but it is expandable. i imagine people who take this viewpoint would have no problem with the use of backups and teleports. want to travel to mars? kill off a copy and replicate another on mars. want to experience the joys of bungee jumping without the cord? be sure to update your replicator.
Thanks!
Greg Egan’s home page
http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/
and for vultures
The Culture Data Repository
http://www.culturelist.org/cdr/home.cfm
Where there are two copies coexisting we cannot say that either is expendable precisely because, as we’ve seen, you cannot establish which one is the “real” you. If you take a snapshot and then simultaneously kill off the copied mind, transmit the copy to Mars, and then restart the copy on Mars, well, that’s a different matter. In practice, the way to make backups would involve copying a person and then keeping the copies in a static (non-running) state in a computer. The copied mind would exist as potential life only. You could erase it without being guilty of murder. But once you start the mindware up you have a sentient being. If your bungee jump goes wrong and you die we restart you from the backup. You won’t get to remember the jump though, unless you were transmitting your experiences just before you died.
how is that a different matter? people who take to the 2nd viewpoint of ensuring ‘immortality’ through backups already place more importance on the software backup than on the “real” you, since they have no qualms about taking teleporters and dying after one is made.
your example of two copies coexisting subscribe to the 1st viewpoint that the original is unique and irreplaceable. by saying “it’s a different matter” if you want to go to Mars then you are saying that the “real” you; where you would have considered not expendable, suddenly becomes so because saving transportation time is more important than the “real” you, since the “real” you must be killed in order to get that copy to Mars.
i disagree. in a world where the 2nd viewpoint takes hold (where, as implied, the continuity of thought is not as important as that backup), permanently erasing a person’s only backup would be tentamount to murder. killing a copy would not constitute murder, because otherwise the technology would not be usable; depriving the copies of their backup would be murder, since they would then die for “real”.
Yes-
You are right, of course.
Killing a fully backed up person is Theft-
theft of the period of life following the latest back-up and all experiences during that time.
I think the legal system will have to be rewritten…
No. Once the copies are started up they have rights arising from their sentience, not from whether or not they are the “real” you. Don’t start a copy of yourself if you don’t want another you around. When you copy yourself and consent to being killed and transported there is only one of you around at any given time. And the one who is killed consents to the process and understands it, we would assume. During transit, of course, you’re nothing but a stream of bits.
It would be hard to define murder in such a world. Killing someone and erasing all their backups would be worse than either erasing backups (which aren’t running) or killing the running copy.
Some new theories of consciousness posit that the brain is an interpretation device for tuning into the frequency that “you” run on. Even mainstream physics theories hold that time doesn’t flow or behave in a linear manner, so “now” is entirely subjective. You have already lived your life, are living your life, will be living your life, simultaneously.
As a real consequence of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, time for you and time for me cannot be the same unless we are occupying the same space, which is of course impossible. Therefore, we each experience time in a different way.
Combining these ideas together, if you were able to make a copy of your consciousness that was congruent down to the quantum level, you would either: A) Create a new individual who is (at first) exactly the same as you, but does not share your consciousness, or B) Create a new node that your consciousness would share (i.e.: you would be experiencing two separate perceptions of time and space as a dual consciousness).
In case B, I’m not sure how your consciousness would handle being two “people” at once. There are several possibilities that present themselves: 1) Your consciousness only inhabits one node at a time. When “you” are not present, the other body or copy is “dead” or non-functional. 2) Only a single node is permitted to exist. The act of making a copy inevitably results in the destruction of the original through universal forces (like matter-antimatter annihilation). 3) A functional copy cannot be made. Whatever process is attempted simply won’t work for any conscious entity, though it will work for inert matter. 4) Experiencing two perceptions makes you insane. 5) You “timeshare” with the copy, experiencing both sets of consciousness in serial, not parallel. 6) You fully integrate both experiences and are able to handle the duality of existence. If one body “dies,” the unaffected body simply returns to living as a singular consciousness.
There are probably other possibilities, but those are what I came up with right away.
SF authors have been playing with this and related areas for years. I’ve read dozens of books dealing with this theme. Here are a few authors I enjoyed most.
Phillip K. Dick, who wrote tons of stories that have recently been made into movies (Total Recall, Bladerunner, Minority Report, Impostor) continually played with the question of memory and how it relates to consciousness, as well as what consciousness itself is.
Greg Bear deals with consciousness, nanotech, quantum states, the destruction/creation of matter, and lots of other ideas that relate to each other.
Jack Vance has cloning, memory transfer, sex changes (with reproductive capability) and all the associated social repercussions in many of his stories.
If you prefer to deal with real science as opposed to theoretical, check out this link to a bibliography of consciousness-related scientific research. http://www.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/biblio/6.html
I tend to think that option B is very unlikely, although it would present some interesting science fiction;
on the other hand it seems likely to me that, if and when a complete copy of your consciousness can be made, that consciousness will be entirely separate.
there is no channel for information between the two versions of yourself except a telepathic one, and there is no evidence that I have seen that convinces me telepathy has any reality.
Mind you, the two consciousnesses could keep in close contact by technological means, via direct neural linkup for instance; at least both brains would use the same code if such a code exists.
so option B might be induced using the same technology as would make the copy possible in the first place.
SF worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
I don’t agree that mainstream physics addresses the question of how time is subjectively perceived by conscious beings. I also don’t agree it claims that our entire lives are already laid out, in some sense, and that all moments exist simultaneously somehow. This could be the way things are; it’s just not a claim made in physics.
If you are saying that space-time can be imagined “as a whole” — as when, in the Family Circus comic strip, we get to see the tangled path little Billy took through the neighborhood as he meandered home from school — then this is true an obvious mathematical sense. The worldline of a particular particle, or the collective worldlines of a system of particles (like Billy), are often things that can be measured and recorded. We can then treat the particle’s time coordinate as an additional space coordinate, and plot the worldline in a new, higher-dimensional space. Sometimes we can even extrapolate the worldline beyond what’s been measured, either forward into the future or backward into the past, using our knowledge of physics. Sometimes, anyway.
All this is a mental tool that physicists often use to think about the motion and mutual interaction of physical objects. But it does not mean that the worldlines of all objects, including you and me, are already “out there” in some way, all at once. Again, this could be the case, but that’s a belief of faith, not physics.
Occam’s Razor™ suggests to me that “now” — as in the moving instant of time separating past from future — surely has physical validity. It doesn’t need to be an illusion, just because it’s fun to think of it that way. Consider that we see colors in the rainbow, and though we know that the colors are subjective perceptions, we also know they reflect an objective physical reality: light comes in different frequencies. The simplest explanation for Now is that it really does exist, at least for individual observers, or more precisely individual particles.
Also, when a physicist says “time is not linear”, he probably does not mean “anything goes, knock yourself out”. Time is still considered to be a one-dimensional and probably continuous quantity (a manifold) embedded in four-dimensional space-time. The non-linearity simply means that the times of events as measured for one observer cannot, in general, be mapped to the times measured for another by using a linear function like t’ = At + B. In general the mapping will be non-linear, but still well-defined and still one-to-one.
Special Relativity doesn’t quite say this. Actually, time for you and me will be measured the same as long as you and I are in the same inertial reference frame and the same gravitational field intensity. Admittedly, in reality these conditions are rarely met to perfection, but it’s certainly true enough for everyday earth-bound purposes. Technically speaking there are even tiny relativistic effects inside your own brain, as different organic chemicals traverse your neural net at different relative velocities. Still, your brain manages to cope with the discrepancies, because of course they’re negligible on the time-scale at which your brain operates.
And although you, by say remaining on the ground while I go on a jet airplane trip, will have experienced a few more nanoseconds of life than I have, I would challenge you to come up with good uses for that extra time.
Thank you for the corrections and clarifications in your reply. It’s been quite a while since I’ve actively debated things like this so I’m working on memories several years old that have more than likely been corrupted by SF novels.
In general, I agree with your statements. Practically, it makes no difference if your frame of reference and mine don’t match precisely. We were proposing theories, though. Practically speaking, it doesn’t matter if there’s any variation in the force of gravity, since the differences, if any, will be negligible but physicists have designed at least two different experiments to investigate microvariations in gravitation. Theoretically, those tiny differences could be enormously important.
Admittedly, it’s a wild-assed theory, and I may not have much of anything solid to support me, but the idea of copying your brain is pretty out there to start with.