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this post was submitted on 09 May 2026
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Asklemmy
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That copy is me though.
You have absolutely no reason to believe that.
What happens if there's a malfunction in the machine and the copy is made at the other end without the original version being destroyed? Do you think you would experience both perspectives simultaneously?
My original answer does indeed include "assuming everything works as intended".
Right, but even if everything did work as intended there is still the possibility that it might not have done, and that possibility helps us understand what is actually happening, which is that you are killed and a copy of you is created somewhere else. There is absolutely no reason to believe that your experience would magically transfer over to that copy.
What do you mean by "your experience"?
There is nothing magic about this. I am what my brain does. My physical brain and its physical contents are cut and pasted.
Edit: "cut and pasted" is used here like with digital files, to avoid saying "copypasted" because I'm actively avoiding that can of worms of creating concurrently existing copies.
Again, you have no evidence for any of that.
For what?
For claiming that you are what your brain does, and the (implied) correlation that another identical brain would therefore continue to manifest an identical experience. All of this is entirely conjectural, we have no evidence one way or another.
Your caveat that you must be cut and pasted and not copied doesn't help your argument, in fact it does the opposite, because it is not theoretically impossible that two identical versions of "you" could exist concurrently.
That is afaik our current best guess at what consciousness is. If you don't accept that model as true at least for the moment, I don't know what we're talking about.
We don't know what consciousness is, that's my point. It's called 'the hard problem of consciousness' for a reason, there is no consensus.
That's why I said current best guess. If we have no idea at all, this entire discussion is useless and OP should delete.
What you're saying isn't the 'current best guess' though, it's a fringe theory which relies on some incredibly speculative concepts with no evidence to back them up (i.e. the assertion that, if you created another brain with the exact same configuration as your current brain then, your conscious experience would automatically transfer over to it. We have absolutely no reason to believe this is true, whereas the concept that the destruction of your brain results in your death is well supported by the available evidence).
The current best guess about what consciousness is is that it's what the brain does, the processes happening in the brain, full stop. Of course nobody knows what would happen if one were to "transport"/beam/teleport a brain and the surrounding human because we know no mechanism to do that. In the OP's hypothetical scenario where we have found a technological mechanism to teleport living beings, if said current best guess approaches reality, I think it's at least a valid hypothesis that you'd also copy the contained consciousness (ie the processes happening in the brain) and it would continue on as before because what you're transporting is physical matter, probably as energy. That's what I'm saying.