Teleportation. It isn't you that comes out the other side. Or is it? - by SubJeff
SubJeff on 23/9/2012 at 10:30
Quote Posted by DDL
Plus of course there's the whole sleep thing. Everytime you fall asleep your consciousness switches off.
If your argument allows for discontinuous consciousness, then teleportation is no more lethal than sleep..
Nope. The conciousness doesn't switch off, it's still there and if it wasn't you'd wake up knowing nothing. It's just certain input/output centres that are temporarily turned off.
Quote Posted by Phatose
I reject the notion that the atoms/molecules themselves are important. Any brain is swapping out the actual particles that make up any cell constantly. If not being composed of the same particles you were composed of is death, we're all dying constantly.
The pattern is what's important, and that's all you need to transmit.
Yes and no. The pattern is what is important but this is both physical pattern and a superimposed electrical pattern. You need a constant physical architecture for the electrical pattern to reside in and therefore they are intrinsically bound. Replacing small amounts of the physical architecture does not disrupt the electrical pattern. Think of it like a flow of water; if you quickly replace very, very small amounts of the pipe the flow will not not be interrupted. And the tiny leaks you have may account for our memory imperfections, failure to be absolutely precise all the time.
I just want to highlight one error in your statement; some of the particles are not swapped out, ever. The DNA for example. The nucleotides in cell 415 are made of the same particles now as they were when cell 415 came into existence however many years ago. There will be other structures that have remained constant. This is true of many but not all tissues.
Quote Posted by demagogue
For the record, that question is a variation of the (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus) Ship of Theseus problem ... where you replace a ship board by board, and ask when (if ever) does it stop being the old ship and start being a new ship (& what if you're using the old boards to make a "new" ship). It's a classic philosophical problem and I'm not sure if there's a definitive answer, but a different answer depending on your perspective.
I think this is quite a different issue. The ship has no other superimposed pattern, nothing else depends on its structure. I would equate the ship with the pipe in my other analogy, but without any water flowing.
Quote Posted by demagogue
Actually there was some debate. Some interpreted it as experienced time slowing down. Other interpreted it as still seeing real-time going by at its normal rate, but at a finer level of grain than usual.
Awesome experiment. I've experienced this during training. The first time you spar everything seems so fast and it's hard to get your body to react to your opponent, to do what you want fast enough, to do x because he did y but then z because he countered your x with his y2. The more you do (over years) the slower time in combat seems to become. When you fight a newbie they seem to be so slow even though they may actually physically faster and fitter than (the ageing) you; their punches are not the blur you first experienced but discreet events you can react and adapt to. Last year I sparred with a guy who is a vet compared to me and it felt like I was fighting in treacle even though he was older, overweight and (apparently) lumbering. He took me apart so easily it reminded me of when I first started and it wasn't because he was doing anything fancy, anything I hadn't really seen or encountered before; it really just felt like he was in the Matrix. This is what I really enjoyed about that film.
Edit: This what I love about TTLG. I don't get this kind of debate anywhere else on the net. And ZB actually posting something relevant! Though he couldn't help point out my crawler-walker mistake. Daawwww.
Vasquez on 23/9/2012 at 17:14
Thanks ZB, that's it :D (Goddamn, it bugged me not to remember!)
Phatose on 23/9/2012 at 18:35
Electrical pattens *are* physical patterns - both in the sense that the relevant charges are determined by the position and velocity of the charged particles, and in the sense that matter and energy are the same thing.
SubJeff on 23/9/2012 at 23:30
Yes, but the electric pattern is ephemeral, the brain architecture is not, and the electrical pattern is superimposed upon and dependant upon the brain architecture.
demagogue on 24/9/2012 at 02:05
The architecture may be necessary, but it isn't literally manifesting consciousness. It's (arguably) actual tokens of processing doing that. If you take a strong commitment to that, then it's possible blips of consciousness are occurring all around us inadvertently in nature all the time without the architecture (or maybe it's strands of accidental architecture), a.k.a. panpsychism. (Some question this; or at any rate it wouldn't be consciousness of or for anything, whatever that'd be like.) And of course a knocked-out or newly dead brain has all the architecture but none of the consciousness.
But to be precise on it, I think the way to frame it is consciousness is a dispositional property of the architecture, which is a common thing in science... like brittleness is a dispositional property of ice or glass or elasticity is a dispositional property of rubber bands, even though you only manifest the property under certain conditions, it's a latent disposition in the physical organisation. That's what one means by the term as a property.
BTW, one interesting twist to panpsychism if you buy it: under some interpretations of quantum mechanics, given a long enough time in the universe, eventually processing tokens may align to give rise not just to *some* consciousness, but *your* personal consciousness, enough for "you" to recognize a blip -- accidental teleportation may also still be you all the same.
catbarf on 24/9/2012 at 03:35
Quote Posted by Vasquez
I've read a short story, can't remember who wrote it (Robert Sheckley, maybe?) and I don't even remember for sure whether it was about teleportation or just faster-than-light traveling. Anyway, the idea was that the passengers had to be put to sleep/hibernation before the trip, because otherwise they would go insane. In the story one of the passengers doesn't go to sleep (can't remember why), and finds out that despite the ship itself travels superfast across [folded?] space, the human mind takes "the long route" and experiences hundreds of years of space travel, all alone and isolated from everything. It was very creepy story, but also very interesting idea.
That would be (
http://www.en8848.com.cn/fiction/Fiction/Scific/2005-11-15/1712.html) The Jaunt by Stephen King. Interesting story, but in the context of teleportation I don't think it's terribly relevant as the mind is governed by physical processes that make the idea of an instantaneous teleportation lasting an eternity to the mind a bit implausible.
Vasquez on 24/9/2012 at 04:28
Blah blah science science ;) It was interesting on many levels - where does the mind "go" when it's separated from the physical structure - and can it be separated etc. More philosophy and imagination than science of course, although imho scientists do need imagination, too (at least the good ones).
Also the thought that seems to prove itself over and over in reality: science has a price. Almost every time humans think up something new, no matter how good, it also brings something bad along. If you play with time, it will play with you.
I don't personally look at it as a moral lesson, rather as a fact of life, and a manifestation of how little we really know. It's basic dualistic thinking, of course, but the simplest ideas are sometimes the most interesting, because they're easiest to find and observe in real life (or construct in your imagination) even if you're not a scientist.
But if we stick so decidedly on science: Dema, a knocked-out brain is more like a sleeping brain than a dead one. Despite the person is out, the brain is still very active, monitoring and controlling heart rate, breathing etc. Maybe the mind is doing a bit of universe-traveling meanwhile :D
demagogue on 24/9/2012 at 04:38
Quote Posted by Vasquez
But if we stick so decidedly on science: Dema, a knocked-out brain is more like a sleeping brain than a dead one. Despite the person is out, the brain is still very active, monitoring and controlling heart rate, breathing etc. Maybe the mind is doing a bit of universe-traveling meanwhile :D
Of course, but these active systems are not involved in consciousness then, and that's what I cared about. Arguably, all consciousness cares is that the
right systems are active, and if they aren't, it may as well be dead as far as the existence of experience goes (the argument would go)... That's an important part of the "dispositional" argument, that consciousness is not inherent in the mind or "out there", but only dispositional and manifested just when its activated and not when it's not.
So there are states the brain is in where it may be very active but not conscious -- knocked out, some stages of sleep (but not other stages where one is dreaming, in which case a KO'd brain arguably has more in common with the dead brain than a sleeping one on just that one property we care about, being cns). I understand parts of the midbrain are involved with the line between being cns & uncns, but SubjEff is our resident expert on this before any of us, so I'd defer to him. We could also imagine a recently dead brain given an electric shock, with parts being temporarily activated and possibly made briefly conscious (though it might be next to impossible to get a report from such an experiment to know if it's experiencing anything, so I'm not sure it could be made into an empirical result. Maybe some "near death" reports might tell us something, if we could work out the timing between brain activity & the reports.).
Kolya on 24/9/2012 at 08:53
Identity is a narrative of the mind born out of personality management. While trying to bring together all the different roles and subidentites and stray thoughts you engage in daily, you're telling yourself an ongoing story about who you are, your overarching identity. This story changes all the time and a lot is gracefully forgotten or dealt with while you sleep. I don't see how this compares to dying, when the whole system is in flux all the time.
