Let’s say my neighbour has an identical car to me. Indeed, it is somehow identical to the quark. The only difference is the (extrinsic) property of location: his car is on his drive, my car is on my drive.
Is my neighbour’s car now my car?
No - there are obviously two identical cars, but the property of location isn’t a very interesting difference (if you swapped them over, nobody could know)
If your car got scratched by a rabid badger on the driver’s door before the duplication (and so your neighbour’s exact duplicate also has an exact duplicate scratch), they’re still identical - that one scratch is somehow ‘original’ doesn’t matter in any way in the present - because the badger, and the event of scratching is gone - there’s no way to ‘link’ to something that doesn’t exist any more.
Bad example.
Try it this way. Assume the properties you already put forth. Now I come along with my Buddy and we take both cars around the block a few times and park them back into the positions they were in. We may or may not have switched them up. You only know that the car you identify as your own is in your drive where it belongs. Is it the same car?
I knew I’d get responses like this, but the interchangeability of the two entities is a different point.
The point was being made by Mangetout that Materialism itself should tend us towards the idea that the two entities are numerically identical.
But actually it’s the opposite: a purely Materialistic take would tend us towards saying entities can be qualitatively identical (in principle anyway), but never numerically identical.
If there are two protons we cannot just say they are one and the same proton simply because they have identical intrinsic properties.
Sure, but it isn’t that simple of a question. The question is less of numerical identity and one of identifiable numerical uniqueness. Subtle difference here, but an important one. You have two protons, but unless you can distinguish between them, it doesn’t matter which one you get. You can have as many as you like in fact, but the point still stands. The argument of Uniqueness is really THE issue at play. The logic is almost irrelevant at some point because it fails to accurately reflect the natural world. This is where philosophy will fall down and physical sciences will have to pick up the ball.
Suppose we have two gold coins. They are identical to the quark for simplicity’s sake. One gold coin was carried about in your grandfather’s pocket for his whole life. It has an interesting story, and has sentimental value to you. Now suppose someone takes your coin and replaces it with the other one that is identical to it all physical ways. If you couldn’t tell the difference then it either doesn’t matter, since you would believe it to be the coin, and none could tell the difference; OR you are arguing for a sort of numerical Uniqueness. If that is the case, the we must qualify that argument. The properties must either be quantifiable, or we are left with nothing but an assertion of difference which may be satisfying philosophically but has no bearing on the real world.
If we agree that we are nothing more than particular bits of fundamental matter arranged in a particular way, then theoretically, there’s nothing to prevent one or more copies of the same thing to exist simultaneously.
So, you (A) walk into a room and sit on one of 5 chairs arranged in a circle. Then via an advanced matter assembly machine (currently in design prototype by Apple) one of you appears sitting on each of the empty chairs (B thru F).
Do you, currently sitting in chair A, have a future in any of the other fellows? If you did, you would be experiencing what they are experiencing right now. You would be sharing some type of shared hive mentality whereby you each see 5 of you, not 4. I, as I believe most of you, don’t think that’s really going to happen. So, the answer to the question the OP poses is quite simple: transporters do destroy the “self”, insofar as “self” includes the self-aware part of consciousness.
Now, if, according to physicalism, there is nothing unique about 2 exact arrangements of matter, and A is exactly like B thru F, then logically, if you have no future in B thru F, you have no future in **A. **Conclusion: it’s not transporters that destroy the “self”; time does.Or, does it?
*The person who wakes up in the morning is different (read: at the fundamental self-aware level) than the person who goes to bed at night; *this is the trope I hear most often, and this, in my opinion, is the more interesting question to ask than the one about transporters. So, what say you? Are you the same person in the morning as you were when you went to bed? Except for the occasional hang over, it certainly feels like you’re the same person. Is this simply a delusion?
If you’re different after hours of sleep, then you’re different every plank-time. So, the amount of self-awareness you have in the brains of the people you’re currently looking at in seats B thru **F, **which is to say none,is the same amount you will retain after you sit in seat **A **(i.e. also none). Even taking into account the “splitting into different realities” bit, I just don’t buy into that concept. And, I think, intuitively, most of you don’t want to buy into it either. But, it’s the only explanation that fits, if you take a materialistic view of the world, and you believe, with respect to your point of view before you sit down in chair A, that there is no difference between you in chair A and the others. It’s as though shoehorning a bizarre, non-intuitive mechanism into the mix simply to make it adhere to what is believed to be a non-assailable theory.
But, if you accept that A is unique, from the point of view of the “you” before sitting down, then you can have your cake and eat it too: no rules of physicalism are broken, and you do have a future in one brain.
It’s not that the philosophy falls down, it’s that it shows that there is a phenomenon that doesn’t apparently fit with a reductionist, third-person account, and some people are uncomfortable with that.
Let’s say you wake up one day in a strange room (I know I’m throwing out a lot of these hypotheticals, but I do think they help).
You want to work out where you are, and fortunately there is a book containing the locations of every particle ever; past, present and future. Unfortunately there happens to be an entity identical to you, in an identical room, also with that same book, thousands of miles away. And currently all your qualia are the same.
Now, the book is telling you basically all of the physical information, and yet it is insufficient to know where you are. And when you walk out of the room you’re going to experience one environment or the other, and yet from a third-person perspective, you and your copy were completely interchangeable.
This is the difficulty in squaring consciousness with a simple uniqueness criteria.
I’m not certain I follow (Though I agree these hypotheticals are helpful). The copies might be interchangeable but they are not unidentifiable. There is the set that is proximal to other matter A and the set that is proximal to matter B. That alone is enough for you to determine your location. Those are either Dividuals, or some sort of different type of clone.
In the transporter, you have a single set that is proximal to A, enters and uses the machine and is continuously aware of exiting proximal to B and remembers being proximal to A. The chain of events distinguishes it as a continuation of the set proximal to A.
As an aside, I recently came across thisarticle, which suggests that having identical genetic makeup might not be enough to make a clone identical to the original.
I don’t think they are numerically identical - but I’m not arguing that two copies of me (or me plus a copy) would be the same person - they would be two people.
But I don’t think I’m numerically identical with the me of yesterday (in fact, I can’t be - because I’m doing different things today. Not even sure I’m qualitatively identical to the me of yesterday) - I’m a descendent effect of that person.
So in the case of the quark-identical cars, If someone asked “are these cars the same car?”, the answer would be an obvious no - you can see there are two cars - so they can’t be the same car. If they asked 'Which of these cars is the one I saw yesterday?", there’s no material reason to pick one any more than the other.
I’d read that too. However, this would only apply to clones, not copies made on the molecular level. Since the machine would be recreating an exact copy of the pattern scanned, it would be recreating everything exactly. Every cell, virus, parasite, scar, hair and pigment in the same place as at the time of scan. Our “copies” are then imprinted with the unique, up to the second mental pattern as well. This would be something far more complex and accurate than a mere clone.
That’s why I said it was an aside.
But we’re still talking around the point. Consciousness, as other posters have stated, is a subjective first-person phenomenon. You can’t solve the problem by arguing around the question of whether the copy is objectively different from the original.
That’s why my bus analogy is relevant. Under what circumstances would Back-of-the-Bus Johnny’s suicide result in the consciousness that resides in the physical body of Back-of-the-Bus Johnny experience not death but rather a shift in place from the back of the bus to the front of the bus? Unless your argument is centered on the subjective internal experience of the consciousness inside the physical body, then the discussion isn’t relevant.
There is no way to determine your location until your qualia differs from the entity that is identical to you. And I explicitly said the two entities are initially experiencing identical qualia.
OK, you’re basically arguing that consciousness is not continuous anyway. Fair enough; that at least appears to be a consistent position to me, just a counter-intuitive one (though, of course, our intuitions may be wrong).
Since the argument really hinges upon whether two identical brains can harbor unique consciousnesses, can a mechanism be thought of to allow for this? I think so; I’ll steal Acid Lamp’s gold coins and expand on the analogy. The uniqueness is relational, not absolute, but that’s not a problem.
As an infant, you’re given a gold coin which you hold on to for the rest of your life. At the age of 20, a replica of yourself appears before your eyes as well as a chimpanzee. 2 exact replicas of the gold coin also appear and are henseforth held by your 2 guests. Is there any difference between you and your replica? No, you are exactly the same in every respect. Is there any difference between you and the chimp? Yes, but the coins are identical.
Now imagine that the gold coins represent the substrate upon which your memories, cognitive abilities and psychological make-up reside and accumulate. Any difference between you and your replica now? Still no, at least until you bifricate into beings with differing memories, you’re exactly the same in every respect. Any difference between you and the chimp? Well, some may argue he’s a less attractive version of you, but, consciousness-wise, you both appear identical before bifrication.
If memories, cognitive ability and psychological makeup were all that comprized consciousness in mammals, I’d have no problem choosing any one of the 3 versions of me to live on, at the expense of the other two…or travel in a transporter.
But, let’s bring self-awareness in to the picture and say that it is represented by the body heat transferred to the gold coins. Let’s say too, that as long as the body heat continues unabated, so continues your self-awareness. If the coin goes cold, your self-awareness ceases. Heat a different, though identical coin, it ignites an equal but separate self-awareness.
Now, can it be successfully argued that you, your replica and the chimp each have something unique about the coins they carry? Yes, each has a different relationship to the body heat imparted by the individual. Your body heat has been warming the coin for 20 years; your replica has been heating the coin for only a few moments and a chimp has been warming your memories for only a moments. If I’m asked at age 18 whether I’d choose my replica’s or the chimp’s coin at age 19, they wouldn’t even exist yet, so that’s an obvious difference, and a “no.” If I’m asked if I’d choose the coins of my replica or chimp after they appeared at my age 20, I’d still say “no”, because I don’t want a coin that’s been heated by an impostor or a *damned, dirty ape. *
[FONT=Trebuchet MS]Let’s bring this analogy around to a possible realistic scenario. In the same manner that a coin may be heated persistently over time by a continuously grasping hand, the non-regenerating, non-atom-exchanging part of the neuronal CNS (the parts not involved in metabolism) may provide the scaffolding upon which to sustain a persistent and uniquely self-aware consciousness. [/FONT]
Protons, maybe… But this breaks down entirely if we speak of photons.
A photon strikes a Hydrogen atom and is absorbed. A bit later, the Hydrogen atom emits a photon at exactly the same frequency. Is it “the same”? In quantum mechanics, the question is wholly meaningless.
(In fact, Richard Feynman joked that there might be only one single electron in the entire cosmos, moving backward and forward in time!)
(And, who knows? Some day in the future, we may figure out some way to “tag” individual electrons, to make them distinguishable from each other! “Yes, professor, that is ‘electron 15b.’ I know, because I charged it with a microquantum of ‘up-blue-strange-chocolate-north-penguin.’”)
It’s a good thing I didn’t say photons then.
And that it doesn’t affect the argument if the idea of identity is hard to apply to fermions or bosons.
There are lots of properties demonstrably evident at the molecular level and beyond that particles like that lack.
Wow, this is strange, I’ve just been reading Glasshouse by Charles Stross, and thinking on this very topic.
Reading through, I will try not to rehash too much.
This is an assertion, but not justified. Without knowing the nature of consciousness and identity and self, I don’t see how this is more than pure speculation. Admitedly, the nature of the question only leaves us with pure speculation.
Yes, real world experience gives us nothing to work with, so we don’t have the language or conceptual framework to work with.
Irrelevant, because an inanimate object is not the same as a conscious being. The Mona Lisa does not experience its own existence.
That is part of the root of the question.
“Will be” is not the same as “currently is”. Furthermore, I don’t think the comparison to past and future versions is necessarily valid. There’s the essence of the “chain of being” that each of those has that a “built from scratch to a pattern” version does not.
But why is he the “beta” version and “you” the “alpha” version? Who decides, and how?
This is an undemonstrated assertion. While I cannot demonstrate evidence against it, there is no evidence to support it either. This is pure conjecture at this point.
So on the one hand, there is nothing at the moment of duplication to distinguish one from the other, to declare an original. On the other, after duplication, both exist and to then terminate either one would be equivalent killing.
I would argue there is one possible means for distinguishing an “original”, if that one maintains the chain of being and is only scanned, vs torn apart and then reassembled while the duplicate is reassembled.
I would also argue there may be grounds for terming the “original” as the one in the original location made from the original matter, as opposed to the one at the distant location from new matter. But that is thinner.
That said, if both are then existent copies that would be wrong to terminate, then why is it suddenly justifiable to terminate one while generating the second? What is the distinction?
This is fundamentally hard to accept. There are suddenly two of you. Great, but we need to terminate one of you. Which one should I shoot in the head? You’d really be okay saying “Yeah, kill this me, that one will continue”? It seems far more likely each version would say “Well, if we’re the same and it doesn’t matter, then kill the other one.”
Given that we only have hypotheticals to work with anyway, the point of altering the conditions is to explore the issue from a variety of directions, in order to better understand the assumptions and conditions for each case. We explore, for instance, the distinction between the wormhole and the disassembler/reassembler. Adjusting the hypotheticals gives a way to point at the areas of contention and apply greater scrutiny.
Except by the time you confirm the alternate you at the other location, you have diverged significantly to be a different existence. He is no longer the same you.
That is part of the nature of the exploration. This feelings on this question do not seem to be in the nature of something we can currently look at evidence, so they come down to a question of how you feel about the topic, a matter of faith. In that respect, no side will convince the other, because there’s some fundamental distinction in the perception of the situation that cannot be explained or defended, just felt.
The issues of complications to legality are separate from the conditions of existence. So what if Gay Marriage complicates the legal situation, if it is right then the legal situation needs to be adjusted.
This is a logical progression. It is explored in the novel, Glasshouse. See also Star Trek vs Glasshouse - transporter technology and its implications - Cafe Society - Straight Dope Message Board
This gets more complicated. There would need to be some manner of demonstrating how to hold the concept of identity in a non-corporeal form. If you can demonstrate a non-corporeal form has some kind of existence and can hold consciousness, then maybe. But that seems to be a much different kind of step than merely reshaping matter.
Assuming I could get over the before/after me paradox of the prior discussion, I would love a medical transporter of this sort. Rapidly fix all those sundry ailments in one fell swoop. No more overweight, no more nearsightedness, no more allergies, no more bunions, no more sleep disorders, brand new cardiovascular system. Hell, I might even be convinced to take up smoking - it’s not like there’s any risk to long term cummulative effects - get new lungs every day. (Okay, probably not.)
Take the thought experiment to extremes in order to see the folly. Instead of a transporter, make the experiment simply an assembly of exactly the same type and arrangement of constituent particles that make the right-now-you “you”, pop into existence in a billion years, two billion light years away. Does the right here and now “you” have any type of self-aware stake in that extraterrestrial person in the future? If so, can you explain the physics that could allow that to happen? Not only will you be resurrecting back into existence, you’ll do so faster than light. That Kool-Aid seems a bit sweeter what even the creationists drink.
To bastardize the physics terms local event/ non-local event (which I understand minimally) to make a point: I think the mistake many people make in this type of thought experiment is conflating memories (think of them as a non-local event) with self-awareness (think of that as a local event). You can wrap someone else’s self-awareness around my memories and fool everyone, including the person who pops into existence on Alpha Centaury convinced that he’s me (even remembering being on Earth before magically popping into a different galaxy)…but, you can’t fool “me”, because I have no real future in him, and his past in me is nothing more than an illusion.
If ‘I’ (first person) walked into the transporter, the person who came out would be me, but ‘I’ (first person) wouldn’t be him.
In effect, there would be nothing differentiating the person who came out from the person who went in, that person would indeed believe themselves to be the person who went in and for all intents and purposes they would be, however the conciousness which entered would be gone for ever. The perception of the person who went in would not be that of the person who came out, even though the person who came out could not tell the difference, and would perceive the world as if they were the person who went in. Only the person who went in would theoretically know the difference, except they wouldn’t because they’d have ceased to exist in order to be able to perceive that. It is essentially cloning the original person complete with their memories and identity; identical but a copy nonetheless.
I agree entirely with this part of your post. And another way to differentiate the two “you’s” is to ask the guy “assembled on a faraway planet a billion years hence” (scenario from my last post) to recall his past. He’ll say something along the lines of “well, I lived in Podunk, Iowa, a small town in the Milky Way galaxy, up until 10 minutes ago, and then I popped into existence here, a small town in the Omega Centauri galaxy.” His memory is false, but he thinks he’s telling the truth. It’s the result of a delusional mind—no version of him existed in reality 10 minutes ago, anywhere. Ask the original “you” the same question and his answer will be true, not delusional. At the very least, this shows there is at least one difference between the two entities.
(bolding mine)
The bolded part needs clarification. Are you saying they cease to exist simply because of the constraint of this transporter model (i.e. the original you in the departure pod is destroyed); or are you saying they cease to exist because of a “no one is really the same in the future” philosophy?
Let’s use an “original is destroyed” model transporter and ask the question in a multiple choice answer format: Will you travel on this transporter? A) Yes, I want to go where it transports and I anticipate no problems; B) No, although I want to go where it transports, I don’t believe it will be me coming out of the arrival pod; C) It doesn’t matter either way, it won’t be me whether I go or stay. My answer is B, what’s yours?