To your consciousness, there is no gap, just the novel experience of watching someone who looks an awful lot like you die. If the consciousness is copied perfectly from a to b, is there a difference in it at that point?
A simple thought experiment: We somehow copy me, but leave the original alive after reviving the copy. Then we kill the original. As the original, I'm gonna be unhappy about that. The exact time you kill me doesn't change that, so killing me then copying me then reviving the copy at the very least isn't a trivially unobjectionable process. As to whether it's actually unobjectionable, that's probably way above our paygrades philosophically.
There's a great star trek episode where Riker gets duplicated in the transporter, leading to years of jokes (and philosophical debates) that the transporter doesn't send you anywhere, it just copies you and kills the original. Real fun to think about.
From the individual's point of view, which is the only one that matters from their perspective, they are dead. Their consciousness no longer exists.
I feel like this has been discussed somewhere already in history.
This is easy to say if you're not the one dying. If you know a perfect clone of your current self is going to live from this point forward, are you still comfortable with being killed?
This all assumes a destructive copy process -- if a non-destructive teleporter is possible, you don't need to destroy remaining copy, but all kinds of legal issues arise. Maybe you'd want to have one copy destroyed to avoid paying double for lunch.
For example: general anesthesia is something I think most people having these conversations should experience (which is to say, generally a lot of people don't). Because it's very different to sleep. Waking up from GA, it's as though no time has passed at all - you were one place, suddenly you're another.
In the case where a person is duplicated exactly, sometime during that period of GA - what's the difference?
It takes a special pleading that somehow, someone would know the difference. While under general anesthesia it's worth considering that people can and do actually die. And unless something metaphysical happens at that point, then the reality is they never know. They went under, expected to wake up, and just don't.
Personally, most nights of normal sleep are like that for me as well. Dreams (or at least the remembrance thereof) are a rare occurrence rather than the norm.
(For reference, yes, I have been under GA. I didn't really find it to be all that different, other than the onset being somewhat more sudden and waking up in a different place.)
No matter how many times I say that I'm speaking from the individual's point of view, some readers seem incapable of looking at it from an individual perspective.
In the case of your statement, it would solely depend on how the copy was made. If it's copied by somehow reading the consciousness, storing it as data, and perfectly restoring it in a new brain, then no, it is not the same consciousness, and from your perspective you are dead.
If it's copied through some kind of direct transfer, where the electrical impulses move, through some kind of biological link, to a new brain, then it is possible that the same continuous consciousness could now exist in the new brain.
(to be clear, I don't mean any of what I said to be insulting. I'm just observing that there are perspectives on this issue that I don't quite understand)
The opposite scenario is that there are now two consciousnesses. If the original dies so does its consciousness and you failed to achieve immortality. Your clone is just your offspring with an identical body and set of memories.
So which is it? I personally picked it based on what I want to believe in, because even if it is a lie it helps me shape the world into one in which I want to life in, rather than one that I do not like and would prefer to get rid of.
Under this premise (as you stated), copying your entire state and spawning it elsewhere (then killing the original) means your original version experiences a stopping of their continuity.
But if you analyze that premise, you realize that the only reason we believe we existed a second ago is because of our memory (the same reason the clone believes it was always alive).
How can you know that you aren't being cloned, in-place, right now? ie. Copied, killed, and spawned in place almost instantaneously. At every instant you carry all your memories and thus "feel" continuity, but it's a new you.
In this view, being killed and spawned elsewhere is no different. It isn't taking anything away from you because you never had it.
Obviously this is just a thought experiment, but just the fact that right now, while you were questioning if being cloned and killed was bad for the original you, this process could have been happening to you without your knowledge, might mean it is irrelevant.
Ship of Theseus paradox, if you replace the planks and beams of a ship over and over until they are all replaced, is it still the original ship?
Difference is, humans have a perspective on the world which ships and brooms do not have. If you watched a team busying about with a machine for a few hours, and then a human stepped out of it, and then one of the team members turned to you and said "OK we've got a clone of you, now we're going to shoot you in the head" would you say "yes I see that new person out there across the room looks exactly like me, so it IS me, so go on, shoot me?"
It's a handle of convenience. If it points to something useful it's useful if not then not there never was or will be a ship of theseus so whether it's the same ship means nothing.
Some things stay rather permanent though, as they're dynamically reinforced, short of serious trauma. Those parts are likely to survive stepped replacement, or rather both the replacement and original adjust to get to the original state. It's like trying to replace a component of a feedback system while it's live, it will be out of whack for a while but if control is good enough will return to baseline.
To your consciousness, there is no gap, just the novel experience of watching someone who looks an awful lot like you die.
This could be rephrased as:
To your consciousness, there is no gap, just the novel experience of dying as someone who looks an awful lot like you watches.
I would argue no. Because for you, your consciousness, it's as if you are still the same person. The first doesn't matter, because it's just turned off. But you still exist.
Unless you're arguing for a 'soul', there is no difference between the two consciousnesses. Therefore, you are still alive.
Externally, no. But it matters to me, the original.
> I would argue no. Because for you, your consciousness, it's as if you are still the same person.
Yes, for the copy, it is as if they are the original.
> The first doesn't matter, because it's just turned off.
What if the copy is made non-destructively?
> But you still exist.
A version of you still exists.
> Unless you're arguing for a 'soul', there is no difference between the two consciousnesses. Therefore, you are still alive.
The causal chain of events matters. If a copy of your consciousness is made, it can be done without you ever knowing about it.
There is a transition point - at least for b.
a gets to the transition point and dies. b "awakes" with a's memories.
So: you are a ... > [transition] ... you are ?
How do you know you (formerly a) become b at that point? Certainly from b's perspective that is the case - but from former a's perspective? Which do you "switch to"? Death or b?
You need to consider 3 perspectives:
a then after the transition:
b (live a)
c (dead a)
If you don't want to consider dead a, then consider this: what if the experiment went wrong?
a isn't killed in the process, but a copy of their consciousness is loaded into b.
Same situation as before, but both a and b think they are former a.
Which are you (formerly a) in that circumstance? Why?
I would argue a has a strong case to be considered the correct version - which means you die in the first case.
You may now commit suicide, safe in the knowledge that it doesn't matter, because there's no difference between the current you and the distant you.
Unless you're now going to change tack and say it only counts if you're in each other's Light cone, and have seen each other, and understand the cloning machine's workings, and trust it was built correctly, and an endless amount of other procrastinating which proves that it does matter to you which one dies, and no matter what words you type, your behavior will show that you recognize a stark difference between "you" and "someone else".
Clearly a condition "I know they exist" doesn't change whether you two are the same person or not, so that can't be an important part of it.
If you decide to commit suicide, then any identical copies of yourself will also have the same thought process and decide to commit suicide too, so you'll have killed all identical copies of yourself. That's very different than deciding to do something (like use a scan-clone-destroy teleporter) that will create a copy of yourself and then destroy one copy of yourself.
Now is it any different to stepping into the teleporter?
If there were truly infinite worlds and infinite of each variation, and you could somehow play russian roulette instead with an entire world, so that each one has a risk of just entirely blinking out of existence ... it feels superficially wrong, but I find it hard to argue against. I'd worry that there's a risk of if it was done infinitely, then by some logic the infinite sum could eventually lead to all worlds not existing eventually, but if that was definitely known not to be a risk then I would find it hard to care about whether the world played russian roulette or not.
A destructive copy is strictly more feasible (as far as such things are feasible at all). But it comes with a possibility to print copies once the reading is done. Then you can get multiple clones made and they will be you, but will start diverge from each other right away due to slightly different experiences.