Sure, if your totally-not-magic society has 100% fidelity printed people and is totally fine with someone with officer clearance printing a few hundred of themself to collectively pull rank in every part of a Star Trek ship at once and demand interchanging legal presence as if the same person was everywhere at once at all times no matter what individually differentiating experiences those 100% fidelity copies start picking up to distinguish themselves. Totally not a magic system. Totally not just your hangup and contempt for the idea of an individual existing outside of crude reductionistic principles.
Comment on Am I? Who knows
LtLiana@startrek.website 1 year agoTwo people can be literally the same person. Your argument only works if there’s a magic law that says there can be only one real ‘you’.
UlyssesT@hexbear.net 1 year ago
LtLiana@startrek.website 1 year ago
You’re the kind of guy to argue that when I cut a sandwich in half then there are two sandwiches.
UlyssesT@hexbear.net 1 year ago
You’re the kind of person that will go so far out of the way to reduce someone to nothing that it’s like you want to disintegrate people with the promised “totally 100% the exact same person, promise” copy just being an afterthought to justify the reductionism for its own performative sake.
Lurker123@hexbear.net 1 year ago
The “magic law” is just the consequence of what it means to be the “same” person. To be the same person, you have to, among other similarities, take up the same spatial-temporal space. This is why if we ask “is Bruce Wayne the same person as Batman” one of the first thoughts is “you know, I’ve never seen them in the same room before.”
Maybe what you’re getting hung up on here is the split. Let’s imagine there is one river (river A) which goes for a bit before it forks and becomes river b and river c. In some sense, we could say that both river b and river c are river a. But if you’re river b, then river c is not the same as you, and vice versa.
LtLiana@startrek.website 1 year ago
Am I not the same person as I was yesterday?
Sure, I am now different both to a molecular level and due to the experiences I have made since, but for all linguistic and social intents and purposes, I am the same person I was yesterday. Because “person” is already an arbitrary term we put on this collection of atoms merely based on continuity, like the Ship of Theseus. If we went by “spatial-temporal space”, then I would be space dust, a collection of bacteria, fluids, cells, proteins… and who “I” am would change every few seconds.
The same is true for two Rikers. That’s the entire point of the episode; that despite them diverging at the point of the cloning into two different people, they are still the same person and need to live with that.
USSBurritoTruck@startrek.website 1 year ago
I don’t think that as the point of the episode. As their lives diverged their interests and desires did so as well. They were similar, yes, but still different people. Will was promoted after successfully evacuating the people of Nervala IV and he became focused on his career. Thomas was stuck on Nervala IV thinking of the woman he left behind, and when he’s rescued he wants to rekindle that relationship whereas Will let it fizzle.
To say nothing of Thomas eventually choosing to join the Maquis. That is not something we’d ever see from Will.
Will: Good luck, Will.
Thomas: I actually thought I might go with the name Thomas.
Troi: Your middle name.
Will: I guess we really are different. I never really cared for that name.
Thomas: Well, I sort of like it. I guess I’d better get going.