4 ms·

"the people who use the transporter don't feel like they're longer themselves. They just feel like they've moved." Well, the people going in the transporter wo

"the people who use the transporter don't feel like they're longer themselves. They just feel like they've moved." Well, the people going in the transporter would be killed, so they wouldn't be feeling anything after that. The people coming out of the transporter might feel like they just appeared in a new place, but that is immaterial to the people who were killed by the transporter. Similarly, a mother could have grounds for rejecting a teleported child, for the one who came out of the teleporter was not physically the one she gave birth to. Incidentally, the philosophical concept that episode explores goes back long, long before Star Trek, to the Ship of Theseus[1] thought experiment from Ancient Greece (and I wouldn't be surprised if this was considered even before then in ancient India or China). The Ship of Theseus problem asks: if a ship's parts are progressively replaced with new parts, until all the parts have been replaced, is it still the same ship? The cells in our bodies are being progressively replaced. A materialist, naturalist, or physicalist would have trouble explaining how someone could retain their original identity if nothing of them was left after this process. The brain upload, teleporter, and transporter questions are variations on these. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

nick_kline 6y ago
It's not immaterial at all. It's basically the same thing as going to sleep at night and waking up or seeing your friend after a 1 minute break. It can feel like the person who was gone had continuity.
- patagurbon 6y ago
  To the observers, but not to the person being transported.
  - indrax 6y ago
    Do you have a reason to believe that the consciousness would stay in one place and be destroyed rather than be in both places, and then just one place again? I don't think that consciousness has momentum.
    - pmoriarty 6y ago
      Why would the consciousness of one person migrate to the other? You're really talking about (at best) a new instantiation of the identical consciousness in a new body. That's not the original consciousness moving, that's a new (identical) consciousness coming to life. I am unconvinced a consciousness can migrate out of the body that it's in. Copies are not enough. This is made more obvious if you consider the case that the original is not destroyed. Then the clone that comes out of the end of the transporter would be having experiences that the original can not experience. If they were really one consciousness they would have one experience from that point on, but they don't. They're two different people. So in the first case one person dies and another person with the same body and memories is born, and in the second case the first person does not die and another person with the same body and memories is born. In both cases they are two separate people.
      - indrax 6y ago
        >You're really talking about (at best) a new instantiation of the identical consciousness in a new body. That's not the original consciousness moving, that's a new (identical) consciousness coming to life. This is making a lot of assumptions about how consciousness works. If I make a copy of a book the story doesn't move, but it is now in two places. If I destroy the original book the story isn't lost. I think experience might be more like that. Multiple copies of the same information system will all only have one subjective experience. Yes if you run two versions they will diverge and the question is much more complicated. But if there is one moment of copy/destruction or you're scanning and then simulating/rebuilding a frozen brain, then there's no point in time where a consciousness doesn't have a future version.
        babesh 6y ago
        You need to consider it from the point of view of each entity. Each entity may not like to be destroyed irrespective of whether there is a copy.
        indrax 6y ago
comex 6y ago
> The cells in our bodies are being progressively replaced. A materialist, naturalist, or physicalist would have trouble explaining how someone could retain their original identity if nothing of them was left after this process. Suppose I transfer a virtual machine from one physical server to another using some live migration tool. Of course it migrates the state of all running programs. But beyond that, for all practical purposes, the new VM assumes the identity of the old VM: its IP address, its pending requests, its role in a cluster, et cetera. Someone might argue that the new VM is not really the same entity as the old VM; after all, it's stored on a different physical storage medium and processed by a different physical CPU. I'd respond: who cares about the physical storage medium? That's the wrong layer of abstraction to be looking at. A VM does not exist on the plane of matter but on the plane of information. It is not made of hard disks and CPUs, but bits. The hardware is just a way to instantiate it in the physical world; it's not part of its identity. So it is with people, even if we currently lack a way to transfer the bits representing them to different storage media.
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  Except that a VM hasn't lived through any events in its life (since it's not alive and doesn't experience anything anyway), and no one would care if it had or hadn't. Also, there are no ethical issues with destroying a VM. The same is not the case with people. It would matter to a lot of people if their loved ones were the ones they knew and had intimate contact with, not some clone of theirs that simply shares their appearance and memories. The person to whom it would arguably matter most is the person getting destroyed or killed. What comfort is it to them that some clone of their lives on?
  - comex 6y ago
    > Except that a VM hasn't lived through any events in its life (since it's not alive and doesn't experience anything anyway), It has certainly processed events during its lifetime and accumulated data about them (~= experience that a person might get from living through events). There wouldn't be ethical issues with destroying it, but there would be the downside of losing that data; however, migrating it doesn't have that problem. > The person to whom it would arguably matter most is the person getting destroyed or killed. What comfort is it to them that some clone of their lives on? Personally I would have no problem with myself or anybody I know going through such a process. Partly because I would consider the result the same person, but partly because I think more broadly that the difference between "I live on" and "a clone of me lives on" is unimportant. For example, suppose I went through a teleporter but due to some mishap the body at the sending end were not destroyed, so there were two copies of me. If this happened and were detected immediately, both copies of me would freely volunteer to kill themselves in favor of keeping the other one. From my perspective (as either of the copies), the only thing lost would be the memories I made since teleporting, but losing a few minutes' worth of memories is not a big deal and something that happens all the time. Beyond that, the other copy is still "me", so there's nothing to offend my desire for self-preservation. If on the other hand the situation lasted much longer before being detected, so I gained more unique memories, or if it was only a few minutes but I just happened to have some kind of eureka moment in that time, I might be more ambivalent. Ideally there would be some way to merge the memories of the two copies into one person. In that case, I would be interested in intentionally making short-term forks of myself on a regular basis, to be merged later (say, after a few hours), so that I could effectively do multiple things at the same time.
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
It'll be solved anyway. By folks who want to do it. They'll just do it. Leave the morality to the philosophers. If my body is failing, I'd be happy to make a copy, even let it run before I die. Not sure I'd want to if it was a destructive copy (it killed me). But some would I suppose.
- yetihehe 6y ago
  If my body was failing and I could make younger copy with same knowledge, as an old body I would want to be killed so as not to suffer.
  - pmoriarty 6y ago
    If you only live to work and take care of things, then sure, having a clone to take on your work would free you up to die and end your otherwise miserable existence, especially if you're suffering. However, if your life has meaning beyond just work and responsibility, then I don't think it matters if there's a clone, as your experiences would presumably matter to you, and it wouldn't matter if some clone was having them instead.
babesh 6y ago
You are a process rather than a snapshot of material. The material is what the process runs on.

nick_kline 6y ago

It's not immaterial at all. It's basically the same thing as going to sleep at night and waking up or seeing your friend after a 1 minute break. It can feel like the person who was gone had continuity.

patagurbon 6y ago
To the observers, but not to the person being transported.
- indrax 6y ago
  Do you have a reason to believe that the consciousness would stay in one place and be destroyed rather than be in both places, and then just one place again? I don't think that consciousness has momentum.
  - pmoriarty 6y ago
    Why would the consciousness of one person migrate to the other? You're really talking about (at best) a new instantiation of the identical consciousness in a new body. That's not the original consciousness moving, that's a new (identical) consciousness coming to life. I am unconvinced a consciousness can migrate out of the body that it's in. Copies are not enough. This is made more obvious if you consider the case that the original is not destroyed. Then the clone that comes out of the end of the transporter would be having experiences that the original can not experience. If they were really one consciousness they would have one experience from that point on, but they don't. They're two different people. So in the first case one person dies and another person with the same body and memories is born, and in the second case the first person does not die and another person with the same body and memories is born. In both cases they are two separate people.
    - indrax 6y ago
      >You're really talking about (at best) a new instantiation of the identical consciousness in a new body. That's not the original consciousness moving, that's a new (identical) consciousness coming to life. This is making a lot of assumptions about how consciousness works. If I make a copy of a book the story doesn't move, but it is now in two places. If I destroy the original book the story isn't lost. I think experience might be more like that. Multiple copies of the same information system will all only have one subjective experience. Yes if you run two versions they will diverge and the question is much more complicated. But if there is one moment of copy/destruction or you're scanning and then simulating/rebuilding a frozen brain, then there's no point in time where a consciousness doesn't have a future version.
      - babesh 6y ago
        You need to consider it from the point of view of each entity. Each entity may not like to be destroyed irrespective of whether there is a copy.
        indrax 6y ago

comex 6y ago

> The cells in our bodies are being progressively replaced. A materialist, naturalist, or physicalist would have trouble explaining how someone could retain their original identity if nothing of them was left after this process. Suppose I transfer a virtual machine from one physical server to another using some live migration tool. Of course it migrates the state of all running programs. But beyond that, for all practical purposes, the new VM assumes the identity of the old VM: its IP address, its pending requests, its role in a cluster, et cetera. Someone might argue that the new VM is not really the same entity as the old VM; after all, it's stored on a different physical storage medium and processed by a different physical CPU. I'd respond: who cares about the physical storage medium? That's the wrong layer of abstraction to be looking at. A VM does not exist on the plane of matter but on the plane of information. It is not made of hard disks and CPUs, but bits. The hardware is just a way to instantiate it in the physical world; it's not part of its identity. So it is with people, even if we currently lack a way to transfer the bits representing them to different storage media.

pmoriarty 6y ago
Except that a VM hasn't lived through any events in its life (since it's not alive and doesn't experience anything anyway), and no one would care if it had or hadn't. Also, there are no ethical issues with destroying a VM. The same is not the case with people. It would matter to a lot of people if their loved ones were the ones they knew and had intimate contact with, not some clone of theirs that simply shares their appearance and memories. The person to whom it would arguably matter most is the person getting destroyed or killed. What comfort is it to them that some clone of their lives on?
- comex 6y ago
  > Except that a VM hasn't lived through any events in its life (since it's not alive and doesn't experience anything anyway), It has certainly processed events during its lifetime and accumulated data about them (~= experience that a person might get from living through events). There wouldn't be ethical issues with destroying it, but there would be the downside of losing that data; however, migrating it doesn't have that problem. > The person to whom it would arguably matter most is the person getting destroyed or killed. What comfort is it to them that some clone of their lives on? Personally I would have no problem with myself or anybody I know going through such a process. Partly because I would consider the result the same person, but partly because I think more broadly that the difference between "I live on" and "a clone of me lives on" is unimportant. For example, suppose I went through a teleporter but due to some mishap the body at the sending end were not destroyed, so there were two copies of me. If this happened and were detected immediately, both copies of me would freely volunteer to kill themselves in favor of keeping the other one. From my perspective (as either of the copies), the only thing lost would be the memories I made since teleporting, but losing a few minutes' worth of memories is not a big deal and something that happens all the time. Beyond that, the other copy is still "me", so there's nothing to offend my desire for self-preservation. If on the other hand the situation lasted much longer before being detected, so I gained more unique memories, or if it was only a few minutes but I just happened to have some kind of eureka moment in that time, I might be more ambivalent. Ideally there would be some way to merge the memories of the two copies into one person. In that case, I would be interested in intentionally making short-term forks of myself on a regular basis, to be merged later (say, after a few hours), so that I could effectively do multiple things at the same time.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

It'll be solved anyway. By folks who want to do it. They'll just do it. Leave the morality to the philosophers. If my body is failing, I'd be happy to make a copy, even let it run before I die. Not sure I'd want to if it was a destructive copy (it killed me). But some would I suppose.

yetihehe 6y ago
If my body was failing and I could make younger copy with same knowledge, as an old body I would want to be killed so as not to suffer.
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  If you only live to work and take care of things, then sure, having a clone to take on your work would free you up to die and end your otherwise miserable existence, especially if you're suffering. However, if your life has meaning beyond just work and responsibility, then I don't think it matters if there's a clone, as your experiences would presumably matter to you, and it wouldn't matter if some clone was having them instead.

babesh 6y ago

You are a process rather than a snapshot of material. The material is what the process runs on.