A copy of you who mistakenly believes himself to be the original. Some random third party mook being clueless about which is which is moderately interesting, but ultimately not germane.
Well, there, alas, is the debate in the tightest possible form.
You say, “A copy of you who mistakenly believes himself to be the original.”
I say, if he is a close enough copy, then his is not “mistaken.” He actually is the original.
To me, the absolute kicker to this is the challenge: “Can you tell them apart?”
To others…that is not in any way convincing.
Frustrating, innit?
I could be very, very happy in an existence as any of Huey, Dewey, or Louie. (Except for that hideous “Quack Pack” treatment, which has to rate as one of Disney’s worst blunders ever.)
Eng and Chang, not so much. (They look a lot like James Coburn, don’t they?)
Not at all, I’ve been very clear.
I’ve said, repeatedly, that the premise of the transporter problem is that we have two entities that are intrinsically identical but differ in extrinsic properties such as location.
If you disagree with this, for what reason?
If I have contradicted this at any point, go ahead and quote me.
Meanwhile, Trinopus, you still haven’t answered which of the classical positions on the transporter problem you take:
1: You die on the launch pad and the copy at the destination is not you
2: You successfully transport
3: There is never any continuity of consciousness and you die at every instant
I’m still not clear whether you think 2 or 3 is closest to your position
Number 2. I think number 1 is contradicted by the “evidence” (i.e., Star Trek drama, where Jim Kirk beams up and down dozens of times and no degradation is shown in his personality – such as it is.)
(Obviously, we don’t have any real evidence to work with, and so there can be no scientific appraisal of the matter at this point in time. For purposes of debate, of course, it’s perfectly valid to come up with a different hypothetical means of transportation/duplication/cloning/etc. including the rather fascinating “Other copies of ourselves a quadrillion galaxies away” model. I have no objection at all to debating via alternative modeling.)
Number 3 seems silly to me. It dilutes the word “die” to meaninglessness. Every time I blink my eyes, I “die” and then am “reconstituted” somehow… Just seems a really absurd way to look at life.
Even the passage of decades doesn’t entail “dying.” I’m not “the same person” I was forty years ago…but each step in between follows continuously from previous seconds, hours, even weeks. The pathway is piecewise continuous, at very least. I’ve never “died” even if I’ve changed to the point of individual renewal/rededication/reinvention.
I disagree…but it isn’t worth feuding over.
I believe that “extrinsic properties” are absurd. They’re magical thinking, like homeopathic chemistry.
Here are two identical Mona Lisa paintings. One was actually touched by Da Vinci. The other wasn’t. And yet…it has his fingerprints on it, and his DNA can be found in little flecks of mucus from his exhalation, encapsulated in the oils of the painting.
As with “Last Thursdayism,” the painting exhibits every factual, material, real property of having been touched by Da Vinci. If I switch them around behind a screen, there is no test you can apply that will tell you which is your magical “original.” Extrinsic properties have no reality, only a philosophical existence.
And that’s why our agreement is one of philosophical outlook, and not to be resolved by any amount of debate. You believe in something which I disdain as magic.
Well you’ve misunderstood the meaning of this term. It’s just referring to a property that is not inherent to an object. The classic example is that mass is an intrinsic property, whereas weight is extrinsic.
In any case, even if you object to this specific terminology, surely you agree that the two entities are in two different locations…that’s the whole point of the transporter. And that’s all we’re saying by saying they differ in at least one extrinsic property: location.
Sure, but first I want to be sure you actually appreciate what the problem is.
When you say things like “where Jim Kirk beams up and down dozens of times and no degradation is shown in his personality” as refuting the bodily continuity hypothesis, I think you’re still not following what the transporter problem is about. All 3 positions that I outlined would agree that the Kirk at the destination is a perfect copy and has no “degredation” (indeed, this is usually a premise of the hypothetical)…but this alone is irrelevant to which of the hypotheses is correct.
Except that this argument then goes on to make this the foundation of a claim that the “copy is not the same as the original,” and “that isn’t really ‘you’ but someone who mistakenly believes he is,” and so on, which I hold to be the results of magical thinking, not valid reasoning.
(Also, in the case of duplicates inhabiting identical environments, the two aren’t really in different “locations.” We’ve cloned the location, too.)
You are claiming 2=1 and say others are guilty of magical thinking?
Is that what Trinopus is claiming? I’d say it’s more like 1=1=1
Thank you; you’re correct.
This thread makes me think of a Trinitarian debating a non-Trinitarian.
“God is One, but in three persons.”
“So God is really three separate Gods.”
“No; they are distinct without being different.”
“So there’s only one God.”
“Yes, but in three distinct persons.”
“So what you’re really saying is…”
“Not at all…”
Round and round and round it goes, and where it stops… Wait, it doesn’t!
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. You were just now saying that the very concept of extrinsic properties was magical thinking. It seems that you’re now tacitly accepting that that was a misunderstanding on your part.
So I can now confirm that stating that “They have identical intrinsic properties, but differ in some extrinsic properties, such as location” is not only consistent with the hypothetical, it’s actually stating the premise more formally. Right? If so, we can advance the discussion.
When we talk of different locations, we’re not saying one guy is stood next to a lamppost and the other next to a palm tree, say.
We’re saying that if we recorded their positions then one person might be at “X=10, Y=10, Z=10” and the other might be at “X=50, Y=50, Z=50”.
That kind of different. And obviously this difference has nothing to do with how the environments appear.
You would completely misconstrue me if you concluded that.
You said that “weight” is an extrinsic property. What kind of fool would say, “Neil Armstrong weighs differently on the Moon than on Earth; he must not be the real Neil.”
Yet you base a similar argument on the extrinsic property of location.
Nope; again, you mis-state my opinions. I recommend you don’t try to paraphrase me. You haven’t succeeded in this once yet. (And…I’ve not had any luck paraphrasing you.)
Those things also have nothing to do with Personal Identity. If there are two identical people, one at X=1 and one at X=2, that doesn’t tell you anything about their nature. It doesn’t inform us which is the “original.” The two are identical, and there is no “original.” That’s a magical property that can’t be measured in any way.
Prove the Trinitarian wrong. Or prove the anti-Trinitarian wrong. It can’t be done, because they’re using words differently.
By my bedside I have a little quick-access library of 20 books…except that two of them are Tom Sawyer.
“I have twenty books.”
“No, you don’t; you only have nineteen.”
“I have nineteen books.”
“No, you don’t; you clearly have twenty.”
Who is right?
I’m just trying to get us to agree on basic terminology first. I didn’t invent the term “extrinsic property”; it’s a standard term within philosophy and physics.
Also, frankly, it was something of a test. I wanted to see if you could just agree on one basic thing without feeling the need to add some straw man or rhetorical flourish or whatever. We see the result of that test.
This back and forth between me and you is not a “talking past each other” situation as you repeatedly insist. I’m interested in hearing other opinions, you are not.
However a difference in the property of location is how we normally count objects.
If you show me a line of 4 coins, I don’t need to inspect them carefully to see which are identical to which, because that’s irrelevant. 4 locations at the same time is 4 coins.
That’s because we don’t normally have situations with identical objects.
A cloning machine changes that; the nature of “identity” is now different than it had been. Mere location is no longer the definition of “instance.”
Neil Armstrong teleports to the moon. “He’s no longer the original, because his location has changed.”
Why would anyone decide that?
We don’t?
Lots of times I am presented with objects that as far as I can tell are identical. Now, of course, there will almost certainly be trillions of differences at the molecular level, but I don’t know that – by some random fluke they might have exactly the same molecular configuration.
Fortunately, I don’t need to care about that, because how similar two, say, pens are, is of no consequence here.
That’s because whether this pen is that pen, and this pen is the same as that pen, are two separate propositions.
I would never phrase it like that. I’d say there’s a human on the moon, and he’s Neil Armstrong, but he is a separate person to the person on the launch pad. If we kill the Neil on the launch pad, he doesn’t live on.
Let me go back to the error problem that I mentioned earlier in the thread:
I create a transporter between the Earth and the moon. My machine however may introduce errors.
After transport, a machine will scan the guy on the moon and check for any differences at the atomic level to the guy on earth (at the exact instance he transported). The number of errors it finds we’ll call N.
Now, for the bodily continuity hypothesis, this error rate has no relevance. Even if N=0, the guy on the moon and the guy on earth are two separate people, and no person actually transported.
But it presents a problem for those who believe that the transporter works. Because, firstly, they believe that if N=0 then a person was successfully transported. But at some N, it was not a successful transport (for example, let’s say that there were so many errors that the person on the moon looks like, and has the memories of Hillary Clinton. We wouldn’t say that now Neil lives on as Hillary, we would just say he didn’t transport, right)?
If we say only a perfect copy will do, then we have the strange situation that a difference in the spin of one electron on the moon makes a life-or-death difference to (Earth) Neil.
And it’s not helped by setting our tolerance at some other level; such as whether there is any noticeable difference between the Neils, or whether N is comparable to how much regular human brains change moment-to-moment…we would still need to draw a line somewhere, and say N is Neil gets transported, but with errors, and N+1 means a new person was made and Neil has not moved.
Actually, I don’t say that only a perfect copy will do.
As far as I’m concerned, you can leave out the word “only.” All I’ve been arguing here is that, if you have a perfect copy, then it suffices to duplicate a human identity.
In real life, we have to put up with constant degradation of our individuality. Brain-cells die off and aren’t replaced. DNA transcription errors and other decay (telomeres and the like) cause us to age, and can lead to cancer.
If one insists that only a perfect copy will do, then that could lead to the conclusion that we aren’t “the same person” from one instant to another. That’s a viewpoint that some, in this thread, have hinted at – the option that “We die every instant and are re-created” – but I don’t go with that viewpoint, as I think it dilutes the meaning of the word “die” too far.
When we take a trans-continental airplane flight, we expose ourselves to heightened levels of radiation, accelerating the degradation of our bodies. If the Star Trek Transporter introduces copying errors of approximately that level of degradation, I’d accept it, and would allow myself to be beamed around about as often as I take long-distance flights.
A perfect copy is sufficient, but not absolutely necessary.
OK, so going back to the last part of the error hypothetical:
So are you OK with drawing an arbitrary line and saying a single quantum difference beyond that line and Neil is not transported?
Or some other alternative?