Teleportation

[Birdjaguar]

What is the "you" you are replacing? Just atoms? Atoms plus particular connections or relationships? An atomic copy. How about a quantum copy? How different would that be from an atomic copy? Reincarnation espouses the transmigration of things not known to be physical.

 

[ulyssesSgrant]

Yes because I inhabit the same medium. My brain is still functioning even if I am not aware of it temporarily. That's very different from vaporizing the brain and reinstalling the thouht patterns on something else.

What if you could freeze someone han solo style. Like, the brain and body would be completely off, for any amount of time. 1 day, 100 years, I don't think it matters. When you turn the lights back on, is it still you?

 

[hobbsyoyo]

What if you could freeze someone han solo style. Like, the brain and body would be completely off, for any amount of time. 1 day, 100 years, I don't think it matters. When you turn the lights back on, is it still you?

Yes, you are in my opinion. However, I also consider you dead when you're frozen. But because it's the same grey matter coming back after revival, it's still you. Copying breaks both temporal and physical continuity. Freezing breaks temporal continuity, integrating with a computer network breaks neither.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Relevant memory of a short story I read...

This guy walks into the "rejuvenation clinic" to get transferred into his new body. He's vastly wealthy, which is why he can afford this service. The clinic transfers "him" into a clone they have been growing in a vat for the past twenty years, and starts a new clone so they will be able to take care of him again twenty years later. In his memories he has done this repeatedly and is well over a hundred years old, and enjoys the physical aging from twenty to forty as a repeated process. Plus, of course, his perspective on "lifetime goals" is a big part of how he has accumulated so much wealth.

That's the last that he is seen in the story, which shifts to the story of the forty year old body with no legal identity or status, who remembers being fabulously wealthy and powerful until he walked into that &^%&^$ clinic.

 

[uppi]

There is a lot of confusion about quantum physics here

Afaik man-caused quantum tunneling is at its infancy, with only particles moved/tunnelled.

You are mixing different effects here. Quantum tunneling and quantum teleportation are very different things.

Quantum tunneling: This effect describes when an object moves "through" a barrier it cannot go over. This only works when the barrier is very thin and the object has a small probability to be on the other side. In this case, nothing gets destroyed, it is the same particle with the same information which appears on the other side. You could imagine it as standing on one side of a wall and then suddenly appearing on the other side of the wall. The problem is that for any kind of macroscopic object going through a macroscopic barrier (anything much thicker than an atom) the probability is so small it is never going to happen.

Quantum teleportation: This describes the teleportation of quantum information. No particles get moved (at least not in a non-classical way) and you need to have an object at the destination ready to receive the information. In this case you do need to destroy the quantum information at the origin so that you can know what you need to do at the destination to recreate the original state.

Also remember that information cannot be created or destroyed.

Information creation is not a problem at all. Entropy ensures that information is created all the time. Technically, it is true that information cannot be destroyed, because that would violate thermodynamics. In practice, you can spend energy to move information somewhere else, so locally you can destroy information.

You cannot move information without destroying it in its original location..

That depends whether you are talking about classical information or quantum information. Classical information can be copied and moved without any problems (after all, you can copy files on your hard drive and move the copy around). Quantum information cannot be copied (the famous no-cloning theorem), so in this case it cannot stay at its original information. If you want to apply this to
consciousness, you need to decide how "quantum" consciousness is. If you could create a classical copy of the consciousness, you could do all sort of things with it. If there is an integral quantum part, you could only move it, not copy it. I have no idea whether it is one or the other.

 

[Synobun]

Philosophizing about this would be a lot easier if we didn't have degenerative neurological conditions. Continuity of consciousness becomes trickier when we have active evidence that the self can be so easily compromised.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Philosophizing about this would be a lot easier if we didn't have degenerative neurological conditions. Continuity of consciousness becomes trickier when we have active evidence that the self can be so easily compromised.

Is it? Or is the degenerative condition only compromising the connection between self and objective reality? If you operate from the theory that death is just the disconnection of the consciousness from objective reality then such disorders aren't affecting the self at all, they are just having a partial effect along the same lines as death has.

 

[El_Machinae]

Thank you for the correction, obviously, information can be created. Brain fart on my part.

My point about moving Quantum information is that if you are moving the quantum information with sufficient Fidelity to continue the consciousness it is harder to say that you destroyed the original consciousness. The original brain can only be in location A or B at the same time. A copy can be placed at a different location, or many locations

 

[Synobun]

Is it? Or is the degenerative condition only compromising the connection between self and objective reality? If you operate from the theory that death is just the disconnection of the consciousness from objective reality then such disorders aren't affecting the self at all, they are just having a partial effect along the same lines as death has.

Maybe. I'm not convinced that consciousness/the self is separate from the body, and that we still exist as complete individuals despite any misfortune we're suffering on this plane.

I'm not opposed to that being a truth, mind, but I don't know. It doesn't seem to parse. Stuff like dementia and Alzheimer's gives you a front seat to watching someone disappear slowly. It would be nice if 'they' were still there, somewhere, just lost. But that doesn't seem to be true.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Maybe. I'm not convinced that consciousness/the self is separate from the body, and that we still exist as complete individuals despite any misfortune we're suffering on this plane.

I'm not opposed to that being a truth, mind, but I don't know. It doesn't seem to parse. Stuff like dementia and Alzheimer's gives you a front seat to watching someone disappear slowly. It would be nice if 'they' were still there, somewhere, just lost. But that doesn't seem to be true.

It also doesn't seem to be false.

Again, the two basic theories are:

A) Consciousness is a product of objective reality, and at some point ceases to exist as the processes occurring in objective reality change.

B) The processes occurring in objective reality, particularly in the material known as "brains" are physical manifestations of consciousness, and when consciousness moves on those manifestations cease and are replaced by more spontaneous processes.

There is nothing available in objective reality to support or refute either theory, so any attempt to "believe" one or the other as "factual" based simply on observations of objective reality is deception.

 

[Estebonrober]

This is the idea that I am confronting. Parts of your body have atomic turnover. Parts of the body don't. Well, at least it's much slower. It's not that 'roughly every seven years the body completely replaces itself', not at all. Some parts have, many times over. Other parts have, less frequently. And other parts haven't.

I'm not even talking about cellular turnover. I am talking about atomic turnover.

I intuitively understand cellular and its relevancy here, but why does atomic turnover matter at all?

Also quantumatically (do we have a word for this yet) speaking we are constantly pierced by neutrinos and tons of other field effects so I'd think this has even less to do with the topic than atoms, at least so far as @Kyriakos was speaking of, what @Timsup2nothin is getting on about might have something to do with quantum reality, who knows.

 

[Synobun]

It also doesn't seem to be false.

Again, the two basic theories are:

A) Consciousness is a product of objective reality, and at some point ceases to exist as the processes occurring in objective reality change.

B) The processes occurring in objective reality, particularly in the material known as "brains" are physical manifestations of consciousness, and when consciousness moves on those manifestations cease and are replaced by more spontaneous processes.

There is nothing available in objective reality to support or refute either theory, so any attempt to "believe" one or the other as "factual" based simply on observations of objective reality is deception.

Eh. You can compromise specific sections of the brain and you'll see the person change before your very eyes. You can recover from an injury to the brain and you'll never be the same again, sometimes to the point of forever being a shell of your former self or being a completely different person entirely. Memory loss can muddy that even further, since you can lose memories (and you do, even if you're completely healthy) and still be 'you'.

Meanwhile we don't have any evidence to support that your total self remains intact despite malfunctions with the brain. At least with our primitive sciences, we don't have much to suggest that our continuity of consciousness is independent from the brain. We don't necessarily have much to suggest that they are irrevocably tethered to one another either, but there's more to that theory than the other side, IMO. We can damage the brain and see permanent, irreversible changes to an individual while we're completely helpless in making someone whole once more (if the issue is their brain and not something else/something attached to the brain [i.e., a tumor]).

 

[El_Machinae]

I intuitively understand cellular and its relevancy here, but why does atomic turnover matter at all?

Also quantumatically (do we have a word for this yet) speaking we are constantly pierced by neutrinos and tons of other field effects so I'd think this has even less to do with the topic than atoms, at least so far as @Kyriakos was speaking of, what @Timsup2nothin is getting on about might have something to do with quantum reality, who knows.

I mentioned atoms because atoms were the unit under discussion up thread of my interjection

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Eh. You can compromise specific sections of the brain and you'll see the person change before your very eyes.

So, if the apparatus through which they express themselves in objective reality is "damaged" the apparatus through which you observe objective reality will perceive them as "changed."

This is supposed to be proving exactly what, again?

 

[El_Machinae]

The second theory doesn't work with energy as we know it. If consciousness is an external event, causing my neurons to fire, where does the energy come from that causes the neuron to fire? Because my neuron fires because of energy transfer

 

[Timsup2nothin]

The second theory doesn't work with energy as we know it. If consciousness is an external event, causing my neurons to fire, where does the energy come from that causes the neuron to fire? Because my neuron fires because of energy transfer

You are presumably limiting "where" as referring to within the bounds of four dimensional objective reality. If so, what if there is a flaw in that premise? If not, there are myriad possible answers and your question poses no particular problem.

 

[Synobun]

So, if the apparatus through which they express themselves in objective reality is "damaged" the apparatus through which you observe objective reality will perceive them as "changed."

This is supposed to be proving exactly what, again?

I'm not trying to prove anything.

Consciousness being its own dimension outside our perception is a theory, one I've heard before and read about in the context of quantum mechanics. As far as I know it's "out there", as in, there's zero evidence to even imply it's possibly true in any capacity. There aren't any known variables in the idea that could be used to make a case.

 

[El_Machinae]

You are presumably limiting "where" as referring to within the bounds of four dimensional objective reality. If so, what if there is a flaw in that premise? If not, there are myriad possible answers and your question poses no particular problem.

I don't even know what you're saying. You don't have a mechanism by which the neuron is influenced in its firing to distinguish the neuron from a thermostat.

One might as well say that "what if we're clouds accidentally daydreaming, and there's no objective reality?" Sure. But, ehn.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I'm not trying to prove anything.

Consciousness being its own dimension outside our perception is a theory, one I've heard before and read about in the context of quantum mechanics. As far as I know it's "out there", as in, there's zero evidence to even imply it's possibly true in any capacity. There aren't any known variables in the idea that could be used to make a case.

Well said, and that's the point. Not only is there no evidence in objective reality either way, in objective reality there isn't the possibility of evidence either way. My question about what you were trying to prove is rooted in your various posts being very clearly based in the assumption that objective reality is the only context in which consciousness or evidence can possibly exist, and there is no support for such a position.

 

[Synobun]

If it exists outside our reality, it's functionally meaningless to postulate over.