Some extra context for the curious: https://pdf.stafforini.com/parfit-1995-unimportance-identity.pdf
If your intent to pull a lever survives the trip, it’s you in any way that matters.
if you asked this question about an inanimate object the answer is much more obvious - if i ‘teleport’ a bicycle by grinding it into atomic dust, then use a computer scanner/matter replicator to create an exact copy of the bike i destroyed with a store of different atomic dust on the other side of the galaxy, is it the same bike? obviously not, even if it is functionally identical. the human desire to deny their own existence is so powerful that when it comes to the concept of consciousness we get confused on this point.
physicalist eliminativist accounts of consciousness essentially deny that it exists at all, reducing Qualia somehow to information processing despite no explanation for the experiential component of consciousness - why do we ‘feel’ our information processing when a calculator does not? what algorithm produces internal awareness in the sense of experiential existence? if we assume that consciousness is just another kind of information processing, what kind is it? how do we avoid slipping into pure animism, if any physical system can have ‘consciousness’ because it is simply a kind of information processing, how do we know that self-regulating, complex physical systems like stars, planets, galaxies, subatomic particles are not conscious in some way?
eliminativists argue that those that do not believe we already fully understand consciousness are unscientific or non-empirical, however in fact, Integrated Information Theory has already been used to develop successful clinical techniques to determine the level of consciousness in unresponsive patients, using the existence of Qualia as one of its fundamental assumptions.
why do we ‘feel’ our information processing when a calculator does not?
You have no way to know if the calculator does not
From other people’s perspective yes, from your own - you won’t have one since you will cease to exist.
It all depends on the origin and nature of consciousness which is something we don’t know much about.
My personal pet theory is that the body/ brain is a receiver for consciousness but not the origin.
Why add that complexity? There’s zero evidence for it, and it doesn’t help explain anything. If something else unknown can house the consciousness then why not a brain?
Imagine jumping in to pull the lever but your clone copy just decides to do differently.
Then who tried to save you and who let you die?
Not really a clone if the neurons suddenly are in different states
So if your clone decides not to pull the lever… are you equally guilty? Would you also have decided not to pull the lever at the critical moment?
What if getting close enough allows you to realize the people on the tracks are Musk, Bezos, et al?
Personally I believe it would be. There’s a lot of people that argue differently on the basis that it breaks some kind of chain of continuity, but I believe that continuity is a concept that doesn’t truly “exist”, or at least has no physical relevance. In my view, what your mind/consciousness/whatever is is information, found in the arrangement and behavior of the matter and energy in your body over time, and as such any time that pattern exists, you exist. The teleporter merely disrupts that pattern while recording a different set of information needed to recreate it, and then recreates it elsewhere.
IF the teleporter didn’t destroy your original body: Would the ‘clone’ still be you? Would you exist twice?
Yeah this is the correct question (answer?)
I just got two comments asking this and dont want to spam the thread with duplicate answers, so see the reply I gave NekoKoneko
This is what I think too. Our perception of continuity is not the same as our actual consciousness.
It’s mind boggling to actually consider deeply and we may never actually know the truth to it since it’s all so subjective anyway. But it is fun to think about.
The teleporter malfunctions and produces a copy of you with your continuous consciousness at the exit teleporter, while you with your continuous consciousness also remains at the entry teleporter. Which one is you?
Both of them. One reason that answer may sound nonsensical is that it sounds like it’d imply you somehow perceive out of both bodies with no connection between them, but that would miss that people are a type of system that change over time in response to physical stimuli, and the two bodies are immediately getting different inputs. My view is that the two will diverge into different people as a result, but that both of those people have just as correct a claim to being the person that stepped into the machine as you have to claim that you are the same person that started reading this a few moments ago, with neither one being the “fake” or “real” version.
To expand on this, all that we really have is a feeling of self-awareness, and a memory of a continuous series of events leading up to this moment. Both teleporter clones would have the same subjective-I feeling, and the memories. Which one is “real” is a meaningless distinction.
It’s like how I woke up this morning, and I have the memory of going to bed last night, but I am no longer that person who went to bed; I cannot know his mind other than in the memories that I have. Did my consciousness in this moment come from him? Clearly not! If he was conscious (which I cannot actually prove now), there was a gap of many hours. (Actually, neuroscience tells us our consciousness dips out every ~90 seconds, so our brains can attend to other tasks. As a ‘fun’ experiement, try to wait out an itch without scratching it, and pinpoint the moment it goes away. Or just have ADHD.)
Same thing with the transporter clones. Each would “come to” in the moment, with the illusion of continuous, conscious experience. The original would be just as “dead” as the me that went to sleep last night.
To expand on this, all that we really have is a feeling of self-awareness, and a memory of a continuous series of events leading up to this moment. Both teleporter clones would have the same subjective-I feeling, and the memories. Which one is “real” is a meaningless distinction.
I disagree, at least if we’re talking star trek transporter. For the person who stepped into the transporter, their conscious experience ends forever. The person who steps out the other side has the illusion of continuity and will understandably believe themselves to be the same person, but it won’t be the same person. As I see it, the original person’s life experience ended permanently when they were “destroyed” by the transporter. The fact that the copy will perceive itself to be the original doesn’t change this.
In some hypothetical where you are magically moved without being destroyed, I could accept that the same person who teleports from spot A is the same person who arrives at spot B, but so far I have heard of no technological idea of teleportation that convinces me people aren’t dying every time they teleport. (I know we’re just debating fiction so it’s arguably meaningless, but I’d for sure be the guy in Star Trek who refused to use the transporter.)
You were married before using the teleporter, is the marriage still valid? Who should the kids call their parents? Can the kids claim either/neither of you gets to tell them what to do? Who owns the video game collection, the car, the house?
The legal issues of having two selves are interesting, but seperate from the moral ones. Legally, I dunno, it depends on the teleporter malfunction laws in my local area. Maybe the teleportation manufacturer becomes liable for duplicating my quality of life for one of us, like a weird technology third version of alimony/child support.
Morally/emotionally whatevet you wanna call it, both of me would be married, as everyone present (me, myself, and my wife) participated in the wedding ceremony. My wife’s vows apply to the both of us, and each of us took vows to my wife. My child gets two dads, since we both fathered her, and she gets to deal with three parents.
I imagine we’d both just live together, and share ownership. In my jurisdiction (the real world, fairly local I’d say) there are no laws about this, and I suppose we’d share our SS number and identity, if for no other reason than neither of us wants to go to court to try to change it. I think I’d choose to switch my first and middle name, so we could differentiate, but still be us. It’d be neat.
Would 3-ways be good?
These are legal and cultural questions with no objective answer outside that context, so its simply up to those involved to figure out what they prefer
Easy solution: put all those things through the teleporter/duplicator
Ok, now we just have 12 combination you-you-wife-kids Cronenbergian entities. We’ve solved it! Take that, philosophy.
Including kids, mother, friends and the bank account.
One will always be the original copy, not the transported “clone” in this case. So whichever one didn’t pop out of the transporter after their matter was combined on the pad, and therefore isn’t 10 seconds old, is the “real” you.
Although I would still argue that the cloned copy is ALSO you, it’s still not the original.
Of course all you have to do is ask Miles Obrien and he will tell you dark secrets starfleet doesn’t want anyone in the federation to know. Transporters kill the original to prevent this scenario from happening, and only on rare occasions does it fail to delete someone, like RIKER.OG.
Would that even be the OG Riker in your scenario? He’d have almost certainly have used the transporter many times before then.
In the case of Riker v William, neither are the original at that point, but the one stranded was the “more” original, especially given he hadn’t used a transporter in 7 (I think) years, while Riker continued as normal, dozens per month for years.
Again, they both still are William Riker. Just one is “more” original.
It’s a real ship of theseus situation.
What you are describing sounds a lot like a material constitution view of consciousness.
I think that, based on what I recall of Derek Parfit, there is a distinction that could be made between the continuity of consciousness and the connectivity. In the teletransporter problem, the continuity of your mind (or at least the body that constitutes your mind) is interrupted, and therefore your previous personal identity ends and a new one is created. However, the connectivity of your mind (relation R) is maintained, as your memory can still chart the path moment to moment as it went through the transporter.
This raises the question of which is more important, personal identity or relation R. Parfit argued that what really matters are your beliefs, memory, feelings, the things that make up your consciousness and not the body that “holds” it. Since these are maintained through relation R, you may not be “you” after going through the transporter, but everything important about you is still there.
I don’t have the time right at the moment to go through all of that, but a little ways in I saw the concept of mereology mentioned, so I thought I might expand on my view a bit by mentioning that I subscribe to an idea similar to what I’ve seen called “mereological nihilism” in that I think that, when you have a thing made up of other things, like a person or a ship or whatever else, that larger thing doesn’t truly exist as a distinct object with objective significance, merely as an illusion of our perception resulting from the way our brains and language work, and that properties ascribed to it are just emergent behavior of the parts said to make it up when arranged in that way.
As a result, in my view, the kind of personal identity you refer to simply doesn’t exist in the first place, so to speak of it’s continuity or lack thereof becomes meaningless, at which point the thing you call relation R is the only basis left to define a specific person by. That also makes a specific person a somewhat “fuzzy” concept without clear objective borders around where you stop and end, and how much must be changed about a copy before it ceases to be you is in my view somewhat arbitrary, without a truly objective answer and more based on you eventually finding the changes too distinct to continue to refer to as the same person as what existed before.
The same goes for people who think they’ll be able to upload themselves to a computer. The so-called “singularity”. One’s consciousness could be lost in the transfer, and no one could tell. You become unconscious and never wake up, you die. The other thing--whatever it is--takes your place in the world, and everyone else treats it as you, but you died. Behind the eyes of that thing, no one is home.
The same goes for people who go to sleep or lose consciousness. Who says the memories you have are yours and you’re the same self as before?
Uploading is making a copy in digital format and be forever changed. Unless the original is actually destroyed in the process then the original would also be changed. Consciousness would not be lost but changed. The real question would be, is the digital copy real or simulated and does that matter.
Teleportation is different because it’s disassembling and reassembling. We have no idea how consciousness at our current level of technology. So, is consciousness something that can be transferred physically or is it metaphysical or is it a little of both? What happens to the original?
A rose is a rose is a rose.
Okay, but I’ve got a theory of consciousness to grapple with
A human is a human is a human
