GMontag

If you take a person and one by one replaced all the atoms in his or her body with an identical atom, would he or she be a different person? You seem to be claiming yes, but (as was mentioned earlier in the thread) this happens to everybody all the time. The figure I've heard is 7 years for a complete replacement of all the atoms in your body. So, are you not yourself after 7 years?

chance

This would be a dream come true for me.

zen_tom

GMontag, you are certainly a 'different' you after 7 years, your brain will have changed shape considerably, as will the consciousness that emerges from it. An exact replica of a thing and the real thing are NOT the same. Rebuilding me using a different process would not be able to transport my thoughts and feelings, the me that resides inside my brain would not be able to continue to reside there if my brain was ripped apart. If you kill someone in a way that doesn't affect their brain, they are still dead, and usually will remain so for some time. Could re-stimulating the dead brain in some way cause it to come back to life? And if so, would it be the same individual that came back?

If the opposite were true, and the machine created a copy of you. Would you be aware of two sets of images from your now 4 eyes, i.e. would you be aware of everything your twin was aware of?

It's a very difficult question to put your finger on, and now, having asked these questions, I am not so sure myself. However, I still wouldn't trust my consciousness, which has got to be the most precious thing on this planet (no, not MY consciousness – ha!) to this machine.

I did like the post someone made about waking up a different person every day, I'm not sure what I think about it, but I do kind of like it.

1010011010

That "Outer Limits Episode" mentioned earlier is based on "Think Like a Dinosaur" by James Patrick Kelly. I recommend reading it, as OL had a tendency to pull the teeth from any hard sci-fi. I think they're the same ones that castrated "The Cold Equations".

I find all the "but it's not really me! what about my soul?" stuff to be funny. Mainly because none of it occurred to me as a possible valid objection.

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Simple Machines in Higher Dimensions

joeshoe

This raises some good questions, but how can you assume that everyone who uses it appears to be the same? That could very well contradict the science behind it.

CSflim

What have a self-turnover of an entire day? Why not a minute? Why not a second? Why not an instant? (a plank time unit ro whatever).

The idea of a persistent self is a pure illusion. A "self" is a narrative constructed by the brain to make sense of the string of perceptions it recieves.

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zen_tom

It may be an illusion, and unfortunately it is one I've grown rather attached to. Coming to terms with this fact is notoriously difficult, and one that many people devote their entire lives to. I assume that you are stating the idea as a rationally held belief rather than as something that you both fully and deeply accept as an individual, but if this is not the case, then I am both envious and deeply interested in how you managed it. I've had *moments* when I've felt like I've almost grasped this truth, but could never hold onto the realisation for long.

Lebell

A clone is not the original.

No.

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"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." – C. S. Lewis

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Lebell

Then again, science tells us that the human body will replace every single cell in the body seven times during our lives.

Interesting.

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"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." – C. S. Lewis

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CSflim

I understand what you are getting at, and I accept that I live my day to day life in thrall of this illusion. I don't see this as a negative thing. The "benign user illusion" (Dan Dennett's term) is a very powerful device which we have evolved, and life would be VERY confusing without it, (probably to the point of being unlivable).

But this doesn't change the fact that as the self is an illusion which superviences on the physical, a transformation which keeps the "physical facts" constant will also keep the user illusion constant, and hence "I" have nothing to worry about when it comes to this machine.

In short I would be mistaken to think, walking out of the teleporter that I would have suceeded in transporting a mystical self over a distance, but I would be equally mistaken had I just drove there instead.

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CSflim

You've got a "me" in there? I suppose that your brain gets visual information from the eyes and projects it onto a metaphorical cinema screen somewhere in your brain, and presents it to this "me". Your ears do something similar with sound. I wonder....what happens when the "me" looks at the cinema screen? I imagine it takes in the visual information, which is then digested and rearranged, and then...uh...presented to your "me's me"? (and in turn to your "me's me's me"?).

Sure, why not? Unless you believe in such things as "soul's" which are a necessary ingredient for life, and "leave" the body at the moment of death. I don't imagine such a thing could ever be done in reality (much too complex), but if it could, then I don't see why this body that is up and walking around and talking and eating (and all the rest), would not be considered to be alive, and if it's not Good Ole Jimmy, then who is he?

You don't have four eyes. You have two. You are only aware of what can be seen with your pair of eyes. As it happens, there is someone walking around who looks exactly like you and happens to share your past. But he of course is the clone, not you. As it happens, naturally enough, he believes that you are the clone, and he is the original. See my chess analogy above to see why the distinction is meaningless and based on a false view of a "self".

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zen_tom

No, the homunculus isn't the only alternative (by the way, the notion of 'soul' suffers from the same problem. i.e. does a soul have a soul? etc) However, there is an another option, that the 'self' we're talking about spontaneously emerges from the processing and reprocessing of all of this data.

This option isn't magical, nor is it necessarily as illusionary as perhaps you suggest, but sits somewhere in-between, an internal phenomenon with not only structure (in the way a hurricane has structure, despite it in reality being a collection of particles unrelated except for their positions, velocities and interactions) but also self-knowledge - whatever that is (which I suppose is the root of this discussion)

A hurricane blows itself out after time, and you can stop the swirl in a bathtub's plughole by putting the plug back in. If self awareness is a delicate pattern, if it is a something that emerges and self-perpetuates from the processes and interactions of complex nets of interconnecting pieces of matter, then it is likely that disruption of that pattern is going to change it in such a way that disturbs and or destroys it. Is it even possible for any machine to freeze-frame such a pattern (even of a the spiral in a bathtub), transport it somewhere, and unfreeze it without damaging the motion in some way? (However, since this is a hypothetical machine, I will keep from posing that hypothetical, but I suspect damning, question)

Now this is all fine and well (rationally describing patterns and drawing similarities between mental processes and weather formations) but as soon as I start wondering what this means for ME, the me that is sitting here typing this, experiencing these patterns, no, BEING these patterns, then where does that leave me if this pattern is interrupted? If it is started again, do 'I' return? Or is it something else? Perhaps it is a delusion, the idea that I am anything other than the stuff of the rest of the world, but then isn't the fact that the delusion exists enough to suggest that the delusion is able to self-fulfill? These questions are ones I don't know the answers to, and while I'm not ready yet to understand exactly what this 'self' is, neither am I ready to accept that there is no such thing as my 'self', leaving me in a kind of limbo.

Your chess analogy is a good one, except that the game is something that the chessboard plays with itself, which complicates matters. If I were to be copied now, or say, while I sleep tonight, and I wake tomorrow, who wakes up? Damn, I'm talking in circles now. I hope I've got over what I'm trying to say (or at least express some of my level of confusion) - Despite this, I do think you and I, if not on the same page, somewhere in the same chapter or even the same book, are at least both able to read.

In the meantime, let me leave you with this observation: I'm trying to answer this on a personal level, while you seem content to do so from a rational standpoint. Is it possible to find a personal way to truly answer this question? Or is it an obvious paradox to be written off and dismissed with rationale? If it is, it's one my existence is directly tied up in.
And if that is the case, how can we answer from a rational standpoint, if we know the question itself is false?
However you look at it, there remain unresolved issues.