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Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

We only have issues with this because we think our consciousness is somehow special wrt the laws of Physics. As always with this discussion, I'll recommend the book Permutation City from Greg Egan [0]

I always think about cloning an OS to a second hard drive. Will the OS care what happened? The only annoyance it may have is that it has the same /etc/hostname as another copy but it won't ague about what OS is "the real one". It's just our obsession with identity and uniqueness that leads to discussion.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City

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Haven't read that, might take a look. Off the top of my head here a couple of books also with interesting related themes:

Altered Carbon - Richard K Morgan (Also probably my all time favourite book along with the other two in the series. Lots of stuff about consciousness transfers.)

Timeline - Michael Crichton (Basically the topic of this question with time travel instead.)

A short story I vaguely remember about a cloning process a rich guy uses to create a new him - Stephen King(?)

What makes you think that consciousness arises from matter? Is it a verifiable hypothesis?

Until there is a better hypothesis I'm applying Occam's razor. Nothing "unmaterial" has ever been found in brains. There are 0 indications that consciousness needs more than matter (or I should say, more than our our laws of Physics can describe currently).

Believing that something special is required, sort of stops the reasoning about this topic, as that something is very vague. Or do you have some hypotheses with some experiments you can suggest?

No, just curious. I think it’s useful to remember when a hypothesis is not verifiable or refutable. Raising that question does not necessarily invalidate the hypothesis, in my opinion.

An alternative hypothesis doesn’t have to imply something special, but it could e.g. raise a possibility that matter is a map rather than the territory. But yes, so far also not refutable as far as I know.

No, we only have issues with this because of mathematical induction. "Suppose Riker was cloned during transporter malfunction and now there are two Rikers" is false statement because to store information about 10^27 atoms of human body is impossible. The statement is false. Anything you base on the false premise is false, nonsensical.

What's next, Star Trek's idea of dilithium not matching reality either?

Thought experiments can be non-sensical, and it’s useful to argue about them. In this case I don’t agree that it’s non-sensical, I mean who says the data should be stored anywhere (it’s stored as Riker himself isn’t it?) but I like the 2 Rikers thought experiment.

Why not? Presumably you can compress the data a lot given that it's non-random. It's possible that you can't compress it enough or perhaps you can but storing the exact data for all 10^27 is an unnecessarily naïve approach.

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