“You” wouldn’t notice being instantaneously killed and copied either. What’s the difference?
Now I lay me down to sleep . . .
Are you concluding that there is nothing that precludes the possibility of such an illusion? Or are you saying it is necessarily an illusion? If the latter, why?
What is “you”? To many of us that pattern of activity which happens to exist in a biologic substrate is “you”, not the substrate. If we are right then if the same very complex pattern of activity ends up existing in a cointinuously perceived fashion in a computer substrate or a new biological substrate it is still just as much you to you.
Okay, imagine that a fully functional copy of you with all your memories springs up in front of you right now (and nothing happens to you). You can’t control him, and his thoughts and memories will not be transferred to yours, e.g. if he goes on a trip to Germany or learns Chinese, you will be none the wiser. Is that being you?
To me it’s pretty obvious that he’s not.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
Vox,
Let me first propose a different thought experiment by way of my answer.
You are suddenly magically twinned, both emergent of your own cells, and each twin has all of your current characteristics, thoughts, and memories. Twin A goes off and learns Chinese and becomes a businessman in Hong Kong over the next decade. Twin B goes to Iraq and returns with PTSD and a missing leg.
Are either of them you-right-now?
No. It’s pretty obvious that neither is. Each will perceive and claim a sameness of identity, a selfness, with the you-right-now that was and each has a justifiable claim to it, as much as “you” will have ten years from now with you-right-now. Each will declare the other as non-self.
Essentially that is the same thought experiment. You-right-now no longer exist the very next microsecond. That copy that went to Germany or learned Chinese is not me-right-now and neither is the other copy, the one that in your thought experiment had more physical continuity with me-right-now, me-right-now. Both are still “me” completely because each has experienced a continuity of redefining “me” as the observer observes and redefines its ever changing self.
And Vox, let’s play with the thought experiment a bit more.
That fully functional exact copy of you with all your memories, personality traits strengths and flaws, etc. springs up in front of you right now and at the same time all your memories, all that you have learned, all of that is erased in your present body. Your present body is now a blank slate with only your inate predispositions still extant.
Which one is more “you”?
Your life partner comes in the room. Who is “you” to him or her?
Why?
(This game is also played with Star Trek transporter analogies too if you want. The premise of the transporter is that crew member’s body is destroyed - converted into energy and a “pattern matrix” - which is used to build an exact copy with all the same memories, etc. at the other side. Does “Kirk” as a valid identity persist - to others and/or to himself - after each transport or not?)
Whatever the ‘self’ is, it’s clear it arrises from your brain and not the brain of anyone else. Therefore, if you were to make a clone, the ‘self’ that exists in the clone will not be the same as you. It can be argued (and has in this thread) that the ‘self’ is nothing more than an illusion of the processes of each mind. But this is irrelevant, as there’s no way to really know if we’re dying each night we go to bed, only to be recast as a new self with all the past memories of the old self intact. Either way, what remains from moment to moment is indistinguishable from a newly constructed self every second to that of a continuous self.
Taking the nature of the brain and human physiology at face value, if we could synthesize a human neuron and all the connective tissue that a brain needs to function, would it be possible to gradually replace your neurons over the course of, say 10 to 20 years (say through nanobots or something not yet invented yet), to eventually create a synthetic version of yourself? Say, one brain hemisphere at a time. In this way, I might be able to buy the idea of creating a quasi-immortal ‘self’.* The trick is to do it as gradually as possible, so as to not destroy the stream-of-consciousness we perceive as ‘ourself’.
*The process would also have to be done in-body. Even after such a gradual replacement of organic with synthetic tissue were complete, and uploading of our new ‘minds’ as it were, it would still only be a copy, and not what you would perceive as ‘you’.
I am not Vox, but I would like to play as well. If my memories are erased, it is still my body. Granted, I might stop bing the “me” that I know at that point. Unless your saying that Mentok the Mind-taker litarly switched the minds of me and the copy, I am still me, and the copy is not me.
If a person I know walked in and saw my blanked out body and the copy, they would of course assume the copy is me.
Just because a person has my memories and acts like me, it does not mean that it is me.
I am not sure I follow you. Of course 10 years in the future, I will not be “me” as I am right now. But if you created a twin of me, I would still be me. If I went to war and lost a leg, it is still me.
Mentok (or his future magical technological equal) put your mind in the exact copy and erased yours of all but your inate predispositions. That’s the hypothetical.
The person walked in and knew that the body had been the body you had inhabited but knows as well that the new copy-body contains your mind.
Which is you, to you and to your life-partner?
In the twins case: Which one of the twins is “you” and which one the twin? [both voices]I’m me! He’s just a copy![/both voices]
For a slightly different slant, you’re knocked out, copied, and the two of you are woken up at the same time. How’d you decide who is, in fact, you? Of course, you would possess infallible knowledge of your own you-ness, but then… so would your copy. Without positing some metaphysical, uncopyable part of your you-ness, there wouldn’t be any way to distinguish the two of you – of course, you would immediately branch out into acquiring different experiences and memories, becoming in effect different persons, but, for both of you, the statement ‘I am [your name here]’ would be equally true; there’s no logical inconsistency in there being two yous at any point in time (or, as I rather think is the case, no closed and consistent you at all).
Speaking of time, how about travelling back a couple of minutes? Then you’d have the you from now and the you from five minutes later – essentially the same situation (even though there is only one ‘you’-line, presumably, if your future self going back in time means you will have to do that when you become him).
Or yous from parallel universes? Or even from this one – if it is indeed infinite, every given configuration of quantum states repeats eventually, and so do you; so there could well be two yous in existence right now, only a few trillion light years that way. What’s the difference between that you and this you, besides mere spatial separation?
I only know that, if it were made available to me upon the moment of my death to be uploaded in some fashion, I would prefer it to oblivion. My body, in all honesty, means little to me in the face of loss of myself, and I would take any form of existence over none at all.
It could, and would, be argued that the new me is no longer me, but frankly, this current ‘me’ would no longer care, and the new ‘me’ would continue on from where I left off undisturbed.
Looking at the twin angle from another direction, tomorrow I will be someone I don’t know. If I knew that there would be two of me tomorrow, I would be unable to make a choice between them regarding who is more ‘me’… both are equally me. Tomorrow when my twin is sprung in front of me with all of my current knowledge and behavior, the me of today knows that to that the me of today will exist within him the same as it does to the one with a physical tie to me.
ugh… I hope I explained that well… this is a very confusing topic.
The person who wrote this no longer exists, because - and this is the really important bit - the moment in which the above was written, is gone forever.. It only exists now as a memory. I possess that memory, so I consider myself to be the person who wrote it.
If by some freakish process I had been perfectly duplicated in the night, there would now be two people who share that memory with exactly the same qualities. There would be two distinct people who both believe themselves to have been me yesterday.
It’s meaningless to ask “which one of the two would be me”, because the moment when there was one is gone. It would have been equally meaningless to have asked yesterday “which of the two will I be”, because at that point, the two do not exist.
It’s possible for two things to share a single history. It’s possible for one thing to split into two things with distinct futures. Probably the biggest reason this troubles us so is that it’s utterly alien to our experience. We never (well, very rarely) split into two copies of ourselves, so we have no mental tools for dealing with what it would be like.
Sorry, I meant the stumbling block isn’t a real one. The scenario is possible, the problem is that we have trouble mentally grasping it.
So why would you care enough to spend money on this transfer? You are going to face oblivion if the old you “dies” in the transfer.
DSeid, I can’t be two people at the same time. Of course there is no way to tell, and I’m still a fully functional human being in both cases, whether I am the copy or not. Theoretically, you could say that both of us are me (although actually not, since one of us does not follow directly in my chain of existence from the womb to the present), but if I shoot the other guy in the face, he obviously does not get to continue existing. I don’t want to be the guy shot in the face (or killed in a mind transfer).
Mangetout, I just don’t believe consciousness works like that. If it did, then there’s really no reason I shouldn’t put a pistol to my head (or yours, for that matter) right now, since I won’t be around the next second to care whether I’m dead or not.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
Well, I guess it’s a good thing you believe whatever you do then, regardless of whether you’re right or wrong, but I would say this: If consciousness does work like that, there’s still really no reason why you should start waving guns around.
Do you agree that the time-moment in which you posted the above no longer exists? You’re not still back there, writing it, eternally, are you?
You know, I am not the man I used to be.
Really. Literally really.
The vessel that is me is different. Ask my wife who laments the loss of what was once a thick head of curls. Or my mother who remembers a someone who at least she thought was cute. My body has rebuilt modified versions over again many times over, some with a bit more paunch, some (during my peak triathlon days) a bit leaner and more muscular. Clearly the qualification of me as me is not the physical structure of my form.
The structure of my brain has changed to. I have learned and forgotten many things. Synapses have been pruned and synapses strengthened. Lost a few in college I’m sure.
I’ve changed my mind several times in single GD threads! And many have told me my mind aint so stable. Clearly a single entity of my mind is not a consistent item across the years. It is a different thing from moment to moment
But my mind’s “I” has managed to look at the shifting me and to always keep up with defining itself as not what I was but I evanescently am from each new vantage point.
That’s some heavy duty processing my minds’ got to do, a real red queen’s race. That self-defining mind uses the biological hardware of my brain, it is perhaps even best described as being emergent of my brain, but it isn’t my Jello pudding brain. It is the swirling ever changing resonating reverberating vortex of patterns that occur within my pudding. Yeah, even mine is a piece of work that is never at peace. Akin to a program that is constantly modifying itself and then erasing the last version at the same time. No version ever exists for more than a blink and yet the same program continues and would even it was running on a different machine, if only it could get there. And defines itself as the same program as much as it changes and wherever it may run. And I hate runny pudding.
Honestly Vox the answer is that you are neither and neither are each other even though both claim a shared history. You are, or were for that plank-second of existence, selfV1 and they are everchanging selfV2 and selfV2. Both came from selfV1 but aren’t selfV1 and neither is each other even though all rightfully self-identify as you.
Backtracking a little to a post I should have responded to earlier.
Yes, however, the copy would react exactly the same way. It would consider itself the true ‘me’ and would say that the original was obviously not ‘me’. What’s more, its perspective would be no more or less valid.
But if you lost that leg, is it “you” as well?