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Comment by nescioquid | Hacker News Reader

Seems apt if you think that every time someone uses a transporter, they are really committing suicide with a new copy of themselves reconstituted elsewhere.

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If you chopped your leg off, they perfectly reattached it, are you dead?

How about heart? What if you removed part of your brain.

What if you grew a replacement part instead of reattaching? When does Theseus become a new person?

Alternatively can you prove you were alive yesterday? Or do you just have the memories, and others have memories of an indistinguishable copy?

How much of your body existed 20 years ago? Are you the same person?

This is a great article on this, with a bunch of thought experiments on what makes you, you: https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/12/what-makes-you-you.html

That was excellent but stopped tantalizingly short - he's on to something. He's uncomfortable about the concept of a "soul", but the idea of continuity is really interesting. It suggests that the boundary of a conscious entity is not purely physical, but must also encompass a temporal dimension. (This is a new thought for me, I'm excited by it.) It's a shame he felt icky about souls because you don't really need that baggage.

I'm not smart enough to really think it through but at a glance it seems to resolve those various tests and scenarios. In the malfunctioning teleport example (where the cell destroyer fails to fire), _both_ London Tim and Boston Tim are equally alive because they share the past: the teleport has succeeded in bifurcating their consciousness. Same with the split-brain twins (though you'd expect the results to be diminished).

I also like the start but it stop way before it get really interesting. I found Permutation City (by Greg Egan) to a great deal deeper, plus it's a nice story. I mentioned this also somewhere else in this thread. Tbh when people start with the soul concept or even mention it as a possibility, I usually stop reading because you start with some un-provable hypothesis that only adds unnecessary complexity. I've yet to run into a thought experiment that arrives at the concept of a soul through structured arguments (and not say religious arguments).

That's just it: jumping from discussions of the biological repository of consciousness straight to souls might be missing a whole big area.

These thought experiments got me thinking about how a conscious entity might better be considered as its "world line", not just its instantaneous physical embodiment. Call that a soul if you want, but there's no particular reason to.

I’d considered the situations in the article, but I do wonder - if you replace 10% of someone with identical particles then they are the same. 20%, 30%, etc then yes the same. But. 80%? Sure. Replace limbs and body and I can see that. But what about splitting the brain (as in article) where you don’t even need 50% for continuity.

But we effectively always get back the the ship of Theseus, and circling back to Trek,

Does Data have a soul? I don't know that he has. I don't know that I have. But I have got to give him the freedom to explore that question himself.

TFA talks a bit about that. The short of it is kinda as I was discussing above - if you consider the entity temporally as well as spatially, the Trigger's Broom/Ship of Theseus problem becomes moot.

If you made a copy of you down to the atomic level, and this copy appeared on a planet several kilometers away, is that new copy "you"?

Does that new copy become "you" if you simply incinerate the original?

They will believe they are you, there is no further link that can change any attributes of the second you upon incinerating primary you, the person that already existed.

Depends on who you ask.

If we clone A, then from A's perspective we now have A-Prime. A-Prime is unaware and believes they are A, who now presumably has been killed. If anyone didn't observe this happen, then A-Prime essentially -is- A. If they did observe it, then they know that it's technically A-Prime.

So I guess the difference is being able to observe the gradual changes. It's more tricky when discussing an inanimate object like a ship that doesn't care either way.

It's funny because we have this discussion only pertaining to humans, if we were to produce a replica computer from computer-0, we'd rename it to computer-1 and that's that. It's just because humans want to name themselves we have issues, and we can't easily ascribe a human another name (it would mean rewriting the memory of the replica to remember being called something else).

Btw, we talk about replica's but that's only because we assume the process leaves an original and a copy, but that's not necessarily so, for example a photon of high energy can split into 2 photons of lower energy. We are not talking about originals and replica's there. One can imagine that our duplication process follows similar rules.

When copying or simply making 2 out of 1, for computers, both still have computer-0 in /etc/hostname so there's that... It's just that neither of the computers will complain when we change their designation at random.

This leaves me feeling weird about the destruction of an original in any copying process. The destruction during copying feels ok, but doing it afterwards feels very bad. It's like we want consciousness to be continuous in time. But why? Again, Permutation City goes into this in a nice way...

If the transporter did not disassemble a person on one end, and instead just materialized a person on the other end (similar things happen a few times in Star Trek), which one of them is 'you'?

And which one do you think we should kill off once the away mission is done? Should we be as sanguine about it as Captain Janeway was about murdering Tuvix?

What's suicide if the pattern that defines you remains? Anyway if you like pondering in this direction, this book is highly recommended: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City

I can't remember who came up with this, but this realisation is made a lot more vivid if you imagine the "original" you being killed with an axe while your "teleported" you is happily unaware. I believe the videogame Soma has an analogous situation, although I haven't played it.

I happens a lot in Altered Carbon as well.

Maybe not in a quantum universe:

> Similarly, cloning would violate the no-teleportation theorem, which says that it is impossible to convert a quantum state into a sequence of classical bits (even an infinite sequence of bits), copy those bits to some new location, and recreate a copy of the original quantum state in the new location. This should not be confused with entanglement-assisted teleportation, which does allow a quantum state to be destroyed in one location, and an exact copy to be recreated in another location.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem#Consequence...

For anyone interested in this conceit, I recommend an episode of The Outer Limits called "Think Like a Dinosaur" dealing with this idea and what happens when it goes wrong.

Or if they use a one minute time machine

https://youtu.be/vBkBS4O3yvY

Part of why I don't see the appeal, even if it were possible, of uploading your "consciousness" whatever that is, to extend "life." It's not you, and you're still dead.

The pattern that is "the other" you will argue otherwise.

In fact, the other you would be very grateful that you (both) didn't succumb to narcissism, and instead copied your consciousness to a better body.

Not if there's a transition, a migration if you will.

Digital metempsychosis is an interesting religious belief. From an anthropological perspective I find it fascinating how the same old ideas get reimagined as technology changes. Feels like how the Sidhe got replaced by the Greys in the abduction racket, and so on.

No, that's not what it is.

Most successful migration in tech requires a time where both old and new system are running concurrently.

In terms of brain, this treat consciousness as software and brain/etc as hardware. whether said software can be modified to run on other hardware, or other hardware can be modified to run said software, is where the key's at.

The key to migration is to have a period when the same software is running on both platforms. As a single unit.

I like that appeal to the Ship of Theseus. It's not compelling, but it is clever.

For those that are not familiar with the the philosophical discussion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

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