Would you use a Star Trek type transporter?

Recovering Agnostic said:
If you're a materialist, you believe (or ought to) that consciousness and our sense of self is an emergent property of neural function, which leads naturally to the conclusion that the "copy" would be as much you as the "real" you. You don't have to like that or feel comfortable with it (you may well have the same reaction as Nick227 that it feels wrong, even while admitting that there's no rational basis for that feeling), but it's the logical result of your beliefs. If you're not a materialist, of course, none of this applies.

It's not something I'd do for fun, and if I look at it the wrong way, it gives me the squicks, but if I'm interested in preserving "me", what does that mean? Would I still be "me" if I was a Futurama-style brain in a jar? If my thought process were stored in a computer? We're back to the mad scientist experiment mentioned earlier - would you rather provide the body or the brain, given the choice? I'd say brain every time.

I think the sticking point here is that we all have a sense (or illusion) of continuous consciousness, and for obvious evolutionary and survival reasons that sense of self is bound up with the meat puppet we call "us". Our instinctive understanding, which has served us very well, is that if you destroy the body, you destroy "us", so the idea of destroying that body to be recreated somewhere else appals us. But if you'd choose to be the brain for the mad scientist's new creation, I don't think you really believe that.
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Yes, exactly. Evolution has hard-wired us to absolutely believe in a Self - someone who is apparently looking out from behind the eyes - yet materialism asserts that this absolutely cannot be so.

We are hard-wired to fight tooth and nail to defend something which, according to materialism, absolutely cannot exist.

(In the unlikely event that transporters like this are ever invented, I predict that people will get over these worries pretty quickly, not just because it starts to seem normal, but because every time you go through one, the person who steps out would be the one who "survived". After a few trips, that would breed a massive amount of complacency.)
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I'm not convinced of this. You are still dealing face-on with the reality of death. You get in the pod, you die, and a new you is created at your destination. The only consolation is that there is not actually a Self inside you anyway, merely the illusory sensation of it. I don't think pods would catch on.

Nick
 
Thunderchief said:
There is nothing different, it is identical. That does not make it the same though, after all one is on Mars. how can they be the same. do you agree that you could create two identical objects? If you do, surly it is obvious that they are identical but not the same. After all you could move one and not the other. If they were the same anything that happened to one would happen to the other.

any help?
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I think I didn't pose my question very well.

How about, what do you believe is actually dying?

A body dies but that is recreated. It seems as though "I" am dying, this in my experience is what most people are concerned about, but this "I" is actually illusory under materialism. It simply does not exist. There is no self that is experiencing. So what does it matter if a body is destroyed and an identical one created? This is materialist logic, but being hard-wired to resist death, it's hard to put one's money where one's mouth is!

Nick

eta: Doug Hofstadter had this thing he called the Godel-Turing Threshold - the point at which a computational device had sufficient processing power that it could become a "universal machine" - it could simulate all sorts of activity. Thus the brain can behave as though it has some "self", some inner owner or controller or experiencer. It can create an extremely convincing illusion - convincing itself that there is some nick227 somewhere who is experiencing all this. But it's BS. Evolution favours the creation of these illusions so they persist. But materialism points out the illusion.
 
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rocketdodger said:
So in a world where teleporters are real, the notion of "dead" is similarly complex. The original body is dead, but the same consciousness lives on. Are they dead, or sorta-dead, or what?
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They're dead. All dead. "Go through their pockets and look for loose change" dead.

It's just that death doesn't mean as much when there's other instances of them walking around. Their other clones, in the pulpy SF sense of the word. Their clade.* So long as the rest of the clade is still kicking they'll live on, in a certain sense of the word which is much more definite than living on in children or philanthropy, but less so than actually still being alive.

Death of an individual is death, but death is cheap. Loss of an entire clade is what we'd hang most of the current implications of "death" on. Right now we're all clades of one, and don't have the luxury of finer discrimination.


[ETA] As for the OP's question, I'd have no problems taking a guaranteed working transporter, but Star Trek does not have those.

Consider that the Enterprise, despite being the pinnacle of engineering, science and technology and staffed with the best of the best, still suffered catastrophic teleporter breakdowns at least once a season. Also think about how rarely you saw them used by anyone else. There must be a good reason everyone prefers to get in a shuttle and physically fly to an airlock instead of glitter-port over in an instant.

Damn things are deathtraps.


* It seems that "clone" does not currently have a collective noun. Would everyone here be okay with "clade?" It's not technically accurate, but it's within spitting distance and doesn't sound as silly as "attack" or "vat."
 
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Nick227 said:
How about, what do you believe is actually dying?

A body dies but that is recreated. It seems as though "I" am dying, this in my experience is what most people are concerned about, but this "I" is actually illusory under materialism. It simply does not exist. There is no self that is experiencing. So what does it matter if a body is destroyed and an identical one created? This is materialist logic, but being hard-wired to resist death, it's hard to put one's money where one's mouth is!
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The body dies, the brain dies, thus the "program" stops, and the "I" dies. I don't see why it matter or helps if there is a another identical body/brain/I walking about somewhere.

I agree that the I is illusory in materialism, but I don't see why that matters. The identical cubes had no "I" but they are still not the same as their identical copies. They are two induviduals, existing independent of each other. You say that this is materialist logic, but I am a materialist and I fail to see the logic, can you lay out the logical path for me? Because I really don't see it.
 
Thunderchief said:
I don't think so, I drive my car every day and I have yet to be merged into a disturbing blend of annoying characters! ;-)
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Ah, but do you drive your car on a television show? To do an apples-to-apples comparison, you'd have to be driving on a TV show, not the real world.

And while you, yourself, may not be "a disturbing blend of annoying characters," I've certainly known a few people who were exactly that. And since transporters haven't been invented yet, I'm forced to conclude that those people are the result of driving around in cars.

What other possibilities could there be?
 
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dasmiller said:
Ah, but do you drive your car on a television show? To do an apples-to-apples comparison, you'd have to be driving on a TV show, not the real world.

And while you, yourself, may not be "a disturbing blend of annoying characters," I've certainly known a few people who were exactly that. And since transporters haven't been invented yet, I'm forced to conclude that those people are the result of driving around in cars.

What other possibilities could there be?
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I think you have me convinced! ;) I'll be taking the bus tomorrow! ;)
 
Thunderchief said:
You say that this is materialist logic, but I am a materialist and I fail to see the logic, can you lay out the logical path for me? Because I really don't see it.
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The logic is that there is no "you", meaning: there is no way one could uniquely identify that illusion we call "self", not even in principle. Much like we cannot uniquely identify a particular particle.

"You" are just a conscious state that can be reduced to software and that only lasts for a fraction of a second.
 
Croc411 said:
The logic is that there is no "you", meaning: there is no way one could uniquely identify that illusion we call "self", not even in principle. Much like we cannot uniquely identify a particular particle.

"You" are just a conscious state that can be reduced to software and that only lasts for a fraction of a second.
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I mostly agree with this, although again I don't see how this helps. Just because "I" is an illusion there does not seem to be a good reason to destroy the machinery generating it. (my brain) Why would a materialist be happy that a copy exists so its ok to end the life of this copy?
 
Thunderchief said:
Why?

Sorry to ask a question and run, but I have to go out now, I'll reply when I can.

Thanks

Simon.
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I can only try and answer from my own perspective... I'm in the pod about to push the button. My mind is like "I'm going to die, I'm going to die". I'm in a lot of feelings. As a materialist I have to accept that none of these thoughts and feelings are happening to anyone, and that my duplicate will emerge wondering what all the fuss was about. He'll remember all the sweating and drama because that will be copied.

From my personal perspective nothing is lost because there has never been anyone there to lose it,merely the illusion that there was. And that too will be perfectly replicated.

Nick
 
Thunderchief said:
I mostly agree with this, although again I don't see how this helps. Just because "I" is an illusion there does not seem to be a good reason to destroy the machinery generating it. (my brain) Why would a materialist be happy that a copy exists so its ok to end the life of this copy?
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I disagree with Nick227 on this. There are no rational grounds for thinking it is acceptable that the original is destroyed besides some obscure zero sum resource allocation nonsense ( like, you can only ever have x of you walking around because of food or energy or whatever ).

From the standpoint of "you want to continue to exist, because the future interests you" the original would never find it rational to self destruct. The copy has a future, but that doesn't invalidate the original's future.
 
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Nick227 said:
From my personal perspective nothing is lost because there has never been anyone there to lose it,merely the illusion that there was. And that too will be perfectly replicated.
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But this is categorically untrue.

From a purely objective standpoint, the future states of a set of particles is now significantly changed. Where before the particles were organized in a complex way that promotes local entropy decreases ( I.E. "life" ) after the vaporization they are just randomly assorted, and will remain so, all else being equal.

So just based on math and physics, there is an argument for not vaporizing the original (assuming value is placed on life, but that assumption seems valid since we are alive ). You don't have to appeal to a sense of self at all.
 
Jack by the hedge said:
What if, instead of pushing the 'transport' button I pressed the 'copy' button instead and made an exact replica of me? Out of whose eyes would I be looking?

I would need an awful lot of convincing that the transporter didn't operate in the same way, just destroying the original while making a copy.
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One big problem is that it would be impossible for anyone to prove that didn't happen, as it would be impossible to prove the copy wasn't the original. Thus I can't see such a device ever being approved.
 
Thunderchief said:
I mostly agree with this, although again I don't see how this helps. Just because "I" is an illusion there does not seem to be a good reason to destroy the machinery generating it. (my brain) Why would a materialist be happy that a copy exists so its ok to end the life of this copy?
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Thunder, I think it's easiest to explain when you look at a possible model the illusionary self leads to:

Imagine your nervous system represented as software and every Planck time (while you are conscious) a snapshot of that representation is taken. You get a finite number of snapshots each consisting of a finite number of 0s and 1s. Let's call such a snapshot a conscious state.

Now do the same with every conscious, self-aware being in existence - across all time dimensions in all universes that might exist and are similar to ours. Multiples (of the same state) are meaningless. Only distinctive ones count. The sum of these states holds everything that could possibly matter for any self-aware being in the whole omniverse.

What we experience at any given moment is just the very existence of one of these states. And there is no connection whatsoever between any of them. A state either exists or it doesn't, there's nothing in between. Each single one includes that illusion of self.

And that's pretty much the whole story. Nothing else is required. It's perfectly sufficient to explain our everyday experience. It's materialistic to the bone.

As for the validity of the model: no soul, no essence, no life force, no causal connection between states, no uninterrupted processes required. Just states. I mean, really: can it get any simpler than that? Plus it fits the data and doesn't contradict any scientific research I'm aware of. IMO it is clearly favoured by Occam's Razor.

Do you now see why one could be content with getting disintegrated while his copy lives on? Because you cannot lose anything. The copy's body will start producing conscious states immediately from pretty much exactly where the original stopped. And the conscious states in existence are all that matters.
 
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