Stasis fields and the destruction of the self

Great Debates
1

Inspired by assertions (in this thread) that the human ‘self’/identity requires continuity (and that interruption of the process is death, and that even a perfectly-copied restoration of same process would be a counterfeit)…

In Larry Niven’s Known Space fiction, there’s a device called a Stasis Field. When activated, everything inside the field stops happening - nothing can enter - not even light (the field appears enclosed in an impenetrable silver bubble). All processes inside the field are completely suspended - no mechanical action or movement happens, no molecular or atomic or subatomic processes progress at all. Photons in transit inside the field are put on pause. Everything stops. It’s not clear whether time itself is paused inside the field, although this might be a moot point if all of the means by which time could possibly be observed or measured are suspended.

When the field is turned off, everthing resumes on its previous course as if nothing had happened (which in a sense, is true), effects still follow causes regardless if that cause was before the field event.

So, what happens to a human inside the field. The field suspends all of the ongoing processes in their body, including the brain, so for the duration of the field activation, their consciousness has utterly ceased. When the field drops, all of the electrochemical actions in the brain resume as if nothing has happened.

But there has been a break in the subject’s consciousness. Were they dead? Is the person who steps out of the field the same person who went in?

2

Damn. That was supposed to be a new thread. I’ll self-report and let a mod judge whether to split it out.

3

I can’t see how it could possibly be otherwise.

4

Another example of being “stopped” would be being cryogenically frozen - if someone is frozen solid and later defrosted is he the same person? By the logic of the people you are talking about he shouldn’t be.

5

If the field works the way Niven describes it, then, yes, you’re the “same person” coming out as you were going in. It’s no different than going in to a deep sleep, or total anaesthesia.

If there were some degradation – as we might expect from some forms of cryosleep – then the damage might accumulate, and the experience might be destructive of individuality. (For instance, after someone has been a severe alcoholic for a period of time, is he really “the same” as he was before? I would say that severe addiction certainly alters human individuality, if not actually destroying it.)

If going on a ten year bender still leaves me “the same person,” then certainly ceasing to exist (and thus ceasing to change) for ten years would also leave me “the same person.” One involves measurable change, and the other doesn’t!

6

I think whatever is in the field has to still exist, because otherwise what would determine what comes out when the field is turned off? Or put another way, what distinguishes one stasis field from another? Sort of like the debate about whether black holes are somehow distinguishable by what’s fallen into them.

7

If time was magically stopped, then no, there was no break. Time has to pass to create a break.

8

The person inside the statis majigger didn’t have a break in consciousness; it was the rest of the universe which suddenly jumped to him (or her, or it, or other, or N/A - given that this is a Niven book). In fact, the person simply time traveled into the future, or alternatively, for him or her a certain segment of time was cut out.

9

In his novel World of Ptaavs, he makes it clear that time stops in stasis fields.

10

Couldn’t much of the same argument apply to someone moving close to the speed of light? He goes out, comes back, and finds that 10,000 years have passed on earth. He’s still himself, but he’s WAY overdue on returning his library books…

Vernor Vinge used the same idea in “The Peace War.” Little time-stasis “bobbles” could be produced, inside which time did not pass. People were using it to “get away from it all,” choosing a one-way trip to the future.

11

For the sake of inquiry*, let’s divert from Niven’s fictional stasis device and assume that in this one, time does pass. All activity is magically suspended, but the passage of time continues (in the same way that time presumably also passes in a matter-less vacuum).

Effect is simply delayed after cause for the duration of the field activation.

What then? It seems to me that, if our selves are nothing more than a collection of processes - causes and effects - happening in our bodies, then suspension and non-degraded resumption should not be a big deal.

*(I’m not doing this just to be obtuse - this is a series of thought experiments which, like physical experiments, we can re-run having altered one of the parameters - to better test our hypotheses.)

12

While I have the chance, I want to propose a related thought experiment - this time, involving Dr Horrible’s Freeze Ray and an army of highly skilled surgical pixies. (I bet you never expected to see that sequence of words today).

Dr Horrible’s Freeze Ray stops time, but only for the victim.
A person shot by the Freeze Ray becomes a frozen statue for a while, until the effect wears off, whereupon (as we might reasonably expect), their experience of the world continues - except that the world has carried on, so the completion of whatever action they were performing may no longer fit into the scene.

So our subject is zapped with the Freeze Ray, then while he’s frozen, the surgical pixies come along and slice off his arm - but don’t worry! - they are skilled enough to be able to rejoin it (atom by atom) to the stump, so you literally can’t see the join.

The freeze ray wears off - and because nothing is any different to the way it was before, I don’t think we can possibly argue that the subject even notices anything wrong with his arm (there IS nothing wrong with it).

Lather, rinse, repeat, except on each repeat, the pixies cut and rejoin the subject in ever-smaller and ever-more-numerous pieces.

Later, for a laugh, they ship the pieces in separate UPS boxes to Frog Suck, Wyoming, before reassembling him.

Eventually, they’re disassembling the subject into individual atoms (time-frozen ones though) and reassembling them perfectly at the other end.

Later, UPS loses the parcel that has all the Carbon atoms in it - but the enterprising pixies have excellent documentation, so they just time-freeze a bunch of new ones and when they reassemble the subject, they use carbon atoms that in every way match the originals.

Somewhere along the way, we’ve invented a teleportation device. Somewhere along the way, we must have started ‘killing’ the subject and creating a mere copy. Where?

13

I am perfectly prepared to belive that at no point did this person die, despite having been entirely disassembled. It does highlight how unlikely successful teleportation would be; the ‘excellent documentation’ that the pixies have would need to record the exact dispositions of 10e27 atoms, not to mention the subatomic particles within. That is as much information as about a quadrillion terabyte hard drives.

14

Well, quite - not to mention the uncertainty principle and the plain magnitude of building a human from atoms, as if they were Lego.

I believe all we can really conclude in these threads is that our notions of what it means to exist or die and what it means to be an original or a copy, are strongly skewed by the circumstantial fact of an imposed single narrative.

15

What everyone needs to first appreciate about this is that consciousness is not an understood phenomenon. I’m not talking about souls or whatever, I’m saying that there isn’t a model for how brains “make” subjective experience. As I said in the other thread, some people dispute that we have continuity of existence now.

No-one should give matter-of-fact answers to thought experiments like this one. Well, except maybe the transporter hypothetical, where any answer other than “you die, and a copy is made of you” seems to lead to bizarre implications and contradictions.
But in the main, these are questions that philosophers and neuroscientists have spent years considering and still debate.

In terms of this hypothetical, the answer “of course you are the same person” has interesting implications also. For one thing, it implies immortality, given unbounded time.
When I die, we could consider this as being put into stasis. Then, there is a non-zero chance of a bunch of atoms happening to arrive at the same configuration of my brain, immediately at the point prior to my death. But this time my environment may be different such that I recover instead of dying again.
It may take 10^million years to happen, but so what – from my perspective it will be instantaneous.
OTOH if my resurrection requires the exact same matter (and why would it, is there some ghost hiding among these atoms?), well again there’s a non-zero chance of it coming together in my brain configuration again one day. It may take 10^graham’s number, but that doesn’t matter.

16

The illusion of continuity of the self is just that - an illusion (just as the illusion of the unity of the self is). What matters is that the process is continuous, not the individual components. Which is why the “transporter = death of self” argument doesn’t fly with me.

17

Well, it does if that’s greater than the lifetime of the universe.

18

Well, that depends.
The end of the universe is often taken to be a point of near maximum entropy, where all stars have burned out, and possibly including all black holes having evaporated.

But what then? Will time continue to tick? Will particles still move?

We don’t know enough yet to be sure of the end state of the heat death and whether we can trivially apply the second law of thermodynamics on a cosmic scale indefinitely.

19

discontinuity.

20

You cannot cut someone who is in temporal stasis. It’s one thing to suggest applying a force to the field as a whole - with the contents hidden in an unchanging “black box” until the field is dispersed, but if it is possible to make relative movement occur within the field itself (whether by heating it up or cutting it apart), it is not temporal stasis.