Self, death, and teleportation devices

[Souron]

Yes, so.. which body do you wake up in? I can't continue this discussion with you until I know if we even disagree or not.

Which body(ies) do you wake up in?

Exactly. And if that original (which is you) is killed, you are dead. No matter how many perfect replicas of you are running around afterwards.

The original body is just a body.

In our drive for self preservation we should ensure that a copy of us lives, never mind where the pieces come from. Only the arrangement is important. Only our identity, and everything that makes us who we are.

 

[Rashiminos]

If we start bringing the mystical into this discussion then you could just say: "Of course teleportation would work, the matter stream is controlled by Q and transfers your consciousness to your new body". You could say anything you want.

Or we could say there's a black box which contains any and all relevant properties of the universe that are involved in teleporting someone in this manner. We don't know all of what's in the box (possibly nothing that we didn't know already, in your proposed case), but it's there.

And what if there are 10,000 clones? You can't possibly claim that those 10,000 people all share the same consciousness (or whatever you want to call it). They will have their own unique needs, wants, and ideas about their own self.

You're making a big claim, yourself.

1. inside your original body
2. inside one of the clones
3. inside both of the clones
4. inside all three bodies

All 4. Simultaneously.

LOTS of people consider the stopping of the heart to be "death" though, which is why we have so many stories about people coming back to life with CPR.

and usually CPR/defibrillation is for abnormal heart rhythms, not a completely stopped heart.

 

[Narz]

Well, yes, you can be woken when you're sleeping. The cells responding to the external environment can override the processes that result in you being unconscious. But you're certainly unconscious during many parts of sleep. You're conscious when you're meditating and daydreaming! And even (kinda) when you're dreaming. But not when you're fully asleep.

"Consciousness" doesn't really have any objective scientific meaning though. Your brain is still your brain, actively processing & organizing information. It's just functioning unconsciously. My "unconscious" is as much a part of me as my conscious is & I strongly disagree with the statement "a person is only themselves while fully awake". If you rape someone while they're unconscious & they don't consciously remember it does that make it ok? Sometimes I'll caress my GF while she's sleeping to try & make her smile & say nice things to her. She rarely remembers it but I like to think it has a positive effect.

I stand by my statement than sleep is a poor analogy for death. People do, on some level, "remember" things that happened in their sleep just as people are profoundly affected by experiences before they could form long-term memories (before the age of 1.5 or so, IIRC).

Thru sleep & wakefullness & all stages in between the brain functions continually from life until death. Any transfer of "selfness" from the brain to another entity (whether another person's body, a machine, etc.) is unproven & probably false (though I'd love to believe in the ability of "the self" to survive the destruction of the brain, would be quite comforting).

 

[Souron]

"Consciousness" doesn't really have any objective scientific meaning though. Your brain is still your brain, actively processing & organizing information. It's just functioning unconsciously. My "unconscious" is as much a part of me as my conscious is & I strongly disagree with the statement "a person is only themselves while fully awake". If you rape someone while they're unconscious & they don't consciously remember it does that make it ok? Sometimes I'll caress my GF while she's sleeping to try & make her smile & say nice things to her. She rarely remembers it but I like to think it has a positive effect.

I stand by my statement than sleep is a poor analogy for death. People do, on some level, "remember" things that happened in their sleep just as people are profoundly affected by experiences before they could form long-term memories (before the age of 1.5 or so, IIRC).

I don't disagree that what happens in your sleep effects you when you wake. That doesn't destroy the analogy. Sleep isn't ok because we change when we sleep. It wouldn't be any worse if people were totally dormant during the night.

Thru sleep & wakefullness & all stages in between the brain functions continually from life until death. Any transfer of "selfness" from the brain to another entity (whether another person's body, a machine, etc.) is unproven & probably false (though I'd love to believe in the ability of "the self" to survive the destruction of the brain, would be quite comforting).

It's quite provable given a proper definition of self. Your "self" is the sum of your identity, your vices, virtues, habits, and hobbies. It is the product of your biology. If your biology is copied, so is your self.

If you define self some other way, please put in on the table, and also explain why that self is worth preserving.

 

[El_Machinae]

Consciousness DOES have an objective scientific meaning! Just because you're the only one that can detect yours doesn't mean anything. The great breakthrough in cognitive psychology was the idea that "hey, if we just agree that consciousness exists, we can do way more experiments!". Before then, they were always trying to prove psychological truths with outside observation. Internal observation counts too!

 

[Souron]

Consciousness DOES have an objective scientific meaning! Just because you're the only one that can detect yours doesn't mean anything. The great breakthrough in cognitive psychology was the idea that "hey, if we just agree that consciousness exists, we can do way more experiments!". Before then, they were always trying to prove psychological truths with outside observation. Internal observation counts too!

Sure. But that's not a persistent consciousness; it goes out when you sleep.

 

[Narz]

It's quite provable given a proper definition of self. Your "self" is the sum of your identity, your vices, virtues, habits, and hobbies. It is the product of your biology. If your biology is copied, so is your self.

If you define self some other way, please put in on the table, and also explain why that self is worth preserving.

My "self" is my brain. If my brain is destroied, I'm dead. Creating a computer simulating of Narz, a bunny rabbit with a Narz computer chip in his brain that makes him think he's me or a clone doesn't make them me. When my brain stops working, I'm dead