starman2112 comments on Teleportation problem

[–] starman2112@sh.itjust.works 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

If you eliminate that location part (e.g. like in “The Prestige”), nobody will know or care who is “copy” or “original”

I will. Or rather, if my original body gets disintegrated, I won't. Because I'm dead.

I'm saying that you're essentially believing in souls.

Nope. I'm explicitly denying the existence of a soul. My experience is bound to my physical body, and nothing else. If my physical body is disintegrated, then my existence ends, even if someone constructs a perfect copy of my body somewhere else. That will not be my physical body.

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[–] flying_sheep@lemmy.ml 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

A you died. A you remains. Nothing is lost, so calling it a “death” is like calling sleep “a small death”: purely philosophical and with no relevance to your ability to live your life after.

It's a trick of perspective. If you acknowledge that “you” is just a electrochemical reaction, you're just like a computer program: only defined by what's happening, not which CPU is running it.

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[–] starman2112@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

This is equivocation. Under one definition, a me died. Under a much more meaningful and relevant definition, the only me died. Someone else that looks and acts and sounds like me is alive, but I am not experiencing life through his senses. He's a different guy, even if no other person can tell the difference between us. I already explained this.

If you acknowledge that “you” is just a electrochemical reaction, you're just like a computer program: only defined by what's happening, not which CPU is running it.

I said that consciousness is a chemical reaction, and also that my experience of life is bound to my physical body. If you destroy my physical body, my experience of life ends. I do not care if an identical program is running on a different CPU right now, I am running on this one.

I want you to imagine for a moment that I'm about to shoot you in the head, but I explained that "it's fine, because I just scanned your body and at some point I will make a perfect reconstruction of it. Nobody will ever know the difference between the you that I shoot in the head and the you that I reconstruct later." You don't want me to shoot you in the head. I know that for a fact. You know there's a difference between the you that's experiencing life right now, and the you that I will reconstruct elsewhere.

It doesn't matter whether I reconstruct you later, or I've already done so, or if I do so at the exact moment the bullet enters your brain. I know that you know that when you get shot in the head, you die, regardless of how perfectly I can recreate you elsewhere. Does this analogy help you to understand why I think that a transporter that disintegrates your body kills you?

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[–] flying_sheep@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Believe me, I've been there. I've thought what you think for decades, but at some point it clicked and I knew.

My point is that there is no part that makes the one that died “the only you”. Your “point of view” is an illusion. Your belief in your ego being a unique continuous thing is product of how our brains functions, not a fact.

Think about the freeze example some more. Think about what would happen to “you” if you ship-of-theseus’d your brain while frozen by dividing all molecules randomly into two piles, adding copies of the respective other pile, and reassembling everything: what molecule holds the “you” particle?

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