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Poll

Would you use a teleporter?

Yes
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Author Topic: Teleportation & personal identity  (Read 6556 times)

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John Shaw

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Re: Teleportation & personal identity
« Reply #30 on: June 26, 2008, 06:44:01 PM »

you have a 100% of "dying" by vaporization.

That doesn't qualify as "Perfect" to me.

Dead is dead. Just because it makes no difference to an observer doesn't mean that you're not still dead.

<<<Will not be killed so somebody just like me, but not me, can end up where I wanted to go.

Right, yeah, that's the response I would expect most people to have.

When you said "If I saw proof that people had been sent through it without harm" I thought you meant you doubted whether your copy might end up hideously disfigured or brain dead or something on the other side.

If you believe "you" are dying, the problem is to come up with a theory of personal identity that justifies your statement that the replica is not you. Under Locke's theory, he is you. Under a looser theory which fixes some of the problems with Locke's theory, and seems to make sense in a whole lot of circumstances, he still is you. You can't say that you can just tell whether you're you or not, because the replica totally believes he is you—at the instant of materialization he has the exact same memories and brain state as you, and he feels like his stream of consciousness is totally continuous with the stream of consciousness that was on Earth.

Let's perform this experiment: put you to sleep, scan you, materialize a copy into a room exactly like the one you're asleep in and in exactly the same position you're asleep in. Now, you both wake up. Which one of you is you? Is there any way to know? If there's no way to know, how can one of you truly claim youness?

My consciousness objectively ceases to exist at the moment I am destroyed. Period. That outside observer is irrelevant.

Objective fact: A person's body has been destroyed.

Objective fact: A new person was created who is indistinguishable from person one.

Objective fact: The only similarity between person one and person two applies to outside observers only.

Objective fact: Person one has ceased to have any experience at all, and is therefore dead. Period.

Fuck teleportation.
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John Shaw

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Re: Teleportation & personal identity
« Reply #31 on: June 26, 2008, 06:45:53 PM »

If I hit you on the head with a baseball bat, and you go unconscious, are you then dead? When you wake up, are you the same person you were before?

Being unconscious is not synonymous with being dead. This is a straw man.
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Kevin Freeheart

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Re: Teleportation & personal identity
« Reply #32 on: July 06, 2008, 03:02:10 PM »

Quote from: 'vosti backle'
If I hit you on the head with a baseball bat, and you go unconscious, are you then dead?

Assuming I never regain consciousness, for all intents and purposes, yes. If and when I awaken, I'm aware of a previous existence and I consider it continual.

Quote from: 'vosti backle'
When you wake up, are you the same person you were before?

This reminds me of one of my time travel thought exercises. If someone went back in time and changed something about my past, and those ripples changed my memory of the event, were my memories actually changed?

Every morning I wake up and believe I went to sleep the night before. As far as I can tell, I lived before this moment, and as far as I can tell I am the same person. My sense of "self" is based on that perception. I'm open to the theoretical possibility that when I sleep, my "perception file" so to speak is erased and replaced with a new set of memories that I percieve as being entirely consistant. An organic firmware flash from "God" if you will.

It's simply that, if this is the case, I can't percieve it or change it and it is largely irrelevant.

It's much like positing to an atheist "If there was an omnipotent, omniscient being that decreed "I am beyond human detection"" would that make you believe in God? Does it really matter if it's not affecting you? I don't beleive it does. While I like thinking about things like this, every morning I wake up with perceptions that make an image of "self" and as long as that is the case, that is "me".

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Alex Libman

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Re: Teleportation & personal identity
« Reply #33 on: July 06, 2008, 03:58:43 PM »

Similar idea here:  God R Us  ("teleporting" / regenerating people from the past by restructuring their mind and body from quantum residue).
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