Comment on Am I? Who knows

• 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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    • KevonLooney@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      That doesn’t answer the question. It’s obvious that the clone of you isn’t you, it’s literally just a copy.

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      • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        That depends on what “you” are. If you are just your brain or nervous system, as in the specific atoms and such that make up that brain, then sure, obviously those atoms can’t be in two places at once, so you are wherever they are. On the other hand, if you are the structure of those atoms and particles, the way they are arranged, the patterns of movement they form as they go about their work, the information they contain by all this; then it stands to reason that a sufficiently perfect copy is the same as you, because if whatever makes you “you” is part that structure, whatever makes it “your” consciousness instead of someone else’s, and the copy has exactly the same structure, then the copy must also contain whatever that part is that makes it “you” and not someone else, and therefore has to be you as well.

        This isn’t a settled question, so one sort of has to decide what answer one thinks is more likely, I personally think the second.

        Consider a hypothetical for a moment. Suppose there are two people, I’ll call them Bob and Bill for the purposes of distinguishing them. Suppose they get captured by some sort of mad scientist, who runs an experiment on them both. They wipe the brains of both people in such a way as to not completely kill them, but such as to remove every trace of their memories, personality, etc, essentially rendering them braindead, but without the physical damage that usually entails. Then, they painstakingly re-create those same neural pathways, same memories, personality, etc, but they recreate Bob’s persona in what is originally Bill’s body, and likewise, recreate Bill’s memory and personality in Bob’s. Which of these two people is now Bob (or if one thinks neither really are and that Bob is just dead, who at least has the better claim)? The one that has the physical brain, nervous system etc of the original Bob, but remembers and thinks exactly like Bill? Or the one that acts like Bob, and remembers being Bob, and probably thinks he is Bob and would insist on his being such, but does not have the same material in his brain as the original? If one of Bob’s friends raids the lab trying to rescue him, which should he take back home?

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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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    • Sordid@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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?

      Consciousness is brain activity. New brain = new activity = new consciousness.

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      • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        The activity of something is essentially information (consider how computer programs are ultimately just the activity of the components of a computer). If I copy information from one substrate to another, and do so with no changes, I don’t have any new information. Applying that back to brains, assuming that consciousness really is only brain activity (which seems highly likely, but since we don’t really understand the nature of consciousness, isn’t completely proven), then I’d disagree with the new brain= new activity step

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  • Doug@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I think you’re just talking about Thomas Riker

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    • Sordid@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Yup, pretty much. It’s a shame Star Trek recognizes and points out this problem but then chickens out of it actually having any consequences.

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