|
Zaphod42 posted:According to Battuta's logic booting up 2 people with the same state would mean one person would be experiencing both because "you" are instantly anywhere that your state exists.
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 08:59
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 19, 2024 09:42 |
|
|
bring back old gbs posted:In the book does the daughter get caught in her mothers sleeve by Kovaks? Because that made resleeving seem pretty pedestrian, even if they are rich. More like a high end designer dress or sports car. Nooope, that's all the series doing and its "Look, we are like Caligula's orgies, morals are for poors" bullshit. Ravenfood posted:That's the cheap, illegal way to double-sleeve. IIRC, the conceit is that for some reason storing stack information in a way that can be used as a backup is difficult and takes a ton of memory, but for some reason stacks don't. My point was more that even d.h.f. isn't a straight transfer, it's a copy and delete. Storing stack information requires sensitive archival media and all the maintenance that goes into that. It's less that you're storing it on a hard drive, more that it needs to in be a thermal-regulated vault to sit for the foreseeable future. Stacks are just state memory SSD's. And yes, you can totally double-sleeve with any private resleeving facility. Miriam Bancroft uses her own island for self-indulgent orgies with lucky guests, remember. The tricky part is not to get caught or it's a mandatory Erasure. No questions, no bargains, you and your double get your stacks fed to an electromagnet.
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 09:03
|
|
|
Altered Carbon sides with the view that Bancroft killed himself and erased his current mind-state from existence permanently. However, it also suggests that backup-Bancroft will go on experiencing life as if he was the original Bancroft who went on a drinking bender for two days and did awful unthinkable things, a description not far from reality. Altered Carbon also takes the view that Takeshi Kovacs and his resleeved double are identically the same person, with equal standing and even equal protection under the law that is indifferent to which one is deleted. One must experience a full death, yeah, but that's a consequence of double-sleeving that the two discuss right from the start. In both situations it's acknowledged up front that the copy has died and completely ceased consciousness, and that it's an unfortunate, undesirable and scary outcome. In both situations there is no fundamental distinction between the original and the copy, both are treated as equivalent if divergent mindsets. Nobody is claiming that consciousness would jump from one copy to the other. What we are saying is that a copy is functionally identical to what I experience to the point that it may as well be me at an equal level. At no point does Kovacs think "well I'm the original, gently caress if I'm gonna die for some copy," he understands that the "copy" is as much Takeshi Kovacs as he is. There's no big deal made out of being the original, there's nothing that makes the original more valuable. So what's really at question is whether consciousness can be preserved across the transfer of mediums. And because this is sci-fi there's no reason philosophically to say that it couldn't be. Death is scary, it's scary to think you could be shut off and then never come back on again, but there are a billion ways you could test out and establish a technology that could move consciousness out of somebody without any perceptual change in a way that would safely satisfy everybody. If my perception is that I have gone instantly from being a meat person on Mars to a different meat person on Earth, then there's no reason to worry about whether some first person was left to die in a bag of meat and I'm just some ghostly digital clone. The Ninth Layer fucked around with this message at 09:36 on Feb 14, 2018 |
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 09:29
|
|
|
Ravenfood posted:No, they're not the same state the instant they're both active simultaneously. Bancroft died, yes, I said so earlier in the thread, but Kovacs meets and talks to someone who is incredibly close to Bancroft. From the perspective of everyone who did not interact with Bancroft after the backup but before the RD (including the backup) the backup is indistinguishable from Bancroft, except for a memory hole. Yeah and I said long ago that Bancroft is identical for everybody external to him. That was never in question. Battuta literally said "you" are anywhere your state is, so that's what I'm disproving. You apparently agree that he is wrong. The Ninth Layer posted:What we are saying is that a copy is functionally identical to what I experience to the point that it may as well be me at an equal level. At no point does Kovacs think "well I'm the original, gently caress if I'm gonna die for some copy," he understands that the "copy" is as much Takeshi Kovacs as he is. There's no big deal made out of being the original, there's nothing that makes the original more valuable. That's not the point though. Of course they're functionally identical! Kovacs understands the copy is a legitimate him, yes, absolutely, that was never in argument. But someone, one of them, has to die. That's the point. Probably a big game of telephone going on here where Battuta says something crazy, I try to refute it, then you start arguing with what I said out of context... Also you do have to consider what I was just saying though Zaphod42 posted:I guess you could argue that while Bancroft and Double-Sleeves are copies, that otherwise everything in Altered Carbon is a transfer, and that backups are a special read-only operation separate and completely different from normal needlecasting. Also Battuta has this weird thing where he doesn't really believe in consciousness and keeps insisting "you" would be anywhere your brain state would be which makes no sense if you can double-sleeve but he just barks "shannon entropy!".
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 09:47
|
|
|
The Ninth Layer posted:So what's really at question is whether consciousness can be preserved across the transfer of mediums. And because this is sci-fi there's no reason philosophically to say that it couldn't be. Death is scary, it's scary to think you could be shut off and then never come back on again, but there are a billion ways you could test out and establish a technology that could move consciousness out of somebody without any perceptual change in a way that would safely satisfy everybody. If my perception is that I have gone instantly from being a meat person on Mars to a different meat person on Earth, then there's no reason to worry about whether some first person was left to die in a bag of meat and I'm just some ghostly digital clone. I've literally posted like 5 times in this thread "you could theoretically transfer consciousness with technology. However what SOMA and Altered Carbon go out of their way to demonstrate is that in their worlds they are making copies, not transfers" People believing its a transfer doesn't mean it isn't a copy. In both cases, actually. E: And again, the real issue is Battuta insisting that it doesn't even matter if its a copy, because you're the same "you" so you somehow never actually die, especially in SOMA where they explicitly said that you are copied not transferred and that sucks, not a good thing. Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 09:54 on Feb 14, 2018 |
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 09:49
|
|
|
bring back old gbs posted:That's sort of what I was getting at. Could an olympic athlete sell a copy of their skills, or pro skateboarder sell his new trick for $14.99? Could you buy a P-90X routine from a huge guy in an infomercial that was his entire memory of correctly learned exercises and food prep routines? Or would you get his roid rage / general distemper along with it? So, really minor spoiler from book 3, not worth blacking out: Tak meets a person on Harlan’s World who is a 13 year old clone sleeve working in a surf shack (The World has amazing waves it’s a thing). The deal with this guy is, he lives in this sleeve and surfs in it more or less constantly, building up the muscle memory for surfing in it. At a prearranged time, the “rich aristo” who comes around now and again to catch some waves and check on his investment trades the guy his 30 year old pampered aristo sleeve for the young super-muscle memory surfer sleeve. Works out for everybody. It’s basically the sleeve gig economy.
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 10:17
|
|
|
Zaphod42 posted:I've literally posted like 5 times in this thread "you could theoretically transfer consciousness with technology. However what SOMA and Altered Carbon go out of their way to demonstrate is that in their worlds they are making copies, not transfers" I don't think we know enough either about how consciousness actually works or about how AC's tech works to say definitely they are copy tech and not transfer tech. Certainly you could design a number of scenarios to test out that would prove one way or the other that a consciousness was transferred rather than copies to one place and erased from another. Also any system where you could transfer would also be able to copy, so the mere existence of copies doesn't prove that transferring is impossible. Copying mind-states raises a bunch of ethical concerns (Black Mirror scenarios) and anyway you're right that a copy doesn't prevent me from drowning at the bottom of the sea, or one Kovacs from eating a bullet and facing oblivion. But Battuta is right that a "copy" of you is still you, a backup of Bancroft is still Bancroft, Reileen's backup is still Reileen, and that's still an existence.
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 10:22
|
|
|
Neddy Seagoon posted:If you want to take the Altered Carbon example, consider this; Battuta's concepts would explicitly prevent Double-Sleeving. I love the bit in Book 2 where someone is arguing that because the humans only got to space because we found the Martians’ maps and “we don’t belong here,” Kovacs’ response is: well, save up for a needlecast to Earth. Place is a loving shithole, but we sure as poo poo belong there. I thought it was pretty funny.
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 10:28
|
|
|
The Ninth Layer posted:I don't think we know enough either about how consciousness actually works or about how AC's tech works to say definitely they are copy tech and not transfer tech. Certainly you could design a number of scenarios to test out that would prove one way or the other that a consciousness was transferred rather than copies to one place and erased from another. Also any system where you could transfer would also be able to copy, so the mere existence of copies doesn't prove that transferring is impossible. I have explained exactly how any form of transfer technology works to you multiple times. Even AC's explicitly works this way. The Ninth Layer posted:Copying mind-states raises a bunch of ethical concerns (Black Mirror scenarios) and anyway you're right that a copy doesn't prevent me from drowning at the bottom of the sea, or one Kovacs from eating a bullet and facing oblivion. But Battuta is right that a "copy" of you is still you, a backup of Bancroft is still Bancroft, Reileen's backup is still Reileen, and that's still an existence. A copy of you is not you, it is their own entity with delusions of self-identity drawn from their own memories. You are still dead. It is A Laurens Bancroft, Battuta insists that any instance is the immutable Laurens Bancroft. navyjack posted:I love the bit in Book 2 where someone is arguing that because the humans only got to space because we found the Martians’ maps and “we don’t belong here,” Kovacs’ response is: well, save up for a needlecast to Earth. Place is a loving shithole, but we sure as poo poo belong there. I thought it was pretty funny. Speaking of the second book, I really hate how they dumbed down the Songspires into "uh.. Glowy trees... I guess?". The book versions are just red coral-like hollow spires (hence the name) that play music as wind blows across them. And give off a scent like cherries for some reason. Nobody knows if they're alive or not, or really what the hell they even are, because they look like part of the rockface on the surface of Mars, yet they're clearly Martian in some form as they can be found on every Protectorate World. Neddy Seagoon fucked around with this message at 10:54 on Feb 14, 2018 |
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 10:49
|
|
|
The Ninth Layer posted:I don't think we know enough either about how consciousness actually works or about how AC's tech works to say definitely they are copy tech and not transfer tech. Yeah, this is where I land with it. Consciousness itself is fairly impossible to interrogate through science, so arguing “how it works” is kind of absurd. There’s no known material of consciousness, no testable way to prove how it functions or what it is/where it exists, just what is suggested by neurology or biology. There’s no objectively verifiable way to prove that another mind actually has experiences, we just accept that they probably do because it really seems like it. Trying to nitpick the mechanics of consciousness at a granular level seems especially arbitrary in that sense...how would you frame a study to say one way or another? Maybe transfer of consciousness is possible because our souls live in Heaven with Jesus and our brains are merely transmitters there. Or, maybe consciousness is a shared material, the continuous Self is a fiction, and every lost train of thought is the same as dying anyway. Neither is more or less possible to prove. Apologies if this has been asked: do the books explain how interstellar needlecasting works? Because the show seems to suggest that this is an instantaneous process...you are instantly loaded into a local sleeve worlds away. But if DHF is data, you’re kind of still limited by the speed of light. Shouldn’t needlecasting between worlds still take years?
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 12:08
|
|
|
Xealot posted:
Needlecasting in the books is some Martian hyperspace stuff. Stacks were a human invention, but a significant amount of their interstellar technology was from Martian stuff they dug up.
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 12:27
|
|
|
Xealot posted:Apologies if this has been asked: do the books explain how interstellar needlecasting works? Because the show seems to suggest that this is an instantaneous process...you are instantly loaded into a local sleeve worlds away. But if DHF is data, you’re kind of still limited by the speed of light. Shouldn’t needlecasting between worlds still take years? Ugly In The Morning posted:Needlecasting in the books is some Martian hyperspace stuff. Stacks were a human invention, but a significant amount of their interstellar technology was from Martian stuff they dug up. More specifically, they can only manage the power requirements to open tiny windows through hyperspace to other worlds. That's why it's called 'needlecasting'. Also most tech is actually human. Archaeologists can interact with Martian technologies, but it's about the level of mid-series Stargate SG-1 when they were starting to play with their own ships and prototyping tech. They can make Martian tech do stuff, but they can't replicate it or understand the underlying principles. Neddy Seagoon fucked around with this message at 12:37 on Feb 14, 2018 |
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 12:35
|
|
|
Neddy Seagoon posted:More specifically, they can only manage the power requirements to open tiny windows through hyperspace to other worlds. That's why it's called 'needlecasting'. The majority, if not all of the settled worlds had the legwork done by martians, at least. Which led to some issues, like the Orbitals on Harlan’s world.
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 12:51
|
|
|
Ugly In The Morning posted:The majority, if not all of the settled worlds had the legwork done by martians, at least. Which led to some issues, like the Orbitals on Harlan’s world. Just about every world has Martian ruins, but very little of it is actually functional. Or at least archaeologists can't get anything working. Out of thirty-odd worlds with ruins, they've managed to get a monorail working on one world, storm shelters on another, and the Orbitals over Harlan's World have always just been there doing their own thing. The Martian Warship in the second book is a major touchstone find that yields the newer tech in the third book.
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 13:01
|
|
|
bring back old gbs posted:In the book does the daughter get caught in her mothers sleeve by Kovaks? Because that made resleeving seem pretty pedestrian, even if they are rich. More like a high end designer dress or sports car. No. There is something sort of similar, but Bancroft's children are only mentioned and not part of the story. EDIT: The existential dread in this thread is hilarious. Let me lob a couple grenades. Our consciousness is emergent behavior as a result of the running state of a pile of meat and electrochemical processes. We are deterministic machines who's actions are channeled through a lifetime of operant conditioning by external factors. "Free will" is post-hoc rationalization of actions already taken. Getting tied up in "identity of consciousness" is a trap since there's no such thing. A copy of pure fidelity of our run-state is indistinguishable from the "original". There is no faux copy. There is no copy. There is, instead, multiple "you's" that exist in a non-integrated fashion. Both are as valid as the other. Oh, we are also certainly living in a simulation. Proteus Jones fucked around with this message at 15:12 on Feb 14, 2018 |
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 15:03
|
|
|
Is it ever explained how planetary colonies were established in the first place? I get that needlecasting allows ftl travel of a sort, but how'd they put the infrastructure there in the first place? Also, I kept waiting for the revelation that the dangly bits on the alien trees were actually alien stacks. I also expected an alien to pop up in a human stack at some point. Or that the stacks were priming them as hosts for the Elders in some fashion.
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 15:17
|
|
|
semantics and hot takes, this thread delivers in spades
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 15:24
|
|
|
Ravenfood posted: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. Whoa, whoa....hold on there, I said: quote:Also I sincerly believe, although I'm not religious, that people are more than just some biomass with memories. I never said I believe in a soul, only that I won't rule anything out, even if it's the most unlikely of outcomes. But my actual approach is analytical philosophy and the human ability (ok and maybe dolphins and magpies) to be aware of being conscious and of oneself. And this is a field where a myriad of questions are still unanswered. So I would not want to so quickly jump to the conclusion that a human being is just a collection of memories. Also: the original's consciousness in the aforementioned example ended by the time the good doctor shut down your brain and transfered a copy into the clone. The original living, breathing, thinking version of you took a permanent dirtnap. Hammerstein fucked around with this message at 15:36 on Feb 14, 2018 |
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 15:34
|
|
|
JESUS CHRIST. it's space magic, ok? It's all space magic. There, now you both can be happy.
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 15:52
|
|
|
There Bias Two posted:Is it ever explained how planetary colonies were established in the first place? I get that needlecasting allows ftl travel of a sort, but how'd they put the infrastructure there in the first place? They don't in the show. But in the book: Automated colony ships. They'd fly out to the location indicated on the charts found on Mars. It would set up a needlecaster in orbit and then hunker down and observe the planet for several years. Once all the data was analyzed they'd start needlecasting people to the ship which would decant them into sleeves that had been in cryo. The process could take decades. Maybe even centuries.
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 16:07
|
|
|
Neddy Seagoon posted:The basic thing people don't seem to comprehend is that when you transfer data of any kind from one system to another, there is no actual magical data entity moving through the signal to its new home. System A sends instructions to System B for how to write down its own copy of the data. Once transfer is complete and verified, System A deletes the original. That's it. bring back old gbs posted:Is an hour old backup of you a completely different person? Neddy Seagoon posted:You have created a separate entity with delusions of continuity because there is no blip in the perception of the replacement, not actual continuity. Zaphod42 posted:They're not the same "thing". Pick whatever word you want to call that! You seemed to really hate entity, how about version? Zaphod42 posted:Lets say I have 2 USB sticks. I copy the data from one to the other. Does that mean I now only have 1 USB stick? No, there's 2 USB sticks that both hold the same data. And then if I delete one, I still have that data, I haven't lost it, but one USB stick is now empty. Get it? Zaphod42 posted:According to Battuta's logic booting up 2 people with the same state would mean one person would be experiencing both because "you" are instantly anywhere that your state exists. Zaphod42 posted:Like in Bancroft's case, he definitely isn't immortal, right? He died. There's still a Bancroft but he definitely died, the backup wasn't even exactly the same person. The Ninth Layer posted:Nobody is claiming that consciousness would jump from one copy to the other. What we are saying is that a copy is functionally identical to what I experience to the point that it may as well be me at an equal level. If you get blackout drunk and lose an hour's worth of memories you don't consider yourself to have died and a "new you" created from a backup - but that is, in essence, exactly what happened. Zaphod42 posted:Also Battuta has this weird thing where he doesn't really believe in consciousness Hammerstein posted:Also: the original's consciousness in the aforementioned example ended by the time the good doctor shut down your brain and transfered a copy into the clone. The original living, breathing, thinking version of you took a permanent dirtnap.
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 16:14
|
|
|
Uh, you guys are thinking way too hard about what are essentially save points in a video game.
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 16:59
|
|
|
Proteus Jones posted:They don't in the show. Not quite, they went there with stored minds onboard. The only thing needlecasted back was an automated "I have arrived" message and updates. There Bias Two posted:Is it ever explained how planetary colonies were established in the first place? I get that needlecasting allows ftl travel of a sort, but how'd they put the infrastructure there in the first place? Songspires aren't anything beyond eerie things that make music. They're not meant to be terrifying or threatening, just a weird thing. The Martian's are also definitively gone. They're not lurking hidden away, plotting against the weird pink apes arriving on their worlds they are just gone. It's not like people have no idea what they look like either, their corpses are readily found throughout their ruins. Tiggum posted:The thing you don't seem to understand is that data does not physically exist. Representations of data exist, but the representation is not the data. You can't copy or transfer data, you can only represent it in different media. Just what the hell do you think data is?  Tiggum posted:See, this is where you reinvent the soul. You're calling it "consciousness" like Zaphod is, but it has all the properties of a soul. In reality the consciousness didn't "end", it just "transferred". It's literally just a ship of Theseus problem. You cannot "transfer" something at a quantum level; You only act and influence upon other objects by observation or interaction. In this case creating a replicated copy based on a source version. You are still dead on the floor with your clone feeling rather smug about being alive. Zaphod and myself are not talking about a soul either, but the processing regions of the cerebrum, which you glossed right over in your poor cyborging example. If it's not you doing the thinking, it's someone else.
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 17:04
|
|
|
Honestly isn't there a "You Can't Philosophy" thread to have this navel gazing conversation?
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 17:09
|
|
|
Zaphod42 posted:No, this isn't given! You can't just declare this! It is not only written into the laws of the universe, there's no way it could be different. A "different process with identical behavior" is the same process. If somebody assembled atoms in the future a way that perfectly matched your current pattern, you would continue existing. This is exactly what happens to you every day. You continue to exist because there are atoms assembled in the future which carry on the information of your currenet state. Of course there are ways you can fork a consciousness and then allow one of the forks to die. No one has argued otherwise. Zaphod42 posted:The part where Battuta said you euthanize the body. That's where you draw the line. Why? Do you tremble in horror that you are constantly euthanizing your past selves by continuing to exist? Do you look at your poop and shriek in terror? "That used to be me!" Substrate is only important to the extent it encodes information. Neddy Seagoon posted:If you want to take the Altered Carbon example, consider this; Battuta's concepts would explicitly prevent Double-Sleeving. Forking only makes sense if you understand that scans are as valid a method of causal propagation as slouching around in a meatsack. Of course information can be duplicated - that's how the human mind works, by recording information in a physical state. If you don't get that fact, you think one of the double-sleeved Taks is a 'copy' and one is an 'original'. If you understand how forks work, you realize both are genuinely Tak, the OG Real Me born on Harlan's World. Zaphod42 posted:According to Battuta's logic booting up 2 people with the same state would mean one person would be experiencing both because "you" are instantly anywhere that your state exists. For the nth time, no. Once you're done with a fork operation, the two forks are no longer causally connected, and they might as well be separate people. But both are valid causal descendants of whoever sat down to undertake the brain scan/teleport/whatever. There is no difference between a copy and a transfer. Copying is moving. Zaphod42 posted:Yeah and I said long ago that Bancroft is identical for everybody external to him. That was never in question. Bancroft's state 48 hours after he got a backup has diverged from his state when he got the backup. That delta is lost. However, the Bancroft who got backed up now exists again: his state has been recreated. He exists because his state exists. You are proving I am correct. Zaphod42 posted:Also Battuta has this weird thing where he doesn't really believe in consciousness and keeps insisting "you" would be anywhere your brain state would be which makes no sense if you can double-sleeve but he just barks "shannon entropy!". Again, pronounced loudly and slowly. Two forks diverging from a single source differ from each other - they are becoming more and more separate people. They are both valid causal descendants of the person who undertook the fork. If you are confused by large words I can use smaller ones. Zaphod42 posted:I've literally posted like 5 times in this thread "you could theoretically transfer consciousness with technology. However what SOMA and Altered Carbon go out of their way to demonstrate is that in their worlds they are making copies, not transfers" The only difference between a copy and a transfer is whether you leave a fork behind to diverge. That's not a matter of advanced technology, it's a matter of vaporizing or euthanizing the corpse. A copy is a transfer in all other respects. Neddy Seagoon posted:A copy of you is not you, it is their own entity with delusions of self-identity drawn from their own memories. You are still dead. It is A Laurens Bancroft, Battuta insists that any instance is the immutable Laurens Bancroft. By this logic you die every instant of every day. You are only a series of copies creating the illusion of continuity through memory. Any instance of Laurens Bancroft's brain state at time X is genuinely Laurens-Bancroft-at-time-X. There is no 'immutable Laurens Bancroft' because brain states constantly change; identity is not an immutable nugget or a dualist soul, as you seem to imagine. Hammerstein posted:Also: the original's consciousness in the aforementioned example ended by the time the good doctor shut down your brain and transfered a copy into the clone. The original living, breathing, thinking version of you took a permanent dirtnap. Why? If you think this, you must be terrified of your own poop, and while I wouldn't put it past goons, I genuinely don't believe you look at your own discarded substrate and weep in loss that you are flushing your true self down a toilet. Good on all the Clear-Headed Physicalists in this thread who understand how consciousness works.  Shame on all of you saying 'we don't know how consciousness works!' We know enough. It's made of matter. It obeys physical law. That draws a box around the possibilities, and we can talk about what's inside that box.
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 17:12
|
|
|
Neddy Seagoon posted:Just what the hell do you think data is? Physics tells us exactly what data is. It's information. It's a state encoded in a specific arrangement of matter. You can change the elements in that arrangement without altering the data. You can't alter the arrangement without altering the data. e: Tell me where the wizard killed you, you sophist, you coward! General Battuta fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Feb 14, 2018 |
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 17:13
|
|
|
Is it okay to talk about Altered Carbon, in this, the TV Philosophy thread?
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 17:42
|
|
|
I feel the core of the disagreement is how much we should privilege biological continuity. You can say that "you" exist only when you have a continuity of consciousness - but then sleeping, getting knocked out, and losing your train of thought count as "death". The new you when you wake up has just a strong a claim as the copy I made from your brain scan. Obviously once both exist at the same time they become different people (because out of petty vengeance I'm making the copies of you all fight to the death) So maybe we should say that the original is whichever exists in the same substrate - I'm the original because I'm the same flesh and blood as I was when I went to sleep. But this isn't a complete answer - my atoms are not quite the same as they were a week ago, and very different from what they were 10 years ago. So we can't really take biological continuity as the most important thing. And if we do, we have to say why being in the same meat-chassis is so very important - and it's hard to make that argument without getting all mystical and hand-wavey. Neddy Seagoon posted:Nooope, that's all the series doing and its "Look, we are like Caligula's orgies, morals are for poors" bullshit. I really liked that bit, especially the reveal that the rebellious teenage daughter was in her 60s. I didn't take it in an especially sexual way (although its hard to interpret "I'm using my mum's body to gently caress strangers" in a completely non-sexual way), but more like she was stealing her mum's ferraria to go for a joy-ride. It was just a repressed, spoilt child acting out. It would have been extremely weird to have Miriam be permanently mid-20s like in the book, but this is a good middle-ground. Strom Cuzewon fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Feb 14, 2018 |
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 17:43
|
|
|
There Bias Two posted:Is it okay to talk about Altered Carbon, in this, the TV Philosophy thread? Yes, but please respect that some of us have been spun up in VR specifically to post about the philosophy of consciousness.
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 17:43
|
|
|
Another question maybe the book readers have an answer to: Why are people still bothering to use flesh bodies and live in the Real, other than for religious reasons? Usually stories with digitization of consciousness result in hiveminds and VR civilizations, but I don't see much of that here.
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 17:57
|
|
|
There Bias Two posted:Another question maybe the book readers have an answer to: It's a really good question. Why don't they all just go to San Junipero (where heaven is a place on earth?) I get the sense that it's basically for the same reason bitcoins suck. Power is expensive, running VR environments eats up a lot of power, and there's no social safety net to buy everyone who's ever born a nice VR apartment at the end of their lives. Even if you did, imagine the potential for crime and abuse in a world like Altered Carbon. Some crime ring steals your grandma's afterlife to use as a virtual torture space, or holds her hostage for weekly ransoms (forever). We could feed everybody today but due to structural inefficiency we don't. Immortality is probably the same kind of badly tended commons in Tak's world.
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 18:03
|
|
|
There Bias Two posted:Another question maybe the book readers have an answer to:
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 18:03
|
|
|
There Bias Two posted:Another question maybe the book readers have an answer to: I assume you're refering to Blindsight in this. If not - you should totally read Blindsight. Part of the setting has people uploading their minds into a virtual heaven (with their bodies in storage/life-support) and it's seen as the ultimate in giving up, in accepting that you have nothing more to contribute to the world. It also has characters express surprise at someone who only takes their sex in the first-person, instead of doing it all in VR. 95% of the planet are physically virgins.
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 18:13
|
|
|
It's good that General Battuta is posting correct things here and it's sad that people can't quite make the mental leap to agree with him. It's ok to believe in souls, you just have to acknowledge it! Also data is not representation, and the same data can be encoded in many different representations in many different places, whether as magnetic regions on a hard drive or neurons or charge in capacitors or standing sound waves in mercury tubes but it's all the same thing.
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 19:17
|
|
|
There Bias Two posted:Another question maybe the book readers have an answer to: There is a sect/group in the books that do exactly that, but somebody has to keep the lights on, and people mostly treat the idea with a kind of genial contempt.
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 19:46
|
|
|
The Ninth Layer posted:I don't think we know enough either about how consciousness actually works or about how AC's tech works to say definitely they are copy tech and not transfer tech. Certainly you could design a number of scenarios to test out that would prove one way or the other that a consciousness was transferred rather than copies to one place and erased from another. Also any system where you could transfer would also be able to copy, so the mere existence of copies doesn't prove that transferring is impossible. Battuta goes beyond that though. Sounds like you and me are on the same page. But he keeps insisting that you do not die, which is wrong. You die, but you also live on. Ive never said the copy isnt just like you and explixitly said that 6 times now. But there's still the original which dies. And spinning up someone's brain scan is no guarantee its the same consciousness as before. Like you say, its black mirror level horror. A big point in SOMA is that if you spin someone up and talk to them and then delete that and start over and spin them up again, you're killing them over and over and over.
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 21:49
|
|
|
Neddy Seagoon posted:A copy of you is not you, it is their own entity with delusions of self-identity drawn from their own memories. You are still dead. It is A Laurens Bancroft, Battuta insists that any instance is the immutable Laurens Bancroft. Yes, precisely this.
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 21:52
|
|
|
Proteus Jones posted:Our consciousness is emergent behavior as a result of the running state of a pile of meat and electrochemical processes. We are deterministic machines who's actions are channeled through a lifetime of operant conditioning by external factors. "Free will" is post-hoc rationalization of actions already taken. Getting tied up in "identity of consciousness" is a trap since there's no such thing. Even if its indistinguishable that does not mean they're the same thing. That's the point. Its not about identity. Its about death. Its about consciousness and existence. I myself said many times in this thread I don't believe in free will, only agency. You don't need free will for death to exist. You guys keep assuming we're talking about something we aren't. Stop and read what is being said.
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 21:53
|
|
|
Tiggum posted:It doesn't matter what word you use when you just keep describing the concept of a soul. You seem to really hate that word but it's what you're talking about. NO IT IS NOT. A soul is something outside of this universe. I'm not talking about anything outside of this universe. If you have two USB sticks with the same exact data on them, they're still not the same thing. They're not 1 USB stick. They're not the same USB stick, even though they have the same state. Do USB sticks need to have souls to be distinguishable from each other, if the data is identical? NO!
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 21:55
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 19, 2024 09:42 |
|
|
Tiggum posted:You're grossly misrepresenting what Battuta's saying by assuming that he believes in souls, which he clearly does not. I never said he did! You're oversimplifying this problem into a false dichotomy of "soul" or "transfer" and there's a 3rd option, and because you keep refusing to see it you keep telling us over and over that we're talking about souls. WE ARE NOT TALKING ABOUT SOULS. There is more to this problem that you are overlooking!
|
|
#
?
Feb 14, 2018 21:55
|
|