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Total Members Voted: 70

[Dunamisdeos]

Honestly, unless there *was* such a thing as a soul, I don't see any way such a machine would work to get the current me anywhere but dead. At least with a soul, there's a vehicle in play that could serve to transfer continuity. Without, it's just some bloke who thinks he's me, and the person writing this right now is as dead as Stalin.

Unless a soul is the byproduct of a certain level of self-awareness! It can exist as a concept rather than a physical object. In that scenario the soul would only exist in conjunction with the being that is aware of it as it's own. It would cease to exist at the time of departure and simply exist again at the time of arrival. A clone would instantly deviate into it's own unique soul since the experience of the clone is fundamentally different from the moment of it's inception.

At this point we've brought up Star Trek transporter technology, so anything is possible.

[TD1]

I have to ask: Descan, if there's no soul, does it matter whether you're "you" or some exactly identical guy made up of different components? I really don't see the issue here. What about cryogenics? Or inducing medical death and reviving? Thought stops there.

Though this might be off topic.

If you make a clone of yourself, then jump off a building, did you die? Of course. The clone is not you, simply some guy who looks and thinks like you. Because there is no soul, that guy is not you, just a clever impersonation.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The teleporter problem is the same as the p-zombie problem, and they are both nothing more than logic traps. Your identity now is not verifiable. Whether you think therefore you are or you simply accept the axiomic assumption of existence, there is no identifiable difference between the realness of pre-cloning/teleporting you and post-cloning/teleporting you. You are real both times or you are fake both times, asymmetry is impossible unless the system changes something significant (and significance counts for a lot when your brain is constantly rewriting itself with new memories and your entire body is replacing itself as time passes).

If A=A then A=A. Anything else is human conceit.

[Descan]

I have to ask: Descan, if there's no soul, does it matter whether you're "you" or some exactly identical guy made up of different components? I really don't see the issue here. What about cryogenics? Or inducing medical death and reviving? Thought stops there.

Though this might be off topic.

Well it matters to me. I don't give a shit if other people think it's me. Since I'm the one getting potentially killed here, I think that's enough to matter, if it's a philosophically coherent risk. (Tho for me this generally comes up with things like brain uploading and the like.)

The problem with MSH's position is that he's taking it as axiomatic that there is no internal difference; It's the same from the outside view so it's the same from the inside view. But if that were axiomatically the case, then I wouldn't have anything to argue. I don't *agree* that that is axiomatic, so any argument stemming from that falls flat unless you can argue *why* the internal view of "it's the same brain pattern so it's the same person" is correct, or the view that "it's only the same person if there's a thread of continuity before and after the Event" is incorrect.

"unless the system changes something significant," considering my argument is basically "it is significant to cut off the continuous signal coursing through a brain from birth to death," what you said amounts to "You're wrong, unless you're right."

Also re: Cryogenics/medical death and revive: Well yeah, I don't think it's the same person after. But in that case, the choice isn't "walk or teleport" it's "die or die but have a clone affect the universe afterward." Either way, *you* don't really change, you're still dead. But there is an argument to be made that it's still of net benefit to have said clone.

E: I also want to somehow bring up the idea that cause and effect are Important to the universe. Just because you can model two things seperated in time/space/origin as being the same and have the math work out as identical, that doesn't necessarily imply that they are The Same Thing. Origins matter. I had to put this in an edit because I have to get going and it's a pretty malformed thought: I'm not entirely sure how to fit it in anywhere.

[Frumple]

Eeeehhh... not really axiomatic. More epistemologically empty. Bit of difference, though amusingly enough they could easily look like the same thing.

Also totes on board with telemurder, so long as the teleportation is actually convenient. If it works but takes twice as long as it would take to just walk, and has barely any vertical movement and can't get through walls and whatnot, it's teleportation but it's pretty shitty teleportation, y'know?

[Egan_BW]

The way I see it, if you were to go through a teleporter, but NOT destroy the original version at the starting point, you've effectively both traveled and not traveled. Form your perspective, you walk into the booth and get scanned and then nothing happens. From the other you's perspective, you walked into the booth, got scanned, and ended up somewhere else. It's a coinflip which person you end up being. This means that I'd probably feel pretty uneasy about a teleporter that kills the original using a knife through the heart, but more okay with one that just vaporizes me after the scan, because even if I die, I won't experience dying, so it may as well not have happened.

Really I see no difference between continuing to live because my brain neurons happen to remain in the same place moment to moment and continuing to live because some machine observed my neurons and made something just like that. That is what I do think a "soul" is, not a brain but the data inside it.

Oh, also change the thread title to Railgun Discussion or face my wrath.

[Rolan7]

I didn't consciously plan this, but today's Schlock Mercenary is particularly relevant.  Context:  The main character died, and was restored from a data backup into a vat-grown body.  https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2017-06-13

Part of the issue with the teleporter is that "you" will definitely get destroyed.  But, there'll be an exact replica of you elsewhere...  The body changes most of its cells over time anyway, like the ship of Theseus, so is there a difference?

[inteuniso]

Can we extrapolate theseus out to include the entirety of existence getting sucked through signularities & reshuffled?

It's still the same energy. What's the true difference?

[Egan_BW]

What would you think if the thing that killed you was actually the thing that scanned you? Say, machine that cuts your brain into thin slices in order to get at the juicy consciousness inside? If said machine then puts those same brain slices together and revives you, were you really dead?

[inteuniso]

What would you think if the thing that killed you was actually the thing that scanned you?

and said: "Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked I will depart. The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised."

For one who has taken birth, death is certain and for one who has died, birth is certain. Therefore in an inevitable situation understanding should prevail.

It was inevitable.
 

[Frumple]

I'd think I'd have bigger problems to deal with now that some nutjob just rolled out quantifiable involuntary respawn mechanics for reality.

Incidentally, my mental image for this murderscanner is large, red, and with a fondness for fresh meat.

[Starver]

If the you that is now is not the you that you were a moment ago, as some would suggest, then we are being duplicated and discarded between moments anyway, and what is the difference between that and the duplicate being deferred to a spacetime point dislocated by some sort of transmat method, rather than merely practically adjacent in Planck-spacetime coordinates by the operation of the universe?

The nature of the 'death' of the precursor could be as violent (or as experienceless) as any artificial disposal method of the clonee body, we don't and (spiritualism aside, which is probably otherwise incompatible for several establishable reasons) unknowable by any and all successor copies, as the new "now"s and new "here"s have no knowledge of that part of  either the old "now" or the old "here" self(s).

Feel free to suggest a possible scientific test, but until then I suspect the metaphysics involved is just so much pure philosophy.


(On the topic of duplication/cloning by Transporter technology, there's a book I read, many decades hence, where an entanglement phenomenon was used for practical purposes. With either two transportation clones from the same clonee, or by retaining the clonee, momentarily upon use of the device an existential link was maintained between both individuals, until outside influences shook them 'apart'. But by keeping (or by placing in-situ) one in a sensory deprivation environment, the experiential link was maintained, up until the severing of the link (e.g. the ambulatory version's death), at which point the copy could be released, to report and upon their "twin"'s actions.  Experiencing one's own death 'first hand', and then potentially going back into the same situation with knowledge of how to avoid it, was a traumatic experience, but there was one particularly resilient individual who was being used to explore a "fatal death trap puzzle" alien space-ship, learning by iterative (re)incarnations that within a certain corridor it was fatal to step into the green-lit areas, or that turning hatch handles clockwise during certain periods of time (or failing to do so during all other times) was bad for ones corporeality. And so was gradually trying to reach through the various (sometimes literal!) pitfalls, often past his prior corpse(s)...  It was very much like a modern FPS with go-again-from-checkpoint plus persistent-player-corpses features, except written at least a decade before even DOOM (maybe more)....   And obviously, as a fictional conceit, bears little connection to practical physics (e.g., isn't being entombed within a sensory deprivation environment itself a sensory discrimination sufficient to collapse the spooky-experience-at-a-distance experiential-waveform) and only really matters to the book plot, but I thought I should mention it as a kind of thought experiment.)

[hops]

Honestly if we can replicate matter cheaply then there are way more problems than just the question about vaporizing someone. And like, why vaporize me? Why can't I have multiple copies of me going around? That's like, more productive. And food's not a problem, because we can keep copying more food. Space might be a problem, I guess.

[Frumple]

Sorta'. If you actually can replicate matter cheaply, you can take some time to figure out how to cook up self-sustaining planetoids and/or ways to expand the effective size of a planet, or all sorts of far easier things before those. If you can make more matter you can probably make more usable space, even if you have to outright stuff the junk into the void, first.

Trouble with multiple copies would probably be primarily legal, though, imo. Like, if copy #58 trips headfirst into a hypothetical cocaine brier patch and comes out so high they start murdering people, are the rest of you liable to some degree, or what? If your 500th incarnation commits manslaughter, and they're actually you, then, well...

... problem being if it didn't work like some kind of unholy mutual liability monstrosity the effects on census taking would probably be hilarious and terrible. "Oh, yes, yes, I live here. And every other residence within five blocks, a couple high rises over in the Philippines, that one arctic outpost I've been manning for a few years on a lark, um... shit, let me just go get the current list." *returns with a book as thick as they are tall and wide enough to host a game of twister on* All sorts of stuff like that. We could manage it, but it would take those multiple copies and who knows how many years to sort out all the issues involved.

On the bright side, legal recognition of polyamory and its variations would find it a lot easier to slide itself in there at some point. In the face of half a hundred literal copies of a person fighting over ownership rights and trying to figure out if someone married to a copy of themselves can file jointly or not, something like that would no longer be so much of a headache relative to everything else it wouldn't be worth it. More like babby's first clone legislation exercise, something to whet the teeth and multiinstance cooperative legal research practices on.

E: Basically, I'm not sure it would actually be a joke to say much of the legal community would be willing to murder all of everyone's copies just to keep the legal implications from being something they have to deal with. And not, like, procedural disintegration or somethin'. I'm talking straight up Mr. Green with candlestick in kitchen type stuff.

[Egan_BW]

Legal ramifications shouldn't be too hard so long as you issue a birth certificate to each new copy. If you're married, the first version of you stays married and the second does not. If you don't like that, maybe you should have thought about it before creating another human being who is you.