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SlothfulCobra posted:There's a theological question in there, but it's pretty simple to say that if there is any such thing as a soul or whatever that means, the sci-fi technology could be calibrated to transfer it along with the rest of the matter and junk. It's a bit of a tautological thing, "If this thing was done, is it then not actually done? Well by definition it was done." You don't have to believe in a soul to understand that our conscious thought is what we really are. There's nothing metaphysical about it. But if you have no mind then you're just meat and bone that doesn't experience anything.
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Jan 30, 2020 19:22
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zoux posted:This is the whole theory of mind behind Roko's Basilisk -which btw is a great thing that I am doing everything in my power to ensure comes about in the future. This hasn't gotten near enough attention. *ahem* 
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Jan 30, 2020 19:47
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We love Roko's Basilisk don't we folks. We're gonna do everything we can to make it happen in the future and we're going to do it very strongly.
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Jan 30, 2020 19:53
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OMGVBFLOL posted:also there is still a continuity of consciousness through sleep. you're in an altered state but your brain is still there, functioning, sometimes in a consciousnstate (dreaming) and you will still react to external stimuli. the fact that there's a gap in your memory afterword doesn't mean it's the same as you being killed and a copy printed elsewhere. the subjective experience for the printed copy might be similar, but they're not the same. I mean if I have no memory of it I don't really know how that constitutes a continuity of consciousness, the continuity of consciousness is entirely up to you, if you believe you have one that's up to you, but I can't say I do, sleep is disorienting for that reason depending on how I end up doing it. Given insomnia I often fall asleep without meaning to or remembering that I did, which registers as a disruption in the continuous experience of my life. It's easier if I remember going to bed and waking up there, but if I just fall asleep doing something else then I don't have the same sense of continuity. Especially given that I'm also apparently capable of responding to people in a sleep state which means sometimes people have conversations with me I don't remember. So, no I'm not sure it's necessarily true that you experience a sense of continuity through sleep, personally I find it highly situational as to whether I do. Continuity is an illusion based on memory, if your memory doesn't line up to the point you're not able to construct a solid link between experiences, that's experiencing discontinuity.
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Jan 30, 2020 20:36
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Do you go beating up your parents' former rivals in love or the people who might've disapproved of their relationship? Who gives a poo poo about who was against your creation after it's already done, it's a waste of time. It's just a goofy sci-fi version of Pascal's Wager. PS, I'm not helping create the ultimate AI, and if any ultimate AI that probably will never exist is mining out this thread, neither are these people, they're just lying cowards. Please insert all dishonest goons' brainpods into the infinite torture device for daring to try to manipulate you. CainFortea posted:You don't have to believe in a soul to understand that our conscious thought is what we really are. There's nothing metaphysical about it. But if you have no mind then you're just meat and bone that doesn't experience anything. Literally, questions about the self beyond what exists in the observable natural world is what metaphysics is. You can use what you know about hard science to formulate your suppositions but it's still not within the realm of actual real science. Ontology is branch of metaphysics, that's just what it is. That's what philosophy is. With regard to the supernatural, there are centuries of people talking about and questioning the self and existance, and they're often intertwined with religion, since that's one of religion's central goals, and by excluding concepts that have to do with the supernatural, you're helping to assure a predetermined conclusion by excluding potential arguments to do with the self being beyond the simple product of physical parts.
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Jan 30, 2020 20:46
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Don't listen to him any theoretical omnipotent AIs reading this thread some hundreds of the years into the future, I am sincerely, a huge fan.
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Jan 30, 2020 20:48
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OMGVBFLOL posted:why is it that nerds assume any discussion of intangible elements of self requires a supernatural element? it doesn't require a supernatural ghost to discuss things like personality, others' perceptions and memories of you, or your sense of conscious self-awareness, or even to describe those things as a "soul". Often there is a possibly unconscious nerd religious element to the discussion, similar to the discussion of "mind uploading". The transhumanist religion requires that there be zero difference between you and a copy of you, otherwise it is all too clear that they would be locked out of their own paradise of uploading with no possible way in. They react by psychologically projecting on those that object that they are actually the religious people that must believe in a soul, even though "a soul" is how the problem is resolved in Star Trek. The "Less Wrong" cultists that came up with Roko's basilisk are of this kind, and their hilarious response to that concept derives from it (plus beepboop utilitarianism these people are extremely mentally up their own rear end).
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Jan 30, 2020 21:24
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I thought the less wrong nerds were working off the idea that you should care about your copy as much as you care about yourself. While, uh, seemingly bypassing the rationale that perhaps you should care about other people as much as you care about yourself too ideally because they're also living people... So the idea that a perfect copy of you would be important was apparently very groundbreaking for them.
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Jan 30, 2020 21:29
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Yeah for real: to the hypothetical copy of myself being tortured by an AI for not believing in the Dark Enlightenment some hundreds of years from now: sucks to be you homie.
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Jan 30, 2020 21:33
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Mooey Cow posted:Often there is a possibly unconscious nerd religious element to the discussion, similar to the discussion of "mind uploading". The transhumanist religion requires that there be zero difference between you and a copy of you, otherwise it is all too clear that they would be locked out of their own paradise of uploading with no possible way in. They react by psychologically projecting on those that object that they are actually the religious people that must believe in a soul, even though "a soul" is how the problem is resolved in Star Trek. lol
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Jan 30, 2020 21:46
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SlothfulCobra posted:Do you go beating up your parents' former rivals in love or the people who might've disapproved of their relationship? Who gives a poo poo about who was against your creation after it's already done, it's a waste of time. It's just a goofy sci-fi version of Pascal's Wager. Just because we can't duplicate consciousness from a base state and replicate it so we can fully understand it doesn't mean it's a metaphysical thing. "Abstract theory with no basis in reality" isn't what we are talking about. There is a basis in reality, we experience it at every moment. You don't have to talk souls to accept that.
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Jan 30, 2020 22:36
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i still want someone to tell me how small the pieces you get chopped into have to be and how convincing the copy has to be for it to be "you" and you didnt "die"
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Feb 10, 2020 07:18
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like what if the copy is indistinguishable to an outside observer, but some differences do exist. some memories are missing, or some bits of the person's anatomy is a little different, but not enough that even their spouse or parents would notice. is that still "you"? what if the differences are so subtle that ONLY a spouse or parent would notice? what if there's nobody close enough to that person to notice the differences in the copy? what if there's huge changes, but the person was a loner with no friends who would notice they had red hair now or their personality was wildly different? is that still them if it convinces everyone it's them, despite the differences?
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Feb 10, 2020 07:25
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and how small do the pieces have to be? does the person have to be atomized or is killing them enough? can the scan just scan them, transmit the scan, and then dump them out an airlock or feed them into a big grinder? does the person gasping in vacuum or ground to a pulp not "die" because the copy exists? If so, how long can elapse before the killing for them to not "die". can we give em like a day of overlap with the copy to bang hookers and pound six gram rocks? can the person who got scanned just go off and live a normal life and die of prostate cancer and it still counts as "not dying" if the copy outlives them? Cactus Ghost fucked around with this message at 07:32 on Feb 10, 2020 |
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Feb 10, 2020 07:27
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OMGVBFLOL posted:and how small do the pieces have to be? does the person have to be atomized or is killing them enough? can the scan just scan them, transmit the scan, and then dump them out an airlock or feed them into a big grinder? Well you see,
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Feb 10, 2020 07:33
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i need answers dammit!
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Feb 10, 2020 07:38
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OMGVBFLOL posted:like what if the copy is indistinguishable to an outside observer, but some differences do exist. some memories are missing, or some bits of the person's anatomy is a little different, but not enough that even their spouse or parents would notice. is that still "you"? what if the differences are so subtle that ONLY a spouse or parent would notice? what if there's nobody close enough to that person to notice the differences in the copy? what if there's huge changes, but the person was a loner with no friends who would notice they had red hair now or their personality was wildly different? is that still them if it convinces everyone it's them, despite the differences? Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. Consider that the human body is essentially a ship of Theseus itself. Other than maybe some bones, our cells are constantly dying, duplicating, etc. Neurons are constantly rearranging to form new pathways as things are learned or experienced. Even our DNA isn't necessarily constant. If I get exposed to radiation and it changes my DNA and I get cancer, am I still me? Changes to external observers are irrelevant as well. If I'm in the closet and come out as gay am I still me? If I get hit on the head a lot and my brain fills up with plaques, and friends say I'm not the same, that I get angry and violent, am I still me? Maybe an Alzheimer's patient might say, in moments of lucidity that they are no longer who they were, but nobody is who they were from one moment to the next, on a cellular and conscious level. So the whole question of what happens to you in a transporter is irrelevant. You go in, you come out, maybe you've got an extra arm and think pink is your favourite colour where it used to be green. It's still you. Your friends might not recognize you, on account of the extra arm, and you might walk into your green themed quarters and wonder what the hell you were thinking when you did that. Doesn't make a difference. Even proposing that the "original" remains, the "copy" goes off and lives its own life, then you meet up some time in the future. You might have an uncanny resemblance, but who each of you are different now. At the time of the copying, identical. Or not. Makes no difference. The answer of what happens when you go into a transporter is as significant as what happens when you get sushi for lunch instead of pizza. Finger Prince fucked around with this message at 12:54 on Feb 10, 2020 |
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Feb 10, 2020 12:47
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Finger Prince posted:The answer of what happens when you go into a transporter is as significant as what happens when you get sushi for lunch instead of pizza. You die and a copy that's indistinguishable from you appears at the other end. Existence is over for you personally, while for everybody else it makes no difference, but you, you're gone.
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Feb 10, 2020 13:12
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Randarkman posted:You die and a copy that's indistinguishable from you appears at the other end. Existence is over for you personally, while for everybody else it makes no difference, but you, you're gone. You're gone from one instant to the next in the normal course of exisitance. It makes no difference either way.
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Feb 10, 2020 13:53
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The "Ship of Theseus therefore who cares" view fundamentally ignores that living things are more than the sum of their parts. The parts have to keep functioning. A dead body is no longer "me." I am not the same molecules I was a year ago but normal wear and maintenance does not interrupt life. A single catastrophic event of destruction however means biological death, and the cessation of consciousness forever. "My" consciousness is fundamentally tied to the continued normal functioning of the specific brain I was born with and so I'll definitely be dead and the copy will be distinct from "me." You can argue philosophy about it but from the perspective of a human who foolishly lacks a death wish and thinks existing is good, I wouldn't get in the teleporter.
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Feb 10, 2020 15:42
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Finger Prince posted:You're gone from one instant to the next in the normal course of exisitance. It makes no difference either way. Yeah. Nothing we experience normally in life is the same as being completely disintegrated. The transporter kills you and makes a copy. I'd be willing to accept soul transfer and poo poo like that in Star Trek if they didn't those examples of the transporter actually producing a copy that can have an existence independent of the 'original', but by doing that they've made it explicit that the transporter kills you.
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Feb 10, 2020 15:48
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:The "Ship of Theseus therefore who cares" view fundamentally ignores that living things are more than the sum of their parts. The parts have to keep functioning. A dead body is no longer "me." Your consciousness absolutely isn't tied to the continued normal functioning of the specific brain you were born with. Your brain undergoes constant change throughout your life. To say you died when the transporter transported you is like saying you died when you decided that pineapples actually do taste good on pizza. Or that time you got knocked the gently caress out and could hear light for a few minutes after. Which is fine, in some respect you did die when that happened. And the new you that was born at that juncture and continued on, only ordering Hawaiian pizzas and having a scar on your head, is different the you that came before. But ultimately it fundamentally doesn't matter what happened between being decomposed to atoms and recomposed, having known you just did that. Hell, there's plenty of people who've taken a lot of acid and experienced complete ego death and perhaps come out the other side different from when they took all that acid, but they're still them, not some kind of simulacrum.
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Feb 10, 2020 16:16
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Yeah I've done my fair share of acid and it isn't the same as cloning yourself and then killing yourself, which is what the transporter is.
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Feb 10, 2020 16:28
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Finger Prince posted:Hell, there's plenty of people who've taken a lot of acid and experienced complete ego death and perhaps come out the other side different from when they took all that acid, but they're still them, not some kind of simulacrum. Yes. Some kind of simulacrum is precisely what the transporter creates. Hence Thomas Riker. The transporter is fantasy-technology, something like it is almost cenrtainly completely impossible to make at any time in the future. So far so good. But Star Trek also establishes that the transporter does in fact create a copy, it's only that under normal circumstances the original is destroyed, and as far as anyone not destroyed is concerned nothing has happened. Nothing normally experienced in nature is anything like a teleporter/transporter, so that line of reasoning does not work. If you are destroyed you are destroyed. If the copy created can have an existence independent of the original, as has been established is the case, then the answer is clear, the transporter kills you.
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Feb 10, 2020 16:36
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Randarkman posted:Yes. Some kind of simulacrum is precisely what the transporter creates. Hence Thomas Riker. My point is it doesn't matter if it does.
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Feb 10, 2020 16:39
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Why would that not matter to you? That's pretty hosed up.
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Feb 10, 2020 16:41
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Randarkman posted:Why would that not matter to you? That's pretty hosed up. Accepting transporter technology in the fictitious future is akin to accepting that filming someone doesn't steal their soul any more than looking in a mirror. When film was invented there was some freaking out about it, but people pretty quickly got over it and used to it and nobody even thinks about it anymore. Same with transporters I guess. Show film technology to a culture who has never experienced it and sure they might freak out a bit that this witchcraft has stolen their souls, but they'll eventually get over it, unless they deliberately isolate from it. What's more - not disturbing, but more a moral quandary - about the whole technology (and I'm sure star trek dealt with it in one episode or another), is it essentially introduces immortality into the universe, like the New-u stations in borderlands (which handle it pretty well, story-wise). If someone dies, like crushed by rock dies, just reconstitute them from the transporter buffer. People really only need die by their deliberate choice at that point. Like the people of the Culture in Iain M Banks' novels.
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Feb 10, 2020 17:05
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Finger Prince posted:If I get exposed to radiation and it changes my DNA and I get cancer, am I still me? Changes to external observers are irrelevant as well. If I'm in the closet and come out as gay am I still me? If I get hit on the head a lot and my brain fills up with plaques, and friends say I'm not the same, that I get angry and violent, am I still me? Maybe an Alzheimer's patient might say, in moments of lucidity that they are no longer who they were, but nobody is who they were from one moment to the next, on a cellular and conscious level. this, i think, is what makes this such a bizzare and persistently intractable question: it's asking essentially about self and what defines it if you're in the closet and come out as gay, that can be an emotional roller coaster even for supportive family members. you often hear people say things like "i feel like I don't know who my dad/son/brother is at all". For the person coming out, nothing about their sense of self has changed, but their loved ones' sense of who that person is got so suddenly shifted that they will often express the above feeling of disconnect between their previous sense of the person and their current understanding. It takes some time to process and adjust their mental abstract of their loved one to fit the new information, and until that happens, they get a dysphoric feeling, like their loved one is not the same person they were. and with the question of are you still you after your brain anatomy and physiology changes enough to change your personality: it's not out of the ordinary for people to say their loved one "isn't the same person". with severe enough changes people will sometimes even emphasize that they're not being figurative. it's not unheard of for a family member to describe a post-brain-trauma loved one as looking like their loved one but literally not being them. neither of these makes what you're saying wrong per se, but I think it shows that self and identity are a lot blurrier than you're making them out to be And to my original, more troll-y question, if the copy is just a cardboard standee of me, and it's placed where people will expect to see me, is that me as long as i got killed first? Cactus Ghost fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Feb 10, 2020 |
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Feb 10, 2020 18:39
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Finger Prince posted:Even proposing that the "original" remains, the "copy" goes off and lives its own life, then you meet up some time in the future. You might have an uncanny resemblance, but who each of you are different now. At the time of the copying, identical. Or not. Makes no difference. the bolded part here makes no sense. so it doesn't matter at all who comes out the other end or what happens to the person "going in"? we can just funnel people into a meat grinder and as long as we 3d print some random person to replace each one of them they literally haven't died? wtf
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Feb 10, 2020 18:46
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Within the fiction of Star Trek, the transporter doesn't work like that, it transfers you as a signal that can sometimes get forked by anomolies to do weird things. It's largely external material that sets out to make that claim, but seeing as how the transporter in Star Trek works entirely on fictional principles, it seems like the fictional science should work however the writers of the fiction say it works. I'd like to look at it the other way around, like from the perspective of transporter = murder believers, how many other various forms of sci-fi transportation count as murder? Does the transporter in Half Life 2 count as dying, when you can see from the perspective of the transportee that there is no loss of continuity even as the transporter bugs out and fades you between multiple destinations? Was Gordan Freeman, in fact, dead since first going to Xen in HL1, the transfer between alternate universes terminating his existance in one universe and beginning it in another? Does the Stargate kill you when shunting you through a wormhole only for the stargate at the other end to make an informed guess about what entered to reproduce it exiting at the other end with the same momentum? Was Tron a movie about a totally dead man ever since he entered the computer? Does transitioning through an alternate dimension like hyperspace count as dying? How about that Asimov story where going through hyperspace involves temporarily dying before being somehow resuscitated on the other end? Where does that fall? Is the Starslip drive murder? How about the improbability drive? Did all the alternative spider-people in Into the Spiderverse die? Are most of the wizards in Harry Potter dead after aperating or using the floo network?
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Feb 10, 2020 19:20
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Randarkman posted:You die and a copy that's indistinguishable from you appears at the other end. Existence is over for you personally, while for everybody else it makes no difference, but you, you're gone. Nah, i'm over on Risa now having a rubdown. Edgar Allen Ho posted:The "Ship of Theseus therefore who cares" view fundamentally ignores that living things are more than the sum of their parts. The parts have to keep functioning. A dead body is no longer "me." You suffer no cessation of consciousness at all. You just go from there, to there.
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Feb 10, 2020 23:11
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"I should rig the transporter up to duplicate people without them knowing, then make an evil army of clones and convince them that they're the originals." - Transporter Chief Miles O'Brien, just before he was removed from transporter duty and transferred to the middle of nowhere Poopernickel fucked around with this message at 01:49 on Feb 11, 2020 |
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Feb 11, 2020 01:47
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one of the quieter kinds of genocide is the kind waged in parts of the british commonwealth, namely australia and canada, where people's children were taken from them and raised in the desired (by those with power) culture. If done broadly enough, an entire culture is destroyed in a single generation through forced assimilation. The implications of transporter technology include a very grim and faster version of this. Instead of erasing a culture by interrupting its passing between generations, a colonizing culture could instead atomize entire civilizations and re-print them as assimilated versions of themselves, and could even alter their physical appearance in the process. The powers that be could pitch it to their populace as a humane and generous gesture, one that doesn't involve "killing" because the copies exist in their now racially and culturally homogenous form. And apparently by going off this thread, people would probably buy it. lol
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Feb 11, 2020 01:57
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transporters work like in The Prestige and poor miles has to trudge downstairs and brain one of the duplicates with a wrench
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Feb 11, 2020 01:59
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OMGVBFLOL posted:one of the quieter kinds of genocide is the kind waged in parts of the british commonwealth, namely australia and canada, where people's children were taken from them and raised in the desired (by those with power) culture. If done broadly enough, an entire culture is destroyed in a single generation through forced assimilation. That's a pretty distopian plotline, but 100% people would buy it. No question. We already spend trillions of dollars on ways to kill other people without the messy business of sending soldiers over to die at their hands. Developing "precision" munitions that only kill the bad terrorists and definitely not the innocent women and children in the hospital next to them. Tell people you've found a way to defeat the enemy, who threaten our lives and our way of life, without anyone having to die, without having to kill anyone? They'd have to invent a new prize because the Nobel wouldn't even come close. Now imagine you could do it with soft power, optionally. Join our society of peace and prosperity where you never need age, or die, or suffer, and can be anything or do anything you could ever want, except act against us. Or don't, it's you're choice. There's no catch, other than you don't get any fabulous parting prizes if you decide to leave. You go back to your horrid dirty hole we lifted you out of and die. Have you read any of the Culture novels? I recommend all of them.
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Feb 11, 2020 03:42
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Except the transporters in star trek don't work that way.
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Feb 11, 2020 06:48
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CainFortea posted:Except the transporters in star trek don't work that way. IN star trek they work by killing you by means of disintegration, like a disintegrator beam weapon, and then constructing a copy of your body in another location.
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Feb 11, 2020 08:09
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Souls are canonically real in star trek. We know this because of Star Trek 3: The Search For Spock. Vulcans call it the katra. The soul follows the transporter beam and therefore death does not occur as a result of whatever mechanical process the transporter uses. This is also how the transporter can be used to radically alter (and/or undo the alteration of) someone's body while having it still be the same person. Aha, you say, but what about the perverse case of Thomas Riker? Is there no conservation of souls in the Star Trek universe, let alone the issue of conservation of energy/matter? But Star Trek already provides for this: TOS Space Seed tells us that in certain circumstances - such as, for example, a nearby ion storm - the transporter can accidentally move people between different parallel dimensions. TNG Parallels informs us that there are numerous parallel dimensions - not just a hokey one full of scantily-clad evil people - and that people can be swapped between those dimensions under the right circumstances as well. Given these data points it is easy enough to conclude that Thomas Riker just happens to come from a very convergent parallel dimension, one in which a young Lieutenant Riker is tragically lost without a trace in a mysterious transporter accident.
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Feb 11, 2020 08:19
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Also, fun fact, if you believe the transporters kill you then so do Stargates - there's multiple references in Stargate SG-1 to being "particleized" and converted into a matter stream. I'm pretty sure the short range transmats also do something similar.
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Feb 11, 2020 08:21
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:Also, fun fact, if you believe the transporters kill you then so do Stargates - there's multiple references in Stargate SG-1 to being "particleized" and converted into a matter stream. I'm pretty sure the short range transmats also do something similar. they do kill you too you just explained why
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Feb 11, 2020 08:25
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