That’s exactly what the other Scumpup said.
Google “Ship of Theseus” or “Grandfather’s Axe” paradox.
That is to say, if your dad replaced the shaft and you replace the head, is it still the same axe?
Does it matter?
The human body replaces all of it’s cells something like every ten years. Is it still the same person?
This is an “atheists in foxholes” sort of argument. If someone who wasn’t an idiot would be willing to use that device, it would be because it is a combination of two things: suicide and a living “black box”.
If someone incinerated the Mona Lisa, would painting a replacement be an acceptable substitute?
Whether or not it matters is dependant on why you value it. For your stereotypical faceless corporation, it doesn’t matter whether you die as long as someone with your skill set can be brought up to speed relatively quickly. For your children or your parents, a replacement goldfish is going to be rather less well accepted. For you, the only advantage is that your duplicate can keep your affairs in order after you’re dead.
It is an axe, serving in the same capacity as the one purchased by your grandfather. It is not the same axe any more than my jeep is the same car as the Aerio it replaced.
What if I could make a molecule by molecule copy of the Mona Lisa, mixed them up so you couldn’t tell which was the original and then asked you to pick which one to keep?
But what defines “you”? If I create an entity that is physically, chemically and biologically identical to you with all your thoughts, memories and emotions, is that any more or less you?
How about the great novela “Think Like A Dinosaur” (which was also made into an episode of The Outer Limits). In that story an advanced alien species (that looks like dinosaurs) has turned up and is giving humans limited access to teleportation technology. It’s been a while since I read it, but IIRC the way it works it that the person being transported gets into some kind of pod and is scanned. This information is transmitted to the destination, where an exact copy is made. As soon as the “transport” is confirmed the original is killed.
So in the story, a person arrives at the station and is scanned to be transported, but there is a glitch and it seems like the receiving end didn’t get the info. So they take the person out of the pod to wait until they can fix the glitch. Then they get confirmation that the scan did go through and a copy was successfully made on the other end. So the human manning the station on this end has the difficult job of killing the original on this end.
It’s made clear that the “dinosaurs” had reservations about giving the transportation technology to humans, as they’re not sure if we’re mentally capable of handling it’s ramifications. And the general public and people who will be transported don’t have a detailed understanding of how the “transportation” works - it’s clear in the story that the fact that it’s a secret and most humans don’t know that the process involves killing the original after the duplicate arrives at the destination.
So the human manning the station (who is one of the few, if not only people who know how the system works) has to kill the original, or risk that the dinosaurs will decide humans aren’t “mature” enough to handle the technology.
If I take apart the Mona Lisa, carefully labelling the molecules as I go, then put it all back in exactly the right configuration - same atoms, same places, same relationships etc. Is it the same object?
If not, why is my toaster the same object if I take it apart to clean out the crumbs, then reassemble it? Is it because I don’t disassemble my toaster to atoms? Why should that matter?
If the reassembled Mona Lisa IS the same thing, then what would be the difference if during the process, I substituted all of the carbon atoms in the Mona Lisa for new ones? One carbon atom is very much like another.
To late to edit to my previous post to add:
“Think Like A Dinosaur” bothered me, and I don’t think I would be comfortable choosing to undergo that type of “copy and destroy the original” transportation. It’s pretty clear to me that the copy is an exact duplicate and has consciousness and is a human in their own right, but there’s no direct continuity between them so the original version is still dead. If I were cloned tomorrow and my memories up until now were implanted in the original, it would be an exact copy but it wouldn’t be me - it would just be a strange kind of twin. And I think one of the things that bugged me in the story was that the humans who signed up to be transported weren’t fully informed of how the machine worked. If someone has no qualms about using that kind of transporter then more power to them - but they should know what they’re choosing to do.
This thread also made me think about the novel “Old Man’s War”. Spoiler warning, since this is a fairly recent novel (2005), and the spoilers give away quite a bit of the plot. [spoiler]In this story, senior citizens are recruited to join the military and defend the earth by fighting aliens, but in doing so they are permanently exiled from earth. When they sign up they are told that unspecified medical procedures will be done to fix any bodily ailments that they may have and rejuvenate them.
After they have left earth they are subjected to intensive physical exams and tests, and their mind is “transferred” into a young cloned version of themselves using their own DNA, but heavily modified to be supersoldiers. The recruits only find out that the process involves cloning and mind transferrence basically as the procedure is happening - it’s a closely guarded secret that’s hidden from all people on earth.
However, it’s interesting that they don’t just go to sleep in the old body and wake up in the new one. Instead, they’re awake during the procedure and they can feel themselves being in their original body, then in both simultaneously, then just in the new body. The book describes the viewpoint of one character throughout the process, and his feelings while in his new body and looking at his former body. For a short time, the old body is still breathing and has basic brain stem functions, but it’s clear that it’s consciousness/higher thought processes/personality/soul/whatever you want to call it is gone. So the procedure doesn’t just copy you consciousness into a new body, but appears to actually transfer it, leaving the old body without a mind.
In this story, as in “Think Like A Dinosaur”, the people signing up to be transported/cloned aren’t aware of what the procedure entails before it is done. However, the “Old Man’s War” bothered me less because there was obvious continuity in the transfer of consciousness from one body to another.[/spoiler]
Waenara, does total anesthesia or the prospect of slipping into coma bother you in the same way?
(And of course Waenara is not Darth, but the posts are sufficiently similar that I can reply to both.)
I too have some reservations about sleep, but the mind is sufficiently active even during periods where you seem totally unthinking that I am fairly reassured that I am the same person who went to sleep the previous night.
Coma and total anaesthesia is a different story. It’s not just theoretical for me, like it is with sleep. I truly do not know if I would be the same person if I went into and came out of a low-brain-state coma or total anaesthesia. So much so that if a doctor recommended an operation that required general anaesthesia, this would factor into my decision in whether to undergo the procedure or not. It would probably not be as big a deal these days: since doctors already try to avoid general anaesthesia due to its dangers, any procedure recommended to me would probably be life-threatening in the first place and lacking a suitable non-general anaesthetic alternative, or else the alternative would already have been pursued because general is so deadly compared to other forms of treatment.
I’ve read some articles about the quantum state of our brains, and the effect of sleep or anesthesia and how continuous is our consciousness really anyways. I’d say that 99% of the time it doesn’t bother me, but if I occasionally start pondering life, death and existence and get into an existential funk, it does kind of bother me.
I’ve undergone total anesthesia a several times for surgery, and it is pretty disconcerting. Just out like a light until you wake up, with no memory or consciousness of anything happening “in between”.
I was similarly freaked out a little by “conscious sedation” with midazolam when I’ve had to have colonoscopies - it’s an IV drug that gives you amnesia where you just forget everything that happened during the procedure (like an ultimate blackout). It’s strange to think of what happens to your consciousness during that time period - you’re awake and can talk to and interact with those around you, but later you don’t remember any of it.
General anesthesia and conscious sedation bothered me a little, but I knew there was still my physical continuity and it still felt like I was me. (Barring random hypotheticals like what if the entire universe was just recently created and false memories implanted in everyone’s minds).
Of course, I acknowledge that in the “Think Like A Dinosaur” story the duplicate is an exact copy of the original, and from the point of view of the duplicate there is continuity and they still feel like “themself”. However, I can’t ignore the fact that the flat out kill the original in order to not have multiple copies running around. The original isn’t transported through a wormhole, and they aren’t even disintegrated as part of the scanning process. In the story, the scan is done and the copy is alive and walking around before the original is killed. So from the original’s point of view, they are dead.
Regarding slipping into a coma, I’d say that it bothers me in the same way that being brain damaged and in a persistent vegetative state, or having severe dementia or Alzheimer’s would bother me. It has implications for whether “I’m still me”, but in a different way. Instead of being my consciousness or a duplicate of me in another body, it would be my physical body with a different or “damaged” consciousness.
You could say the same thing about someone with a traumatic brain injury. I heard a story before about a woman who suffered TBI from an accident, and after her physical recovery and rehab she had permanent amnesia from pre-accident, and her personality was also somewhat changed. She and her family decided to treat it as if her pre-accident self had died, and that she was a different person. It gave her peace to view herself as being a completely new person, rather than continuing to unsuccessfully strive to become the person she used to be. I think that I understand her position.
What defines “me” is a body whose sensory inputs I can experience and whose actions I can control. If you create an identical duplicate of me a mile away, I cannot see through his eyes and I cannot control his actions like I am controlling my own hands right now. He is not me. If you create an identical duplicate of me and then kill me, you have done nothing to change that relationship. He is still not me.
You can’t (from here) control the actions of the body that climbs out of your bed tomorrow morning, but that will be you.
You seem to be assuming the existence of some sort of soul or homunculus that lives in your body without being part of it.
Nope. Suppose I create that duplicate, then hook up the input/output for both brains to a transceiver so that Brain A controls & perceives the body Brain B is in and visa versa. That duplicate over there that you can’t control or see out of? That’s you. The body you are walking around and seeing with? That’s his body, not yours.
I am to be honest baffled that there are people who take seriously the idea that someone post-general-anaesthesia might not be the same person as the one pre-.
Let me put it this way: If in fact we’re killing one person and creating a new one when we put someone under (which has, btw, happened to me) then it turns out killing people isn’t always actually that big a deal. If Kid Frylock died at age 11 when he had his surgery, and I’m a different person now, then, well, Kid Frylock’s death was no big deal, either from his point of view or mine, because both of us got exactly what we wanted out of the deal.
Killing isn’t trivialised by this thought experiment - the nature of identity is.
If you are just a product of stuff that’s going on in your body (i.e. if there is no metaphysical soul or similar), then any machine that can do the same thing will embody you - therefore computing your mind in your body now and a different one tomorrow is just as continuous - in any way that matters - as computing your mind on two consecutive days in the same body.
To me that line of argument smacks of Argument to the Consequences. If something is true, the fact that it might have troubling consequences does not alter its truth value. Relevant XKCD.
Belief in a soul is not necessary here. All that’s necessary is understanding the concept of “original” and “copy.” No matter how faithful a copy is, it is not the original.
But there is no "original’, we are all “copies”. The matter we are composed of is constantly being replaced
Not at all–I was arguing that there’s at least a tension, if not an outright inconsistency, in a position that says general anaesthesia is killing, and we should be concerned about that. Because if GA is killing, then we shouldn’t be worried about killing.