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Nitrousoxide
May 30, 2011

do not buy a oneplus phone



Powered Descent posted:

Do it many times. Make a coin-op machine that'll create and dispense a new sentient Hitler-copy-in-a-box that you can take home and watch being punished to your heart's content, and... drat it, Simpsons Black Mirror already did it.

This, but with Hitler instead of puppies.

http://www.scpwiki.com/scp-1459

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Khanstant
Apr 5, 2007

Tiggum posted:

Souls work however you want them to because it's not real. Can two souls merge into one? Sure, if you want. Can you duplicate a soul? Not if the writer says you can't. Once you bring souls into it, the answer is whatever you want it to be.

You're assuming that there is a distinct, identifiable something we can call "Picard"; a thing that possesses the unique quality of "being Picard". To put it another way, you've invented the soul.

Yes, it's the same mistaken argument as with transporters. That thing you're calling "consciousness" is not something that exists. It's just a different name for a soul.

What does that mean though? In what way is it significant that this "consciousness" is broken? What is the effect?

The argument laid out in this cartoon doesn't hold up.

You have a person, let's say Fred, go into a teleporter. Out of the other end comes Fred¹, who claims to be Fred. The cartoon wants to argue that he is actually not Fred but a meaningfully distinct person. But to make this argument, it changes the scenario.

In the altered scenario, Fred goes into the teleporter and both Fred¹ and Fred² come out, both claiming to be Fred. But only one Fred is allowed, so one of them has to die. Neither one wants to, so they each set out to prove that the other is the "copy". But that's missing the point. If Fred¹ is Fred then so is Fred². They're distinct from each other, but that doesn't invalidate either one's claim to being the "real" Fred. From an outside perspective, it doesn't actually matter which one of them is killed - Fred survives, because there's no meaningful difference between "original" and "copy" if it's a perfect copy. They're both Fred.

It makes literally no difference.

The thing that is "Picard" isn't a soul, AFAIK, outside my own fictional universe, souls are generally understood to be some kind of magic ghost that lives inside of some fraction or all life-forms or maybe other things as well. This ghost retains some quantity of the body it inhabited memory, personality, or some ineffable qualities.

"Picard" is a body. Yes, there's something to be said of a person's atoms not being consistent, your body ship of theseus' itself over time for the most part. When talking about "Picard," not talking about a soul, talking about an organism (collection of organisms working in conjunction), along with the brain/memories/experiences that happened to that collection of organisms over their lifetime. Using magic, create two Picards at birth, who go through the exact same actions and motions every step of the way as normal Picard did, except now one of them is two feet to the left - they're still different people, despite sharing body composition and life experiences.

Consciousness is not another name for the soul, I mean, there are times when people use them to mean consciousness but I don't think it's right or fair to equate them across the board and neuroscience still hasn't really cracked that egg open yet. Personally, the best cracks I see are that consciousness itself is just an abstract framework we think through and believe ourselves to be making choices and having our unique thoughts out of sheer free will, when the reality is the majority or all of our actions are determined before we can possibly even consciously make those choices and often the entire system is just playing catch-up, rationalizing to yourself in this framework why your body is doing what it is doing after the body is in action.

So maybe consciousness ain't poo poo, throwing it into any body won't make a real difference since the body and brain are going to determine the body's actions and thoughts anyway. I'm actually having trouble imagining what that would even mean, to put someone's "consciousness" into another body, even ignoring the fact this entire idea of consciousness kind of doesn't even make sense separated from it's meat, would the brain of the victim need to basically be scrambled and be remade and run through some kind of hyper simulation of the neural networks built up over time?

Even worse is the show basically just says they did memory disk recovery on the corpse, threw the files onto quantum sim, then copy-pasted them into the golem. What the gently caress? What does it even mean to copy someone's memories, hell, people can't even accurately remember loving anything. I have no memory of many things I experiences or saw, I have false memories of things I never did or saw, I have a altered memories of events I did experience, kind of, but the memory is unreliable and warped. Also, come on, they took corpse memories, threw it in a computer, then threw it in another thing, that kind of transfer and conversion starts to smell like new entities anyway you slice it. If I upload my brain/memories/consciousness to a computer, whether I live or die after, the new entity in the computer is it's own being. We share not thoughts, we control only what is connected to our respective "bodies." "I" am fundamentally an emergent property of my biology, in particular of this rotating confederate aggregate of cells following the instructions my parents reproductive cells gave us while reacting to the environment around us. You change that, it's a new thing. You make a copy, the copy is a new thing, a thing which has, as it's first moment of existence, a lot in common with you through scifi, but one of you was born in XX years ago out of a vagina like a bat out of hell, and the other was assembled with scifi X seconds ago. I believe both me and me-copy would both understand this but still understand it's only fair to do a coin toss to see who gets the first copy-handjob. Let's say we then toss another copy of me into the Margolem, that's another new thing. Since this is consensual copying done while I'm alive, by choice, I think we'd all three know who is who and manage to remember when we were created, despite sharing the same childhood memories.

The government is going to want to tax all three of us and why shouldn't they? How could it hold up that these three dudes daisy chaining their beards together in some sort of weird clone sex thing are just one person? Just because their beards are tied together? Because they have some abstraction of the original copied onto themselves? Even though they are wearing one shirt with extra holes cut in it, its obviously going to wear out and they'll eventually need to buy basically 3x the material anyway just he same as wearing each 3 shirts, or is only one of them to wear the shirt at a time if they're the presenting "face" of the "supposed individual??"

Snow Cone Capone
Jul 31, 2003


dude what

Tiggum
Oct 24, 2007

Your life and your quest end here.


Neddy Seagoon posted:

What you're fundamentally missing is you are subjectively pointing at both Freds and saying you could live with either one as the definitive Fred you know and speak to. Both Freds, however, are going to have very different ideas on the subject, namely that one of them knows they popped into existence a few minutes ago and there's a pre-existing Fred proving that no they did not just blip across the room and reassemble.
So are you saying then that the "copy" is somehow lesser, that it shouldn't have the same rights as the "original"? If so, why? If not, in what meaningful way is it not Fred?

Which of the many ideas on that page are you referring to though? When you say that a "consciousness" exists and continues to exist from moment to moment and defines an individual, what are you talking about? Where is it located? What is it made of?

Khanstant posted:

I'm actually having trouble imagining what that would even mean, to put someone's "consciousness" into another body
In the case of Star Trek, it means that the robot is Picard. Whatever unqiue quality makes him him, it's in the robot now. Call it "consciousness"; call it a soul; call it a social construct that doesn't actually exist. It doesn't matter. In the show, the robot is Picard.

Khanstant posted:

Also, come on, they took corpse memories, threw it in a computer, then threw it in another thing, that kind of transfer and conversion starts to smell like new entities anyway you slice it.
That's just an appeal to common sense. It's not a valid argument.

Khanstant posted:

If I upload my brain/memories/consciousness to a computer, whether I live or die after, the new entity in the computer is it's own being.
The word "after" is extremely significant here. If you get a degree in medicine and then a perfect copy of your mind (or consciousness if you prefer) is put into a robot body, does the robot have a degree in medicine? If not, why not? It has the same memories of completing the required study that the "original" you did. For all intents and purposes it and you have the exact same history. Until the copy was made, the two of you were the same person. You're different people now, but you're both equally the output of the function that was the person who got that medical degree.

Khanstant posted:

Since this is consensual copying done while I'm alive, by choice, I think we'd all three know who is who and manage to remember when we were created, despite sharing the same childhood memories.
Sure. But why does that matter?

Alchenar
Apr 9, 2008

Look it's the Shakespeare test: if you prick it and it bleeds and says 'ow' then it's a person.

Neddy Seagoon
Oct 12, 2012

"Hi Everybody!"

Tiggum posted:

So are you saying then that the "copy" is somehow lesser, that it shouldn't have the same rights as the "original"? If so, why? If not, in what meaningful way is it not Fred?

Different is the relevant word here. Or perhaps Divergent. You're still looking at this from your own external perspective and not either Fred's.


Try looking at it this way; I shove you into the transporter and out pops another Tiggum beside you, while you remain unchanged. I decide both Tiggum are identical, and we really only need one around here, so I spin a revolver and start pointing it at each of you in turn. Bang it goes, and you are the lucky winner of a bullet in the chest. You've got about half a minute to live, are you gonna calmly muse on there being another Tiggum who will go on living what was your life as equally Tiggum as you were, or are you gonna frankly be a bit pissed that I just shot you arbitrarily on the merit of you both being equally Tiggum, and am quite happy with there being A Tiggum around with no regard for your imminent demise? Or that the other Tiggum's not all that fussed either considering they are equally Tiggum and not the unlucky bastard that just got a bullet in the chest?

No-one else might know that that Tiggum's not same one that entered that room, but you sure will.

Arquinsiel
Jun 1, 2006

"There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first."

God Bless Margaret Thatcher
God Bless England
RIP My Iron Lady

Tiggum posted:

The argument laid out in this cartoon doesn't hold up.

You have a person, let's say Fred, go into a teleporter. Out of the other end comes Fred¹, who claims to be Fred. The cartoon wants to argue that he is actually not Fred but a meaningfully distinct person. But to make this argument, it changes the scenario.

In the altered scenario, Fred goes into the teleporter and both Fred¹ and Fred² come out, both claiming to be Fred. But only one Fred is allowed, so one of them has to die. Neither one wants to, so they each set out to prove that the other is the "copy". But that's missing the point. If Fred¹ is Fred then so is Fred². They're distinct from each other, but that doesn't invalidate either one's claim to being the "real" Fred. From an outside perspective, it doesn't actually matter which one of them is killed - Fred survives, because there's no meaningful difference between "original" and "copy" if it's a perfect copy. They're both Fred.

It makes literally no difference.
You didn't understand why the narrator got into the teleporter, even though she sang a song about it.

Nitrousoxide posted:

If continuity of consciousness is what makes your identity secure than replacing your brain or your entire body piece by piece are you remain in a continuity of consciousness and the individual pieces of you lose the continuity of consciousness once they are removed then it does potentially avoid the ship of Theseus issue.
You are literally describing the ship of Theseus.

Actual Satan
Mar 14, 2017

Keep on partying!

You'll NEVER regret it!

Trust ME!


Khanstant posted:

The thing that is "Picard" isn't a soul, AFAIK, outside my own fictional universe, souls are generally understood to be some kind of magic ghost that lives inside of some fraction or all life-forms or maybe other things as well. This ghost retains some quantity of the body it inhabited memory, personality, or some ineffable qualities.

"Picard" is a body. Yes, there's something to be said of a person's atoms not being consistent, your body ship of theseus' itself over time for the most part. When talking about "Picard," not talking about a soul, talking about an organism (collection of organisms working in conjunction), along with the brain/memories/experiences that happened to that collection of organisms over their lifetime. Using magic, create two Picards at birth, who go through the exact same actions and motions every step of the way as normal Picard did, except now one of them is two feet to the left - they're still different people, despite sharing body composition and life experiences.

Consciousness is not another name for the soul, I mean, there are times when people use them to mean consciousness but I don't think it's right or fair to equate them across the board and neuroscience still hasn't really cracked that egg open yet. Personally, the best cracks I see are that consciousness itself is just an abstract framework we think through and believe ourselves to be making choices and having our unique thoughts out of sheer free will, when the reality is the majority or all of our actions are determined before we can possibly even consciously make those choices and often the entire system is just playing catch-up, rationalizing to yourself in this framework why your body is doing what it is doing after the body is in action.

So maybe consciousness ain't poo poo, throwing it into any body won't make a real difference since the body and brain are going to determine the body's actions and thoughts anyway. I'm actually having trouble imagining what that would even mean, to put someone's "consciousness" into another body, even ignoring the fact this entire idea of consciousness kind of doesn't even make sense separated from it's meat, would the brain of the victim need to basically be scrambled and be remade and run through some kind of hyper simulation of the neural networks built up over time?

Even worse is the show basically just says they did memory disk recovery on the corpse, threw the files onto quantum sim, then copy-pasted them into the golem. What the gently caress? What does it even mean to copy someone's memories, hell, people can't even accurately remember loving anything. I have no memory of many things I experiences or saw, I have false memories of things I never did or saw, I have a altered memories of events I did experience, kind of, but the memory is unreliable and warped. Also, come on, they took corpse memories, threw it in a computer, then threw it in another thing, that kind of transfer and conversion starts to smell like new entities anyway you slice it. If I upload my brain/memories/consciousness to a computer, whether I live or die after, the new entity in the computer is it's own being. We share not thoughts, we control only what is connected to our respective "bodies." "I" am fundamentally an emergent property of my biology, in particular of this rotating confederate aggregate of cells following the instructions my parents reproductive cells gave us while reacting to the environment around us. You change that, it's a new thing. You make a copy, the copy is a new thing, a thing which has, as it's first moment of existence, a lot in common with you through scifi, but one of you was born in XX years ago out of a vagina like a bat out of hell, and the other was assembled with scifi X seconds ago. I believe both me and me-copy would both understand this but still understand it's only fair to do a coin toss to see who gets the first copy-handjob. Let's say we then toss another copy of me into the Margolem, that's another new thing. Since this is consensual copying done while I'm alive, by choice, I think we'd all three know who is who and manage to remember when we were created, despite sharing the same childhood memories.

The government is going to want to ta x all three of us and why shouldn't they? How could it hold up that these three dudes daisy chaining their beards together in some sort of weird clone sex thing are just one person? Just because their beards are tied together? Because they have some abstraction of the original copied onto themselves? Even though they are wearing one shirt with extra holes cut in it, its obviously going to wear out and they'll eventually need to buy basically 3x the material anyway just he same as wearing each 3 shirts, or is only one of them to wear the shirt at a time if they're the presenting "face" of the "supposed individual??"

Can confirm that all of this is 100% accurate. Unfortunately, reading it is what actually destroys your soul.

The Bloop
Jul 5, 2004

by Fluffdaddy

Neddy Seagoon posted:

Different is the relevant word here. Or perhaps Divergent. You're still looking at this from your own external perspective and not either Fred's.


Try looking at it this way; I shove you into the transporter and out pops another Tiggum beside you, while you remain unchanged. I decide both Tiggum are identical, and we really only need one around here, so I spin a revolver and start pointing it at each of you in turn. Bang it goes, and you are the lucky winner of a bullet in the chest. You've got about half a minute to live, are you gonna calmly muse on there being another Tiggum who will go on living what was your life as equally Tiggum as you were, or are you gonna frankly be a bit pissed that I just shot you arbitrarily on the merit of you both being equally Tiggum, and am quite happy with there being A Tiggum around with no regard for your imminent demise? Or that the other Tiggum's not all that fussed either considering they are equally Tiggum and not the unlucky bastard that just got a bullet in the chest?

No-one else might know that that Tiggum's not same one that entered that room, but you sure will.

You probably don't do very good philosophy with a gun to your head, is that what you're getting at?

Why is murder the catalyst for this understanding

The Bloop
Jul 5, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
Also they are BOTH divergent from the one that went into the transporter.


This is like the "evolved from monkeys" thing. No, we and monkeys evolved from the same common ancestor. Both now-Tiggums have the same ancestral Tiggum, one did not come from the other.

(sorry Tiggum I guess this is about you now)

Khanstant
Apr 5, 2007

Tiggum posted:

So are you saying then that the "copy" is somehow lesser, that it shouldn't have the same rights as the "original"? If so, why? If not, in what meaningful way is it not Fred?

In the case of Star Trek, it means that the robot is Picard. Whatever unqiue quality makes him him, it's in the robot now. Call it "consciousness"; call it a soul; call it a social construct that doesn't actually exist. It doesn't matter. In the show, the robot is Picard.

I'm not saying the copy is lesser. I'm saying the copy and original have equivalent/no value. They both should have rights, we give babies rights and every baby is way more useless than an adult optionally-immortal copy of someone with a lifetime of skills. However one person was born years ago and lived a life, another person has the equivalent in some cartoon version of consciousness and memory. It doesn't matter, it does matter, nothing matters, anything matters. It is what it is, another person is created through whatever magic scifi is going on to make the copy.

Tiggum posted:

The word "after" is extremely significant here. If you get a degree in medicine and then a perfect copy of your mind (or consciousness if you prefer) is put into a robot body, does the robot have a degree in medicine? If not, why not? It has the same memories of completing the required study that the "original" you did. For all intents and purposes it and you have the exact same history. Until the copy was made, the two of you were the same person. You're different people now, but you're both equally the output of the function that was the person who got that medical degree.

This depends on the magic of memory in this scenario, I guess. I kind of don't think the transferring of a consciousness into a different body and structure for thought and feelings and all that even makes sense. Converting data from a corpse into a simulation of a person makes a little more sense, I reckon you'd just say the sim was just as skilled at the tasks and so was the body somehow, in which case, yeah probably keep the degree but like its a robot body and apparently youre doing magic with memories so why not learn kung fu on top of it? If you're just doing a straight 1:1 copy, down to biology, then def yeah.

Tiggum posted:

Sure. But why does that matter?

It matters because we are all three unique individuals deserving or not deserving of life as anything else. You cannot freely interchange us. I am the one who was born and lived and created the memories over years in the conditions I was born and raised through. My magic copy is the one who was created with magic to be a copy of what I am at some point. The robot golem with a corpse-scraped sim version of me is another person. I cannot speak to their experiences, I don't know what it is like to exist as someone that is a magic copy of another and obviously I know even less about what it means to be dead, let alone to have someone mulch parts of me into a robot body. None of us is better than the other, these are all equally valid ways to exist. This would be true for any number of copies that were made. If murder is wrong then murder should be wrong for every species/level-of-intelligence that gets the privilege of their intentional deaths being called murder. You don't get to murder anyone and be like "chill, there's a copy at home." Likewise when someone is killed, we can't be like, "no biggie, we got a backup."

I also do not think we, as non-copied mundane mortal biopeople can really make the judgements of whether the circumstances and experiences of those who are copies-of-a-quantum-simulation-of-someone's-corpse-scraped-memories are so easily dismissed to say he's just like us when none of us have ever walked in the shoes or spent even a second living as someone of that background.

The Bloop
Jul 5, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
"I" literally is those memories and experiences and the pattern/process, not the atoms of the body, though. Or do you think otherwise?


And yes, we are assuming that a sophisticated enough computer system can replicate the processes of a human body, but I don't think that's an unreasonable assumption for an arbitrary value of "sophisticated enough"

Tiggum
Oct 24, 2007

Your life and your quest end here.


Neddy Seagoon posted:

Different is the relevant word here. Or perhaps Divergent. You're still looking at this from your own external perspective and not either Fred's.
No, I'm explicitly not doing that.

Neddy Seagoon posted:

Try looking at it this way; I shove you into the transporter and out pops another Tiggum beside you, while you remain unchanged. I decide both Tiggum are identical, and we really only need one around here, so I spin a revolver and start pointing it at each of you in turn. Bang it goes, and you are the lucky winner of a bullet in the chest. You've got about half a minute to live, are you gonna calmly muse on there being another Tiggum who will go on living what was your life as equally Tiggum as you were, or are you gonna frankly be a bit pissed that I just shot you arbitrarily on the merit of you both being equally Tiggum, and am quite happy with there being A Tiggum around with no regard for your imminent demise? Or that the other Tiggum's not all that fussed either considering they are equally Tiggum and not the unlucky bastard that just got a bullet in the chest?
Obviously not. But let's cut that section of time out of the equation (as we would naturally do if it were a fraction of a second during "teleportation"): I exist now. After teleportation, I will still exist. There's one, real me now. There'll be one, real me at the end. That brief moment where there are two (or zero) of me is irrelevant. The me who "dies" doesn't matter because they don't exist any more.

Neddy Seagoon posted:

No-one else might know that that Tiggum's not same one that entered that room, but you sure will.
No I won't. Both Tiggums will fervently believe that they are the real Tiggum, because I believe that and will believe that no matter how many duplicates of me there are.

Arquinsiel posted:

You didn't understand why the narrator got into the teleporter, even though she sang a song about it.
Yes I did, I just think she was wrong. Her reasoning doesn't add up. She wants to live, but she wants to be guilt-free. She claims to believe that the person who comes out of the teleporter won't be her, thus won't carry her guilt - yet if she actually believed that she'd as soon shoot herself in the head as get in the teleporter. But she didn't shoot herself in the head, because she doesn't really believe what she claims to believe. She wants to live but also to believe that she's not the person who "killed" the scientist. It's a dumb story.

Khanstant posted:

I'm saying the copy and original have equivalent/no value. They both should have rights, we give babies rights and every baby is way more useless than an adult optionally-immortal copy of someone with a lifetime of skills. However one person was born years ago and lived a life, another person has the equivalent in some cartoon version of consciousness and memory. It doesn't matter, it does matter, nothing matters, anything matters. It is what it is, another person is created through whatever magic scifi is going on to make the copy.
OK, so now you're talking about the ethics of the device which is an entirely separate issue. You've moved completely away from the topic of identity. You're not talking about whether the person who comes out of the teleporter is the same person who stepped in, you're saying that the fictional, hypothetical process is unethical.

The question of identity remains even if it's a cloning machine rather than a teleporter. If one Tiggum steps in and two step out, they're both equally entitled to claim the identity of Tiggum. There was one, now there are two. From this point on they are separate people, but before now they were one person. Neither has primacy or any greater claim on the assets, rights or responsibilities of the "original".

Typical Pubbie
May 10, 2011
The mental gymnastics of pretending you would be ok with a doppelganger taking all your stuff because you can't admit the two of you aren't the same person.

The Bloop
Jul 5, 2004

by Fluffdaddy

Typical Pubbie posted:

The mental gymnastics of pretending you would be ok with a doppelganger taking all your stuff because you can't admit the two of you aren't the same person.

The inability to read that leads you to this summation.

The Bloop
Jul 5, 2004

by Fluffdaddy

nine-gear crow
Aug 10, 2013





So if the transporter kills you, does that make Miles O'Brien one of the greatest mass murderers in Star Trek history?

Arquinsiel
Jun 1, 2006

"There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first."

God Bless Margaret Thatcher
God Bless England
RIP My Iron Lady
Yes. That's why he loves his job so much.

Tiggum posted:

Yes I did, I just think she was wrong. Her reasoning doesn't add up. She wants to live, but she wants to be guilt-free. She claims to believe that the person who comes out of the teleporter won't be her, thus won't carry her guilt - yet if she actually believed that she'd as soon shoot herself in the head as get in the teleporter. But she didn't shoot herself in the head, because she doesn't really believe what she claims to believe. She wants to live but also to believe that she's not the person who "killed" the scientist. It's a dumb story.
No, she can't live with having just murdered someone to prove a point, so she kills herself. The person she regards as a completely different individual is guilt free, because said person springs into existince already believing that it is a discrete individual. She has resolved the problem to her personal satisfaction only, and maybe not for long.

Khanstant
Apr 5, 2007

The Bloop posted:

"I" literally is those memories and experiences and the pattern/process, not the atoms of the body, though. Or do you think otherwise?


And yes, we are assuming that a sophisticated enough computer system can replicate the processes of a human body, but I don't think that's an unreasonable assumption for an arbitrary value of "sophisticated enough"

"I" might not really be anything at all, WRT to thought patterns, identity, whatever, I think a major element, if not, then the primary element is going to have a lot more to do with the body and the associated creatures that compose a person moreso than our own ideas of "Who we are" in our little brain abstraction framework explaining our bodies actions to the self we've created internally to deal with our body doing things in our environments. There are also outside factors that may be influencing what we do or how we think, plus there are a lot of forces in the universe my species is unable to perceive or understand or properly measure. In any case, I do not believe there's enough reason to think you could reasonably "copy" someone just by copy-pasting some abstraction of their memories into another body or simulation. I don't think even a magic-perfect copy of the entire brain and connected nervous system would be enough. Can't even be sure copying every atom might work, if atoms can even be copied. For all I know every goddamn quark in the universe has an entire history and web of interconnected relationships that ultimately determine how it decides to jiggle jaggle this way or that, which has some nonzero effect on a system that has some other effect and so on.

Could also be way simpler than that and you could jam a hunk of turd into a biobot's gut, upload a 16kb file, stretch the telomeres to "old," and shake some dna at it and get a perfect copy.

Tiggum posted:

OK, so now you're talking about the ethics of the device which is an entirely separate issue. You've moved completely away from the topic of identity. You're not talking about whether the person who comes out of the teleporter is the same person who stepped in, you're saying that the fictional, hypothetical process is unethical.

The question of identity remains even if it's a cloning machine rather than a teleporter. If one Tiggum steps in and two step out, they're both equally entitled to claim the identity of Tiggum. There was one, now there are two. From this point on they are separate people, but before now they were one person. Neither has primacy or any greater claim on the assets, rights or responsibilities of the "original".

I don't think the copying process is unethical! I said it's just as valid a way to have come into existence as anything else. The killing-a-copy is a separate thing about murder/suicide/rude, I'm not even sure signing agreement to kill yourself to use the transporter knowing a new person will be created that everyone basically thinks is just as good and will inherit your every property and relationship makes it okay? I've wanted to die a lot of times in my life so like, whatever for me, but I know a lot of people would lie awake at night bothered knowing they're a really doppelganger a previous self agreed to generate.

I am also saying that the person that goes into the machine and the person to be created in the other one, at no point, are the same person. One is a person the machine just created, the other one is not. They both have a right to life. Legally I'm not sure they'd be entitled to the same property, given the property owned is something which cannot be freely duplicated (but you probably could if you can make a machine to create new life on demand). Are children entitled to any of their parents property, or in this situation would the folks who made and ran the machine be responsible for taking care of the new person? I definitely think if you make a copy to help you ditch class or go on a date with two people at the same time or whatever, you should probably become responsible for one another or else we'll need some kind of social net to help copies born as fully capable adults but I guess that's a given in any halfway decent place by default for any person.

As similar as the two+ people and copy may be, one of them will always have a different life than the other, and it may be the original is long gone and it's been copies of copies for a while. Hell, if you copied the same person at different moments in their lives, those would all be unique people as well. I don't think it's fair to act as though there's an instant in the machines where both people are equal and it's fair game to kill one and you can't erase or ignore the experience of being generated-in-a-machine-as-a-copy-of-someone.

MariusLecter
Sep 5, 2009

NI MUERTE NI MIEDO

Alchenar posted:

Imagine finding out that the difference between yourself and your mirror universe counterpart is that your counterpart actually had ambition and was proactive.

Still lol that Enterprise mirror Archer was told to his face he has no ambition and is just a boot-licking tool.

nine-gear crow
Aug 10, 2013





MariusLecter posted:

Still lol that Enterprise mirror Archer was told to his face he has no ambition and is just a boot-licking tool.

Yeah, and then he went nuts and murdered everyone in the chain of command above and parallel to him, so NOW whose unambitious, Captain Dad?!

The Bloop
Jul 5, 2004

by Fluffdaddy

Khanstant posted:

"I" might not really be anything at all, WRT to thought patterns, identity, whatever, I think a major element, if not, then the primary element is going to have a lot more to do with the body and the associated creatures that compose a person moreso than our own ideas of "Who we are" in our little brain abstraction framework explaining our bodies actions to the self we've created internally to deal with our body doing things in our environments. There are also outside factors that may be influencing what we do or how we think, plus there are a lot of forces in the universe my species is unable to perceive or understand or properly measure. In any case, I do not believe there's enough reason to think you could reasonably "copy" someone just by copy-pasting some abstraction of their memories into another body or simulation. I don't think even a magic-perfect copy of the entire brain and connected nervous system would be enough. Can't even be sure copying every atom might work, if atoms can even be copied. For all I know every goddamn quark in the universe has an entire history and web of interconnected relationships that ultimately determine how it decides to jiggle jaggle this way or that, which has some nonzero effect on a system that has some other effect and so on.


I'm agreeing with you that merely "brain state=self" is an outdated concept, but I can think of no reason a sufficiently sophisticated simulation couldn't mimic any and all required circumstances and I don't think you can either without woo woo handwaving

Yes, it's possible but it's not parsimonious

Why would the atoms need to be copied, for instance? C12 is entirely fungible. The whole universe would need to be ghosts all the way down





edit: is this some homeopathy poo poo?

MariusLecter
Sep 5, 2009

NI MUERTE NI MIEDO
Okay, so to revisit the blender and high pressure pipeline idea.

What if we removed the need to transport the slurry you at all and just reconstituted you at the destination using the blendered remains of other transportees using a similar 'pattern data' of a trek transporter?

As well your puree'd remains would be stored in a bulk vat with others and used to reconstitute others incoming from the destination you left.

Delsaber
Oct 1, 2013

This may or may not be correct.


It's gonna be a long road getting from here to August 12.

Khanstant
Apr 5, 2007
Not any homeopathy, just rear end covering if it turns out one day they can track individual atoms or whatever. If we're doing scifi there can be a god who should be able to keep track of all that stuff, making a universe isn't that impressive, hot dense matter big whoop-- but tracking the exact state and position of every bit of it is!

I'm a determinist and I agree with good enough magic a copy of a body could be made to be identical to recreate a new but nearly-identical person. I only buy stuffing the body into a golem if you work backwards from saying "no really this whole thing is exactly like his body was except not dead and also not sick but we stretched out the telomeres and directed the right tachyons to pop through at the right angles and look its really all the super same." Even then I do not think those people are fungible and I find their origins and zyxt position in timespace to be sufficient means to qualify each as a unique individual from the instant of creation, not an instant after,

In the show they, without consent, scraped memories from a corpse, made a sim based on it, then jammed that sim into a golem meant for someone else, and then put all of that inside of a show that will not meaningfully or satisfactorily engage with any of the worm-cans they're tearing open in the process of ripping off mass effect out of order. We got three Picards, maybe a fourth, didn't Q make a lovely-Picard or am I misremembering that? Would love for them to explore what the "self" means in a universe where anyone can be freely replicated in totality and even resurrected from the death without permission.

The Bloop
Jul 5, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
Unless Picard signed a DNR for some dumb reason there's nothing "without permission" about saving a life/mind whenever possible

And yes both people are different from each other but also from the person that existed moments before, albeit in different ways.

And the DS9 bodged-together main computer and a spank shack kept a half dozen people alive just fine without bodies as long as we're talking Trek and not contradicting what it shows us

Pastamania
Mar 5, 2012

You cannot know.
The things I've seen.
The things I've done.
The things he made me do.
So in conclusion, you can sweep the floor using Thomas Riker?

The_Doctor
Mar 29, 2007

"The entire history of this incarnation is one of temporal orbits, retcons, paradoxes, parallel time lines, reiterations, and divergences. How anyone can make head or tail of all this chaos, I don't know."
Voyager should have used the Thomas Riker method to have Tuvix stick around after they got Tuvok and Neelix back.

nine-gear crow
Aug 10, 2013





The_Doctor posted:

Voyager should have used the Thomas Riker method to have Tuvix stick around after they got Tuvok and Neelix back.

"We've successfully separated Neelix and Tuvok AND kept Tuvix alive, but on no, Tuvix is unstable now and we need to put him in this storage unit down the cargo hold that the Doctor just whipped up until we can find a cure for him." TUVIX WAS NEVER SEEN AGAIN

Eimi
Nov 23, 2013

I will never log offshut up.


The_Doctor posted:

Voyager should have used the Thomas Riker method to have Tuvix stick around after they got Tuvok and Neelix back.

And deny Janeway a perfectly legal chance to murder a sentient being?! You monster.

The_Doctor
Mar 29, 2007

"The entire history of this incarnation is one of temporal orbits, retcons, paradoxes, parallel time lines, reiterations, and divergences. How anyone can make head or tail of all this chaos, I don't know."

Eimi posted:

And deny Janeway a perfectly legal chance to murder a sentient being?! You monster.

Tuvix is clearly the superior replacement for Neelix. Just saying.

Tars Tarkas
Apr 13, 2003

Rock the Mok



A nasty woman, I think you should try is, Jess.


nine-gear crow posted:

" TUVIX WAS NEVER SEEN AGAIN
Tuvix hangs out with the surviving USS Equinox crew

Bilirubin
Feb 16, 2014

The sanctioned action is to CHUG


The_Doctor posted:

Yeah, I'm enjoying it a lot. Not constantly being hassled to buy the in-game currency to progress goes a long way.

how is that other Star Trek phone game I keep seeing in ads, the one with the weird ship with no nacelles the Saladin or whatever? Thought about giving it a go but the last think want is another gatcha begging for my money

HD DAD
Jan 13, 2010

Generic white guy.

Toilet Rascal
I will forgive all of Discovery’s faults if they have a cliffhanger where Tuvix inexplicably steps out of the shadows

Bilirubin
Feb 16, 2014

The sanctioned action is to CHUG


nine-gear crow posted:

So if the transporter kills you, does that make Miles O'Brien one of the greatest mass murderers in Star Trek history?

maybe DS9 really is his purgatory. All the suffering kinda makes sense now

The Bloop
Jul 5, 2004

by Fluffdaddy

HD DAD posted:

I will forgive all of Discovery’s faults if they have a cliffhanger where Tuvix inexplicably steps out of the shadows

I hope he pulls off fake sideburns and then says "computer, end program"

Delsaber
Oct 1, 2013

This may or may not be correct.

HD DAD posted:

I will forgive all of Discovery’s faults if they have a cliffhanger where Tuvix inexplicably steps out of the shadows

Finally, the true identity of Future Guy is revealed.

Cojawfee
May 31, 2006
I think the US is dumb for not using Celsius

HD DAD posted:

I will forgive all of Discovery’s faults if they have a cliffhanger where Tuvix inexplicably steps out of the shadows

"God is real and she saved me from being murdered by creating new, soulless, copies of Tuvok and Neelix to live on Voyager and sent me to the future where I would be finally understood."

Khanstant
Apr 5, 2007

The Bloop posted:

Unless Picard signed a DNR for some dumb reason there's nothing "without permission" about saving a life/mind whenever possible

And yes both people are different from each other but also from the person that existed moments before, albeit in different ways.

And the DS9 bodged-together main computer and a spank shack kept a half dozen people alive just fine without bodies as long as we're talking Trek and not contradicting what it shows us

I don't think everyone thinks resurrection, let alone corpse-scraping-sim-copy-golem-transfer resurrection is the same as like, saving someone during a heart attack or whatever. I don't believe in an afterlife, but even without a religious afterlife, there exists sim afterlife and anyway a lot of people think death is a big deal and someone's gonna come back really hosed up because they saw the afterlife was nothing or worse, wasn't nothing, and now they're gone from it. Rude!!!

My least favourite Picard is the second one that killed Data, even though Data was asking for it. That or kid Picard from that time Picard became a whiny british toothpick

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Gonz
Dec 22, 2009

"Jesus, did I say that? Or just think it? Was I talking? Did they hear me?"
Picard is going to be able to lift crazy heavy poo poo over his head now.

This will come in handy during his archaeological digs.

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