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Originally posted by Kyo
It's difficult to really piece together all of my thoughts, since I have just read this thread now and am itching to respond before I forget everything. So, you will have to forgive me if my statements seem disjointed.
Your concept of immortality isn't immortality at all - entropy wins eventually. Whatever you use as the container for your 'self' will, at some far-off and unknown time, disintegrate into its constituent subatomic particles and/or energy.
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Yeah, that’s true. I mean "immortality" in the loosest sense of the word, i.e. living for a really really long time...assuming you don't get hit by a bus/get plugged out by the cleaning lady/get swallowed by a black hole...etc... Should have stated that explicitly though! Immortality in the sense of not "dying of old age"
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Regardless, it brings up an interesting problem - which of you is really you? If you could pattern the mind exactly, what would determine which is the original? If all we truly are is some matrix of physical and chemical processes and structures in our minds, a perfect copy should be ourselves, exactly. Going further with this eventually leads us down into the bottomless pit that is the argument for/against a soul, so I'm going to stop here.
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Well assuming the correctness of "proper" atheism, and assuming the correctness of my original argument, then the question of "who is the original" is meaningless. The original existed in the past. The "original" no longer exists.
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Something to note, however, is that at the very moment of 'download,' or transfer, if you will, the two beings begin to diverge - they are instantly different upon the moment of creation.
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Yup. No disagrement there!
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And another thought - would the method of download make a difference?
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That's what I'm trying to figure out. In a hypothetical future world, given a choice of potential immortality via:
a)Transferring your thoughts into an artificial brain
or
b)Having your brain, bit by bit replaced by artificial neurons,
I would undoubtedly choose b, from a point of view of preservation of self.
The question is...WHY?
If I am look to the success of both of these operations on my friends, I would come to the conclusion that they are equivalent.
My friend John got his memories transferred to an artificial brain, which was connected up to a mobile robotic suit. When I talk to him, he is obviously still John. We share jokes about times past, and reminisce about common acquaintances, who just didn't live long enough to see immortality become a reality. Pity really, that bobby was great laugh! Wouldn’t have minded seeing him stick around for another couple of thousand years...etc.
Similarly my friend Mary, has had her brain slowly replaced. Then to ensure immortality, she had all of the limbs/organs/flesh etc replaced at a later date. She is now, like John, purely artificial. We also talk, and remember times past. This person too, is obviously Mary.
Ironically, now that we even have the technology required to perform these operations, we still cannot answer the question about the preservation of self. The only way to find out, is to try it for yourself....and if it fails, you'll never know. And even if it does fail, "someone else" will experience as if it all went well, and will go and tell of their friends about how great this new treatment is! And if it works, nobody can take our word for it that it works!
So even with the ability to empirically observe the results, it won't answer our question.
The only way to answer it seems to be to logically "philosophise" on it...but it appears to be a bottomless pit!
What we really need to do, is ask if the question is in fact meaningless....which I am starting to believe.
I wouldn't go so far as to make the claim that there is no self, and that there is no consciousness, for reasons that I already explained.
But rather I feel, we need to look more closely at what is the nature of this elusive "self". What unfounded assumptions are we making, without even realising them?
To analogise:
Take Newtonian time. It "makes sense", it fact it is "obvious". There seemed no sensible way that you could argue with Newton's definition of time. It most certainly matched our natural intuitive grasp of what exactly time was.
Then along came Einstein, and blew all that away! The REAL nature of time, is in fact quite very different to the time that we find "obvious".
Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are the two things which cause me to be instantly suspicious of making any assumptions, on the basis that "they are obvious".
So, in the same way that the true nature of time, is not expressed correctly in the "obvious" Newtonian sense, I fear that our "obvious" interpretation of self, is not the true self.
In fact, I feel that the argument I stated at the start of this thread is one indication that such things are so. After all, the continuity of consciousness is undoubtedly an illusion, despite that fact that it seems "obvious" that it exists! The “obvious” self is starting to come apart at the seams!
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Consider two different methods: 1) actual physical transfer and then replacement (ie, actually moving the brain one particle(?) at a time and then recreating the original), or 2) True replication (the original remains untouched). Would the result be different? Assume that both the original and the copy are completely and utterly unconcious during the process. Both would think they are the original, yes, that much is obvious. But would the original actually know which one he was?
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I don't see what you mean? Both would claim to be the original. The copy would say that he has just experienced himself being teleported into a different room, and the "real original" would claim that "obviously" he was the actual real self, that he experienced lying on an operating table and hearing all sorts of loud noises, after which he got up, and his identical twin walked into the room.
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e've also discovered why the existence of a soul, like many religious concepts, is such a convenient theory.
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