Personality and Copies

[SOdhner]

Hey, you should thank me. All your sins have been forgiven. After all, you didn't commit them!

First of all, let's be consistent: all HIS sins are forgiven. And probably not, at that. Actually, I might have to pay for them ALSO because some gods can be pretty bad about passing sins from one person to another. Father to son and whatnot. You jerk.

 

[marplots]

.... removes godly robes and slinks off....

 

[rocketdodger]

Your copy of "The Fountainhead" is unique. It has had experiences that have altered it so it is no longer an exact copy of the original so when you destroy the book you are losing all that information, printing out a new copy of the book does not recreate your old book. A book is more than just the story that it contains.

I totally agree that we are not just our brain, indeed on its own the brain is pretty crap at being me, but the "I" that I am is the product of all the changes that have happened to the meatbag that we call "I". I would go further and say that there is no black and white, no clear cut line to where I end and the "rest of the environment" starts, I am contiguous with the environment; to such an extent that the particles in the air that I use to precess the smell of toast cooking in my kitchen right at this moment links me directly to the toast, the toast in a real and meaningful manner is part of what we generally call "I".

So to duplicate me "truly" accurately you'd have to duplicate my environment and that isn't very practical. Now in practical terms is there a lesser fidelity by which you could create a new "I" either from a destructive scanning of this particular meatbag or one that creates a new meatbag and doesn't destroy the original meatbag that would for all extent and purposes be indistinguishable from "I"? My guess is that yes there is.

The idea is that the part of "I" that I really care about is limited to the "story."

I wouldn't mind a body switch, or some different memories, whatever. Want I want to stay the same is the story part.

 

[Lithrael]

It "comes back" from where? Where was it? You are proposing the reincarnation of souls.

This kind of thing must be due to some misunderstanding. You guys keep trying to show us we're secretly proposing a metaphysical continuity of some kind when we're thinking of it as a process being stopped and an identical process being started up somewhere else, and calling that the same, because as far as we're concerned it is the same. We're not saying the old process somehow became the new one. We're saying the new process is indistinguishable from the old one and for our purposes this is sufficient to call it the same.

However we're also saying that while the process is running it is changing. After even one moment, the process that was 'the same' has changed. We simply still identify it as the same individual, the same way we identify ourselves as the same individual before and after lunch.

If you had two of this process running at the same time, each one would immediately begin to diverge from the other due to its different experiences and they would no longer be the same, only very similar. It's a legal and social quandary as to what you'd do with two individuals with the same legal and social identity. Personally I'd think of myself and the other as both being me, and so would she, being me and all. I think we'd have a pretty good time.

ETA: I guess you're seeing a contradiction in that if there's only one of "me" then I don't mind dissolution and recreation somewhere else, but if there's two of "me" at once I get all crabby and don't want to die? It's because I don't want to lose any individual identity. If the identity is destroyed and recreated exactly nothing is lost. If the lives of two 'identical' identities are allowed to diverge in the slightest then what began as two of 'the same identity' becomes two individual identities and the loss of either one will represent the loss of an individual.

If you have three clones of yourself made, are you now seeing with eight eyes and controlling four bodies? Or does each brain produce its own consciousness?

This strawman thing comes up in every thread I've read on this subject and I still have no idea where the heck it's being pulled from. It sounds like you're claiming we're thinking the 'brain is a receiver for a metaphysical soul' thing.

 

[Beerina]

First of all, let's be consistent: all [your identical clone's] sins are forgiven [and thus he's good to go but you aren't, God-throwing-you-into-Hell-wise.]

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Not you, SOdhner, just that the thread has gotten here.

 

[SOdhner]

Not you, SOdhner, just that the thread has gotten here.

Hey, not only was this whole conversation stupid, but I found something that sums it up all at once! So we could have just linked to this comic and skipped the whole thing.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1879#comic

And a bonus one, from the same place: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1677#comic

I take comfort in the fact that I didn't start a single one of these teleporter conversations. Or... okay, fine, I did and it's all my fault but it wasn't intentional. It was just an offhand comment in a post about Jehovah's Witnesses. Sigh.