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Total Members Voted: 53

[GlyphGryph]

dude what are you talking about? if you make a copy of your brain and put it into something else then that one is the copy, and you are the original, and only you would know this and it would be impossible to tell otherwise. Even if you connect the 2 brains together such that you can sense what the other body senses (information) their still separate because the they are 2 separate functional brains.

As for splitting 1 single brain, that creates 2 new beings neither of which is you, because your memories and your consciousness make up who you are, if neither of those 2 halves are really complete you end up conscious with half your memory beside a stranger who has the other half, but is not you because their brain is fully functional and they control their own body. Its also quite possible for you to never wake up, and 2 new beings result with half of your memories each, but you cease to exist.

Wow it's almost as if you completely failed to understand what you wrote. Probably because you completely failed to understand what I wrote.

Shall we do an analogy? Let's do an analogy.

Take the Ship of Theseus, which we'll call S.S.Teddy. Take note of all the pieces that are in it, and acquire copies of all of them. Now, we have a pile of materials that are clearly NOT S.S.Teddy, and we have S.S.Teddy.

But I think we can agree that S.S.Teddy is still S.S.Teddy. The existence of this pile of copied material isn't really relevant to that.

That's Step 1. Original, plus non-original component pile.


The S.S.Teddy:
=======o
| o o   :-,
| o o   :-`
=======o

Pile of Stuff:
==============||,,::--oooooo


Now, let's do some damage to S.S.Teddy. Let's split the front of the ship, about 2 feet deep. S.S.Teddy is damaged, yes, but I think we can all agree that it is still the original S.S.Teddy.

That's Step 2. S.S.Teddy with a split nose, plus a non-original component pile.

The S.S.Teddy:
=======o
| o o   :-`
| o o   :_,
=======o

Pile of Stuff:
==============||,,::--oooooo


Now, let's conduct some repairs. But not EXACT repairs. We think, well, even with a double nose, S.S.Teddy would still be pretty neat, so we keep the nose pulled apart a bit and sort of repair inwards. This is our first bit of contention.

But that's step 3, a slightly modified S.S.Teddy.

The S.S.Teddy:
=======o
| o o   :=;
| o o   :=;
=======o

Pile of Stuff:
==============||::oooooo


Now, we take this out for a couple weeks, sail around, it works fine. But this is the first point of contention. Does anyone think S.S.Teddy is NOT the same ship? Does anyone feel it lacks continuity?

[Kadzar]

Now that this discussion has been transferred to a new thread, is it still the same discussion, or just a copy of the discussion in the previous thread?

[Catsup]

even if you took a blank brain and somehow modified the neuron connections in it to exactly match your own that would still be recreated from scratch using a blank brain and not an exact copy.

So what you're saying is that even if it's an exact copy, it's not an exact copy?

correct, the wording may be a little confusing but you will always know you are the original because you saw it's creation and you are in control if YOUR body.

the copy will have the same memories except for the creation process and will think they are also you because of the same memories.

a true exact copy would have to function completely independently of YOU with its own consciousness but somehow gets their memory and consciousness updated in real time to what YOU sense, while also NOT being able to update their memory and consciousness from the body they are using.

[GlyphGryph]

Catsup, what is your opinion on the S.S.Teddy in step 3?

[Graknorke]

even if you took a blank brain and somehow modified the neuron connections in it to exactly match your own that would still be recreated from scratch using a blank brain and not an exact copy.

So what you're saying is that even if it's an exact copy, it's not an exact copy?

correct, the wording may be a little confusing but you will always know you are the original because you saw it's creation and you are in control if YOUR body.

the copy will have the same memories except for the creation process and will think they are also you because of the same memories.

a true exact copy would have to function completely independently of YOU with its own consciousness but somehow gets their memory and consciousness updated in real time to what YOU sense, while also NOT being able to update their memory and consciousness from the body they are using.

That could be fixed by having the patient be unconscious during the process.
Then could we agree that the two minds are perfectly identical?

[Catsup]

Catsup, what is your opinion on the S.S.Teddy in step 3?

its still the same ship, iunno what youre trying to prove.

oh and i probly did misunderstand you, i havent read the original thread.

[Catsup]

That could be fixed by having the patient be unconscious during the process.
Then could we agree that the two minds are perfectly identical?

doesnt work, they will become different as soon as both wake up and start updating their mind according to their own body.

[DeKaFu]

But you would be both the original and the copy.
There would be no difference in anything between the brain-copy and the brain immediately before the transfer. The only thing that would suck would be if they let the original survive for a bit before killing it off. Because then it would suck for that version of yourself.

The only difference between these two scenarios is that in the first one you'd be dead too quickly to realize you were wrong.

Brains are made of matter. They're physical objects. If you destroy a physical object, it is destroyed. If you construct a copy a physical object, it's not the same object. Picture it with baseballs instead of brains if you have to.

Unless you consider the mind to exist somehow independent of the things it's made of, it's not going to work. A mind is not a concept. It's a physical reality in the shape of a gooshy organ in your head.

(I realize not everyone believes this, but then we're getting into souls and such, and that's a different discussion.)

[GlyphGryph]

Cool, cool. What I'm doing is working through my initial post, and trying to find the area of disagreement before I decide whether there even is anything TO prove.

So let's continue!

Unfortunately, the S.S.Teddy has another little accident. That damn split bow! We crashed into a rock, and it caught us right in between doing damage to the midship!

The S.S.Teddy:
=======o:-,
| o o   :-`
| o o   :-,
=======o:-`

Pile of Stuff:
==============||oooooo

That is step 4. We damage the ship again. I think we can both agree that it's the same ship at this point - let me know if you don't.

I'm going to trust that we agree, despite this damage, it's still the same ship. We've used some materials from our repairs pile, we don't look quite the way we originally did, but still the same ship.

So let's move on! We're going to repair her!

The S.S.Teddy:
      =o
======  :-,
| o o  o:-`
| o o  o:-,
======  :-`
      =o

Pile of Stuff:
==============||oooo

Well, yuck. That's not pretty. Still, she's sea-worthy again. We had to pull the sides out a bit to fit the repairs in, but repair her we did.

This is step 5, a newly repaired S.S.Teddy. Still the same ship?

[Lysabild]

It's not about whether or not it's identical.


If people here know the game EVE, then I'm sure you know the lore behind the player characters.

When you fly your spaceships, you're in a small pod, that takes a screening of your brain and kills you if your ship is about to blow up, it then sends the screening to a clone waiting, ready to receive you, just as you were before you died.


But the guy in the pod died. His consciousness is dead. The new clone is the same as him and considers itself a continuation, but the mind of the guy who died in the ship is gone.

How is that hard to understand?

[cerapa]

I can't really contribute to this thread much, because I hold the very extreme opinion that continuity and even memories aren't necessary for a person to be itself, but their base goals and thought patterns are.

Lets say you have a person called Bob. Bob gets hit in head with a brick and loses his memories. He still likes chicken and long walks on the beach. If given a choice of what to eat, he would take chicken, exactly like Bob. He simply does not know his own name.
Now lets say Bob didn't lose his memories, but instead became a vegetarian because he could no longer stand the taste of meat, and now has a phobia of sand. He shares the exact same memories with the original Bob, but acts completely differently, and therefore I consider it another person.

Now lets take it a step further. Say across the world another person very similar to Bob, Carl, who just has different experiences, gets hit in the head with a brick, and now acts the same as amnesiac Bob. Since if A=B and B=C therefore A=C as in, since amnesiac Bob is Bob and Carl is amnesiac Bob, therefore Carl is Bob. This same principle would apply to clones/copies/virtualized brains. If similar inputs give similar results, then its the same person.

Obviously this does not apply if you don't think a person and its amnesiac self are the same, but unless you go with that, then a person is actually many people, due to forgetting their past experiences and gaining new sets of memories.

And of course, if there's two of a person running around I wouldnt consider the the exact same, much as you wouldnt call two identical chairs a single chair, but a part of larger set, in the case of my examples there is a set "Bob", which contains Bob, amnesiac Bob and Carl, but not brain damaged Bob. It could also contain computers that think like Bob or sentient slimes. It also contains the copies of Bob that the discussion is about, especially if the memories are the same.


Just my 2 cents. Right now everyone seems to have a different concept of what constitutes "the same person", and I don't really think this is a thing that can be really debated away. But I think its fun to take peoples thoughts to their logical conclusions(like mine, where a sentient cloud of dust could be Bob).

[Catsup]

Brains are made of matter. They're physical objects. If you destroy a physical object, it is destroyed. If you construct a copy a physical object, it's not the same object. Picture it with baseballs instead of brains if you have to.

Unless you consider the mind to exist somehow independent of the things it's made of, it's not going to work. A mind is not a concept. It's a physical reality in the shape of a gooshy organ in your head.

i think he worded it better than i can, i also believe this is the case

This is step 5, a newly repaired S.S.Teddy. Still the same ship?

it doesnt matter how much damage is done or how much the ship is changed from the original design, its still the same ship.

[GlyphGryph]

Unless you consider the mind to exist somehow independent of the things it's made of, it's not going to work. A mind is not a concept. It's a physical reality in the shape of a gooshy organ in your head.
(I realize not everyone believes this, but then we're getting into souls and such, and that's a different discussion.)

You don't need a soul. It's the difference between a computer and a computer program. You can have a distributed computer program that can keep running if all of it's original hardware has been replaced. Most people would say it's still the same program, even if all the original computers are in a scrapheap somewhere.

Hell, people say it's still the same program if you make a hundred copies of it and run them on different machines, and that destroying one of the machines doesn't destroy the program! But it's probably better to think of the distributed computer program here, since that's really what your mind is. Hundreds upon hundreds of thousands upon thousands of tiny computers, all working together to run the program that is YOU, and which are often destroyed and replaced, individually, without us saying that it means you no longer exist or that you died.

The mind is the system. The brain is the hardware.

it doesnt matter how much damage is done or how much the ship is changed from the original design, its still the same ship.

Then bear with me. Because your initial claim seemed pretty diametrically opposed to this one. Again, I want to find the point where we disagree, and the best way to do that is methodologically. Before moving on, is there anything you want to add, any potential complications? Are all of the pieces, held into a whole, labeled S.S.Teddy in that picture part of the S.S.Teddy?

[Graknorke]

You don't need to believe in a soul.
The brain can be destroyed, but there is another identical copy. This will do the exact same thing as the original; except presumably be in a better housing.

[Catsup]

The mind is the system. The brain is the hardware.

incorrect. For computers and machinery different hardware can be used to run the same software, but each brain can only ever run 1 individual person's consciousness.

your initial claim seemed pretty diametrically opposed to this one

can you explain what you thought my original claim was?