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Well consciousness is just chemical and electrical impulses. If you manage to re-create everything down to the molecule in the right area then you could completely rebuild the consciousness. Also means you’d be able to completely manipulate memories, experiences, basically anything held in the brain. Provided you had an intense enough neural mapping and deep enough understanding of the human brain to accomplish that. Luckily in the Trek universe, at least at the time of the 24th/25th century, that isn’t possible.

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4am@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Your current consciousness, the one you are thinking with right now, would end.

A clone of you would go on at the transport site, fully believing that it is you, and that everything was fine.

Reconstructive teleportation is just remote replicators with mind control.

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- DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Feel free to prove the discontinuation of consciousness scientifically while satisfying all philosophic schools of thought on the matter.
  
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  - School_Lunch@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    If you make a perfectly exact replica of yourself do you suddenly perceive the universe from two perspectives?
    
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    kaitco@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Is this the point where we start talking about Theseus and his ship?
    
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    CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Presumably not without some means of information transfer, but that doesn’t mean that a replica isn’t you, because it could also mean that there are now two of you, both of which have an equally valid claim to the original identity, but which immediately diverge into identities distinct from eachother by virtue of having slightly different experiences after the split.
    
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  - nymwit@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I mean, is there a scientific consensus on what constitutes consciousness? I thought that was a stumbling point on trying to pin down the various parts of the study of it. I wouldn’t say brain activity ceases while sleeping like that other comment but I’m in the camp that thinks the break in consciousness/awareness-of-being in a ST transporter is not really different than the break when sleeping.
    
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  - Sordid@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Easy, build the clone without destroying the original, then test if they share perceptions and memories. Show one a playing card and ask the other what card it was or something. Showing that two people don’t have the same consciousness is pretty trivial, and I don’t know of any philosophical schools that would dispute that.
    
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    CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    It seems a silly question to ask, but interesting to think about because I can’t think of a way to prove the intuitively obvious answer: how does one know that the duplicate doesn’t somehow inherit the original consciousness, and some new one with the memories and personality of it doesn’t get immediately generated in the original body?
    
    My point is meant to be, that proving that two duplicates are not the same people as eachother, is not quite the same thing as proving that a duplicate is not the original person.
    
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    Doug@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I think you’re just talking about Thomas Riker
    
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- nexguy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Same as sleeping. You could have been replaced by a clone every night while sleeping and never know it.
  
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  - School_Lunch@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    That sounds like a form of last Thursdayism. The entire universe could’ve been created last Thursday with everything made to seem older, including everyone’s memories. These philosophies are usually shot down by occam’s razor.
    
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    nymwit@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Agree for Occam’s if someone is actually suggesting they are replaced nightly or your last Thursdayism, but as for conceiving of parallels to a made up teleportation technology and its philosophical implications, is the break in consciousness/self awareness for sleep not a reasonable comparison?
    
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    Doug@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Occam’s razor is just one tool though, not an end all be all answer. Complicated things happen.
    
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    CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I’m not sure it’s really the same thing, because it’s already pretty clear that something happens to consciousness when one is asleep, since that period is experienced differently than when awake, positing something like that about the nature of what happens to it doesn’t add a bunch of unnecessary complexity the way that assuming the universe just randomly assembled to look far older than it is does.
    
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    nexguy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Cloning isn’t necessary. Every night your stream of consciousness could actually and permanently end and a new one is created upon dreaming/waking but you would never know it. This could be how it really works though we can’t know that. You could continuously lose and create new consciousnesses every firing of a neuron.
    
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  - 4am@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    True. This could be the first and only day of your life so far!
    
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- FfaerieOxide@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  Your current consciousness, the one you are thinking with right now, would end.
  
  Same thing happens every time you go to sleep. If your consciousness exists you exist, right down to you worrying about continuity of consciousness.
  
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  - kherge@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Brain activity does not cease when you sleep.
    
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    FfaerieOxide@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Are you sure?
    
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  - be_excellent_to_each_other@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I'd buy this argument if brain death happened every time you went to sleep. Being in maintenance mode doesn't count.
    
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- CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  The thing is, we don’t actually know that continuity is required for it to be the same consciousness. It might work that way, or it might be that sufficiently recreating the right brain patterns restarts the same consciousness in a new location, or something else entirely
  
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  - 4am@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Occam’s razor would dictate that I would not chance it.
    
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Olgratin_Magmatoe@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

Also means you’d be able to completely manipulate memories, experiences, basically anything held in the brain.

That’s assuming you know which exact parts do exactly what. Kinda like an encrypted zip file versus an unencrypted one.

You edit whatever set of bits/bytes you want in both, but only in one of them will you actually know whats going on.

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cheery_coffee@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
But we do know there’s quantum weirdness to the universe, so I personally think you would need more than just a molecular copy.

It’s really the question of why am I the brain in this body? Why do I perceive existence, and why isn’t it just a sequence of reactions in a brain which can adapt to highly complex phenomenon.

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MrPoopyButthole@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace's_demon

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