Tomorrow, the ‘me’ of now will only exist as a memory in the mind of the ‘me’ of tomorrow. I may talk about my intent to do this-and-such, but all I’m doing is laying down a memory of the intent to do it. It will be done (or not, in the case of a change of mind) by a ‘me’ at some point in the future.
I guess you could interpret it that way, but there is no obligation to do so. Also, the mere fact that something has unpleasant consequences is no particular reason to rule it untrue.
Once again, there is no inconsistency in BC between saying that him over there is not me, but the Mijin of one week in the future is me. Because BC says PI is tied to particular brain matter.
If you want to attack BC, there are lots of good arguments, but this one is not working.
Unless and until BC explains itself further about what ‘PI’ really is and how it is linked to specific atoms, whilst at the same time being additional to their material properties, this at least remains a valid challenge.
If you can’t say what it is, how can you rule out what it isn’t?
Personal Identity is just a philosophical term meaning pretty much what you’d assume from the individual words. I can’t even parse what not believing in it would mean – you would be claiming planet earth right now has 0 people.
As for the rest of your point, obviously none of the positions on PI can describe themselves in terms of specific atoms, because we can’t describe consciousness in terms of individual atoms yet. It’s the elephant in the room we can’t yet see in the room.
But for now people can argue for various positions, based on deduction from premises we all agree on.
What you keep doing is basing your argument on premises we don’t agree on, and that someone that believes, say, the BC position, would not agree on. It’s fine if you want to do that, but it means your argument is no more persuasive than just asserting the conclusion.
I’ve had little choice than to assume things about the PI/BC positions in this thread, because folks arguing in support of them aren’t saying what they are.
How can it make any sense to be arguing (in prarphrase) “We don’t know what PI is, but it requires BC, and would be broken by teleportation”?
This has been killing me since near the beginning.
No one has ever been able to step up and tell us what is missing, and how we would “feel” it.
And more importantly, what makes this non-material, non-physics-obeying “something” different from the “soul,” which they claim they are not asserting.
I’m basically taking the fully materialist stance here: You duplicate yourself, both are “you” in the moment of duplication (because they both have the same material and state information) and diverge thereafter. Killing either in the process is no less murder than killing any other human, but the non-killed version has every claim the original possessed, and isn’t diminished in any sense by the killing.
In the entire thread, I haven’t seem any decent argument to this other than either asserting magic souls (calling them “continuity” usually), or the old “in the absence of evidence, all possible explanations are equally valid” fallacy.
Mostly, folks just seem to get stuck on the fact that we can call one of them “original” and one “duplicate,” without telling us why this matters, and more important, what would be different if the labels were reversed.
Consider a teleporter that moves your original atoms and state ten feet to the left via quantum teleportation synchronization, and simultaneously creates a “copy” where the “original” was. Alternatively, it can create the “copy” ten feet to the left, and leave the “original” alone. It chooses one of these two possibilities using a random input of some sort, and does not record which one it did.
Bamf! (Teleporters always go “Bamf!”) It’s done. We now have two of our teleportee. What test can determine which is the copy and which the original? By all physical measures, they’re identical (although diverging now). What’s the property that makes them different, and why is it not represented in their physical state?
What is the difference in physical state between two entangled photons? We can tell that they are not the same photon. But what property is different (other than location and direction)?
I do find it vaguely amusing that all parties here seem to think that the counterargument requires a “soul”. I don’t see how I can exist in two places at once in the absence of “magic”. So, I assume that any copies are a different person, even if they are indistinguishable. They are no better or worse, but they are different.
I suppose I must come across as an extremist in this, but I would say that such a “murder” isn’t a murder at all. (However, because many think it is, teleportation would have to be restricted to voluntary participants. Forcible teleportation shouldn’t be punished as murder, but it should be punished.)
I say it isn’t “murder” because there’s no victim. The transportee is sitting there at the destination, smiling and happy. He’s where he wants to be. Okay, there’s a whole bunch of carbon atoms at the origin point, but that is about as relevant to me as the bunch of carbon atoms I pooped out this morning.
Still, I take comfort in that you partially endorse my viewpoint! (I feel like a Young Earth Creationist taking comfort from the partial agreement of an Old Earth Creationist!)
(That’s an attempt at self-deprecating humor… Reading it, now, I can see how it might not come off right. Some day, I need to find a humor coach! Do you remember the scene in ST:TNG with Jay Leno? Figure he’s available?)
Yes, definitely different. But both are Dr. Strangelove. Who else could they be?
(I rely, perhaps, too much on the “quacks like a duck” argument. But when it resembles a duck right down to the arrangement of the atoms and electron energy levels… It’s not only a duck, it’s the same duck!)
I really need to drop out of this thread; I’m repeating myself terribly, and becoming a tad rude through frustration.
It’s a fascinating subject, that’s for sure!
So far as I can tell, this is just semantics, though. Of course they’re two different people after the copy. But both have the (up to the moment of copy) memories and experiences of the other. You seem to be assuming that they share each other’s current thoughts or something: they wouldn’t, any more than you’d share the thoughts of an identical twin. But both would feel the “continuity of consciousness” – and both would be right. Both people would have an unbroken stream of memories and experiences up to the “now,” it’s just that all but the very newest of them would be shared with someone else – certainly an unprecedented phenomenon, but not an unexpected one, just something made possible by the new technology. It’s part of what “copy” means.
The “you” that inhabits a given body can’t be in two places at once. But the consciousness that inhabits each body is both “you” in the sense that neither has a better claim.
Again, PI is just a term meaning something like “personhood”.
No-one would dispute that on Earth right now there are approximately 7 billion people. So the idea of a person is one we’re all familiar with and agree on.
Things wouldn’t be so clear-cut if we could duplicate or splice brains. And this is where the positions differ. Indeed that’s what taking a position here actually means: BC is itself a particular definition of what PI is.
Duplicate me and BC says there are now two people, even at the moment where our brains are identical, because there are two brains.
The psychological continuity (PC) position, which I believe is closest to your position, claims that at the point where the brains are identical there is one PI, that then “splits” into two.
BC is a Materialist position.
There are many criticisms of it, but the straw man of this thread that it requires or claims souls is factually incorrect.
I agree with that. They both have equal claim to being Mijin. However, I am only 1 entity. I experience qualia of only 1 body. And I have no reason to suppose that if someone out there has identical memories to me, I will experience the qualia of his body.
That’s one of the two straw men here…
And this is the other! Who here ever said you would experience anyone else’s qualia?
For the record, I think “qualia” is a nonsense term, and my instinct is to reject any argument based upon it. But, even granting it, you’re rebutting something no one has said!
Well, it depends on which thought experiment you’re talking about. I’ve been considering a scenario where synchronicity is maintained even after the copy. Or thoughts are thus the same for some extended period of time, but happening in two different places.
I fully agree with this, with the caveat that I wish there were a better way of phrasing “the consciousness that inhabits each body” that didn’t sound like dualism. At any rate, you apparently agree that there are two people, just that neither one has a superior claim to “me-ness”. I think it follows directly that I should never get into a transporter. I die, and another me is born with all the same thoughts and memories.
Curiously (back to the scenario of an ordinary copy), I think I would be willing to merge back with myself if the other me has not diverged too much. Presumably, the majority of my memories and personality traits remained the same, so really I would just be gaining some new memories. The same is true for my counterpart. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t feel the same continuity of consciousness as long as the process isn’t too abrupt.
Experiencing a second body’s qualia is the position of psychological continuity, and the main rationale behind voluntarily going in the transporter. It’s not a straw man, it’s the position held by many people in this thread (and elsewhere).
How is it a straw man? You’re making a claim that there’s a magical “something” that makes us a person that’s not represented in our physical state. That sounds pretty damn soul-like to me.
This “soul” hijack has thoroughly taken over what was an interesting discussion of the economic and sociological ramifications of teleportation.
(imitating Inigo Montoya) You keep using that word, but …
You believe that there is some continuous “youness” that persists and is unique. I do not. Please give me evidence that this continuous thing exists, outside of the continutity provided by memory. I’m not speaking of the dubious fact that your consciousness exists even when you’re unconscious (which seems like a contradiction in terms – there’s a difference between brain functions and consciousness, and clearly, you consciousness can go away and come back.)
When an electrical current is applied to a coil, it produces a field. Stop the current; the field goes away. Restart the current. Is it the same field? I say that the question admits no answer and is not meaningful. Consciousness is just like that field: it’s created by the physical activity (of perceiving, cogitating, predicting, etc.). Shut it down, start it back up, “same” is meaningless. “Equivalent” is meaningful. When I go to sleep and wake up, I’m the equivalent me, regardless of how many copies of me were created in the night, and regardless of which atoms are causing me.
No problem. With a duplicate, we have two independent consciousnesses. Terminate one, the other continues. Which is “you”? The question isn’t meaningful unless you posit something for which we have no evidence.
And yet they include naysayers on the arguments like the Chinese Room and the Knowledge Argument. My feeling is that if you adopt the same position as those who see no problem with either of these puzzles, you would be most consistent if you also hop in the teleporter without a second thought.
Beside the point. First, it’s a bad analogy because mind would be an instance of a program in operation, not the program. Second, who cares how the machinery works? My point is that the results are machine-independent. Admittedly, “results” here include only the objective results. The subjective result is seen only by the mind itself, and to that extent I agree that I haven’t made an indisputable argument that refutes your position. Rather, I’ve merely posited a simpler explanation, where both hypotheses are consistent with observable results. However, my simpler hypothesis avoids a lot of confusing issues concerning identity.
RIght, I believe that p-zombies are impossible, and my arguments rest on that assumption. Admittedly, your position does not, since we all know that awareness exists, regardless of one’s position on p-zombies. Instead, it rests on an assumption of some unique continuous property that sentience has, with curious unresolved issues regarding when it is preserved and when it is not.
That’s not really the argument; the argument is “I continue living when I wake up, but while I was unconscious, my consciousness (the thing I’m calling ‘I’ here) did not.”
I seem to have neglected to quote the part where you say you’d have issues on being reloaded on a different computer, were you a sentient program. I disagree: you’d have had that happen numerous times (including many before your earliest memories) and never noticed any problem, so you’d allow it, just as we all are happy to go to sleep and wake up in the morning.
I bet you’d be surprised. I’d hop right in, assuming it was well-tested.
I absolutely disagree with this. To begin with, I don’t even believe in qualia! I think it is a meaningless (and, frankly, vacuous) concept. It isn’t defined or definable. I absolutely do not depend on it in any way; it is not “my position” at all. I don’t believe anyone in this thread has argued for it, and this is why I call it a “straw man” characterization.
You see “red” as “red.” I see “red” as “blue” but I call it red, so when you say “Press the red button,” I press the button that looks blue, except I call it red, so I press the button we all agree is called red. Um… So what? Show me a means by which this description of the world can be tested. Objectively, I press the same button you do. Qualia is a big mound of hog droppings.