My point to a t. In a world with duplicating machines, we would need a new philosophical vocabulary to describe events.
Simply asserting, “But he isn’t real” doesn’t cut the mustard.
(Any more than Roger Penrose scored the points he thought he did when arguing against machine intelligence, and demanding the machine tell us “How does it feel?” To Penrose, that was a winning point, but to those of us who accept the Strong AI hypothesis – that machines can achieve true intelligence – it was just a childish quip, glib but vacuous.)
It’s simple logic. Either the two people share a consciousness (a “hive mind” if you will) or they don’t. If they don’t, this means that what person B experiences does not affect person C, and what person C experiences does not affect person B. Do you dispute this?
If the experiences of each does not affect the other, that means that person B’s death does not mean person C has died, and person C’s continued life does not mean person B continues to live. This means that if you are copied and then destroyed (or destroyed and then copied), you are still dead.
You are treating analogy and metaphor as if they were fact. An earthquake that you survived has not literally destroyed your life - it has inconvenienced you. A teleporter has destroyed you - it has torn you apart at the atomic level, at which point you die.
No… I just don’t see how it serves to rebut the claim that both persons are, in fact, the “real” Emilio James Olmos. We’ve duplicated the body, the memories, the personality, the reflexes, the moral values… How have we failed to duplicate the person?
Yes, they have different experiences starting now, immediately after the duplication. But my point is, we, as individuals, have “different” life experiences depending on the contingencies of what happens in the next five minutes.
If I’m still “me” after the lottery, or an earthquake, why am I not still “me” immediately after being duplicated in a new place?
Yes, they are two separate persons. They’re also both EJO. In what way is one “the real he” and the other not?
Yes; both. Both alive and dead. One copy was created, and, for that moment in time, there were two EJOs. Or yous. Or mes. Then one is destroyed…or not. Doesn’t make an ounce of difference to my argument. While both are alive, both are the “real” me. Hell, there might be 50,000 “real me” running around.
(I promise not to use this technique to overload the message boards with sock puppets!)
Well, I’m using the metaphor to indicate that the existence of the individual does, in fact, survive vast dislocations of “point of view.” If I’m still “me” after, say, a massive heart attack or stroke, then certainly I’m still “me” after being duplicated in exact perfect detail, on a Transporter stage in Paris… Even if, at the same time, another “me” appears on a Transporter stage in London!
I do apologize if I seem to be too “definite” or “certain” in my opinions, by the way. This is a silly sin in a discussion of something wholly speculative. As I said earlier, somebody invent the doggone thing already, and then we can find out!
What if it puts you back together? Open heart surgery tears you apart at a more macro level. And it’s more inconvenient and invasive than stepping on a transporter and reappearing somewhere else.
Really, it sounds like for a teleporter to be completely non-controvertial, it would need to be some sort of wormhole portal you walk through. Not a 3d fax machine that creates an exact copy of you somewhere else while instantly and painlessly destroying the original.
It does nothing to your brain however, and that is considered the seat of consciousness.
Let me try another attempt at this:
If I were to stick a pin in myself, I would feel pain. If I were to stick a pin in you, I would not feel pain.
Now, what if we give you 90% of my memories?
Well, nothing has changed about stimuli and pain response: I could still stick a pin in you and feel nothing. Right?
Now what if you have 100% the same memories as me, and are identical to me to the quark? Does my consciousness suddenly branch out, and a pin in either of us will make us both feel pain?
No, of course not. My consciousness is still bound to this body. And that’s how I define “me”: my consciousness and the entity that it is bound to. I could lose all my memories, change my appearance completely, and I’d still be me. Conversely, making X clones of me doesn’t duplicate my consciousness.
You said that if they don’t share a consciousness, then B’s experiences don’t affect C. If you accept that, then* you accept that if B’s experiences affect C, then they share a consciousness. Since pre-copy person’s experiences do affect post-copy person, it follows from what you’ve claimed here that pre-copy person and post-copy person do share a consciousness.
*By the general principle that when A -> B is true, then -B -> -A is also true.
That is fair enough, but you have to consider that other people define “you”, as a specific set of behaviours and mannerisms attached to a specific physical entity. A copy of you down to the quark IS you as far as everyone else is concerned. That brings us back to semantic word games again. WHAT is the difference? What makes the new you not “you”? The moment of disconnection? Then who is the new you? Just asserting “some other guy who thinks he’s me” isn’t good enough. To any other human in existence you would be identified as “you” no matter how many times you went through the process. Your “clone” :rolleyes: Would also identify himself as you, and be baffled that anyone would be asserting differently as his perception would be identical in memories and continuity to “yours”.
Well it sounds like we agree here. Of course the clone would think he was me. Of course everyone else would too. But he wouldn’t be me. Stick a pin in him, and I wouldn’t feel pain. Indeed, I wouldn’t feel anything because I’d be dead.
There’s a temptation in these kinds of thought experiments to assume a third-person perspective because it hides all the problems. But we aren’t p-zombies, consciousness is a real phenomenon and it is meaningful to discuss what happens to my consciousness. Answer: it’s destroyed.
Currently, the destruction of any given individual is tragic and possibly criminal because they are unrecoverable. In this case though, that is not true. So the objection must lie in the moment of destruction then. What is lost or what is quantifiable that we can demonstrate that the new person is “not you” other than in an abstract, semantic sense?
I disagree with this premise. We don’t consider such an action to be immoral/illegal merely because it is unrecoverable from a third-person perspective. It’s mainly because it’s taking away what is most precious to me: my life.
In the transporter hypothetical, this same crime is still happening.
Well, as I’ve pointed out already, some people dispute that we have continuity of consciousness now. So that’s one way out of this problem I suppose.
This would not be my personal view however. I would see that as another example of declaring something an illusion simply because it’s not understood yet. I’m not saying that there necessarily is continuity, just that we should take it seriously until we have a model explaining the nature of the illusion, if that’s what it is.
Nobody - including the copy - can tell the difference. And the same could be happening to us every second without us noticing (if they’re right that consciousness is not a continuous phenomenon anyway)
Do you eat when you are hungry? Do you take pains not to step out in front of moving cars? Asking him what his life his and why it is precious to him when the very fact that you are alive to post indicates you are protective of your own is rather facile.
In the real world, people don’t split in two (well, not completely - although this is interesting), so we have not developed a way to think about what that would mean, or rather, we have built a paradigm that assumes singular continuity, in which we are somewhat trapped.
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In case anyone’s interested, I found a discussion of exactly this thought experiment here (warning- this is a philosophy site)
from there
There’s one answer- you were really two people all along…