, people! The philosophical

There's a whole section in here about how people do stuff while being transported, and then about energy beings. This is just fiction, people! The philosophical issues from the start of the article are just made unrealistically complicated if you also posit that teleportation has to obey the demands of the plot. Make sure to be clear about the difference between "is teleportation in Star Trek a death sentence" and "is teleportation in principle a death sentence". [As has been rightly pointed out, I really mean "teleportation by beaming". There are other possible means of teleportation which don't require disassembling one's self and reassembling it elsewhere: for example, travel through wormholes.] Teleportation in principle is not a death sentence if (like me) you're a reductionist who believes that the mind is a pattern which happens to be encoded on a physical substrate. To copy the substrate perfectly implies copying perfectly the pattern encoded on it, and hence (since I'm a reductionist) copying perfectly the self. No comment from my end about teleportation in Star Trek being a death sentence.

TomMarius 9y ago
What if someone made an exact copy of you? Would your consciousness gain a second body?
- Smaug123 9y ago
  Yep. Both are me; they start diverging as soon as the copy is made.
  - gnaritas 9y ago
    Both were you, they stopped being both you the second they started diverging which is the second they came into existence.
    - Smaug123 9y ago
      Per the parallel thread: the word "are" is misleading, and you should distinguish between the two things you mean by it. (I should have done that myself in the grandparent to this comment.) I am who I was five minutes ago, and I am also not who I was five minutes ago, for two different senses of the word "am" which happen to have the same word in English.
      - charlesism 9y ago
        I think it's more accurate to say the problem is "me." We don't need to worry about it most of the time, but the only "me" around is the state of your brain at this instance in space and time. Anything else is just more or less "me"-like, but not exactly "me." So if someone recreated you in triplicate, the instant after they appeared, all four of you would all be the same amount "you," though you four would all diverge thereafter, and be more and more some other version of you.
        Smaug123 9y ago
        Nice angle I hadn't really crystallised in my mind. I'll meet in the middle and say that the problem is the combination of "is" and "me"; one sense of "is" applies to a particular sense of "me", and the other sense of "is" applies to the other sense of "me".
        treebeard901 9y ago
        Now if one of the copies mysteriously grows a goatee then all bets are off.
        gnaritas 9y ago
        Simply put, identity and equality are different things; he's conflating them. This was already pointed out, but he didn't grok it.
        Smaug123 9y ago
        I'm not conflating identity and equality; I'm arguing that you mean two different things by "identity" but are using one word to refer to both, resulting in confusion all round.
        gnaritas 9y ago
        I was not replying to you, you're intellectually dishonest, we're done, I've made that clear.
  - lfowles 9y ago
    Basically the big idea behind We Are Legion (We Are Bob)!
- nathan_f77 9y ago
  You would have an identical twin.
gnaritas 9y ago
> Teleportation in principle is not a death sentence if (like me) you're a reductionist who believes that the mind is a pattern which happens to be encoded on a physical substrate. To copy the substrate perfectly implies copying perfectly the pattern encoded on it, and hence (since I'm a reductionist) copying perfectly the self. A copy of you is not you, one need only not destroy the original for you to quickly admit that the copy is not you. If I copy you, and ask you if the copy over there is you, you'll say no. If I then kill you, you have just been sentenced to death. The copy will live on feeling as if it is you, but it isn't you, it's a copy of you. That is unless you believe there can be any number of you; but the second they're created they are by definition no longer you, they are them, and your experiences are no longer identical, you are instantly separate beings so they are instantly no longer you.
- Smaug123 9y ago
  Here we go :) Your fundamental misunderstanding of my viewpoint is that there can only ever be one of me. The "copy", as you put it, is also one of me. The two are different people by the time you come to threaten one of them with death, but at the instant of creation of the second, they were the same. They diverged since (just as identical twins would, immediately after their brains began to form in the womb). The question of "which one is me" is meaningless: they are both me, in the sense that they have a common "ancestor" (i.e in the sense that I am who I was five minutes ago), and they are both not me (in the sense that I am not who I was five minutes ago).
  - gnaritas 9y ago
    You're just playing a semantic game with the word "me" and "self". Saying they are both me and they are both not me is saying nothing, it's a meaningless statement devoid if any value to communicate anything at all. Put the semantics aside, and try and address the actual underlying issue, identity. The second a clone exists, they are unique individuals, they cannot both be you anymore.
    - Smaug123 9y ago
hacking_again 9y ago
> the mind is a pattern which happens to be encoded on a physical substrate Why do you believe you can differentiate between mind and substrate? Copying the mind is not like copying a hard drive at rest. It's more like copying a hard drive while somebody is actively writing to it at random, inserting new sectors, shaking it, etc. I believe that to perfectly copy the mind, you have to make an instantaneous perfect copy of the entire human.
- Smaug123 9y ago
  Sure, I'm happy to believe that. This is only a thought experiment, so we are allowed to do things instantaneously if it makes the issues clearer; and I never actually said that the physical substrate was necessarily the brain. It could just as well be the body more generally.
  - hacking_again 9y ago
    Ok sounds good, but why differentiate between mind and substrate? Doesn't the pattern / substrate model reduce the mind to just information, and the brain (or body) to just machinery? For me the substrate and the pattern are the same thing, like a vinyl audio recording. There's arguments each side of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind–body_dualism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind–body_dualism
    - Smaug123 9y ago
      Sure, this is basically just amateur late-night fireside chatting based on stuff that has already been hashed out in much more detail by much more competent people :) But yes, there is a sense in which they're definitely the same thing: changing the substrate would change the pattern encoded on the substrate. There's a sense in which they're different: the pattern could in principle be copied off the substrate and encoded on a different substrate. (I'm a reductionist, so in my opinion this holds for my self, as well as recordings on vinyl.) The reason I differentiate here is so that I can be more flexible when weird situations come up, like the notion of me living as an emulated human on a different computer system.
Someone 9y ago
”To copy the substrate perfectly implies copying perfectly the pattern encoded on it, and hence (since I'm a reductionist) copying perfectly the self” But if yo copy a living being, you end up with two living beings, each (presumably) with their own self. Some people would argue getting rid of the original is murder (if you assume the original and the copy share a self, it would be mutilation) I think the way out of this is to not call it copying but moving (you move a body from atoms a pattern buffer and from there back to atoms)
- Smaug123 9y ago
  Yep, it would be murder - except that in this thought experiment, I stepped into the transporter of my own free will, and thereby expressly consented to the destruction of one of my selves in the immediate future. It becomes much more interesting if someone is forcibly transported; then I think the moral answer depends on what the transportee believes about their consciousness. Do they believe they'll be murdered, or not? Then I think there's a fair argument to say that the forcible transport is morally evil, or neutral, depending on the two cases.
  - colordrops 9y ago
    "one of my selves" - the flaw in your logic is revealed by this phrase.
    - Smaug123 9y ago
      Not to me, it isn't. Care to elaborate? (Pointing out "there is a flaw in your logic" to someone who has a flaw in their logic is rarely very helpful unless you actually point out the flaw too.)
      - colordrops 9y ago
        Who are you if you aren't an individual? How can you have multiple selves? What entity is doing the possessing of multiple beings? Do you believe in a soul?
yazaddaruvala 9y ago
I agree with all of your points about "beaming" it just wasn't clear from your statements that you were considering alternate implementations of teleportation. > is teleportation in principle a death sentence If we were to harness folds in spacetime, or other dimensions to teleport, we would have no philosophical questions around it being death, because locomotion through any dimension is a "solved philosophy".

TomMarius 9y ago

What if someone made an exact copy of you? Would your consciousness gain a second body?

Smaug123 9y ago
Yep. Both are me; they start diverging as soon as the copy is made.
- gnaritas 9y ago
  Both were you, they stopped being both you the second they started diverging which is the second they came into existence.
  - Smaug123 9y ago
    Per the parallel thread: the word "are" is misleading, and you should distinguish between the two things you mean by it. (I should have done that myself in the grandparent to this comment.) I am who I was five minutes ago, and I am also not who I was five minutes ago, for two different senses of the word "am" which happen to have the same word in English.
    - charlesism 9y ago
      I think it's more accurate to say the problem is "me." We don't need to worry about it most of the time, but the only "me" around is the state of your brain at this instance in space and time. Anything else is just more or less "me"-like, but not exactly "me." So if someone recreated you in triplicate, the instant after they appeared, all four of you would all be the same amount "you," though you four would all diverge thereafter, and be more and more some other version of you.
      - Smaug123 9y ago
        Nice angle I hadn't really crystallised in my mind. I'll meet in the middle and say that the problem is the combination of "is" and "me"; one sense of "is" applies to a particular sense of "me", and the other sense of "is" applies to the other sense of "me".
        treebeard901 9y ago
        Now if one of the copies mysteriously grows a goatee then all bets are off.
      - gnaritas 9y ago
        Simply put, identity and equality are different things; he's conflating them. This was already pointed out, but he didn't grok it.
        Smaug123 9y ago
        I'm not conflating identity and equality; I'm arguing that you mean two different things by "identity" but are using one word to refer to both, resulting in confusion all round.
        gnaritas 9y ago
        I was not replying to you, you're intellectually dishonest, we're done, I've made that clear.
- lfowles 9y ago
  Basically the big idea behind We Are Legion (We Are Bob)!
nathan_f77 9y ago
You would have an identical twin.

gnaritas 9y ago

> Teleportation in principle is not a death sentence if (like me) you're a reductionist who believes that the mind is a pattern which happens to be encoded on a physical substrate. To copy the substrate perfectly implies copying perfectly the pattern encoded on it, and hence (since I'm a reductionist) copying perfectly the self. A copy of you is not you, one need only not destroy the original for you to quickly admit that the copy is not you. If I copy you, and ask you if the copy over there is you, you'll say no. If I then kill you, you have just been sentenced to death. The copy will live on feeling as if it is you, but it isn't you, it's a copy of you. That is unless you believe there can be any number of you; but the second they're created they are by definition no longer you, they are them, and your experiences are no longer identical, you are instantly separate beings so they are instantly no longer you.

Smaug123 9y ago
Here we go :) Your fundamental misunderstanding of my viewpoint is that there can only ever be one of me. The "copy", as you put it, is also one of me. The two are different people by the time you come to threaten one of them with death, but at the instant of creation of the second, they were the same. They diverged since (just as identical twins would, immediately after their brains began to form in the womb). The question of "which one is me" is meaningless: they are both me, in the sense that they have a common "ancestor" (i.e in the sense that I am who I was five minutes ago), and they are both not me (in the sense that I am not who I was five minutes ago).
- gnaritas 9y ago
  You're just playing a semantic game with the word "me" and "self". Saying they are both me and they are both not me is saying nothing, it's a meaningless statement devoid if any value to communicate anything at all. Put the semantics aside, and try and address the actual underlying issue, identity. The second a clone exists, they are unique individuals, they cannot both be you anymore.
  - Smaug123 9y ago

hacking_again 9y ago

> the mind is a pattern which happens to be encoded on a physical substrate Why do you believe you can differentiate between mind and substrate? Copying the mind is not like copying a hard drive at rest. It's more like copying a hard drive while somebody is actively writing to it at random, inserting new sectors, shaking it, etc. I believe that to perfectly copy the mind, you have to make an instantaneous perfect copy of the entire human.

Smaug123 9y ago
Sure, I'm happy to believe that. This is only a thought experiment, so we are allowed to do things instantaneously if it makes the issues clearer; and I never actually said that the physical substrate was necessarily the brain. It could just as well be the body more generally.
- hacking_again 9y ago
  Ok sounds good, but why differentiate between mind and substrate? Doesn't the pattern / substrate model reduce the mind to just information, and the brain (or body) to just machinery? For me the substrate and the pattern are the same thing, like a vinyl audio recording. There's arguments each side of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind–body_dualism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind–body_dualism
  - Smaug123 9y ago
    Sure, this is basically just amateur late-night fireside chatting based on stuff that has already been hashed out in much more detail by much more competent people :) But yes, there is a sense in which they're definitely the same thing: changing the substrate would change the pattern encoded on the substrate. There's a sense in which they're different: the pattern could in principle be copied off the substrate and encoded on a different substrate. (I'm a reductionist, so in my opinion this holds for my self, as well as recordings on vinyl.) The reason I differentiate here is so that I can be more flexible when weird situations come up, like the notion of me living as an emulated human on a different computer system.

Someone 9y ago

”To copy the substrate perfectly implies copying perfectly the pattern encoded on it, and hence (since I'm a reductionist) copying perfectly the self” But if yo copy a living being, you end up with two living beings, each (presumably) with their own self. Some people would argue getting rid of the original is murder (if you assume the original and the copy share a self, it would be mutilation) I think the way out of this is to not call it copying but moving (you move a body from atoms a pattern buffer and from there back to atoms)

Smaug123 9y ago
Yep, it would be murder - except that in this thought experiment, I stepped into the transporter of my own free will, and thereby expressly consented to the destruction of one of my selves in the immediate future. It becomes much more interesting if someone is forcibly transported; then I think the moral answer depends on what the transportee believes about their consciousness. Do they believe they'll be murdered, or not? Then I think there's a fair argument to say that the forcible transport is morally evil, or neutral, depending on the two cases.
- colordrops 9y ago
  "one of my selves" - the flaw in your logic is revealed by this phrase.
  - Smaug123 9y ago
    Not to me, it isn't. Care to elaborate? (Pointing out "there is a flaw in your logic" to someone who has a flaw in their logic is rarely very helpful unless you actually point out the flaw too.)
    - colordrops 9y ago
      Who are you if you aren't an individual? How can you have multiple selves? What entity is doing the possessing of multiple beings? Do you believe in a soul?

yazaddaruvala 9y ago

I agree with all of your points about "beaming" it just wasn't clear from your statements that you were considering alternate implementations of teleportation. > is teleportation in principle a death sentence If we were to harness folds in spacetime, or other dimensions to teleport, we would have no philosophical questions around it being death, because locomotion through any dimension is a "solved philosophy".