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SecretAsianMan

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Yes, Ship of Theseus and all that.

What's the difference, if not a soul? What is the thing that carries from the present to the future that the "other" you doesn't also have?

(I don't believe in souls.)

I mean, I agree with you in that I wouldn't step into the teleporter. But I think it would be like a branch splitting, and one of the off-shoots getting sawn off. I don't think the remaining me would be any sort of an impostor, or inauthentic, or not "Me" me.

It's so completely obvious to me I have no idea how to explain it besides just saying it like I have been. There's literally no other way to interpret it.

 

If a teleporter is putting bits and bobs together to recreate your everything, but in the process destroys the original you, then the new you isn't you. Because the old you is dead. That's literally all there is to it. You're making a clone of yourself and then committing suicide. Or the other way around, I guess, since I doubt you'd survive until the end of the process. I don't know how else to explain it because it is something that doesn't need explaining!

 

Maybe the problem is that I'm talking about the physical you and you're talking about some other measurement of you. But that's not the issue here, because it's the physical you that's dying. Hence why the lack of existence of a soul matters. Unless of course there is a soul and it is also destroyed in the process. OR there is a soul and the process forever destroys the link between body and soul.

 

Obviously, for all intents and purposes, you would still be the same person to everyone else. But it's not about outward appearances. The moment you go through this process, you are cutting off your consciousness and creating a brand new one that, while identical to you, is not you. Because you are destroyed.

 

I guess I could rephrase the same thing over and over for days but I don't see the point.

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Hard sci-fi type Teleportation kind of only exists for the benefit of others. The original is still dead and the duplicate is still a new organism, it's just one that your friends and family will recognize. For all intents and purposes the teleporter might as well just be a "builds humans in a different place" machine/suicide booth.

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But if every cell in my body is replaced every x years, then the version of me that existed x years ago is already dead and I'm a new organism. I feel like I've been the same person the whole time, but that's just because I have those memories. For all I know I could be dying and being replaced by a new organism every time I go to sleep. If it's possible to maintain the illusion of continuous consciousness while your entire body is slowly being replaced due to aging, it seems like it could be theoretically possible to do the same thing while quickly moving all the pieces from one place to another.

 

But we'll never know! A "builds humans in a different place" machine/suicide booth still sounds like a pretty sweet deal, though.

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Your new self would maintain that illusion, of course. But you'd be dead.

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Regarding teleportation and the concept of "self", have a look at this: http://existentialcomics.com/comic/1.

 

How is a temporal/physical break in "conciousness" meaningful other than as a form of pedantry?

 

Basically, all teleporters "kill" the person at the point origin (whether it's disassembly>transport>reassembly or extact atomic cloning). But how is that death meaningful to anyone? That definition of "death" can apply to every yoctosecond of mundane existence.

 

Sorry if I come across as arrogant, It's just that this topic has been discussed a lot (sometimes heatedly) between my circle of postgraduate friends, and i'm confident we've covered most areas of discussion that are likely to be brought up, and that my/our arguments hold pretty well under scrutiny.

 

Anyway having said that, i'd still be scared of teleporting myself if it did exist, even when I logicaly think there's no reason to fear it.

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It's only meaningful to you. Also the dis->reassembly isn't death. That's a temporary lack of consciousness.

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So if a person was killed in a freak accident, and their fresh corpse was reassembled (i.e. using the same atoms) to the state before death, would that count as a 'temporary' lack of consciousness?

Re: problem machine, in that hypothetical what is the irreducible part of 'self'? If the particles are in different positions why bother to qualify with 'looks the same', because that's an arbitrarily macro frame of reference. Is it that the person 'feels the same'? If so how do you measure that, and if multiple people feel the same does that mean they are the same? (i'd argue not, barring certain circumstances).

Also, 'perfect' reassembly and perfect recreation is fundamentally impossible as it is impossible to clone/recreate quantum states. (see: no cloning theorem). Quantum teleportation at subliminal speeds is theoretically possible, but i don't think that is what is generally being discussed here.

Just as a pre-emptive comment, I don't have an issue with what people want to define as death, conciousness, self, etc. However they should be logicaly consistent rather than only applying in circumstances where they support a conclusion. Also there is a spectrum of useful/meaningful definitions, that could range from overly broad 'everything in the universe forms a single conciousness', to the narrow 'self only remains the same if there are no temporal and physical breaks'. Both are reasonable, but the usefulness of each are different.

This reminds me that The Swapper was a really great game, and that this thread has gone super off topic haha.

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Guys. A sense of self has literally nothing to do with this. I don't know what you're talking about. This is just about how you LITERALLY DIE FOREVER PERMANENTLY. It has nothing to do with how the new you feel about it afterward.

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New implies that there is a new 'self', otherwise why would that 'death' be important? You've said that death is important to the 'original' but why do you assume ownership of that original but not of the copy? Again I don't disagree with you necessarily, just that if you think teleporting makes you die permanently forever, you're also dying permanently forever every second all the time. But I don't think you're agreeing with the latter.

Death matters to you because you are not that copy, you are not the same as a copy because your sense of self is not transfered / is broken. I'd say the sense of self is pretty important to your, or anyone's argument.

Problem machine, i agree that 'self' is metaphysical concept and is an emergent product of how our minds usually work. I think it's a useful concept to have though, and that it's not immutable and that we can come up with good definitions for it. These can be prescriptive or descriptive, I prefer the latter.

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Hey, don't put words in my mouth. I never said ANY of this is important!

 

Also teleportation-by-destruction and aging are simply incomparable if you're talking about death. Aging is your own cells reproducing over time. It's something your body is always actively doing. I don't know how you get from that to the idea that you're being completely replaced by a new being at every moment of your life. Those new cells wouldn't exist without the old cells, and it's a gradual thing, not an instant thing, and it's one cell at a time, not all at once. There are so so so so many differences between them.

 

And no, new does not imply new "self" unless you attribute self to body. Which I never said I did. Maybe you do. I mean I guess in a strictly physical sense, there is no "self" without all your neurons firing off in a particular manner, but since you're clearly not talking about that - if you were, there's literally no way you'd be proposing that there is no new self - it's not relevant.

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Ok, I thought you were attributing 'self' with body, or at least the physical state of your brain, as per your previous comment about needing all your neurons to be preserved. And that the recreation of the brain does not count as being the same brain to you.

I compare teleportation with 'aging' because the fundamental state of 'your' quarks, gluons etc. are different for every moment. So you could define youself as a different person at every moment.

You can draw a causal link between a cell existing now and a cell existing later, but you can also draw a causal link between stepping into a teleporter and emerging from the exit.

The quadruple negative in your last paragraph is confusing! Anyway I don't know if we disagree all that much actually, but it's getting harder to track what everyone's views are.

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For all I know I could be dying and being replaced by a new organism every time I go to sleep.

 

Thanks for that, shammack.  ;(

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Ok, I thought you were attributing 'self' with body, or at least the physical state of your brain, as per your previous comment about needing all your neurons to be preserved. And that the recreation of the brain does not count as being the same brain to you.

I compare teleportation with 'aging' because the fundamental state of 'your' quarks, gluons etc. are different for every moment. So you could define youself as a different person at every moment.

You can draw a causal link between a cell existing now and a cell existing later, but you can also draw a causal link between stepping into a teleporter and emerging from the exit.

The quadruple negative in your last paragraph is confusing! Anyway I don't know if we disagree all that much actually, but it's getting harder to track what everyone's views are.

When you teleport there is a discontinuity though. Personally I think continuity is a useful concept to apply here. A continuous function can be different in every point, but the change from one moment to the next can be made arbitrarily small, so the function is always "itself" in every instant. 20 years from now you will be a different person from whom you are now, with different tastes, values, experiences etc. but you were always yourself in every instant between now and then.

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Are we posting our kitties?

 

Two months ago my partner and I were talking about adopting a cat. Her brother was with us, and he said that he had a friend who had two cats that she couldn't keep and didn't want to separate as they're sisters that grew up together. This is Daisy and Juniper, our new(ish) kitties:

 

 

EDIT: I don't know why it keeps switching this sideways whenever I try to attach it. Whatever.

post-6403-0-58492500-1413747538_thumb.jpg

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(For those of you who are interested in the ramifications of matter transmission, Rogue Moon is a really good book you should go read while the rest of us change the subject).

 

Good news: this year the GameCity Festival has its own building and more staff. Things are getting done earlier, everyone is considerably less stressed/exhausted than usual, and nearly all of the people we're dealing with are really super lovely. Most games events I've been to or worked on in the past few months go some way to restoring my faith in people, but especially this one.

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Yeah has everyone not been referencing this cartoon for the last two pages? That's what I thought it was about.

Oh well.

 

I'm gonna post a weird good news thing thing, my wife with an opossum:10698657_10204759481167366_5649484178105

 

I was letting our dogs out late at night a few weeks ago and one caught this little thing and shook it, it was already still before I scared it off. I thought it was a humongous rat at first, but it was a very young opossum. It's mouth was wide open so I figured it was really dead. It wasn't until I went upstairs to bother my wife about it until I realized it might be playing dead. So I had her go check it out and then tell me what I should do if it is dead, like toss it in the trash or get it tested or something in case of rabies or infection to the biting dog. She's a lead vet tech at a local vet hospital so I pretty just consult her on everything now.

 

She thought it was dead too though because she picked it up and it was excreting tons of stuff out of it's anus and it seemed like rigor mortis set in. She put it in a little container since it was faintly breathing and we just started reading on in the internet about opossums playing dead. Apparently they really do play dead to an extreme degree, not like just flopping over for a bit until the animal goes away. Like opossums will stay in a catatonic state for hours, will secrete nasty liquid from it's glands to make it smell like a diseased carcass, and go completely stiff and have its eyes roll back.

 

We put it in a nice dark cat bag with a blanket because we were sure it wasn't dead, went to sleep, woke up and saw it seemed fine and alive, and my wife took it to work to make sure the dog didn't injure it at all. It was fine, no bite marks and was weirdly nice. She came home and was just holding it like it was her new pet and then I held it for a bit and it didn't seem like it was interested in being vicious. Then we let it go in the backyard again and I hope it's safe out there.

 

So opossums are really fucking good at tricking predators, like I am super impressed seeing this first hand. Also apparently they aren't aggressive and will avoid conflict. I guess I assumed they were aggressive because at my parents house growing up they used to invade our backyard for catfood and we had a large territorial killer cat who would fight them off, so it was always just these awful noises at night when it was most likely just the cat being the aggressor. Oh and you don't have to be afraid of rabies with an opossum because their temperature as marsupials is a few degrees lower than the usual mammal so they can't contract it in most cases (there's still a sliver of a chance).

 

Anyway, it was ugly and it was cute! GOODNEWS!

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