Would you use a Star Trek type transporter?

[Nick227]

So the original and the copy are not individuals? You don't see them as separate beings? I think they are, they behave the same, but do so independently.

They are and are not individuals, which I appreciate doesn't help very much! The brain learns to create the illusion for itself of having a personal self that is doing and experiencing, but it doesn't actually have such a thing.

Thus it seems that when the original is killed so something tangible is lost - this experiencer or doer. If you yourself imagine getting into the pod and pushing the button, probably a voice inside is saying "I'm going to die!" Am I right?

But this is the illusion. There is, according to materialism, no "I" that is going to die here, just a body dematerialising, and being replaced with an identical copy.

Some body dies, but some one does not.

Nick

 

[Nick227]

You do have to destroy both, yes.

But you don't have to have two sets of memories. You merge both sets into a single set.

This is entirely possible if you think about it -- our memory doesn't work in terms of values. You don't remember "I was doing this 4 hours ago, and doing this 3 hours ago" etc. All you remember is the events themselves. To the extent that we can determine order, it is only based on our ability to infer logically based on the content of the memories.

For example, I bet if you recall something that happened years ago, and then recall something else, you can't tell immediately which happened first. You need to evaluate the contents of the memories to infer which *must* have happened first, given the content of the memories.

So merging a set of memories from your time on mars, with a set from your time on Earth, even though both spans of time are the same, is trivial ( in a mathematical sense ). What is not trivial is hooking up the neural networks properly without nuking important stuff.

What if, while I'm at work, I decide to go out to lunch? Using the teleport. My original, second one now, will remain hungry whilst the copy is merrily stuffing himself!

Plus, all this merging involves doing the one thing that you were trying to avoid - killing people. So my original doesn't go to work but just lazes around all day waiting for the copy, or copies to return. OK, he's avoided dying. But now, in order to merge with the copies, he has to be killed and a new, merged version created. If I'm trippy about being killed so my copy can go to work, wouldn't I be equally trippy about being killed just so some merged version of me can remember being at home and being at work?

Nick

 

[Nick227]

You're going to No True Scotsman me? Really?

Alright chief, let's do this. How does identifying clones as two people count as being a "false materialist?"

The "false materialist detector" works by asking people if they would travel in the teletransporter (to give it its original name). (The version that kills the original and replaces it with a copy.) If they say "No" a loud buzzer sounds - uh-uhhh - and they fail!

Nick

 

[Beelzebuddy]

The "false materialist detector" works by asking people if they would travel in the teletransporter (to give it its original name). (The version that kills the original and replaces it with a copy.) If they say "No" a loud buzzer sounds - uh-uhhh - and they fail!

Nick

Oh, alright. Hey look, I can be dismissive too: whenever you want to stop being wrong, I'd be glad to talk.

 

[Nick227]

Oh, alright. Hey look, I can be dismissive too:

I'm not being dismissive. I'm pointing out how the thought experiment works. Clones are individuals regardless of whether you're idealist or materialist. Clones have nothing to do with it. It's whether you would travel like this.

So... would you travel in the pod, knowing that nothing is really dying when you're body is recreated elsewhere, or are you not a real materialist?

Or are you one of the ones that wabbles on about the machine going wrong or what to do if the original doesn't die, or other irrelevant, avoid-the-question nonsense.

Nick

eta: ps, I'm pasting the original version of the thought experiment that Susan Blackmore uses with her class. Note that no quibbling is allowed...


The teletransporter (from http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/Books/Consciousness/2Ed/activities.htm)

Imagine you want to go to the beautiful city of Capetown for a holiday. You are offered a simple, free, almost instantaneous, and 100 per cent safe, way of getting there and back. All you have to do is step inside the box, press the button, and .....

The box is, of course, Parfit’s teletransporter. In making the journey every cell of your body and brain will be scanned and destroyed, and then replicated exactly as they were before, but in Capetown. Would you press the button?

To create a memorable exercise you might like to use a few chairs or tables to make the box and provide a colourful “Go” button for a volunteer inside to press. Would this volunteer press it? Does everyone else think they should? You can then ask everyone else to answer ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. Do not allow any ‘Don’t know’s (if people do not want to answer publicly then get them to write down ‘Yes’ or ‘No’). Do not allow students to quibble over safety or any other details – if they do so they have failed to understand the nature of thought experiments. In this one the box is 100% safe and reliable. If they won’t go in, this has to be for some other reason than that it might go wrong.

Now ask for a volunteer who said ‘Yes’ and ask them to explain why. Others can then ask further questions to work out, for example, why this person is not worried about having their body completely destroyed. Next ask for a ‘No’ volunteer and let others ask why she or he will not go. Bear in mind that people’s reasons for not going may involve their deepest beliefs about their soul, spirit, God, or life after death. It is helpful to remember this even while pushing people hard to explain what they mean.

After the discussion find out how many people have changed their minds. In a course on consciousness it is instructive to ask this same question again after a few weeks or months of study, and for this purpose it is helpful for people to keep a record of their answers. They may change.

 

[Earthborn]

First, I'll die if I don't sleep from time to time, so it's not quite the either/or proposition that the transporter is.

It does show though that your rule of thumb against doing something is useless. If you ask whether you will survive a thing, "in a manner of speaking" or "it depends on how you look at it" are correct answers no matter what that thing is. It is simply a fact of life that you are constantly dying and constantly be recreated. In order to survive in a manner of speaking you'll have to die if you look at it from a different angle.

Second, I don't believe that consciousness has a sharply defined edge.

It doesn't, which is the point.

I think that I'm still 'there' while sleeping, simply less aware;

You are still there while being digitised only in a different form. You are still there while the digital form is used to reconstruct you.

I don't understand how the ongoing changes in my brain give rise to my perception of consciousness, so it's really not clear to me that the teleporter wouldn't represent a sharp change in continuity.

I think it mostly depends on how much time the transfer takes. If the person to be teleported is conscious, it can't take more than a few milliseconds before you'll end up with two diverging versions of you, and the you at the destination shouldn't be more different from the you in the sender than you would have been a few minutes later otherwise. If sending the person is unconscious and frozen or held in a Star Trek stasis field or whatever, the transferring process can take longer.

If there's one receiver, why not 2? Why not 50? So suppose that the teleporter created 50 copies of you, and each copy had a wallet. If 49 of you died, the survivor would have all 50 wallets with all that money!

And a prison sentence for counterfitting money...

So, let's suppose that the teleporter was set up to create 50 of you, each in a room with a gun. 49 of the guns are loaded, one isn't. You've just been teleported into a room, and the gun is sitting there in front of you.

Would you do it?

Do what? Kill myself? Kill another instance of myself? Check whether the gun is loaded?

It's a function, like the light emitted from a light bulb where my body is the bulb.

If you send the light bulb through the teletransporter, and screw it in, how would the emitted light be different?

If it's theoretically possible for an outside observer to tell me that the body my consciousness turned off in is the same one my consciousness turned on in again in the morning, sleep doesn't bother me.

I don't think that is theoretically possible. The light from a light bulb seems pretty similar after it has been off for a while (despite being made from completely different photons), but my consciousness seems to constantly change; I certainly don't feel the same after a good night's sleep than before it.

 

[Jomante]

Don't go to sleep tonight. The person who wakes up tommorrow is not in all respects the same person as the one who went to bed. Your consciousness even "died" for some time.

No, your consciousness chose not to remember what happened. This is quite different from dying or even not being aware. When you wake up while dreaming you remember the dream. When you don't wake up in the middle of the dream, your brain sets aside the collection of thoughts and forgets them. Indeed, even when you wake up in the middle of a dream your brain still ends up trying to forget it. Brain activity continues the entire time you are asleep, at no time does it come to a complete halt so I would not accept that your consciousness "died" even though it may not remember what happened.

Then you look at your arms wrongly. Your brain is constantly influenced by signals from your arms (and other body parts). Without them you are not the exact same person.

I would not agree. My brain together with another body would become a new entity. Some of my consciousness will linger, but this entity will be too different from me to be me. My old me would be mostly dead and only a bit alive.

That depends entirely on how you define yourself, which is one of the hardest parts of these thought experiments. I do not consider a radical change to the body (such as the loss of a limb) to mean that I am no longer and a new entity exists in my place. In my definition, I am the identity that goes by my name with my thoughts, my experiences, and the supporting structure for processing and storing the information. That's not for one moment, but for the length of time that the supporting structure continues to provide brain activity. Any replication, no matter how perfect, is not me even though that replication may have the same thoughts and experiences as I had. Of course, this viewpoint contradicts yours which is:

This is very different from making copies of me in the teletransporter: in that case both resulting bodies would be so similar to original me that there is no significant difference and both are me.

So if I made a near perfect replica of a Van Gogh painting, then should it be every bit as valuable as the original? I think you'd have a hard time convincing people of that, although you could certainly fool some into thinking it was the original but that's a different question.

I am not convinced that two half brains that have experienced significant time in seperate bodies can converge back into one individual mind.

We don't really know, it could end up with two different personalities, or not. That's a weakness in my thought experiment is we don't know enough about the brain to say conclusively what would happen.

So a question I have for you: If you had to choose between being forced to use a teletransporter and getting a hair transplant, which would you choose?

 

[Earthborn]

Note that no quibbling is allowed...

I think quibbling should be allowed. As the machine is presented here, a hard materialist can't object to being teleported, but must also conclude that the machine cannot even theoretically exist. The machine is magic, and cannot be made in a materialist universe. If something like it were made in a materialist universe, it would have limits on how accurately, quickly and safely it functions.

Blackmore's way of presenting the thought experiment forces people to take on of two positions: either you accept that the machine is magic, or that there is something magic like the soul the machine can't scan. If the soul exists the machine might not exist, and if the machine exists the soul might not exist. But you can't disprove one magical concept with another.

It is a bit like the thought experiment with the lightyear-long rod made of perfectly rigid material that is sometimes used to challenge relativity. Push on one end and the other end is moved simultaneously, which would allow superluminal communication. But the perfectly rigid material is impossible in a relativistic universe, so one either has to accept the existence of the rod and assume relativity is false in the thought experiment, or one has to accept relativity and argue that the rod does not exist. A thought experiment can't include two irreconcilable concepts and still be useful.

 

[Beelzebuddy]

I'm not being dismissive. I'm pointing out how the thought experiment works. Clones are individuals regardless of whether you're idealist or materialist. Clones have nothing to do with it. It's whether you would travel like this.

Clones have everything to do with it. Why do you think people in this thread keep insisting that it doesn't matter what happens in the middle so long as one of you enters and one of you leaves?

A teleporter that destroys the body and recreates it elsewhere via quantum mysticism isn't substantially different from one which doesn't destroy the body, just clones it remotely and the original is destroyed soon afterwards. And that one's not substantially different from one where the original is never destroyed at all, and now we've just got two clones. It's the same problem, you're just trying to get out of considering it in this particular instance by insisting that if we destroy one clone really really quickly, it doesn't count as being a person.

So... would you travel in the pod, knowing that nothing is really dying when you're body is recreated elsewhere, or are you not a real materialist?

Again, bull. You're begging the question. In the teleporter case, your original dies and a clone is created. If I were to clone you nine times, line you all up and shoot all but the third individual, that individual would survive and the other nine would be murdered in cold blood. That they are all the same clade is inconsequential; they are each individual people and deserve to be regarded as such.

It seems to me the dualist perspective would be to disagree with this: all of these clones must share the same personhood/soul, so all you're really doing is clearing up confusion. Teleportation should be fine and dandy: you're still the same person, possessed of the same spirit in the eyes of the Lord, only now you're on Mars.

Seriously, how is it that the side which thinks your personal identity can zip around the universe like a thetan on PCP to anywhere a clone of your brain resides, and so long as one still gets away somewhere the others have no claim to human rights, even remotely the materialist perspective?

Do YOU put sugar on your porridge?

Note that no quibbling is allowed...

...about the reliability of the teleporter and other such technicalities that answer the question without addressing the intended issue head-on. Which I notice is exactly what you're raising.

 

[Earthborn]

No, your consciousness chose not to remember what happened.

When I wrote "your consciousness died for some time" I wasn't talking about dream-sleep, but deep-sleep.

I do not consider a radical change to the body (such as the loss of a limb) to mean that I am no longer and a new entity exists in my place.

I do consider a radical change to the body, such as taking out half my brain and putting it in another body, that I am no longer. This other body has become a new entity that is not me in any meaningful way.

Any replication, no matter how perfect, is not me even though that replication may have the same thoughts and experiences as I had.

This replication will disagree with you on that. And if the teletransporter works as advertised, you won't be around to contradict it.

So if I made a near perfect replica of a Van Gogh painting, then should it be every bit as valuable as the original?

Yes, of course. Both perfect replica and original would probably be half as valuable as the original was before replication. If the original were destroyed, the perfect replica would become as valuable as the original once was.

We don't really know, it could end up with two different personalities, or not. That's a weakness in my thought experiment is we don't know enough about the brain to say conclusively what would happen.

We probably know enough to say what might happen, though without any certainty whether it will happen any time it would be tried. One possibility is that both hemispheres have diverged so much by their separated experience that they can never resolve the conflicts between them and you might end up with a human whose left and right halves are constantly fighting, perhaps literally. Another possibility is that both hemispheres will greet each other as old friends and manage to work together as a unit, but still with a few residual quirks that betray that they were once separated. With the sensory input from the new body, they won't work as if they were the same person from which they were taken. Tastes and preferences will likely be very different, some memories may have remained.

So a question I have for you: If you had to choose between being forced to use a teletransporter and getting a hair transplant, which would you choose?

Why would I get a hair transplant? I don't like being forced to do anything, but if I am assured of its safety I would choose the teletransporter. Seems like a more interesting experience.

 

[Nick227]

I think quibbling should be allowed. As the machine is presented here, a hard materialist can't object to being teleported, but must also conclude that the machine cannot even theoretically exist. The machine is magic, and cannot be made in a materialist universe. If something like it were made in a materialist universe, it would have limits on how accurately, quickly and safely it functions.

The thought experiment, as Blackmore presents it, gives people the opportunity to really look. Which personally I like.

There have been numerous teletransporter threads on the jref and I've participated in a fair few. There always seem to be a lot of people who to me just quibble on endlessly - what if the machine fails, what if you're still alive, what if this, what if that, what if, what if. I mean Blackmore clearly states that you can't quibble about these things, but it seems that on this forum people just can't not quibble.

I don't personally understand the rationale behind endlessly digging up all these "what if's". It's a thought experiment with a clearly articulated purpose. Quibbling is just a way of avoiding your own involvement. There are some really watery materialists on the JREF.

Nick

 

[Beelzebuddy]

I mean Blackmore clearly states that you can't quibble about these things,

Things which answer the question but avoid addressing the issue. Begging the question, by insisting that everyone accept that the original doesn't die as part of the premise, also avoids addressing the issue.

You are quibbling.

 

[Earthborn]

Clones have everything to do with it.

Using the term "clones" in this case is confusing as it is a term usually reserved for non-perfect replications of organisms by very different means than scanning and printing them out at atomic level, and who won't share the same experiences and memories.

Why do you think people in this thread keep insisting that it doesn't matter what happens in the middle so long as one of you enters and one of you leaves?

Because it doesn't.

It's the same problem, you're just trying to get out of considering it in this particular instance by insisting that if we destroy one clone really really quickly, it doesn't count as being a person.

If one is destroyed really really quickly, it doesn't count as being a different person.

If I were to clone you nine times, line you all up and shoot all but the third individual, that individual would survive and the other nine would be murdered in cold blood. That they are all the same clade is inconsequential; they are each individual people and deserve to be regarded as such.

Only because you allowed them time to become different individual people and put some of them through the pain of dying from gunshot wounds.

It seems to me the dualist perspective would be to disagree with this: all of these clones must share the same personhood/soul, so all you're really doing is clearing up confusion. Teleportation should be fine and dandy: you're still the same person, possessed of the same spirit in the eyes of the Lord, only now you're on Mars.

Indeed, the teleportation thought experiment doesn't help you distinguish between dualists and materialists. While some dualists might object to teleportation because they believe the machine cannot effectively scan their non-materialist soul, others might have no problem with it because they believe their non-materialist soul can find them at the destination without any difficulty, not being bound by space or time.

Seriously, how is it that the side which thinks your personal identity can zip around the universe like a thetan on PCP to anywhere a clone of your brain resides, and so long as one still gets away somewhere the others have no claim to human rights, even remotely the materialist perspective?

... because a materialist thinks their personal identity is bound to their physical structure and is therefore replicated together with the rest of the body. Once you have a machine that allows the body to zip around the universe like a thetan on PCP, one's personal identity -- being part of that body -- inevitably follows.

 

[Beelzebuddy]

Using the term "clones" in this case is confusing as it is a term usually reserved for non-perfect replications of organisms by very different means than scanning and printing them out at atomic level, and who won't share the same experiences and memories.

I should have reiterated what I mentioned upthread, that I'm using "clone" here in the pulpy SF sense of a magic box that makes two of you. You're right that it's confusing given the scientific definition, but that's actually science's problem since it was derived from the SF usage. "Clade" I'm deliberately swiping and using incorrectly as a group of clones in revenge, and also because "line" is too specific to the scientific use of "clone."


I hate omnislashing, so rather than respond to each tiny snippet I'm just going to cut to what I think is the core of the matter. Apologies in advance for any unintentional strawmanning.

... because a materialist thinks their personal identity is bound to their physical structure and is therefore replicated together with the rest of the body. Once you have a machine that allows the body to zip around the universe like a thetan on PCP, one's personal identity -- being part of that body -- inevitably follows.

Yes, but once you replicate the body you end up with two personal identities. It doesn't matter a whit how much time they've had or haven't to grow apart, they're already two separate but presumably identical people. Yes, to the rest of the world it may make no difference which lives and which dies, but one of them is still living and one is still dying.

I found Nick's attempt to NTS me amusing, because I find I'm so materialist I crap secularism. For example, I don't think consciousness exists except as a convenient term to use from a metaphorical distance. Once you get up close it evaporates into the individual processes, which apart from their distributed interactions make up no unified whole that we can coherently describe.

Similarly I don't think personal identity exists except as a convenient fiction to tie actions and interpersonal relationships to. Outside of conversations like this it doesn't make much difference, 1 clade == 1 person == 1 personal identity, but now we have a chance to metaphorically get up close.

Up close, each clone has a functioning, healthy brain. Each clone is a functioning, healthy person. To kill a functioning, healthy person is murder, even if you've got an exact copy to replace him with. There is no unified whole tying the two people together. They're different, despite being identical. We now have a clade of two.

If you'd like, I can go into how I'd approach the legal ramifications of clades and the interactions of the people they comprise (for example, how would marrying into a clade work?), but I've nattered on long enough for one post already.

 

[Myriad]

Ack! Double post. I shall now delete the text of this one, but the text will live on in the next post, so it's not really deleted.

 

[Myriad]

Around 2100, transporter scientists finally give up and admit that transporting matter in liquid and gaseous phases has too many practical difficulties. However, there's a way around the problem: in 2060, a reliable process for cryogenically freezing and then reviving people was perfected and has been in steady (though not frequent) use since then. The freezing process is to a chemically inert solid state; there is no heartbeat or brain activity while frozen. The process has been developed sufficiently that there is no tissue damage, and people who have been frozen and revived claim to think, and verifiably behave, as if they were the same person who was frozen.

The teletransportation process thus becomes: first, freeze the person, then scan/destroy the frozen person while sending the information to re-create the frozen person at the destination, then revive the frozen person at the destination.

Obviously this process is no longer suitable for routine trips to the grocery store, or even transcontinental travel (except for very wealthy people who find it worth the cost to reduce the time of a long transcontinental trip down to six hours or so -- most of which is spent recovering after thawing -- instead of 20), but it's great for going to mars or the L5 stations.

I assume that anyone who would take the standard teletransporter would also take the modified one with cryo-freezing. But does the modified procedure change anyone else's view? Here are some possibilities to choose from --

- I would not take the teletransporter, and for the same reason I would not undergo cyro freezing, even if I were not teletransported while frozen.

- I would not take the standard teletransporter, and I would not be willing to be teletransported while frozen, but undergoing cryofreezing and revival itself wouldn't be a problem if there were a good reason for it.

- I would not take the standard teletransporter, but I would use the modified form with cryofreezing.

Respectfully,
Myriad

 

[blobru]

I agree with Myriad [post #255], but disagree with his clone [post #256] (or my clone does; I'm not sure).

 

[Nick227]

I've nattered on long enough for one post already.

So, you're in the pod. Are you going to push the button, not push the button... or continue nattering?

Nick

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

And yet we talk about moving files, because we recognize that when we create an identical file elsewhere, nothing is lost.

How do you know that is true in the case of a transporter?

 

[Jomante]

When I wrote "your consciousness died for some time" I wasn't talking about dream-sleep, but deep-sleep.

Even so, deep-sleep still has brain activity going on, does it not? When a loud noise occurs in the house when you are in deep sleep, you awake do you not? Well, that depends on the person, but let me get to the point: You are still aware.

I do consider a radical change to the body, such as taking out half my brain and putting it in another body, that I am no longer. This other body has become a new entity that is not me in any meaningful way.

So then when you are replicated with different atoms even though they may have the same quantum states aligned and be put into the same configuration, it is a new entity as well isn't it?

Why would I get a hair transplant? I don't like being forced to do anything, but if I am assured of its safety I would choose the teletransporter. Seems like a more interesting experience.

But you aren't the one who had the experience, your replication was and if something went wrong and the original you wasn't destroyed in the process then you will go on wondering what the experience was like despite your replica having had the experience. And that is actually another interesting topic: If the original is not destroyed immediately, do you ask the original to submit to being destroyed later? How would you handle that?