The reason that it’s a salient point is because we don’t believe that when I am standing here, looking through these eyes, thinking with this brain, and interacting with the world here, that this other person is me, regardless of whether he’s identical to me or thinks he’s me. Unless you can see through your copy’s eyes (to reduce it to one degree of perception), you aren’t him.
It’s morning and it’s time for Johnny Electric to go to work, so he gets up and gets ready, and heads outside to walk to the bus stop. Unusually, there’s no one else already waiting, so Johnny Electric is first in line. But the bus seems to be running late, and as Johnny Electric waits, other bus riders arrive and form a line behind Johnny. Johnny looks at his watch and notices that it’s now nearly 20 minutes that he’s been waiting, and the line behind him is so long that it’s now snaking around the corner and Johnny can no longer see the end of the line from where he’s standing.
Finally the bus pulls up and stops with the entry door right in front of where Johnny is standing. No one gets off the bus, so Johnny quickly boards, swiping his fare card. As he turns toward the seats, he notices that they’re already filled up, and he starts walking down the center aisle to the back of the bus. More and more people board, and Johnny keeps moving further back as the aisle gets more and more crowded with passengers.
Just as the last few passengers are preparing to squeeze their way onto the bus, Johnny remembers that he has to pick up his dry-cleaned shirts before he goes to work. But the dry cleaner is at the very next stop. Johnny is now squeezed into a spot in the very back of the bus and he realizes that it will be almost impossible for him to get to the exit door in time for him to disembark at the next stop.
Just then, Johnny feels a tug at his elbow and he looks down to see a wizened crone seated next to where he is standing.
“My son,” she says. “You need to be at the front of the bus, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Johnny says. “How did you know?”
“Never mind how I know, but I do know,” the crone says, and looking into her clear blue eyes, Johnny knows that he can trust and believe every word that this kind old woman says to him.
She gestures with her finger towards the front of the bus.
“Look,” she says.
Johnny turns his eyes towards the front of the bus, and he sees the last passenger squeezing into the door. His jaw drops open when he realizes that this new passenger looks exactly like him, in every way. He is even dressed exactly the same.
“See that man?” the old woman asks. “He is absolutely identical to you, physically and genetically. He even has your exact memories. The sole difference between you and him is that you were standing at the front of the line at the bus stop and he was standing at the end of the line.”
Johnny doesn’t know why, but he believes every word the old woman says.
“So, Johnny, you want to be where he is standing, right?”
Johnny nods.
The old woman reaches into the folds of her clothes, and brings forth a glass phial with a rubber stop. Inside is a clear green liquid. She shows it to Johnny and presses it into his grip.
“Drink this, Johnny. It is a fast acting poison. If you drink it now, you will be dead before this bus reaches the next stop. Since that man there is identical to you, genetically and physically, and he has your memories, once you are dead here, you will still be alive there – at the front of the bus – and then you can easily disembark to get to the dry cleaner.”
Should Johnny drink the poison?
The timeliness is also a big issue.
If you accept the model that both duplicates are “really me” (and I understand that many here do not accept that) and that, as time goes by (I could get a job as a songwriter) the two persons diverge and take on separate personalities, then the time to do the deed is instantly, before this process of individuation goes very far at all.
In the absurd case, they continue to exist separately, go on, get different jobs, have a falling out, one becomes conservative, the other liberal, one writes some books, the other marries and has kids… At that point, it would be really stupid to kill the “duplicate!”
Nope; by having that conversation with him, the crone has introduced significant differences into the two persons. They are no longer “the same,” because one has the memory of the conversation with the crone, and the other didn’t.
So, we’re back to as long s we kill somebody quickly enough, we didn’t kill anybody…
What are your views on abortion?
I just don’t see a problem with the premise that a transported person (B) is different in one fundamental way, from a non-transported person (A).
As I see it, according to theory, if two objects have exactly the same composition and array of particles down to the quantum level, there is no measurable difference between them—they are exactly the same, and by extrapolation, this includes self-awareness. Is this correct?
Furthermore, as the argument goes, there is no difference between person A + time, who wakes after sleeping (or regaining consciousness after general anesthesia) and person B who emerges from the transporter pod: they are equally different from person A at time 0. And, so far as self-awareness is concerned, both A and B can be thought of as being long temporal chains of consciousness “packets” dying and being born from the moment awareness begins, till brain death—and the perception of continuity we all experience is merely an illusion propagated by our sapient minds. Therefore, one has no more vested interest in the person waking up in their body and the person emerging from the transporter pod. Is this correct?
Well, perhaps that is the way reality works, our being long chains of born-again consciousness’s and all, but that seems like a pretty tortured and complicated resolution to an apparent paradox, doesn’t it? Certainly not in the spirit of Occams razor. Wouldn’t it be a simpler system if our perception of smooth streaming self-awareness was not the result of a mind game patching together multiple consciousness packets, but rather the result of it being exactly how we perceive it, one consciousness per brain, spread over time?
But, therein lays the paradox: if your consciousness is singular and spread over time and there is no difference between the you who wakes up in the same body in the morning, and the you who emerges from a transporter pod (assume the original survives), then you would have to be singularly self-aware in two brains at the same time. You would see, hear, smell, taste and feel everything your transported self does. And, while this would be fun (particularly if transported you eats at fine restaurants and gets laid a lot), I’m pretty sure it breaks some rules.
So, either self-awareness is a chain of consciousness’s strung together by our wily brains (messy), or a schizophrenic action at a distance is allowed with two identical minds (weird), or no two brains can be exactly alike.
I opt for no two brains being exactly like. Is there a difference between the you right now with respect to A (you in five minutes) versus B (you transported in 5 minutes)? Well, there is no measurable difference; for all intents and purposes you are identical to all outside observers. But, there is one difference between A and B: the brain “particles” that consciousness A is attached to may be identical to those that consciousness B is attached to, but they aren’t the same particles, they occupy two different positions in space. A consciousness was born shortly after the birth of the person **A; B **consciousness was born the moment A was transported.
I don’t see this as being a problem even if the cells or particles that self-awareness is attached to regenerate over time: they wouldn’t all regenerate at the same time, so there would be continuity. Continuity of a substrate allows for continuity of that which supervenes on it. But, we don’t even need to add that caveat to this argument: for the most part, CNS neuronal cells (including significant atoms…if I can re-find the cite, I’ll post it) of mammals do not typically regenerate. The question I have is, why can peripheral neurons and non-mammalian CNS neurons regenerate, but not mammalian CNS neurons?
I believe one answer is that it provides a stable matrix for self-awareness to survive over time, and be unique. So, I’m staying away from transporters unless they let both parties survive.
Forget that. The premise is that there is no difference between the two other than where they are standing on the bus. If back-of-the-bus Johnny kills himself does he then continue to exist at the front of the bus?
The only way I can make sense of what you’re saying here about what to forget and what the difference is, is to think that somehow front-of-bus Johnny also has the impression he’s in the back of the bus, and also has the impression he’s talking to the Crone etc.
And in that case, I don’t feel at all hesitant to say that Johnny should feel free to take the poison pill. I mean, in the scenario as you’ve set it up, Johnny doesn’t even know which Johnny he “really” is. And once he takes the pill, he’ll experience, not his own death, but rather a sudden teleportation to the front of the bus.
Or consciousness is not continuous in the first place, or some other option we haven’t thought of. Really, there is no model of consciousness, so it’s quite wide open.
But the teleporter hypothetical should be fairly cut and dried. In philosophical circles, it’s used as a jumping off point for discussing Physicalism. It’s pretty rare to see someone bite the bullet and claim that the entity that walks into the transporter is one and the same entity as the one that walks out.
And really that’s the answer to the OP: What the OP is “missing here” is that not everyone agrees with the assertions on which his/her argument is based. Such as the implicit idea that qualitative identity is the same thing as numerical identity.
I have no idea why some people think this way.
If such a thing as exact duplication were possible, one person would instantly become two people, and should not be thought of as the same person. They both inherit the same consciousness, but they have separate consciousnesses.
Are you proposing some sort of law of conservation of consciousness, so that only one inherits the real thing, and the other has no consciousness at all?
…
I suspect that may be because not enough philosophers study quantum physics.
Note that the scenario being described here is not quantum teleportation. Nor is quantum tunneling happening.
I don’t think either of these phenomena are candidates for teleporting humans anyway, as they cannot send classical information, let alone reform a complete human being.
What do you understand “consciousness” to mean?
I think some people in this thread are taking it to mean something like “having a set of memories”.
But the crucial thing about consciousness is that it is a first-person, subjective phenomenon.
To imagine my consciousness being in two people goes against the very definition of what consciousness is. What you are describing is not consciousness as we know it but some new phenomenon.
And what’s the physical basis for this phenomenon? If Johnny experiences “a sudden teleportation to the front of the bus”, then what changed in the physical system? If I put an array of detectors along the bus, what would they detect?
There seems to be no plausible mechanism by which a human could be duplicated exactly so it its an entirely hypothetical thought experiment. I don’t think duplication was mentioned in the OP, so we are getting slightly off the point.
However, if we must try to imagine a duplication machine, lets make it at least a semi=plausible one;
if the duplicating teleporter accidentally makes two of you, then the second one comes from somewhere. Perhaps it uses the ‘many-worlds’ idea mentioned upthread; instead of sending you or failing to send you, it does both, and both versions of you end up in the same timeline while the other timeline ends up with no-one in it. What now? Both versions of you are incontrovertibly you; you don’t ‘share a consciousness’ but you have both inherited the same consciousness.
Now perhaps this concept of an ‘inherited’ consciousness could be applied in the real world. By duplicating yourself using a non-destructive scanner that instantly rebuilt you using classical information rather than non-duplicatable quantum information, could you still say that your duplicate has inherited your consciousness?
Quite a few transhumanists would like to think so. Personally I’m not so sure.
And as far as the destructive scanner and re-assembler mentioned in the OP, I don’t fancy that at all. On the other hand, it may be possible to build such a thing one day, and one might find that those people who do accept descructive scanning and re-assembly might be the ones who get broadcast around the galaxy, while we more conservative types stay at home.
This Many Worlds idea gives another way of refuting the OP.
If the Many Worlds Interpretation is correct, a minute ago my timeline diverged from countless others including a timeline where I made a gateaux, and a timeline where Kelly Brook decides to come round to my house.
Now the Mijins in these timelines started out exactly the same as me. Yet I can neither taste cake nor smell perfume right now. There is no more reason to suppose that if I died, I would jump into one of their minds (and what would decide which timeline I would wake up in? Ziggy?), than to suppose I would jump into Barack Obama’s mind.
(For the sake of simplicity in this argument, I think it’s best to regard consciousness as a stratified entity, whereby self-awareness is the higher order mental process that supervenes on lower order mental processes. And it’s only the higher order process that concerns us here. We need not consider mental functions like memories, emotions, psychology, etc.)
Agreed. But, it’s stimulating to consider all options, absurd as some may be, then let Occams razor separate the wheat from the chaff.
(bolding mine)
But, in my experience, what the hard-core physicalists do assert is that there is no difference, from their first person perspective, between the entity that walks into the transporter (A) and the one that walks out (B). They typically claim that they would not hesitate to travel via transporter.
If they believe that there is no difference between two entities with exactly the same constituent composition, and they believe that the transported person does have the exact same constituent composition, and they would not hesitate to travel by way of transporter (even when the original is destroyed)…what can we deduce from this? Well, logically, they must believe one of these 3 options to be true: #1: their self-awareness has a future in both A and B; #2: their self-awareness has a future in neither A or B; or #3):they don’t care whether or not they kill themselves so that someone else can live. I think we can safely throw #3 out, leaving us with #1 or #2.
Let’s analyze #1: Perhaps your lower order mental processes can have a real future in two entities at the same time, but not your higher order self-awareness. That’s a paradox that can’t be resolved, IMHO.
That leaves us with #2: If you believe you (self-aware you, first person singular) has no future in A or B, then, you have no* real* future, period. You are as dead to the person emerging from the transporter as you are to the person inhabiting your original brain matter right now +1second. The person reading this part of the sentence is now dead, replaced by the person reading this part. That’s absurd—possible maybe, but absurd. If true, it means the only reason to keep living is for the sake of a multitude of self-aware entities to be created and instantly destruct after you’re gone (which now you are). Why does it even matter if the you in 5 seconds, or the transporter you even has your memories or your psychology? It doesn’t affect you at all. It may as well be a chicken who comes out of the transporter pod. But, besides being depressing, it’s not elegant and it’s not simple. I don’t believe the universe was set up that way. But, I may be wrong.
What’s a more appealing scenario? One that follows our known physical laws—i.e. no allowance for two local events like self-awareness to exist in two places at the same time (Bell’s Theorem notwithstanding); and one that doesn’t include an inelegant, and futile cacophony of staccato consciousness’s strung together to be the correct theory of the mind. How can we have this?
We can have it if the entity that leaves the transporter is not the same as the entity that arrives, and our real future in only one entity, the one in the original package. How can we have this and still adhere to the tenets of physicalism? By realizing that there is a difference in two identical arrays of particles occupying separate locations in space—the difference being that they occupy separate locations in space. That makes them unique.
Well, exactly. Barack Obama has nothing to do with it; he did not inherit your consciousness, nor you his. But all of the duplicate Mijins did. Consciousness is not something you share (unless you have a group mind of some sort), it is something you own, and something you can inherit.
If (and it is a big if) consciousness is a program, a collection of interacting information and operations, then it can be duplicated, and the duplications can be momentarily identical. But it cannot be shared (without a direct neural link of some sort) .
This is what I fail to understand; why do people conflate inherited consciousness with shared consciousness? Is different thing.
I don’t think I even agree with this idea of inherited consciousness. Certainly a copy of me inherits my memories and characteristics.
But what does it mean to inherit consciousness?
Consider this: what if I make a copy of my brain, but there is an error; one atom is out of place. And it has the effect that one “pixel” of one “frame” of a memory is a different colour in the copy’s mind to mine. Does the copy still inherit my consciousness?
If so, how different can my copy be to me and still somehow count as my copy – where do we draw the line?
If not, then changing a single atom has made a huge difference to the outcome; maybe a life or death difference (depending on what exactly is meant by inherited consciousness).