I think you’re just talking about Thomas Riker
Comment on Am I? Who knows
Sordid@beehaw.org 11 months agoEasy, 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.
Doug@midwest.social 11 months ago
Sordid@beehaw.org 11 months 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.
CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 11 months 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.
Sordid@beehaw.org 11 months ago
Consciousness is brain activity. New brain = new activity = new consciousness.
CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 11 months 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
Sordid@beehaw.org 11 months ago
But you have a different instance of it. If there was no distinction, copyright wouldn’t exist.