Because I’m not 100% sure.
Doesn’t science also tell us that the copy, will not, in fact, cannot be a perfect copy? I’m not sure how that would affect the discussion at hand, really, but doesn’t the uncertainty principle say that we could never really have a true, identical, copy of an object down to the atomic level?
That’s just it, I cannot conceive a soul that comprises particles of matter, or a God that is made up of matter either. If the soul were matter it would have been replicated in the transporter as all other matter was. This places the soul into a different, as yet undefined but in my opinion not as unreasonable as often claimed, catagory.
As to the transporter itself, if a human has a soul and is reproduced and deconstructed then that soul, not having been reproduced and no longer having a meat sack to reside in, has cast off this mortal coil and gone on to whatever awaits. If a human has no soul then the deconstructed person simply ceases to exist as does his experience (or specifically his capacity to experience). The reconstructed person contains the sum of knowledge and experience* as the original but the original capacity still ceases to exist. In either case it means the death of “me” as I understand myself and the creation of “someone else”.
*Of course it could also pass that the sum of knowledge and experience cease when the individual ceases. A parallel would be a computer RAM chip. Perhaps the electrical and bio-mechanical reactions are there and they are what stores the experience information but once they are reproduced and eliminated the new copy is a blank slate.
Do memories physically exist? The electrical functions behind the chemical reactions exist but do these physically comprise a memory or do they just store the data? As these memories persist across time, and the chemical reactions change or fade away so the reality of these memories fade away, are they still there and just not as easily accessed or do they indeed rely on the chemical reaction to exist at all?
What bothers me most in these discussions is the equivalency drawn — wrongly, in my view — between rational proof and scientific proof (or actually, scientific evidence, there being no such thing as scientific proof). I can provide a rational proof, in the form of testimony from personal experience, that I dreamed about our old house last night. But I cannot provide any scientific evidence whatsoever for it, despite that it is true.
That’s only true if the soul actually exists and isn’t duplicated by the process we are speaking of, and there is no evidence of either.
Why ? If a soul doesn’t have any detectable effect on the material world, then it simply isn’t important. If souls exist and don’t interact with the brain so we can detect them, then they are essentially just . . . there. They aren’t us in that scenario, but just something loosely associated with us.
All evidence is that memories are physically part of the brain, yes.
Blame the limitations of present day brain scanners.
But that you do not possess the scientific evidence currently does not mean that we could not assemble it, or that it doesn’t exist to be assembled.
If we had the technology we might still be able to access the experiences that made up your dream. Current scientific thinking doesn’t have memory working like a hard drive, so we might not be able to access a “video recording” of your dream, but the set of data that was assembled in your brain to create it, might be accessible. And even if we couldn’t do that with the dream you had last night, perhaps it could be done with one you will have in the future.
What I’m trying to say is that just because we don’t currently have scientific evidence of something, doesn’t mean that that evidence does not exist.
Then perhaps you should work on your God scanners as well.
More or less; but then, it seems highly unlikely that one is necessary. It’s useful to specify something for a thought experiment; but for copying a mind you probably don’t need anything like that resolution.
Lacking anything to scan, or any reason to think that God is even possible, there’s nothing to work on. You might as well ask me to work on necromancy detectors.
Yet you trust that I dreamed about our old house last night, despite lacking any of what you call evidence. (Unless you think I’m lying, of course, which is a completely different matter.)
Wait, so now you are saying that we lack scientific evidence for the general phenomena of dreaming? I don’t see how you can believe that.
This about sums it up for me.
It seems to me that you have merely put forward a bit of a development of when someone is considered identical with someone else, and your answer is, “Never.” I’m not sure you need a soul to explain this. Perhaps you could say that at time t they were identical but 1) while the identity of an individual is preserved with respect to time, 2) identity relationships between entities (molecules, people, cars) is not necessarily preserved with time. If you wish to call the “symmetry breaking” force a “spirit”, be my guest, but I’m not sure it’s anything but a misleading use of the word.
No, not me. I’m saying what I said: you have no scientific evidence that I dreamed about our old house. You can’t just leave out words and rearrange what’s left to quote me as saying that you have no evidence that people dream. I mean, you can, but it doesn’t help either of us.
You have general evidence of dreaming, just as you have general evidence for religious experience. (Google phrases like “God and the limbic system”.) But you have no evidence, of the scientific kind, for any specific God or any specific dream.
Once you’ve gotten the assertion straight, we can discuss. But you can understand that I have no interest in defended an assertion I did not make.
Big claims require big evidence. Small claims do not. Just about everyone has had dreams, knows about them, accepts them, etc. Claiming that you had a dream, even a specific one, is trivial. Nothing rides on your being correct.
Claiming that everyone has a soul is different. It doesn’t fit science’s current laws, and would change a lot of things. A soul is not a trivial claim, and so evidence is asked for before the claim can be accepted.
Why would we need evidence of a specific dream? Who cares? It doesn’t affect anything. But evidence is most certainly required for a claim of there being something like a god. They are not equivalent claims.
I don’t think bumper-sticker slogans make for a good argument. Any claim requires exactly as much evidence as is necessary. Some big claims require very little and some small claims require a lot. Einstein’s paper on energy and mass equivalence is very short, as is Godel’s paper on undecidable propositions. And Gettier stunned the world with his very brief paper knocking down two thousand years of acceptance that knowledge is justified true belief.
Meanwhile, Russell and Whitehead, in Principia Mathematica, used 362 pages to prove that 1+1=2.
Does that mean you are prepared to accept popularity as evidence? If so, I can offer you links contrasting the number of faithful with the number of nonbelievers. (I eagerly await hearing how it’s different in one case versus another.)
But I have evidence, the evidence of my experience — same as the evidence I have for what I dreamed. Now, you might not care about my experience, and you might think my experience does not amount to a hill of beans. But I think differently.
Brain scans wouldn’t be enough. You’d have to have mapped out the contents of Lib’s memory, and thus know that a stimulus at a certain neuron would produce an image of his house. I think a lot of sf on this subject assumes that there is some sort of hologram being constructed in your brain - I think it is a lot more complicated than that.
The beam in raw data form is no more a person than a corpse is. It doesn’t think or sense anything.
My take on your example is basically the same as DerTrihs, but here is another scenario for you. In the Many Worlds hypothesis, the universe branches into two universes at every event. We’ll make it simpler. Say tomorrow morning I go to work in one universe, but I can also decide to stay home, which creates a second universe. Am I the same person in both? Do I not have a soul in one universe, but do have it in another? What about if in the first universe I have the soul but get killed on the way to work? Does my soul pop into my second body? Repeat for all possible decisions. You become a different person every time you make a decision from the person you would have been if you had chosen the other way.
You are using the soul as a kind of marker to distinguish the “real” you. No such marker is necessary, and one you is no realer than the other.
There are lots of things in this world that can’t be or are unlikely to be proven. What did Caesar have for breakfast a week before he got stabbed? I can more or less prove that you’re dreaming, but not about what. You might give an accurate report, or you could lie, or you could give a confused report because the dream has become blurry.
The problem with the soul argument is that the soul isn’t well defined, and at the moment I can’t tell if I’m seeing the soul or not. In the OP’s example, even assuming there was a soul to begin with, there could be two souls at the end, or one, or none. He doesn’t give any way of deciding, or of detecting the soul. I’d guess that both individuals would handily pass a Turing test, so that won’t help.
I don’t consider that rational proof, actually, though I agree with your general argument.
I’m not so sure that there is no “scientific evidence whatsoever”. For example, if you were lying about what you dreamed about, there are some techniques in questioning that tend to trip up liars more than truth tellers. There are things like so-called “lie detectors” that seem to be able tell lies in some situations and with some people.
Additionally, we might monitor your sleep and when you enter REM sleep (am I correct in remembering that this is when dreams occur?) we could wake you up and ask what you’re dreaming about. You’re probably less likely to lie reliably on a spur of the moment question coming out of a dead sleep.
These things are hardly hard evidence, in fact they’re thin as hell. But I think they could be said to constitute some evidence, and if done rigorously for large enough groups may lead to some fairly good statistical evidence about what kinds of things people dream about.