Question from an armchair philosopher:
If the machine created two duplicates, while the original simply disappeared, would you say that one of the duplicates is the same person as the original, neither is, or both are?
If the machine created one duplicate, while the original simply disappeared, is the duplicate the same person as the original or not?
That’s the important distinction. Danton knows when he goes into the machine, he’s the one not coming out, even though an exact duplicate will exist as if nothing happened.
It’s the same with the Borden brothers. He can take comfort in that his twin will take care of his daughter and can have his own life now, but I’m sure he’d rather not be executed.
Neither, and no. And it’s got nothing to do with the “soul” and everything to do with accurately describing how the process works.
Wait, I thought the one that lived was the one with the daughter? Didn’t he say he was the one that loved the mother?
(Whatever you say about Borden, it was pretty cruel to make his poor wife go through that - and it drove her to suicide…)
Where has anyone argued this?
No one has accurately described how the process works though. Your CD analogy is flawed, because it’s not fabricating a new physical CD out of thin air that is molecularly identical to the one you put in.
And more importantly, the CD doesn’t have consciousness.
You’re being consistent, but I don’t think it’s enough to say “we have to accurately describe the process.” That doesn’t determine what we should say here. We can “accurately” describe the process using a language that counts people who share memories in the right way “the same person,” and we can also “accurately” describe the process using a language that does not count two entities as the same person if their timeline is not completely physically continuous in the normal biological way. These are two different languages one can use to describe the situation, the situation can be fully and accurately described either way, and normal English is ambiguous between these two languages.
How do we choose between languages, and does it matter?
It does matter because the semantic properties of a language can have psychological and political effects. Here’s what I mean. If the person post-duplication is to be called “the same person” as the person pre-duplication, then we will take ourselves to owe the post-duplication person all the same rights that were due to the pre-duplication person. The prior person’s house is now the later person’s house, and so on. But if we use the other language, we’ll treat the later person differently. He’s not the same person as the prior person, so he doesn’t get all the prior person’s stuff. The prior person is dead. We have an estate sale. Too bad for the later person.
It’s not a question of accuracy, then–again, both ways of describing the situation are completely adequate to the physical facts and vice versa. It’s instead a question of, basically, (in this case), political systems. Should we use a language that gives rights W X and Y to entity Z, or should we use a language that doesn’t?
How do you decide that? In this case, my own instinct is to think “Geez, what if I were that poor duplicate? I’d have all the memories of the past person, yet all these people would be treating me as though I weren’t him and had no right to his stuff and so on.” That’d suck pretty hard. If I think the right political system is one that minimizes things sucking pretty hard, then I think that the language that strips this entity of rights is not the right language to use.
Of course in more complicated duplication systems, more complicated problems might arise concerning the rights of the entities involved, and more complicated problems about language would develop concomitantly. I’m just looking at one kind of scenario here. My main point is that “adequacy to the facts” actually doesn’t determine which description to use here. Different languages, each plausibly in keeping with English usage, are all adequate to the facts. Yet different languages have different consequences in practice, for a matter like this anyway. Hence we have a choice to make, and can’t base the choice on the criterion of factual accuracy.
A clarification on my view (or what had always been my view, since it never occurred to me to look at this the way you do): I don’t think the machine working one of the two ways I described procludes Danton from being uncertain how the machine works. The only other matter that had passed through the machine previously were hats and cats, it’s not like he could ask THEM how it worked. Even if other people had passed through, I agree they come out identical in every way, so how would they know?
I guess I’ve always looked at it this way because Tesla did not design the machine as a duplicator, he designed it as a transporter. It was only as they were about to give up that they figured out that it was replicating. I’ve always seen the mistake as “oops, it doesn’t transport the man but instead sends a copy of him to the destination”, or “oops, it transports the man but leaves a copy in the machine.” Never thought of it as “oops, it splits him like an amoeba.”
Still, I can’t fathom what the experience of the man would be, in the latter case. If I were to step into the Amoebic-Split 3000, what would my experience be? Would my conciousness end, as I am torn apart to create two copies of myself, or would my conciousness still either be the Prestige or the man in the box, with a brand new identical twin brother, who carries all my memories? I certainly can’t experience being both men at the same time, right?
Going back to the film - if it had been a split-consciousness-making machine in the film, I don’t see how he would have carried on drowning his new other self, as he’d discover that Caine’s character had been lying to him about drowning being a pretty OK way to go. Instead it was a terrible shock to him when confronted with the story.
In your hypothetical - I guess it depends on what we might hypothesize that a “consciousness” involves. I could see people assuming that it is indeed shared - and that would probably drive someone crazy before long, trying to process two sets of sensory input/events in the world - or that it is duplicated.
Not at all relevant. Unless your aim is to mire this in pointless philosophical asides.
That’s not a bug, it’s a feature. But if you like, hypothesize technology that does exactly that, and the answer is still the same.
You appear to be engaging in a different argument from the one happening in this thread, then.
You’ve forcibly dragged the discussion over into your philosophical terms so you can talk about things that fascinate you. The person who flipped the switch is the original. After he flipped the switch, there is the original, and the new guy. It doesn’t matter that they’re identical. It doesn’t matter that both of them think they have continuity of consciousness.
In that context, the original Danton is dead by the second performance of the show - either in the show itself, or the pre-show test. The fact he has an identical copy who persists and believes himself to be the original Danton is not really relevant.
No, someone said :
Which is exactly correct, and then things spiraled out into a semantic argument about when ‘different’ can be ‘the same’. I am reaffirming the original statement.
Candid, Clockwork, etc., you’ve failed to explain why there’s any non-trivial difference between what you’re calling the duplicate and the original. You can’t. There is no non-trivial difference. They’re the same. (N.B., those of us on this side of the argument mean it when we use the word "exactly, and you guys mean something like “awfully close.”)
–Cliffy
Which was four posts after Frylock introduced the concept of self-identity as an extension of conscious experience into the thread, so I’m not sure how bouv’s post gets the status of “original statement,” being neither the point of the OP, nor the first tangent to be introduced into the thread.
Also worth noting is that the theory put forward by Frylock, Cliffy, myself, and others, is explicitly endorsed by a character within the film, and one could credibly argue that the character is acting as a mouthpiece for the author in that scene. Certainly, the character (being the inventor of the machine) is presented as having greater understanding of the implications of the machine than anyone else in the film. That does not, of course, automatically make him correct, but it does shown indisputably that the ideas we’ve raised are not irrelevant to the film, but rather, central to one of its core themes.
Yes, but bouv’s statement was responded to by Frylock, trying to shoehorn it into the discussion he wanted to have.
And I’m sorry, but there’s just no compelling ambiguity to explore here. For any given flip of the switch, there is the original, and the new copy.
As for Tesla’s statement… ‘All of them.’ I think you’re all overblowing that to justify this aside. Both the original and the duplicate are, in some sense, Danton. But one is the original, and one isn’t, and the distinction is easily made (in the context of logic, not the film). And it is a distinction with a difference - one physically existed before the switch was thrown, and one didn’t. One is continuous, one mistakenly believes himself to be. Tesla’s statement simply confirms that the hats are physically identical.
As for Cliffy’s notion that there are no non-trivial differences - what about age? One is years old, the other seconds. what about experiences? The both remember them, but only one body actually had them. If I artificially age a sword and make up a story about it being wielded by Richard the Third, should it go for the same price as the real article? And I consider location a pretty significant part of an object’s properties.
Seriously, if I take two molecularly identical apples, are they the same apple? The notion is ludicrous on its face.
If I kidnap John Smith, and use a molecular re-assemblerizer to make his body physically identical to mine, and then erase his mind and program it with my experiences, memories, personality - is he me?
No.
