What entity do I mean when I say “me”? How can I define myself? I could list out my genetic code, and say that the entity with that genetic code is “me”. But by that standard, the person that steps out of the transporter is still “me”, because the transporter copies the genetic code. I could show my fingerprints, and say that the entity with those fingerprints is “me”. But again, the transporter duplicates this. I could recount all of my memories, my personal preferences, my current train of thought… But the person that steps out of the transporter has all of those. In what way, then, can I say that the person who steps out of the transporter is not me?
Ellis Dee’s thought experiment is exactly on the money.
Let’s say you were duplicated instead of transported and then the transporter operator said, “Oops! The other you has already appeared on Cigna 7. If you’ll just hold still, I’ll shoot you with this Romulan disruptor since we can’t have two of you running around. Don’t worry, it’s completely painless, just like the transporter. Here goes!”
You are A-OK with that?
He IS you. That’s not the problem here.
The problem is that YOU are no longer him.
Sure I will. Who “I” am is a fantastically complex pattern of information, stored in about three pounds of meat. It’s the pattern that’s important, not the meat. If you run that pattern on a different piece of meat, that’s still me. That pattern isn’t destroyed by the transporter, it’s just moved to a different location.
So you’re fine with the scenario with the Romulan Disruptor then? I am not saying that you will entirely cease to exist. There will still be a “you” in the universe. But the you that is experiencing reality right now? That you’s experience has come to an end. And that’s the one that matters to the right-now-you.
What about a scenario where they copy your pattern into the machine and say “We’ll bring you back in 50 years. Your copy will get to time travel! But now we must disintegrate you. Hold still!”
Are you OK with this one too?
I don’t understand how what happens in the world AFTER you have stopped experiencing it affects how you feel about your disintegration.
You’re saying: “I get disintegrated, nothing left that thinks it’s me. My family is sad. That’s murder. But if I get disintegrated, and I get replaced by a doppleganger with all my memories, that’s fine with me! Go for it. I won’t be upset one bit by my experience of the universe coming to an end.”
I don’t get it.
What do you mean “take his place?” Isn’t that exactly what you claim cannot happen?
If I can “take his place” then I have successfully teleported. Success. Everybody’s happy.
Seriously; you seem to be stuck on the projected thoughts of someone who isn’t there any more. “If you died, how would you feel about that?” See the problem? There isn’t any such point-of-view any longer; meanwhile, the identical point-of-view exists somewhere else. The point-of-view – the sense of self, the person in every meaningful way – has been shifted to a new place. Keen. Beats airsickness!
Ah, there’s the rub. You are more than that. You are also a stream of consciousness. That’s what ends, that’s what matters. I can reliably say, “You will wake up tomorrow and experience breakfast.” I cannot say, “You will teleport and experience breakfast on Cigna 7.” The copy experiences it, while feeling exactly like you WOULD have, but you stopped having experiences the second you were disintegrated.
I mean “take his place” as in you are willing to step into a teleporter/disintegrator. You are right, after he has been teleported, there is no place to take.
I’m not asking about the thoughts of the person AFTER they’re dead. I’m asking about the dying. Being willing to end it all. If it doesn’t bother you at all, because you won’t have any more thoughts, then why not just end it now? What’s the point of continuing existence at all? It’s because the continuation of existence has VALUE. It’s not “the fact that I exist in the universe” that has value, it’s the universe that I get to experience. If I stop experiencing it, that’s bad! I don’t want that to happen!
That’s how the teleported person feels afterward, sure. But all experiences have stopped cold for the guy who stepped in.
Why are you guys so hung up on guns? Shoot the duplicate. Use a disrupter on the duplicate. What is it with you guys and violence?
If the transporter failed in that way, just let me go back into it again and try another time. Your thought-experiment invokes additional pointless violence, threats, fear, and pain.
Did I consent to the idea in the first place? Then, yes, I’m perfectly okay with it. It’s by consent. I disappear here, and re-appear somewhere else, at a later time. If I had a good reason to want to bypass the intervening 50 years, then, sure. (Maybe I’m an astronomer, and there will be a really big supernoval 50 years from now. I might choose to jump ahead in time to see it.)
After I’ve stopped experiencing existence…I no longer experience existence. So long as the disintegration (please to call it “scanning”) process if painless, then it won’t matter a bit. My consciousness opens its eyes in a new place, somewhere I wanted to go. I continue existing in that way.
That “you don’t get it” is abundantly clear. You can’t fathom it. It doesn’t make sense to you. But to jump from that to “it’s murder,” “it’s suicide,” “it’s insane” is an argument from ignorance. The problem is merely that you are only seeing one side of a debate that has more than one side.
(I believe the word is spelled “Doppelganger.” I made that exact same spelling mistake in a story once, and am still hearing about it years later!)
Not to nitpick, but we all know damn well that in the ST universe, should such a scenario occur, nobody is going to be taking a distruptor to anyone’s head.
But here’s the thing, we keep referring to the “stream of conscience” and the default position seems to be that the one left behind is “you”. I disagree, I say the “SOC” is both here AND there. Kind of like Schrodinger’s cat of consciousnesses.
It’s not an argument from ignorance. I understand your point completely. You claim to be OK with this as long as you continue to exist, even if you don’t get to experience that existence. What I don’t get is WHY that is OK with you. Personally, I prefer to continue having experiences.
What if your teleported self was not an exact copy of you? What if it was missing a pinky finger? Small price to pay for instantaneous transport, right? Or what if it looked completely different, but it still had all your memories? So it thinks/feels like it’s you, but it looks in the mirror and thinks “Wow, I have a whole different body now.”
Are you still OK with teleportation under these circumstances? If not, why does it matter that your copy was imperfect? You’re not around to care, after all.
You’re right, the SOC is in both places at that moment. If I was the guy who stepped OUT of the teleporter, I wouldn’t want to be vaporized to “fix” the problem either. No matter which individual I am, I want to continue having experiences.
Let me try explaining it this way:
Second-by-second journal entries.
Guy getting teleported: “Stepping up onto pad, Oh pretty lights!” The End.
Guy who got teleported: “Oh, pretty lights! Stepping off pad. I remember stepping up onto the pad and everything that came before, too. Off I go…”
Now who wants to volunteer to be that first guy?
They’re not two people, it’s just one person.
Same as when I go to sleep, I don’t fear going to sleep any more than I fear waking up. Over the course of sleep, my SOC has been broken. I have no recollection of what happened over the past six hours yet, here I am.
I don’t agree. Even while you are asleep, your brain is very busy. You just don’t remember it most of the time.
Yes, that’s my point exactly. If my stream of consciousness ends here, and resumes there, at exactly the point it left off, then it’s the same continuous stream - the person who’s there is the person who was here.
I’ll go.
If I froze you to absolute zero and then brought you back, would you still be you?
Do you also get confused when you find three hundred books all bound together between the same covers, each one taking up where the previous one left off? When you turn the page, continuity is maintained, and it’s the same book, even though it’s now continuing on a different page. When you beam up, continuity is maintained, and it’s still the same person, even though it’s now continuing in a different place.
Well, yes, that would be confusing. Also, unwieldly. Did you mean pages?