Narz
keeping it real
From everyone else's perspective. However the original person who walked thru the teleporter is dead.
Self, death, and teleportation devices
- Thread starter Mise
- Start date
warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
Legally speaking I doubt a perfect clone would get to inherit the rights of the original, especially if that original was still walking around doing stuff.. but that's a slightly different tangent. Still, a point that a copy would not be treated as the original.. not in all respects. Also, the above.
If you were not confident that you would wake, you would try not to go to sleep. Likewise with being scanned in this way. But if you know that you are going to wake, then it's ok to sleep. It's ok to let your consciousness go out for a short time.
By consciousness I am referring to your sense of being yourself, being a particular individual distinct from the world around you, and with your own particular traits and memories.
Exactly right. And consciousness as you describe it is quite mystical. Entirely non-physical and any claim about it unfalsifiable.
warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
Being killed and then reassembled atom by atom somewhere else is not "letting your consciousness go out for a short time".
When you sleep your consciousness goes nowhere. Your brain is still working - uninterrupted.
It's a very poor comparison. If during sleep you were killed and then put back together and revived somehow, you'd have a point.
It's not mystical. We don't fully understand it - but that doesn't make it mystical. We can't just go making stuff up about something just because we don't fully understand it. (sure, we can, but why bother? it's not going to help us understand it any better)
Narz
keeping it real
Agreed, sleep is a terrible analogy for death, IIRC your brain is actually more active during sleep.
What defines a person? I say it is their identity; the sum of their memories, habits, vices, and virtues. And that is preserved.
Sleep is a good analogy here. No consciousness exists for large portions of sleep. Yes there is a body that is capable of creating that consciousness at any time, but so long as it doesn't there is no perspective that perceives the identity of that person through their eyes. Similarly if one truely dies you cannot talk about the perspective of the dead. The dead -- the truly dead, not dead but with a eternal soul -- don't have a point of view. In the scenario only the pre-transport original and post-transport copy have a perspective. And from their own point of view, they go to sleep in one spot and wake in another.
Narz
keeping it real
A person is defined by their brain & body. If that person is murdered they're not a person anymore, they're a corpse. It doesn't matter if you cloned them the second they died or 50 years later, either way the original human being would be dead.
I mean maybe I could clone myself & my daughter & her mother wouldn't know the clone from the real me. He would carry on as me for 40+ more years. However me, I'd be dead.
No, from their own point of view the pre-transport person goes in a machine, receives a strange feeling from being copied, then is murdered. Another separate entity, who happens to have all the memories of the original person is simultaneously born. You really believe if I cloned you & then murdered you your consciousness/soul/whathaveyou would somehow ethereally jump ship from your dead body/brain to the clone's? No, he'd just have a replica.
It's really quite simple.
warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
You are looking at it from the point of view of somebody watching that person step into the xerox/teleportation machine and then re-appearing somewhere else. From that point of view you are exactly right - the person emerging is exactly the same as the person who stepped in, even if the result is 2 clones or 5 or 10,000.
You are not looking at it from the point of view stepping into the device, which is what me and Narz are talking about.
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.
It has nothing to do with perspective - and everything to do with your brain. Your brain does not shut down when you sleep - it is very active.
Your brain WOULD shut down if you were killed. It is not even close to being a similar process.
Doing a function like breathing is indeed called life. And your brain does breath oxygen from your blood when it sleeps. Ok it does more than that. But of what worth is it? There's nothing special about being alive. In some anaerobic bacteria the difference between dead and dormant is quite small. Being alive, preforming a mundane function is not better than being dormant or temporarily dead. If my heart stopped every night I went to sleep, I would not care as long as that did not prevent me from waking (which it does). Cryogenic freezing is in many imaginings exactly that -- killing a person in away they can be later revived. Would you get cryogenicly frozen if it involved stopping your heart, but if you could also be assured that you would be revived?
I should try to find examples of organisms where the point of death is very hard to identify.
What hypothetical test can we do to prove that this "consciousness" does or does not go anywhere when you sleep? That it even exists?
I don't claim they share the same consciousness, because I claim that consciousness as you define it does not exist. But right after cloning they will indeed have the exact same wants, and ideas about their own self. Those may change as they each live out their lives, but not at the moment of revival.
Hmmn, to be honest, I assume my consciousness to be 'me'. I just am comfortable with the idea that it's housed in my body. Sleep is a pretty good analogy, we're just so accepting of sleep not being the death of consciousness that we don't like it as an analogy.
warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
The point is that when you're asleep your brain goes on living - and doing stuff. There is no interruption in activity - only a change. When you die - you are brain dead - that is an interruption in brain activity and the reason why sleep is a bad comparison to death - at least in the context of this discussion.
There are sciences that deal with the very subject. Neuroscience, psychology.. heck, I don't know. I do know that none of them have a hypothesis that you leave your body when you sleep - in any sort of form.
Souron said:
Yes, but.. wait, what are we even disagreeing on here? You need to clear that up before we continue!
Let's consider this thought experiment, which should hopefully help us figure out where we disagree:
Consider a xerox machine that is able to copy humans to the very last atom - creating PERFECT copies, in every single way. The one caveat is that it knocks you unconscious during the scanning process - you wake up 10 minutes afterwards.
You step into this machine, it scans you, and produces 2 copies. What do you think happens from YOUR point of view? You step into the machine.. where do you wake up?
1. inside your original body
2. inside one of the clones
3. inside both of the clones
4. inside all three bodies
If you're going with 1. then we do not disagree at all on what happens when one steps into a teleporter.
Narz
keeping it real
No, sleep is a bad analogy because sleep =/ absence of consciousness. When I asleep my brain spins dreams, regulates my body's temperature, is aware of loud or unusual noises & can spurn me back to full awakeness in a milisecond.
The brains rhythms simply change just as a person meditating or daydreaming. Half-sleep is not half-dead.
It's simply a poor analogy. It's like saying trees "die" in the winter. Sleep & death are only similar on a very superficial level.
There is an interruption in one very important activity: consciousness. All the other activities don't matter as far as this discussion is concerned. They have no worth. You're less than an animal in that state. Only the potential to wake gives you worth. And if it becomes apparent that you won't ever wake then you may as well be allowed to die.
There are sciences that describe what happens to your body and your brain when you sleep, but you're talking about something that doesn't have a pinpointed place in the body. You're talking about a very abstract self. It's a very philosophical self you're talking about here, and none of the exact sciences have anything to say about that.
So I'm advocating the same method in philosophy that we apply to the measurable physical. There is no evidence for a persistent soul, persistent self, persistent consciousness or whatever you want to call it. There is only the body. Sometimes this body is the house of our self awareness. Over times it's merely alive.
I am also not confident that one can have a logically consistent definition of a soul where the soul has worth beyond that which is arbitrarily assigned to it, and which is not merely a semantic construct.
All three bodies are a continuation of me. They all have the same vices, virtues, hobbies, habits, mannerisms, and most importantly everything that I'm proud of. They are all equal.
Nothing splits though. Nothing is shared. Each of the bodies are entirely separate.
Yes your body and brain are alive when you sleep. So is a tree, even in winter. And a tree is not conscious. Neither are you when you sleep. It is only the potential to wake or to dream that separates you from a tree in that state.
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. The consciousness ends, and restarts with new memories and a slightly new personality (crabby? cranky?). When I agree that the chain-of-life is retained, people seem to be fixated on the concept of remaining alive as if it's inviolate. As mentioned, we easily imagine that the cells renew over time and the molecules renew over time. Each component of 'you' can leave or die and we still think that you're 'you'. (I don't actually believe that all the molecules are replaced, but lots of people like to think that). For the record, I agree, btw. If you're copied and then killed, you're dead. There's a new person who should be treated as if they're you, however.
It's a decent analogy! We're just very, very biased towards ignoring it, because we casually accept losing consciousness to sleep. The trick is to migrate, philosophically, to deeper implications.
If you fall asleep, and are carted to another room, are you the same person?
If you fall asleep, and have each atom disassembled from the whole, carted to another room, and reassembled, are you still the same person? If you fall asleep, get disassembled, each atom is then replace (individually), and then reassembled, are you the same person? How about if you fall asleep into a long coma, are fed through IV, and have many of your atoms replaced due to intake/output of food molecules: are you the same person?
To answer Warpus's question: cognitively, I feel like I fell asleep, and then three people wake up thinking that they're me. In an absolute sense, obviously, the original is still the original.
Mise
isle of lucy
Like I said right on the first page, what if you have a cardiac arrest and literally -- physically and mentally -- die for a brief period? You are completely unconscious, your heart stops beating and your lungs stop breathing. You're dead. Then someone comes along and does CPR on you or uses a defibrillator and resuscitates you. Now you're alive again.
Is the you that died the same "you" as the you that gets up and walks away, swearing that the CPR worked a treat and should be used on all people who suffer cardiac arrests? Does your consciousness persist, even though your consciousness is clearly gone for those moments when you are, by all indications, dead? Does the fact that certain metabolic functions, e.g. in your muscles or digestive system, continue to function involuntarily have any bearing on whether your consciousness persists across that brief moment of unconsciousness and death?
Is the you that died the same "you" as the you that gets up and walks away, swearing that the CPR worked a treat and should be used on all people who suffer cardiac arrests? Does your consciousness persist, even though your consciousness is clearly gone for those moments when you are, by all indications, dead? Does the fact that certain metabolic functions, e.g. in your muscles or digestive system, continue to function involuntarily have any bearing on whether your consciousness persists across that brief moment of unconsciousness and death?
You don't actually die shortly after cardiac arrest. At least, your neurons don't. They enter a quiescent state, with reduced metabolism that then fires back up after the blood starts flowing again. I've seen cortical neurons survive (in vitro) for hours and hours without oxygen or glucose or pyruvate. (Fun fact, it's actually the sudden flow of oxygen that's the most dangerous time after a stroke or heart attack).
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.
The neuronal state of being unconscious due to lack of oxygen is vastly different than what happens when we sleep. When we sleep, consciousness is over-ridden with dominate biological functions preventing consciousness. No oxygen means that the mechanism of consciousness (neurotransmitter flow) stops sufficiently to remove consciousness.
Perceptively, they're awfully similar. We're "off", and then we hallucinate a bit as we turn "on".
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.
The neuronal state of being unconscious due to lack of oxygen is vastly different than what happens when we sleep. When we sleep, consciousness is over-ridden with dominate biological functions preventing consciousness. No oxygen means that the mechanism of consciousness (neurotransmitter flow) stops sufficiently to remove consciousness.
Perceptively, they're awfully similar. We're "off", and then we hallucinate a bit as we turn "on".
warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
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.
