Would it make a difference if the laws of physics prevent or allow a machine from operating in ‘duplicate’ mode?
ITT: People who haven’t seen The Prestige
I would encourage everyone else to use it. So roads will be less crowded and I can enjoy nature in its true beauty. Assuming of course Big Corpos haven’t completely ruined it.
Of course. Fastest travel = best travel.
And the whole “you might die” sounds like big oil propaganda to me. I bet car accident deaths are way more likely.
For me, yes. I like the duplicator transporter thought problem, but I’ve always come to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter. If what comes out doesn’t know the difference, and the version left behind just stops existing, what’s the difference? Maybe if the old version suffered from it I wouldn’t, but if they just cease to exist then what’s the functional difference between the two? If you believe there’s a soul then maybe there’s an issue, but I don’t.
Instantaneous Ship of Theseus
I mean at that point we probably have the tech to remotely pilot a James Cameron Avatar meat puppet, so I’d rather just do that.
And probably stay in the puppet all the time tbh because I would like to be tall and athletic. Hold the blue and alien parts tho pls.
I used to work with radiation and oh my GOD would having a disposable remote brain-controlled body be a fucking boon to that industry. Though probably at that point in tech history there will be very little if any need for human radioactive material handling
Relevant Mini Fantasy Theater
I would. Never understood why people are scared of having their consciousness cut and pasted. I have files from 25+ years ago that have been moved between numerous hdd’s, that’s still the same file. (Always assuming everything works as intended, of course)
It’s never been the same file. It’s been a copy of it. Which is irrelevant in every scenario, and to everyone involved, except from the perspective of the original file, and even then, only if it were conscious.
If we give the original file consciousness for your hypothesis, that consciousness gets duplicated to the copied files, but consciousness doesn’t get removed from the original. And there are now a bunch of distinct consciousness streams, all of which smoothly continue on from the original, but none of which are the original. And if you delete the original, you delete that stream of consciousness, which makes no difference to anyone, except the original consciousness, for which, it’s a cessation of existence.
From the outside, the copy is the same as the original. But from the originals perspective, not so much…
Doesn’t make a difference to me. I get that people seem to see a difference and I am indeed slightly unnerved that I don’t but it is what it is.
The difference is that you’d be dead. There would be a copy of you running around that thinks it is you, but you, your chain of continuity would not be that copy. To literally everyone else, including the copy, you may as well be the original, but the journey from your personal experience would be over. You would be dead and the world would continue on with a copy of your in your place, which you wouldn’t experience.
For all I know I’ve been cut and and pasted 20 times in the last 5 minutes. There’d be no practical difference and I’d feel the same. This is only an issue if you think there’s something like a “soul”.
You wouldn’t feel anything. A copy of you would be the one not feeling the difference.
That copy is me though.
You have absolutely no reason to believe that.
What happens if there’s a malfunction in the machine and the copy is made at the other end without the original version being destroyed? Do you think you would experience both perspectives simultaneously?
Because then that means free will can’t exist.
Deterministic universes disallow any concept of free will or variance beyond what was calculated at the very femtosecond the universe started. Nothing is possible except what has happened and will happen.
There’s nothing in free will that would prevent this though. I’m confused how you get to this conclusion.
How do you change an equation from within said equation?
Equation? Is that what you think existance is?
That is what deterministic reality means. And if you can exactly replicate a consciousness, that is the indication we’re in an deterministic universe.
Don’t see how you get your conclusion from the premise.
Strictly speaking, sure, but for all intents and purposes, you can still have practical free will in a deterministic universe. If a system is chaotic enough (which a human brain is almost certainly going to be), it may be theoretically possible to predict what a person is going to do, but it will always be practically impossible to actually do so.
We never say that the weather is perfectly predictable, yet it’s clearly driven by purely deterministic mechanisms
The problem with chaos theory and its ilk is it’s frame of reference is so pathetically human.
No, humans even with computer aid will not be able to predict a sufficiently chaotic system, but that doesn’t mean its not predictable.
That’s the definition of deterministic. That given infinite compute time and an accurate starting state, and accurate formulas, you are able to calculate the totality of any single point of time in that system. In other words, if the universe were a single equation, i.e. Δe=(mc²)t and you knew the starting values of e, m, and c; you could fill in the t(ime) and figure out the Δe at any point in time.
That fact doesn’t change if there are a infinite number of items in the formula, or even infinite formulas – there will never be any other outcome to those equations than what was set in motion at the start of the universe. Free will, i.e. true deviation from determinism, cannot exist in a deterministic universe. Without deviation from determinism, without free will, we are not participants in the universe. We are observers. We cannot change any thing, even how we think about the fact we are observers.
Every thought you’re having right now, in a deterministic universe, was determined the second the universe started. Every action you’ve taken, including writing this comment, was set in stone. There was never a single thing you could do to change it, there was never anything else that would have ever happened, there is no variance with these starting conditions that this universe started with.
If you are just the result of mathematical formulas being resolved in real time, you cannot change the variables. You aren’t part of setting the equation. You are a blip in it being solved.
For most people, that’s depressing. For some people, this being proven will cause them to kill themselves, which would have been again set in stone before the Earth was formed. For anyone this should be distressing, unless, of course, you were programmed at the start of the universe to not find it distressing and just be okay with being an unwilling actor in a movie recorded before the concept of light existed.
I don’t disagree with you, but it seems you’ve missed the point that I was trying to make. Yes, sure, the future has been predetermined in a deterministic universe. But if no person in that universe can ever figure out what that future is going to be, is there any practical distinction? To any entity within the universe, the future is completely unknown - the only thing that can be said for sure is that there is going to be a future. That is what I mean when I say that there can exist a practical free will in a deterministic universe
In my eyes, any person who would feel dread over whether or not free will exists in a deterministic universe is splitting hairs over a thought experiment where all outcomes are practically equivalent
I don’t see how no free will follows from “consciousness can be cut and pasted” but I also don’t know what difference it makes for me.
Free will, presumably, is the ability to choose. Or at the very least the ability to change an action from a predetermined course.
If consciousness derives from a series of physical interactions, i.e. you are just a set of electrochemical reactions that follow deterministic (i.e. unchanging no matter how many times it happens) physics, you cannot change anything. Every thought that you have ever thought was determined before electrons formed in the universe. Every single action the collection of waves and particles you arbitrarily call ‘you’ happened all at once at the start of the universe, we’re just seeing it happen slowly.
If consciousness is deterministic, there is no concept of free will, you are in the middle of a mathematical formula being solved, nothing more or less. You have no ability to change your fate, or choose anything. Even your reaction to this idea was determined before the universe was cold enough for light to exist.
Therefore, we should hope consciousness, if nothing else in the universe, is not deterministic. That there is no ability to stop or restart it here. That there isn’t a way to copy it, or paste it. Otherwise no human has ever chosen anything, even a single thought in their head.
We don’t know if free will exists. Maybe it just doesn’t
Which would be terrible, genuinely speaking. Proving that to yourself in what is essentially suicide from anything other than a deterministic viewpoint is an extreme most will simply never do.
Most people do not accept nor want to think that they are merely watching a movie. Most people want to believe they have struggled. That they have suffered. That they have overcome that suffering. That their choices lead, at least in part, to the success or failure of the things in their life.
Without free will, the concept of choice does not exist. Struggle and suffering were built in. Whether or not you got through it has nothing to do with you. You have not accomplished anything, you will never accomplish anything. Not that there is a meaningful definition of ‘You’ in a purely deterministic universe; anymore than there is a definition of the viewer of a movie from the universe within that movie.
Depends on whether they would work by actually moving me through space (using a wormhole or something) or by disintegrating me at point A and creating a copy at point B. In the latter case, I probably wouldn’t use them.
Yeah, I’d risk it walking through a Stargate, but the Enterprise transporter can fuck all the way off.
We see their perspective though in an episode. It transports and preserves your consciousness somehow. You apparently even see lights.
Only Stargate canonically disintegrates and then reintehrates you.
Like a solid 4th of trek episodes involve some sort of transporter malfunction. I’m not getting in one either.
I am thinking of a case where it is ‘disintegration’ and ‘re-integration’, but making use of some physics that prevent making a copy. For example, let’s say that the mechanism relies on a step for which the ‘no-cloning theorem’ applies. In this hypothetical scenario, a commonly held belief is that the inability to make a copy retains the person’s identity. It is a similar logic to how a person remains who they are from childhood and through adulthood despite the atoms that compose them changing over time.
There’s no difference. The universe could be destroying you and recreating you every Planck second, and it’s indistinguishable from continuous existence.
The problem with that line of thought is that even if it is true, it doesn’t apply here, because when you create a perfect copy of yourself, you don’t magically get a shared continuity where you experience the continuity of both the original and the copy. There would now be two independent chains of experience, and even if every chain of experience is endless destruction with continuity just being a trick of memory, there would still be two divergent continuities now, and one of those would end.
True but that’s already happening in theory. All copies would argue they are the original even if their futures diverge. None would think otherwise or have an experience any different than our moment to moment continuity as it stands now. That’s only apparent to a 3rd party.
From the perspective of a 3rd party, it’s a technicality. From the perspective of the original continued consciousness, it’s not.
They would both have the exact same continued consciousness, that only diverges later. Only an outside party can tell there are 2 separate lineages.
So confident about something we aren’t even remotely close to understanding
I imagine even if there is a strong philosophical argument that it’s a “you die and it’s a copy/clone that comes out” in this scenario that people would still use it just from social and economic pressures. It would become normalized to work on the other side of the planet and just teleport there, your friends might be scattered across the globe, and not using the tech would put you at a massive disadvantage to everyone.
It’s a fun one to think about though - our consciousness is interrupted at different levels all the time (Sleep, injury, anesthesia etc), would a teeny tiny interruption from being rebuilt, make you any less you? Perhaps the scary thought is “you” aren’t something continuous, and that teleporting (dying/being rebuilt) isn’t really that different than just normal living.
All that said - I’d probably grow up with the technology and use it while trying my best to never ever think about the details!
I think similarly…
Hypothetically: I spent my childhood and early teens using teleportation machines and I never had an issue. As a teenager, I learn about people who are strongly opposed to teleportation. People around me talk negatively about these people, and are perhaps annoyed at the laws that are made to accommodate those who choose not to teleport. They are seen as a nuisance because they complicate workplace dynamics because they don’t want to do something simple and convenient that most in society do. The belief they hold makes most people uncomfortable because of the philosophical implication.
So, as a teenager, I realize that to become a ‘non-teleporter’ I need to accept that I have already chosen to destroy myself multiple times, and that my family and friends who leave are not the same that come back. It would be so difficult to make this philosophical mind-shift and stop teleporting so that copy #4,242 gets to live.
What happens if I splinch myself?
Well, for a robust teleport function it should first make a duplicate of you at the target location. Check that it went well and if all good, then blast the original you into a cloud of red fog.
I remember watching a documentary about teleportation that said that the biggest issue doesn’t seem to be how to reconstruct the body rather than how you reconstruct the consciousness
Emerson Green convinced me that p-zombies are plausible. So there’s no way to know if a teleporter would end your consciousness.
P-zombies always seemed like anti-materialist navel gazing to me. I don’t think they’re meaningfully possible.
Maybe not from the outside, but you’d still know if you’re conscious, right?
Is this before or after the great oil and transportation war has taken its casualties?
It is still possible to use regular transportation at a similar cost as today
I would be scared that the person on the other side is just a clone rather than me.
There’s nothing to guarantee that every night you go to sleep that doesn’t happen.
Thank you, came here to say this. People like the phrase “continuity of consciousness” but the problem of persistent identity is much more fundamental than this thought experiment lets on
What if:
- It is physically impossible to make a copy
- Your family and friends use it daily
Different person but:
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I am concerned about continuity of consciousness, not about copies. From an earlier comment posted, you mention disintegration and reintegration. If we’re just transcribing the data into new atoms on the other side, continuity of consciousness will not transfer over. Well, to be more precise, the individual on the other side will believe it has, and to the rest of the world I will be functionally the exact same being. This doesn’t matter to me though, because my specific consciousness no longer exists. If we’re actually using the exact same atoms after disintegration, I couldn’t tell you if that would work. I sure as shit wouldn’t be trying it though.
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My family and friends do things daily I am not interested in, including things which they find to be convenient or important to their daily lives. I’ll be fine, but I also wouldn’t bother stopping them either. From my perspective, their original continuity of consciousness is irrelevant to me. They will live, feel, and act the exact same regardless. It only matters to the self, and the new iteration will always feel as if their continuity is unbroken.
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