Teleportation. It isn't you that comes out the other side. Or is it? - by SubJeff
DDL on 24/9/2012 at 11:18
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
if you were copied and told you would be killed but the copy would live on you wouldn't be happy about that, would you?
If I told you that you were actually murdered last night while you were sleeping, and replaced with a copy SubJeff with all your memories...
how would you know the difference?
My argument here is that really, continous consciousness is by and large a lie our brain feeds us to stop us going mad. We only actually exist NOW, everything else is conjecture.
faetal on 24/9/2012 at 11:20
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
What makes me me is inherent to me. The copy is just that, a copy. It doesn't matter if it is identical to me in every way, I am still as separate being.
They are just words though and don't effect the reality of it. If you were both kept in the dark and the teleportation was only to a pod on the other side of the room and you were both mixed up, you'd both have the same memories of arriving at the facility and getting in the machine and you'd both have had the same life. Neither would know who was the original and who was the copy. When you copy paste the contents of a word document into another word document - it doesn't matter which is the original and which is the copy, since the information is identical. If there is no degradation between A and B, then the labels A and B are meaningless.
Quote:
You say that the difference between the two is not material in any way and yet if you were copied and told you would be killed but the copy would live on you wouldn't be happy about that, would you?
Depends which me you're talking about. The one which gets to live might feel some remorse - the one which is destroyed will likely be sedated beforehand, so won't care. That might get tricky actually, if the person getting out at the other end starts to feel cumulative guilt after each trip. I can imagine many would be driven to suicide, which would be so ironic as to be hilarious, since they'd have technically killed themselves in some sense each time they travelled.
SubJeff on 24/9/2012 at 11:33
You wouldn't care if you were killed provided you were sedated first? Ooookaaayyyyy.
Quote Posted by DDL
If I told you that you were actually murdered last night while you were sleeping, and replaced with a copy SubJeff with all your memories...
how would you know the difference?
My argument here is that really, continous consciousness is by and large a lie our brain feeds us to stop us going mad. We only actually exist NOW, everything else is conjecture.
Ha ha. Yes.
faetal on 24/9/2012 at 11:41
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
You wouldn't care if you were killed provided you were sedated first? Ooookaaayyyyy.
It's not that I wouldn't care
per se, it's that being sedated and then injected with e.g. a respiratory depressant and anaesthetic wouldn't cause suffering (unless you REALLY hate needle-sticks). This whole hypothetical scenario presumably rests on the notion that this is proven technology, you go into it knowing that you'll come out the other end. I guess it comes from realising that you need to separate yourself from the idea of continuum. Going into the procedure would be indistinguishable from going in for a surgical procedure. The only people able to discern a difference would be outside observers. It'd never catch on simply because no one would every be able to separate themselves from the ego going in to the machine. The surviving copy would have all of the exact same memories, so would experience the whole thing as a journey without travel. I don't think our brains are very good at dealing with this kind of scenario tbh, as we're so complex, than we're kind of guaranteed to be unique, so this thought experiment messes with the fundamentals of experience and consciousness existing only once.
DDL on 24/9/2012 at 11:46
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
You wouldn't care if you were killed provided you were sedated first? Ooookaaayyyyy.
Faetal's point (and mine) is that if you were sedated first, you wouldn't even
know if you had been killed.
In essence,
1)you get sedated, walk into room. You wake up, walk out of room. Room is in the same place.
2)you get sedated, walk into room. You wake up, walk out of room. Room is in a different place.
As far as you and your thoughts are concerned, as the person walking out of the room, these are entirely equivalent, but with the second one you get a free holiday. You could've been killed and replaced in either scenario.
As soon as you get sedated, that person you were will
only ever exist in memory. Who then carries that memory doesn't really matter: that person you were is already effectively dead, as is the person you were three minutes ago, as is the person you were when you started reading this reply.
Vasquez on 24/9/2012 at 12:29
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
You say that the difference between the two is not material in any way and yet if you were copied and told you would be killed but the copy would live on you wouldn't be happy about that, would you?
Now you're being emotional, you silly snowflake you. The SubjEff who pops out the other end of the teletube might just as well think: "Hey, that was nothing after all, I'm still me!"
faetal on 24/9/2012 at 12:36
An amazing premise for a sci-fi story would be how people use this method of transport with their conscience essentially racking up euthanasia of yourself every time they do it. How would you dispose of the body too, since I'm guessing a funeral for all of your copies would get expensive and consume too much space. Plus, having a mausoleum filled with former versions of yourself would be a little on the macabre side. I guess organ donor agreements could give it a positive side effect.
SubJeff on 24/9/2012 at 12:39
Nice.
The copy wouldn't know, no. Perhaps this is why I hate having an anaesthetic myself - somewhere I know that it's not me that wakes up...
The me that wakes up is just living in a neurally constructed illusion that it is the same me that went to sleep.
AAAAAAAARGGGGHHHHH
Vasquez on 24/9/2012 at 12:42
;)
Quote Posted by faetal
How would you dispose of the body too, since I'm guessing a funeral for all of your copies would get expensive and consume too much space.
I'm still voting for that chopping the body into tiny bits and shooting it through the teleporting machinethingywhatever. No messy body disposal, but still the intriguing death by teleport.
DDL on 24/9/2012 at 12:48
It is definitely one of those "don't think about it too much" things, isn't it? :p
Mind you, I think a key issue here is whether (if teleporters..you know, existed, and were of this type) we'd euthanise anyone at all? We'd probably use them as cloning machines for the rich and famous, so they can chair like, 15 business meetings at once.
And of course, if we're taking it as read you could translate people into information for subsequent reintegration elsewhere, why not just store the information? We've basically invented the quicksave key. "Risky activity? Better quickly make a backup."
EDIT: the only real way I can see this being impractical (ahahahha aside from the entire thought-experiment nature of the enterprise, of course) is if quantum entanglement is somehow intrinsic to teleportation, like..you really can't make two copies of one thing, because the spinstates don't copy. So if you disintegrate someone to send them somewhere, you make them into entangled information so they can either be reintegrated at the destination (collapsing the entanglement) or reintegrated back at the starting location (again collapsing the entanglement), but never both.
That would be somehow more mathematically pleasing.
