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esperterra
Mar 24, 2010

SHINee's back




Dollhouse is unironically my favourite Whedon show, but that's mostly due to everyone not named Eliza Dushku being insanely talented and good in it. Dichen Lachman and Enver Gjokaj elevated that show way beyond what it would have been without them, and that's without mentioning Williams/etc.

It had a weak-rear end start with those first procedural as hell episodes but the back half of s1 and most of s2 I really, really loved.

Still salty they cancelled T:TSCC instead of it tho.

esperterra fucked around with this message at 23:46 on Feb 13, 2018

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General Battuta
Feb 7, 2011

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.
Helo from BSG had a pretty shaky Russian accent imo (I am not an expert on Russian accents). It's hard to buy him as a slimy villain.

Niwrad
Jul 1, 2008

I'm 4 episodes in and had a question. What do they mean by "being offworld"? Kovachs says "do you think this Riker guy has been offworld?" to the virtual tech guys after being tortured.

Neddy Seagoon
Oct 12, 2012

"Hi Everybody!"

Niwrad posted:

I'm 4 episodes in and had a question. What do they mean by "being offworld"? Kovachs says "do you think this Riker guy has been offworld?" to the virtual tech guys after being tortured.

As in actually offworld. Kovacs is from a planet called Harlan's World.

Ravenfood
Nov 4, 2011

Hammerstein posted:

The simple drive of self-preservation for example. If my heart stops and as a consequence my brain dies, then I cease to exist (no one knows if there is an after-life or an immortal soul). I don't want my current existence to end and if I die then it's not comforting to me that a clone of myself gets activated with the same memories.
Right, that's what happens now in the real world because we can't separate consciousness and physical brain activity. You're saying that something about the brainmeat and heartmeat I guess is "you", even in a fictional universe where consciousness can be fully realized with neither. What about the brain matter is utterly essential to being "you"? And, on top of that, what about those particular brain cells are important? If we're creating an identical clone, we're creating an identical brain, too. What makes that not you? The lack of contiguous physical existence?

If that's the case, I think you're fixating too much on the dying/clone aspect. Pretend that there is an identical physical clone of you created. You are sedated heavily enough that brain activity beyond the level of the brainstem is effectively stopped (with appropriate cardiopulmonary support). The clone body is similarly treated, the sum total of your experience is copied and implanted into the clone, then you are both awakened at the same in a different place than when you fell asleep. How is that clone not you? How could you even tell which one "you" are when you awoke? For bonus points, someone who does not know which body was the original and which was the clone comes in and flips a coin, killing one of the two at random, with nobody knowing which was which. I'm assuming that you believe that there would be a material difference if the clone was killed and the original was killed despite there being no physiological or neurological difference, and both bodies having exactly identical memories, and nobody in the world knowing which happened. If that's not true, what makes this box of mysterious randomized murder different?

The part of self-preservation that's important to me is my consciousness. Yeah, you're right that its bad if I cease to exist, but what I'm saying is that "I" am nothing more than the totality of my experiences. If that totality can be transferred elsewhere, how is that not me? I suppose you could argue that my mood, affect, etc are significantly altered by hormones and other physiological systems within my body and if I was in a different body, I'd act differently than I would have before if given the same stimulus, which I agree with. But that's not really different from taking some form of exogenous hormone treatment or, for example, an SSRI.

Hammerstein
May 6, 2005

YOU DON'T KNOW A DAMN THING ABOUT RACING !

General Battuta posted:

Why does your heart stop and your brain dying cause you to cease to exist? There's a right answer to this question: because it leads to the breakdown of the information stored in the physical structure of my brain. But if that information isn't lost, then it's not death; nor is it a matter of a 'clone of myself' activating with the same memories. My chain of existence is going on unbroken just as it would on any other day, but one of the links in the chain uses digital sensors instead of nerve tissue.

The 'clone' does not 'think he is the real me'. Metaphysical soul-jumping does not exist, nor do souls; therefore all criteria for selfness are physical. If the Shannon entropy of your self hasn't been lost, then you have not died. The creation of a 1:1 copy is an extension of your life, because it is exactly the same way you live from day to day. You are constantly copying yourself forward into new but slightly different bodies.


The end of these functions also leads to the end of the current entity hosting them, aka death. Sure the stored information is now backed up in the clone, but the life of the original host ends. The orignal and the clone may share the same memories, but each is an individual lifeform and not some kind of inter-connected swarm intelligence and I cannot imagine why either of them would be comforted by the idea that their memories live on in another body, because I believe that people generaly consider themselves unique and want to prolong their own existence for as long as possible.

Also I sincerly believe, although I'm not religious, that people are more than just some biomass with memories. Of course people risk their lives in often selfless acts, but no one I know would sacrifice himself so that a clone can awaken and take over.

If you define a person as just some water and carbon plus a heap of memories, then your approach might be valid. But the drive of self-preservation, self-awareness, consciousness, individuality and simply the joy of being alive are completely left out when viewing it from such an angle.

Ravenfood
Nov 4, 2011

Hammerstein posted:

Also I sincerly believe, although I'm not religious, that people are more than just some biomass with memories. Of course people risk their lives in often selfless acts, but no one I know would sacrifice himself so that a clone can awaken and take over.

If you define a person as just some water and carbon plus a heap of memories, then your approach might be valid. But the drive of self-preservation, self-awareness, consciousness, individuality and simply the joy of being alive are completely left out when viewing it from such an angle.

So yeah, you're saying there's a soul. We could have saved a fuckton of time if you'd just said that. Everything else you're saying stems from that. We're imagining a system where consciousness is fully capable of being duplicated. So self-awareness? Duplicated at the same time. Individuality? Same, though with caveats if you make multiple copies. "The joy of being alive"? Pretty sure a clone of me with all my memories is as happy as I am about being alive. Self-preservation? I mean, sure, I don't want to die, which is why i made a copy of my memories, because my consciousness is me.

e: If it makes you feel better, pretend the stack copies whatever that extra bit of a "person" that you can't name is. See if it changes any of your responses to anything.

Ravenfood fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Feb 14, 2018

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

General Battuta posted:

You agreed with this yesterday. Why has it taken you so long to get back here today?

You opened this conversation today by saying we didn't understand consciousness and that the identity-safety of a brain upload was a matter of opinion. Are you still holding to those points?

Agreed with what, myself? of course I agree with myself. I'm trying to get you to agree that backups are not actual immortality in the sense most people want. You haven't come around to that yet and I don't see why not.

Those are two conclusions you drew based on what I said, but they are not what I said. When it comes to complex philosophy like this the details are VERY important, you need to be more careful about assuming things.

I never even said the word "identity-safety".

Hammerstein posted:

The end of these functions also leads to the end of the current entity hosting them, aka death. Sure the stored information is now backed up in the clone, but the life of the original host ends. The orignal and the clone may share the same memories, but each is an individual lifeform and not some kind of inter-connected swarm intelligence and I cannot imagine why either of them would be comforted by the idea that their memories live on in another body, because I believe that people generaly consider themselves unique and want to prolong their own existence for as long as possible.

EXACTLY.

Dunno why Battuta doesn't see this.

Hammerstein posted:

Also I sincerly believe, although I'm not religious, that people are more than just some biomass with memories. Of course people risk their lives in often selfless acts, but no one I know would sacrifice himself so that a clone can awaken and take over.

Right.

Personally I don't think there's much more to people than just biomass and memories; but it doesn't change that the original entity in such a scheme would be "dead" while a copy entity would "live". Regardless of soul or no soul.

Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 01:38 on Feb 14, 2018

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Neddy Seagoon posted:

As in actually offworld. Kovacs is from a planet called Harlan's World.

And, as Seagoon explained earlier, there's little reason for people travelling between the Settled Worlds unless they're planet-hopping Meths, elite off-world mercenaries, or, more likely, CTAC.

Neddy Seagoon
Oct 12, 2012

"Hi Everybody!"

Young Freud posted:

And, as Seagoon explained earlier, there's little reason for people travelling between the Settled Worlds unless they're planet-hopping Meths, elite off-world mercenaries, or, more likely, CTAC.

Actually people travel interstellar all the time via needlecast for business or pleasure. Being a Meth has nothing to do with it.

bring back old gbs
Feb 28, 2007

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN
Yeah it's probably like those $25k/flight insane personal-pod-with-a-shower Dubai airlines, but they're all paid for by giant corporations so their deal-making employee can be well rested and comfortable on his way to closing a $15 million deal. The cost of the flight is basically irrelevant if it means your guy is just that much more "in the zone" than the guy from the other company who had to slum it and fly first class.

Tiggum
Oct 24, 2007

Your life and your quest end here.


Zaphod42 posted:

That isn't how you define life.
It isn't how you define it, but I don't think you even know how you define it.

Zaphod42 posted:

Replication isn't the same entity!! I can replicate data but it isn't the same data
Yes it is. Data (or information) is not a physical thing. The sequence 12345 is exactly 100% the same information in your computer as it is in mine. Calling it a "copy" is just a conceptual convenience, not a fact of reality.

Zaphod42 posted:

If you get alzheimer's, information is lost. Are you dead?
Yeah, pretty much. The person you were no longer exists.

Zaphod42 posted:

Life is a process, not information.
What do you think the difference is?

Hammerstein posted:

The end of these functions also leads to the end of the current entity hosting them, aka death.
OK, so you both clearly believe in souls. You're not calling them souls, but they're functionally identical, ie. a part of you that contains your "true self" and affects but is not affected by the physical world. And if there are souls then of course we don't know whether a clone is you unless we can find out whether or not it contains your soul.

But in the fictional world of Altered Carbon, there are no souls.

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.
No, I just went out of my way to say

Zaphod42 posted:

Personally I don't think there's much more to people than just biomass and memories; but it doesn't change that the original entity in such a scheme would be "dead" while a copy entity would "live". Regardless of soul or no soul.

I do not believe in souls and you do not need souls for death to still happen. I did add that comment though so maybe you missed it.

Tiggum posted:

Yes it is. Data (or information) is not a physical thing. The sequence 12345 is exactly 100% the same information in your computer as it is in mine. Calling it a "copy" is just a conceptual convenience, not a fact of reality.

It depends upon what you're talking about. If you're talking about a number, then yeah, those numbers are equivalent. But there's also a RAM address holding that value, and when you replicate it, it doesn't have the same RAM address so it isn't the same entity.

As we've said all along; from the perspective of the outside world you don't die. That works fine. The question is and always has been, do instances of yourself still experience dying, something uncomfortable or undesirable to them? And the answer is yes! Cloning yourself or replicating yourself creates 2 versions of the thing, you can't have the same 1 thing be 2 things at once. If one of them dies, it dies. It doesn't merge in with the other one. Death still happens. Its a loophole that allows "you" to still live, but the you-entity that had the brain scan done is dead as a doornail whether or not another instance of you exists.

You can say the new instance and old instance are identical, but its a different process so its a different life.

Again again, you could have a theoretical technology which doesn't copy but does a move. But SOMA and Altered Carbon both do a copy, they are clear about how this works. Copies means death still happens. That's that.

If its possible to have 2 versions of yourself conscious and alive at the same time, then they cannot be the same entity. They're 2 separate entities. And one of them dies.

esperterra
Mar 24, 2010

SHINee's back




oh my goooooooooood

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.
To me knowing that my brain-scan will live on is about as satisfying as knowing that my twin brother will live on after my death. Its nice, but you're still gonna die.

Neddy Seagoon
Oct 12, 2012

"Hi Everybody!"

Tiggum posted:

Yes it is. Data (or information) is not a physical thing. The sequence 12345 is exactly 100% the same information in your computer as it is in mine. Calling it a "copy" is just a conceptual convenience, not a fact of reality.

Oh dear christ. Yes, it is. Anyone who's worked with a computer can tell you that. It is engraved on a hard drive platter, or stored as flipped gates in an SSD. A Cut/Paste operation reads the stored data to copy it to another source then deletes the original. There is no singular transference of data.

Tiggum
Oct 24, 2007

Your life and your quest end here.


Zaphod42 posted:

No, I just went out of my way to say
Yes, you say you don't believe in souls, but then you go on to describe the thing that you do believe in which exactly fits the definition of a soul.

Zaphod42 posted:

It depends upon what you're talking about. If you're talking about a number, then yeah, those numbers are equivalent. But there's also a RAM address holding that value, and when you replicate it, it doesn't have the same RAM address so it isn't the same entity.
By that argument, if I move my chair 3cm to the left it's now a different chair.

Zaphod42 posted:

The question is and always has been, do instances of yourself still experience dying, something uncomfortable or undesirable to them?
The answer is "not unless they have a soul" because you can't "experience dying" unless you have a soul because dying means ceasing to exist.

Zaphod42 posted:

It doesn't merge in with the other one.
No one is arguing that anything is "merging". You keep bringing it up as a counterargument but it doesn't relate to anything anyone else is saying.

Zaphod42 posted:

Its a loophole that allows "you" to still live, but the you-entity that had the brain scan done is dead as a doornail whether or not another instance of you exists.

You can say the new instance and old instance are identical, but its a different process so its a different life.
See, there it is! When you use the word "entity" or "process" you're talking about some non-physical part of a person that defines them as an individual and affects but is not affected by the physical world. Or to put it another way, a soul.

In a purely physical world there is no "entity". The "process" is just the consequences of physical conditions, and if the same physical conditions are replicated then the same consequences (or process) results. Not a similar but fundamentally different process, the same process.

Tiggum
Oct 24, 2007

Your life and your quest end here.


Neddy Seagoon posted:

Oh dear christ. Yes, it is. Anyone who's worked with a computer can tell you that. It is engraved on a hard drive platter, or stored as flipped gates in an SSD. A Cut/Paste operation reads the stored data to copy it to another source then deletes the original. There is no singular transference of data.

The data is represented in a physical medium. The data itself is not the medium.

EmptyVessel
Oct 30, 2012

esperterra posted:

oh my goooooooooood

:same:

Ravenfood
Nov 4, 2011

Zaphod42 posted:

but the you-entity that had the brain scan done is dead as a doornail whether or not another instance of you exists.
Only in the sense that "you" are constantly dying because who you were two seconds ago isn't the same person as you are now. Unless you're bringing a mysterious "process" into it that you won't explain.

Neddy Seagoon
Oct 12, 2012

"Hi Everybody!"

Tiggum posted:

The data is represented in a physical medium. The data itself is not the medium.

Yes, it is. "Data" is the position of the logic gate, set by reading another logic gate and duplicating it. There is no singular "data" entity moving, you idiot. Information is only observed and replicated.

Tell you what, go crack open a hard drive and see how much 'data' falls out and how much stays in the drive platters.

bring back old gbs
Feb 28, 2007

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Zaphod42 posted:

To me knowing that my brain-scan will live on is about as satisfying as knowing that my twin brother will live on after my death. Its nice, but you're still gonna die.
That's up to the author of the specific sci fi universe since we're discussing spirituality at this point. In Star Trek you'd be correct, you die and get replaced by a clone with the exact same memories and experiences as you up to the immeasurable moment in time when the teleportation occurs. The "you" on the planet dies but the "you" on the ship is alive.

Since you don't experience dying and the clone on the ship has no recollection of the teleportation, from the perspective of the teleported life form it was instantaneous teleportation from one location to another with complete coherence of thought. If you or your clone experienced the dying in any way those memories would be in some way transferred to the clone and you'd probably get more and more insane with each teleportation as the deaths compounded, because that has to be pretty drat traumatizing being splintered to the quantum winds every time you did an away mission and remembering how that felt.

Which is probably a neat concept for a black mirror episode.

bring back old gbs fucked around with this message at 02:40 on Feb 14, 2018

Noctone
Oct 25, 2005

XO til we overdose..

Zaphod42 posted:

Agreed. When its fully ripping off Blade Runner it looks good but it doesn't seem to have as much substance behind the style.

The AVClub review called out the scenes as being kinda hollow and similar. Where in Blade Runner each scene had a distinct tone that really sold you on its purpose, lots of details and clutter.

Still, its a TV show and I'm surprised the budget was as high as it apparently was. We're lucky that it didn't look more like Farscape.


God drat nerds love :jerkbag: over how good they are at watching TV. Its loving TV dude its not a skill, its not something to brag about or wave your dick around over.

Its actually a valid point. Yeah, yeah, her apartment is underground because everything is "overcrowded" and space is "hard to come by". Except Poe's empty hotel that hasn't had guests in years has no problem paying rent? How does that work.

The fact is lots of the sets feel kinda same-y, I think its the lighting.

lol I’m not saying I’m smart, I’m saying you’re dumb. So much of the show is “show not tell” and you clearly didn’t see anything. You also completely missed my point. There are important characterization reasons for the state of her apartment.

e: also lmao what in the hell gives you the idea that Poe pays rent? Who would he pay rent to? He is the hotel.

Noctone fucked around with this message at 03:14 on Feb 14, 2018

misguided rage
Jun 15, 2010

:shepface:God I fucking love Diablo 3 gold, it even paid for this shitty title:shepface:

Zaphod42 posted:


EXACTLY.

Dunno why Battuta doesn't see this.
Probably because that's a very very stupid way of looking at it. Especially in the world of the show.

Tiggum
Oct 24, 2007

Your life and your quest end here.


Neddy Seagoon posted:

Yes, it is. "Data" is the position of the logic gate, set by reading another logic gate and duplicating it. There is no singular "data" entity moving, you idiot. Information is only observed and replicated.

Tell you what, go crack open a hard drive and see how much 'data' falls out and how much stays in the drive platters.
Data is not a physical thing. It doesn't exist. A vertical line is not the number one, it is a representation of the number one. The number one is the number one no matter how or where it's represented. The magnetic patterns on a disk are not data, they are the representation of data in a physical medium.

Neddy Seagoon
Oct 12, 2012

"Hi Everybody!"

Noctone posted:

lol I’m not saying I’m smart, I’m saying you’re dumb. So much of the show is “show not tell” and you clearly didn’t see anything. You also completely missed my point. There are important characterization reasons for the state of her apartment.

This is actually true. Ortega explicitly states she's not done unpacking her poo poo because the apartment is meant to be shared with Ryker and she wanted to do it with him.

General Battuta
Feb 7, 2011

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Zaphod42 posted:

Agreed with what, myself? of course I agree with myself. I'm trying to get you to agree that backups are not actual immortality in the sense most people want. You haven't come around to that yet and I don't see why not.

Because it's not true. It's not hard to design a backup scheme in which you don't leave any forks behind to die - for example, get a full structural scan off your body while unconscious, start running a digital fork, and euthanize the body before it wakes up. You can't call this 'dying' any more than you call your day to day life dying: in the act of typing your response to this post you've overwritten yourself with slightly new brainstates uncountable times.

It is possible for a backup scheme to fail to prevent a future fork from experiencing death, for example if you scanned your brain and the meat fork then walked out and got hit by a car: but since nobody has claimed otherwise there doesn't seem to be a point arguing it. The fact that you're agreeing with Hammerstein about anything is what I want to dig at, since that suggests you don't fully understand the facts here.

quote:

Those are two conclusions you drew based on what I said, but they are not what I said. When it comes to complex philosophy like this the details are VERY important, you need to be more careful about assuming things.

I never even said the word "identity-safety".

The more time you spend trying to parrot my words or quibble over exact definitions, the less you have to say for yourself. You are centrally concerned with identity safety. Allow me to quote what you said after writing this.

Zaphod42 posted:

To me knowing that my brain-scan will live on is about as satisfying as knowing that my twin brother will live on after my death. Its nice, but you're still gonna die.

quote:

As we've said all along; from the perspective of the outside world you don't die. That works fine. The question is and always has been, do instances of yourself still experience dying, something uncomfortable or undesirable to them? And the answer is yes! Cloning yourself or replicating yourself creates 2 versions of the thing, you can't have the same 1 thing be 2 things at once. If one of them dies, it dies. It doesn't merge in with the other one. Death still happens. Its a loophole that allows "you" to still live, but the you-entity that had the brain scan done is dead as a doornail whether or not another instance of you exists.

You can say the new instance and old instance are identical, but its a different process so its a different life.

You are concerned that in the following situation:

You go into a room to get a brain scan. You are sedated and your brain is scanned. Your brain function is frozen at the moment of the scan and your body is vaporized. Your brain scan is activated in a computer, exactly where it left off.

that you would 'still experience dying'. You are afraid that you are now 'dead as a doornail' and that 'another instance of you' has taken over. In short, you are afraid that this identity is not safe. Yet this is clearly untrue. There is no diverging fork, no one to leave the room and get hit by a car; no information has been lost. This is no different from your conscious experience on a day to day basis.

Why are you afraid that this would kill you? Can anyone here be said to 'die'? Can you articulate a reason to distinguish 'original' from 'copy' from the first-person, subjective point of view (without invoking someone else's perspective)?

Hammerstein posted:

The end of these functions also leads to the end of the current entity hosting them, aka death. Sure the stored information is now backed up in the clone, but the life of the original host ends. The orignal and the clone may share the same memories, but each is an individual lifeform and not some kind of inter-connected swarm intelligence

Why? Can you articulate why an entity dies in your proposed scenario of "lie down, get scanned, vaporize, scan implanted in new body"? Do not use the circular 'because they die'; define death. It cannot be because of the loss of bulk matter, because all matter of the same type is equivalent. One carbon molecule is as good as another. What, then, is being lost when the body is vaporized? What has died? Answer this question and you can prove your point; but it cannot be answered affirmatively, because nothing is being lost.

quote:

Also I sincerly believe, although I'm not religious, that people are more than just some biomass with memories. Of course people risk their lives in often selfless acts, but no one I know would sacrifice himself so that a clone can awaken and take over.

This is all well and good, but belief is irrelevant. Objectively people are made of matter organized into structure. Since individual particles or atoms cannot contain information specific to an individual (they are all alike), the individual's existence must be encoded in the relationship between the matter in the body. A person is matter arranged into a pattern, and the specific matter involved is irrelevant. This definition includes self-preservation, self-awareness, consciousness, individuality, and the joy of being alive: these are all the results of operations conducted in the material brain.

This is a fact. It is unavailable to dispute on the grounds of belief.

Big props to Tiggum for bein right about everything and don't forget disinterested bystanders you can always put users on ignore!

esperterra
Mar 24, 2010

SHINee's back




If I could put people on ignore on a thread by thread basis I would. Otherwise I refuse to potentially miss out on good cringe comedy by using the ignore function!

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


the level of bullshit semantics is reaching staggeringly high levels itt

wellwhoopdedooo
Nov 23, 2007

Pound Trooper!
i mean come on, somebody having an existential crisis right here in this thread is just too perfect.

Hey dummy. You’re religious. Learn to be comfortable wirh “I don’t know” before you go off the deep end.

EmptyVessel
Oct 30, 2012

dead comedy forums posted:

the level of bullshit semantics is reaching staggeringly high levels itt

Buttressed by generous piles of unproven assumptions.

bring back old gbs
Feb 28, 2007

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

dead comedy forums posted:

the level of bullshit semantics is reaching staggeringly high levels itt

really though? what is high to you? personally i believe high is an indeterminable distance and high isn't high, it's actually Really Far Up. Really Far Up is a different thing, it means something that is far up so you cant reach it because it is above your head.

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

Tiggum posted:

See, there it is! When you use the word "entity" or "process" you're talking about some non-physical part of a person that defines them as an individual and affects but is not affected by the physical world. Or to put it another way, a soul.

In a purely physical world there is no "entity". The "process" is just the consequences of physical conditions, and if the same physical conditions are replicated then the same consequences (or process) results. Not a similar but fundamentally different process, the same process.

No! It doesn't have to be a soul. You have 2 different things. What do you call those things? What do you call each different "version" of a double-sleeve? They're both people who have the memories of being that person up to the point they were double-sleeved, but its not right to call them the same thing, the same entity, the same version. Whatever you call them to separate them, THAT exists, regardless of a soul. They're not the same thing!

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

Noctone posted:

e: also lmao what in the hell gives you the idea that Poe pays rent? Who would he pay rent to? He is the hotel.

It doesn't have to be rent per se, but if the building is worth untold billions of dollars of money why is poe sitting around with the hotel an not like, cash it in and run some other mega-business. He could be a meth!

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

General Battuta posted:

Why are you afraid that this would kill you? Can anyone here be said to 'die'? Can you articulate a reason to distinguish 'original' from 'copy' from the first-person, subjective point of view (without invoking someone else's perspective)?


Why? Can you articulate why an entity dies in your proposed scenario of "lie down, get scanned, vaporize, scan implanted in new body"? Do not use the circular 'because they die'; define death. It cannot be because of the loss of bulk matter, because all matter of the same type is equivalent. One carbon molecule is as good as another. What, then, is being lost when the body is vaporized? What has died? Answer this question and you can prove your point; but it cannot be answered affirmatively, because nothing is being lost.

Because when you double-sleeve there's two different consciousnesses! That alone proves it, like I said long ago. That proves there's 2. If there's 2, you don't somehow go back to having 1. The only way to go from 2 to 1 is for one of them to die.

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

General Battuta posted:

Because it's not true. It's not hard to design a backup scheme in which you don't leave any forks behind to die - for example, get a full structural scan off your body while unconscious, start running a digital fork, and euthanize the body before it wakes up. You can't call this 'dying' any more than you call your day to day life dying: in the act of typing your response to this post you've overwritten yourself with slightly new brainstates uncountable times.

This just means your original died in its unconscious sleep. Which is preferable to a painful death, but is still death.

You can call this dying more than your day to day life because maintaining a flow of brainstates isn't the same as euthanizing a brainstate to nothing. You just used the word "euthanize" yourself! That means killing!

There Bias Two
Jan 13, 2009
I'm not a good person

So I just finished this show and I have really mixed feelings about it. It was definitely fun, but a lot of the elements fell completely flat for me. I wasn't sold on the whole idea of the envoys trying to destroy stack technology. What about the Meths makes them any worse than regular ol' privileged psychopaths? It seems stupid to attack a tool when clearly the main issues were socioeconomic ones.

Besides with the existing biotechnology, they'd probably develop an alternative system in just a few years.

Tak's whole backstory in general was a mess here.

General Battuta
Feb 7, 2011

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Zaphod42 posted:

This just means your original died in its unconscious sleep. Which is preferable to a painful death, but is still death.

You can call this dying more than your day to day life because maintaining a flow of brainstates isn't the same as euthanizing a brainstate to nothing. You just used the word "euthanize" yourself! That means killing!

But the brainstate isn't euthanized to nothing. It is preserved and carries on. The body is euthanized; the body is not the brainstate. It's a substrate for holding the brainstate. We established that when we proved that repairing wounds or swapping out matter doesn't kill you.

Stop worrying about the case of two separate forks after a backup/teleport/whatever. Nobody is contending that if one died it would magically migrate to the other.

There Bias Two posted:

So I just finished this show and I have really mixed feelings about it. It was definitely fun, but a lot of the elements fell completely flat for me. I wasn't sold on the whole idea of the envoys trying to destroy stack technology. What about the Meths makes them any worse than regular ol' privileged psychopaths? It seems stupid to attack a tool when clearly the main issues were socioeconomic ones.

Besides with the existing biotechnology, they'd probably develop an alternative system in just a few years.

Tak's whole backstory in general was a mess here.

You would probably like the books better, where the problem is capitalism, not stacks (stacks are seen as an enabler for really lovely immortal capitalists, but not inherently evil) and the Envoys are a UN Protectorate anti-insurgency group that Takashi leaves in disgust.

bring back old gbs
Feb 28, 2007

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Zaphod42 posted:

It doesn't have to be rent per se, but if the building is worth untold billions of dollars of money why is poe sitting around with the hotel an not like, cash it in and run some other mega-business. He could be a meth!

That's interesting, because the Carnage guy was a human stack in a shoddy android body.

So in theory could Poe(or AI in general) be transferred to a stack/stack-like interface and put in a meat+bones clone?

bring back old gbs fucked around with this message at 04:23 on Feb 14, 2018

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Ravenfood
Nov 4, 2011

Zaphod42 posted:

No! It doesn't have to be a soul. You have 2 different things. What do you call those things? What do you call each different "version" of a double-sleeve? They're both people who have the memories of being that person up to the point they were double-sleeved, but its not right to call them the same thing, the same entity, the same version. Whatever you call them to separate them, THAT exists, regardless of a soul. They're not the same thing!

The thing that would separate them is different experiences. Until they have those, they would be the same set of consciousness that I am choosing to call a person. They would therefore both be the same person. Choosing to call one a "copy" is wholly arbitrary and is convenience.


Zaphod42 posted:

Because when you double-sleeve there's two different consciousnesses! That alone proves it, like I said long ago. That proves there's 2. If there's 2, you don't somehow go back to having 1. The only way to go from 2 to 1 is for one of them to die.
If you read what he says, there isn't an instance of double-sleeving in his question. At no point are there two consciousnesses "alive" simultaneously.

e:

bring back old gbs posted:

That's interesting, because the Carnage guy was a human stack in a shoddy android body.

So in theory could Poe(or AI in general) be transferred to a stack/stack-like interface and put in a meat+bones clone?
Maybe, depends on how AI function/exist/work and interface with stacks. I'd imagine it'd be a lot easier to design a synth body that could house an AI instead of trying to make a bunch of connections between however AI works and brain/body functions.

Ravenfood fucked around with this message at 04:27 on Feb 14, 2018

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