You know those sci-fi teleporters like in Star Trek where you disappear from one location then instantaneously reappear in another location? Do you trust that they are safe to use?
To fully understand my question, you need to understand the safety concerns regarding teleporters as explained in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQHBAdShgYI
spoiler
I wouldn’t, because the person that reappears aint me, its a fucking clone. Teleporters are murder machines. Star Trek is a silent massacre!
Well, if the technology actually existed, it would solve that whole “soul” question.
We would know pretty quickly if we transported humans and they came out the other side as soulless aberrations because their original just got killed.
So yeah, I would 100% use it after it first proved once and for all that the sum of our consciousness really is all the synapses and signals and grey matter in our heads. Because if so then what does it matter if your original matter has been erased and then recreated. Your clone is just as much you as you are you at that point.
How would you know?
Fair question.
I’m assuming that if your soul really is “you” then a soulless clone of you that is identical to you down to every atom, but had no soul, would be bad.
I don’t know if that means your soulless clone would just be an instinct driven animal, or maybe just an evil version of you that immediately grows a goatee. I don’t know what function your soul actually performs. But at some point, maybe not immediately, a bunch of soulless clones walking around would be noticed.
Maybe? (Or maybe not?)
As far as an outside observer is concerned, the clone is identical to you in every way. But now you’re the outside observer, a dead outside observer, while that clone goes on and lives your life.
It’s not really about a ‘soul’, but your first person perspective of being you and not being someone else. Imagine if the teleporter malfunctioned and created the clone without disassembling you. That clone isn’t ‘you’, and disassembling you still wouldn’t make the clone you.
If you have no soul and you just exist as matter, then in a horrible transporter accident where your clone and your original still exist, now there are two of you. You are both you. There is no difference if you are both perfect copies of each other. 1=1.
Sounds like a win/win to me, finally a best friend who really gets me.
You wouldn’t experience being the clone though. You’d only be one of you, the other person is completely separate.
Hopefully my clone likes me as much as I like me.
You’re assuming that souls exist. That may be a mistake.
Spiritualists think they are some timeless deity puppeteering their bodies like marionettes, afraid that using the transporter will cut the strings. More palatable to imagine the fleshbag collapsing on the floor without your control inputs than knowing you are the fleshbag…
Agreed. That’s my point. I don’t really know if we have a soul. If transporter technology existed and worked as theorized, then it would answer a bunch of questions that have been plaguing humanity.
If everything that I am can be duplicated by making a perfect copy of me atom for atom, then there is nothing to fear from transporter technology.
Souls are useless in any case.
If you’re satisfied that a perfect copy of you takes your place after your obliteration, sure.
So you’d commit suicide so that some clone of you with all your memories can have a fun time on Mars?
Absolutely this.
Someone else can be the guinea pig, but if it’s been tested and everyone came out fine? Yeah. I’ll absolutely take advantage.
Even if the clone is undistinguishable from your old self, that old self has died. “you” has died. You didn’t teleport to Mars, you died on Earth.
You’re repeating what OP said.
Thing is, the idea that an “old you” has “died” is a modern soul conceit. If “me” is just the combination of meat, electricity, and memories - then for all intents and purposes I was simply taken apart in one place and reassembled in another. Continuity of all three is maintained when I am reassembled on Mars with my body and memories intact. There is no “old” and “new” me - because what you or OP think defines “me” isn’t something that dies when the meat stops working briefly.
“Soul conceit” is the right term here. The belief humans can’t seem to shake that I am more than just the sum of my parts.
I don’t know if I have a soul or if my consciousness is really just electric meat. But it seems that if I am more than the sum of my parts, the soulless me that comes out the other side will just be “my parts” and will be obviously different than the original me.
If we really are just our atoms, and the technology can be trusted to reliably replicate me atom for atom on the other side then there’s nothing to be afraid of. The original you hasn’t died, it’s just ceased to exist. No big deal. The clone of you is also you, so you still exist.
But you could just not disassemble your old body and now you have two. It’s committing suicide to put a clone somewhere else.
But we can “prove” that isn’t true because what if you aren’t disassembled on the first side? Just copied over. Either you have a sense and control of both bodies at once, or in a real teleport where you are disassembled, you’re gone the moment you teleport and the “you” that remains is another different person with exactly your thoughts, feelings, motivations, memories, etc.
I love how this was said completely unironically.
We’re talking about something that only exists in sci-fi stories and you’re trying to argue about souls as if one outcome of teleports is clearly more real than another.
Ship of Thesius, though. If it’s exactly my thoughts, exactly my feelings, exactly my motivations, my memories, my body … That’s me. There’s no other parts that got left out.
But consciousness was interrupted briefly when the transport happened? That happens to me every night - except in the morning I wake up in the same place instead of a different one. For all worthwhile intents and purposes, everything tangible and real that makes a person a person is relocated and the person remains. Getting lost in whether or not “you” “survive” is wasting angst on the existence of a soul.
I don’t really agree with this. To me it has nothing to do with souls, it’s about continuity of experience.
If I don’t get to continue to experience life because I’m dead and some clone with my exact thoughts etc is now me, it’s only the rest of the world who experiences that as me continuing to live. But I don’t get to.
I think that distinction is artificial.
My continuity of experience is interrupted every night, among others - and I don’t worry that my experience as being me is somehow invalid now, or fear sleeping lest a doppelganger take my body overnight and wake up ‘as me’ the next morning. The idea that this would be different is resting on the notion that there is something other than mere meat and electricity that would be lost when the teleport interrupts consciousness, and I think that assumption is something that needs direct challenge.
I think you would experience life continuing from the moment consciousness resumes in the new location, the exact same as how you experience life ‘continuing’ when you wake up each day. All the ways that you experience your own consciousness would simply have relocated. Without assuming a soul, there is no subjective distinction between pre/post teleporter any more than there’s a distinction between pre/post nap.
Thanks for taking the time to explain to me in such detail. I’m finding this perplexing because to me it’s the exact opposite. I was raised non-theist and find ‘souls’/non material components completely impossible to believe in. And if l am only those then it isn’t me if it gets destroyed.
Consciousness isn’t the self. The self is a complex organism that is very much alive and functioning even when it is asleep. If you are in fact a doppelganger you have no way of knowing and neither does the Anomander who died. And that is why I wouldn’t risk teleportation.
The arguments of @Zetaphor eksewhere in here describe it better than I can.
Using the star trek transporter as the example, you actually experience the teleportation process. In one episode, we see the perspective of someone being transported and they go into a white void, briefly, and then appear in the 2nd location. It takes like 8 seconds. We also know that some transporters are faster than others.
I don’t believe there’s anything special about my current body. Barring teleportation, I fully believe that if it were possible to disassemble a person, but them in a box, ship them across the Pacific Ocean, and then put them back together again, that they’d be the same person.
I don’t see how being converted into energy and back represents death.
People experiencing the transport process is due not understanding how copies work. Damn, they don’t seem to grasp the idea of a backup.
Seeing as anything that we copy or make backups of now is not self-aware, I don’t see what that has to do with anything. If anything, a teleport (as conceived of and described in science fiction, not how it might “actually” work) is more like moving a file from one tree to another. The whole idea of the teleport as a plot device is to create a form of near-instant transportation. I feel like these thought exercises where “what if the teleporter cloned you and killed the original copy” miss that.
Its like, “hmm what if the train from New York to Boston actually brought you to a cloning facility in New Haven, shot you in the head and then replaced you with a lab-grown clone that went on to Boston in your stead” well then it wouldn’t be what most people think of when they think of taking the train.
In order for me to be convinced that the common depiction of teleportation is a form of cloning and murder, I would need someone to prove to me that humans have souls in a metaphysical sense - that there’s something about us as individuals beyond the sum of our lived experiences and the atoms that make up our bodies.
Sorry, no it’s not. When you introduce technobabble related to “buffers” and “caches” where the information is stored temporarily, the working must conform to the way files are handled. Yes, you can handwave whatever you like for narrative purposes, but this discussion is not supposed to have as a valid answer “a wizard did it”.
That is ridiculous. Please search the short stories “The phantom of Kansas” by John Varley and “Think like a dinosaur” by James Patrick Kelly to see the implications of this kind of transport. Neither posits the existence of a soul, and the scenario of “the original dies, a copy keeps living” is very clearly shown as the only valid explanation, and how the assumption that the person is the same after the transport (or the cloning, in the first story, but the effect are the same) is merely a legal fiction for convenience.
In any transport there’s a copy, and any copy takes a non-zero time and an instant where the copied person must exist in two places at the time. Unless the spacetime is curved and poked and you transit through the hole, there is no other viable model.
There’s an underrated Paul Rudd tv show about this: Living With Yourself.
That’s not the issue.
Your body is copied as a file.
Your mind is a process running in a body created from that file.
When the process stops, you are effectively dead. Another copy of your body runs another process with an identical content. He has your body, but he’s not you.
That’s absolutely the issue.
This presumes that there is something special in this model that doesn’t resume when your mind resumes running in it’s new location. Or, in other terms, “a soul”. The idea that an identical consciousness in an identical body is “not you” is based wholly on the assumption that “you” is something other than the consciousness.
And your mind, or my mind, are both “processes” that stop regularly already - are you claiming that old you dies each night and a completely new but otherwise identical person lives each morning?
That is ridiculous.
When you kill a process and you re-run a program, even if you saved the full state of the memory elsewhere, you don’t say that it’s the same process. Is another process with identical content. There’s no need of a metaphysical entity. It’s another instance.
You’re deeply, sorely mistaken. Even in a deep, unconscious state, the mind keeps working, even if the degree of consciousness is different. That we’re not 100% certain of what the brain does in those moments doesn’t mean that it stops working.
So you do see my point.
People aren’t computers, so getting all worked up about how software models instances still isn’t a valid modelling for human consciousness.
But this is so hair-splittingly pedantic it’s almost doubled back to be incorrect. If you ask 99.999% of the world, they’ll be like “yeah I closed outlook and then I opened outlook” - to them, it’s still the same program. They’re launching the same software again. No one is like “oh well once you quit Skyrim it’s all over because even if you reopen it later, it’s a new instance and the old one is dead” … no. That’s ridiculous. It’s the same program, the same save file, resumed from save at a later date.
Your focus on “Process” instead of “Program” is making the soul argument. The “process” you’re arguing for is a soul. Something intangible and irrelevant to the end user, that does get terminated on shutdown, that cannot be restored from save. Consciousness is the software, not the process itself. Memories are the save file. There is nothing in OP’s model of teleporting that suggests “process” itself is the sacred portion - when the hardware & software of “Dave” gets paused and resumed flawlessly.
Not at all. Consciousness is interrupted. Unless we’re assuming that the “process” itself is sacred - what happens to consciousness is all that matters in either case. If your ability to perceive yourself as a conscious being stops - it doesn’t matter to your experience of your own consciousness if the ‘process’ stopped or went to sleep during the gap.
Sorry, no. But trying to make you understand. You are deeply mistaken, but I’m not interesting in departing with you any longer.
I’m never going to sleep again!
The mind doesn’t stop during sleep. We’re not fully aware, that’s all.
Mine stops. If I were to fall asleep (which I now won’t), and someone were to transport my body away, and the mind resumed running at it’s new location, the future copy of me would be very confused.
This is how I feel about lab grown meat. I’m sure it’s probably fine, but I don’t want to be one of the first to try it out. I’ll give it a couple of years and see how the first adopters get on lol.
I would actually really like a 4"x4"x1.5" square of perfectly marbled steak cloned from Kobe beef genes in some tray in a lab. No gristle, no bones, perfect consistency in every bite.
Seared in a blazing hot cast iron pan with salt, pepper, butter and lemon.
$8.99 lb. at Publix. I’ll take the transporter to get there.
Note to self: check on DJKJuicy in a couple of years before trying this
How would we ever know for sure if the copy was really you or not? What question could we ask that only your objective self would know, but the sum collection of cells would not?
Exactly. The copy would think it’s me, and that’s nice for it. It would go around thinking the tech was great.
But I wouldn’t get to enjoy that because I would be dead.