• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Here's something that bothers me about teleportation.

kittoo

Cretinously credulous
Yea so keep in mind that your body is always regenerating new cells.....so when you go to sleep at night where does "you" go when you are not dreaming ,and when you wake up in the morning are you a different person with the same memories or the same person. Have fun sleeping tonight!
Isn't it a scientific fact that every single cell of the body is replaced and everything is created from scratch in about 7 months? So basically we all are anyway copies of our 7months old selves. Except this time the old ourselves are dust and hair and nails now.
Same thing I suppose, maybe even worse.
Edit: It's 7 years and not 7 months.
 
Last edited:
Isn't it a scientific fact that every single cell of the body is replaced and everything is created from scratch in about 7 months? So basically we all are anyway copies of our 7months old selves. Except this time the old ourselves are dust and hair and nails now.
Same thing I suppose, maybe even worse.
Edit: It's 7 years and not 7 months.

so it may just be that the pace at which cells are replaced has a bearing on the "you" remaining in existence. If we slowly replaced a brain to an artificial brain over a long period of time would that be a way to have an eternal consciousness and beat death? What if you replace or upload your brain but your old brain still exists and is alive..which one is "you" or is your consciousness now in two places at once? The same can be said about uploading your consciousness and then duplicating that data...will it be two separate consciousness's ..which would be you or do you feel both at the same time. Its these ideas that make me agree that there may be a quantum aspect to consciousness that we dont understand yet.

Do identical twins have the same exact brain structure down to the cellular level or at least close enough? Maybe there is a reason we see identical twins sometimes have weird coincidental thought processes and reactions.
 

Thurible

Member
If you are simply "cloned" and killed I would not consider that teleportation as the subject leaving would not be the same person as the one entering. A clone is not the same being as it's progenitor even if it has the same genotype, phenotype, and beliefs or ideas.
 

Thurible

Member
If it’s an exact copy then by definition it will be you. Not much different to shedding skin.
I disagree. A clone is a completely seperate being from the original. It has different origins and would automatically be put into different circumstances and situations than the original. A clone and it's progenitor would have two seperate bodies with completely different thoughts and experiences. You cannot completely replicate someone's behavior and background. Animals have been cloned in real life and the progenitor and clone do not act completely the same and sometimes exhibit completely different personalities.

I also would personally argue that the physical material does not make a person alone, and that there are other variables at play.
 

Karma Jawa

Member
I disagree. A clone is a completely seperate being from the original. It has different origins and would automatically be put into different circumstances and situations than the original. A clone and it's progenitor would have two seperate bodies with completely different thoughts and experiences. You cannot completely replicate someone's behavior and background. Animals have been cloned in real life and the progenitor and clone do not act completely the same and sometimes exhibit completely different personalities.

I also would personally argue that the physical material does not make a person alone, and that there are other variables at play.

It’s not a clone in the same way as DNA replicas. In theory it’s an exact copy of who you are. If it isn’t, that’s down to deficiencies in the tech.

There could be a million versions, but it doesn’t matter if you still feel like you. If that sense of self consciousness no longer exists, or exists for a new entity that doesn’t share the memories of your experience then yes it’s artificial. Otherwise it’s exactly the same.
 

Grinchy

Banned
Maybe it was covered, but why would a teleporter have to pull you apart and put you back together? I guess the OP did specify that it had to be that way.

But what if it just bent space between you and the point you're going to or used a wormhole of some kind?
 
Last edited:

Cutty Flam

Banned
I know nothing about teleportation or its theories but I’ve actually been daydreaming about the possibilities of it

The founder / discoverer of teleporting successfully would be the richest man financially speaking, to ever live I would think. His or her creation would literally change nearly everything

People having serious issues could teleport to the hospital and significantly increase their chance of survival

Natural disasters would not claim as many lives

Imagine all the dangers that would be lessened or even possibly eliminated thanks to such a means of travel ......

It would be the greatest invention since the MRI machine or the spaceship or the computer
 

Sakura

Member
Ok so lets say in 500 years from now teleporting is mainstream. But how do we know its the version that doesn't kill the person who steps in?

Lets say its the only version thats possible and it completely destroys your atoms and makes a perfect copy of you on the other side. That copy thinks nothing bad happened and believes teleportation was succesful. But he is just a clone. The original person is destroyed. How can you prove that other than spying on the inventors to see if they want to use it?
Why would we use this technology if we have no idea how it works?
If you are basing this on Star Trek, keep in mind Star Trek isn't really all that realistic. Humans can have children with entirely alien species, all aliens breath the same atmosphere as we do, etc.
We wouldn't come up with transporter technology and mass use in the real world if we didn't know exactly how it worked and had done vigorous testing to prove it isn't just cloning people, because 500 years from now people would have the same concerns as you do about it.
 
Of course it’s death. Even if by some magic, you could transport the atoms themselves, you’d still be disassembling them first (death), then reassembling them. The question would be if it matters and if the teleported person would care, assuming they couldn’t tell the difference.
 

DrAspirino

Banned
Has anyone watched "Altered Carbon"?

They present a very creative approach to the "teleportation question": they simply move consciousness, independent of the body. For example, There's a "body bank" in some other place (so to speak) and you want to go there, you simply upload your consciousness to that body and continue on. When you want to return home, you simply return the body to the bank and transfer your consciousness back to your body. When you're about to die, you simply transfer the consciousness to another body and that's it, another 80 years or so to live.

Now, goin back to reality, I think that approach seems much more realistic and "possible", since there would be a separation of the biological body and the consciousness that is already being studied.
 

Ornlu

Banned
Has anyone watched "Altered Carbon"?

They present a very creative approach to the "teleportation question": they simply move consciousness, independent of the body. For example, There's a "body bank" in some other place (so to speak) and you want to go there, you simply upload your consciousness to that body and continue on. When you want to return home, you simply return the body to the bank and transfer your consciousness back to your body. When you're about to die, you simply transfer the consciousness to another body and that's it, another 80 years or so to live.

Now, goin back to reality, I think that approach seems much more realistic and "possible", since there would be a separation of the biological body and the consciousness that is already being studied.

You'd still need to pair that with some form of FTL, otherwise it would be limited to one solar system in functionality, or you would end up with a 100+ year gap in between lives in other systems. :messenger_dizzy:
 

wondermega

Member
Yea so keep in mind that your body is always regenerating new cells.....so when you go to sleep at night where does "you" go when you are not dreaming ,and when you wake up in the morning are you a different person with the same memories or the same person. Have fun sleeping tonight!

Never mind when you go to sleep at night, might as well apply this logic to your waking hours as well. How do we know that "we" are the same 100% on all levels even moment to moment? This is playing with the delicately-held concepts of what consciousness/"souls" are. The way I see it, these are the options:

1. We are just very fancy machines with zero soul at all so this is all irrelevant (no one likes this thought)
2. We have souls but they are not physically bound to our body in a way that we can conventionally even begin to understand so this all may or may not be irrelevant either way
3. We all "share" the same soul/life-essence/whatever so it doesn't matter if there is one copy of you or 500, they are all linked to the same exact pool (this is a combination of philosophies of 1 and 2 I suppose) meaning that you and your teleported self are always the same but also always unique.
 

Whitesnake

Banned
Yea so keep in mind that your body is always regenerating new cells.....so when you go to sleep at night where does "you" go when you are not dreaming ,and when you wake up in the morning are you a different person with the same memories or the same person. Have fun sleeping tonight!
Isn't it a scientific fact that every single cell of the body is replaced and everything is created from scratch in about 7 months? So basically we all are anyway copies of our 7months old selves. Except this time the old ourselves are dust and hair and nails now.
Same thing I suppose, maybe even worse.
Edit: It's 7 years and not 7 months.

Not really.

Your brain, for example, really only regenerates cells when it absolutely needs to. And even then they can only regenerate certain types of cells, and only to a limited capacity. For the most part it stays relatively static once fully developed.

Here’s a simple chart on the renewal rate of different tissues throughout the body. Make note of the ones that have very slow rates of regeneration, and also the ones that say “life time”.
eq6EleZ.png
 
Last edited:

Batiman

Banned
What always bugs me in media is how things get teleported with a person. How do clothes, weapons, etc get teleported as well always bugs the shit out of me. If it’s whatever’s attached to you how come you don’t take whatever your on with you? In guess I’m just thinking too much about it.
 

kittoo

Cretinously credulous
Not really.

Your brain, for example, really only regenerates cells when it absolutely needs to. And even then they can only regenerate certain types of cells, and only to a limited capacity. For the most part it stays relatively static once fully developed.

Here’s a simple chart on the renewal rate of different tissues throughout the body. Make note of the ones that have very slow rates of regeneration, and also the ones that say “life time”.
eq6EleZ.png
Didnt know that not all cells regenerate. Thank you for this. Very informative.
 

Ornlu

Banned
What always bugs me in media is how things get teleported with a person. How do clothes, weapons, etc get teleported as well always bugs the shit out of me. If it’s whatever’s attached to you how come you don’t take whatever your on with you? In guess I’m just thinking too much about it.

I think they just go with the rule of cool most of the time; getting too far into the weeds just isn't interesting to most people. I think Star Trek could generally use more rule of cool, and less technobabble.
 

Whitesnake

Banned
What always bugs me in media is how things get teleported with a person. How do clothes, weapons, etc get teleported as well always bugs the shit out of me. If it’s whatever’s attached to you how come you don’t take whatever your on with you? In guess I’m just thinking too much about it.

I think the basic idea is that everything inside of the teleporter chamber is teleported to an identically-sized teleporter chamber, with all of the particles in the exact same orientation and position relative to each other that they had before teleporting.

Think of it like in microsoft paint when you cut a square out of a picture and drag it somewhere else. Everything inside the square is the same, but the square itself is in a new position.
 
Last edited:
how about the whole thing with Altered Carbon where you just put your consciousness on a chip and put it into whatever clone body you like elsewhere? so that way it's just faxing your mind over instead of your body.
 

Ar¢tos

Member
You are looking at teleportation the wrong way.
It's more plausible to bend space, make a hole and go through it than to de-materialize a living thing and assemble a 100.00% copy of it elsewhere that shares the same consciousness.

Aside from cats, nothing living can teleport (nearly all cat owners will agree with me).
Cats also have the unique ability of being solid and liquid at the same time.
 

TwoDurans

"Never said I wasn't a hypocrite."
I like the teleportation from "The Jaunt".

Read it people, it's short and sweet.

Wait, you'd want to do that? What if something goes wrong with the sleeping gas? What if you have that kind of paralysis where your body is asleep but your mind isn't? Fuck that.

I'd rather take the risk that I die and my clone gets to live somewhere else than possibly suffering an incalculable amount of madness inducing travel only to die anyway.
 
For teleportation to maintain continuity of consciousness, you would have to:
  • Create a wormhole or similar space-time distortion to connect one section of space to another and send an intact person through.
  • Transport a person and the surrounding matter intact instantly to another location through some quantum quirk.
  • Build a perfect duplicate copy of a person on the other side, connect their minds so that the transported consciousness is utilizing both bodies, and then destroy the original.
The last method is homologous to uploading a person to a computer. You cannot just make a copy in a computer - you have to extend the person's consciousness, their experience, into the new vessel and then destroy the original to complete the transfer. If you connect a person's mind to a computer that can maintain their thoughts and generates experience, then the entire system is that person. As long as the computer can maintain the experience, you can kill the body and their experience would continue uninterrupted.
 

kingbean

Member
Wait, you'd want to do that? What if something goes wrong with the sleeping gas? What if you have that kind of paralysis where your body is asleep but your mind isn't? Fuck that.

I'd rather take the risk that I die and my clone gets to live somewhere else than possibly suffering an incalculable amount of madness inducing travel only to die anyway.

I mean I like the story and the unique way it works. Not that I'd like to do it.
 

LordKasual

Banned
You die, and then you're alive again.

The question then is what "you" are

Your consciousness goes with you because your consciousness is an emergent property of your brain.


If you get copied, then there are now 2 of you. Which one is "YOU" is only a relevant question when there are 2 of you

At which point, the only time "YOU" are different from "HIM/HER" is when you become aware of the fact that you've been cloned.


The existential question here is "what is consciousness" or "what is this feeling of me feeling like i'm inside my body". And that's pretty much impossible to answer.


I think the resolution of this question requires us to abandon the idea of you having a "Soul" or singular identity and accepting it for the illusion that it is.

Cloning/teleporting doesn't "Kill" "You" because you are alive elsewhere. The temporary loss of consciousness shouldn't matter, right?

To the new lifeform, it would be literally no different from going to sleep, losing consciousness, and waking up a different day.


For all we know, that's all death is!

You're "unconscious" for an indefinite amount of time (8 hours or 8 billion years, makes no difference, you're unconsciousness) and then suddenly you aren't.

The teleportation question forces us to change our definition of what being conscious or having an Ego actually means.
 
Last edited:

Keihart

Member
Ok so lets say in 500 years from now teleporting is mainstream. But how do we know its the version that doesn't kill the person who steps in?

Lets say its the only version thats possible and it completely destroys your atoms and makes a perfect copy of you on the other side. That copy thinks nothing bad happened and believes teleportation was succesful. But he is just a clone. The original person is destroyed. How can you prove that other than spying on the inventors to see if they want to use it?
This is why you don't use teleportation.

Imagine that it is the best version, in theory it should disassemble you and reassemble you, but how can you call the reassembled version still you?
It's the same matter, but no necessarily the same conscience, and then you have to ask the real question, what it's really YOU?
is it the body you are born with, your cell are all renewed during your life.
is it your dna? how about perfect clones then?
is it your brain map? what if you can copy it?
is it your concious stream? what about when you faint then or even sleep?

There are countless interpretations, but all in all, this is a recurring question within science fiction.
I think it is even questionable if you are still you if there are any real breaks in your conscience, i think that it's something that we can not just get to terms with. Our consciences gets reset multiple times within our lives and the sense of self remains, but i think we are probably a new us every morning if not every second.

Or maybe, there is a ghost...and we can put it in a machine, we may call it, the ghost in the shell.
 
Last edited:

nkarafo

Member
You're "unconscious" for an indefinite amount of time (8 hours or 8 billion years, makes no difference, you're unconsciousness) and then suddenly you aren't.
Are you really unconscious when you sleep though? You are still dreaming of things even though most of the time you don't remember them later. But your "ego" is still active during those dreams.
 
so it may just be that the pace at which cells are replaced has a bearing on the "you" remaining in existence. If we slowly replaced a brain to an artificial brain over a long period of time would that be a way to have an eternal consciousness and beat death? What if you replace or upload your brain but your old brain still exists and is alive..which one is "you" or is your consciousness now in two places at once? The same can be said about uploading your consciousness and then duplicating that data...will it be two separate consciousness's ..which would be you or do you feel both at the same time. Its these ideas that make me agree that there may be a quantum aspect to consciousness that we dont understand yet.

Do identical twins have the same exact brain structure down to the cellular level or at least close enough? Maybe there is a reason we see identical twins sometimes have weird coincidental thought processes and reactions.
As an identical twin let me chime in here.

Erm... no we don't...

Same originating DNA but probably material divergence in methylation.

What's interesting between us is that there have always been marginal differences between us whilst growing up; I'm a cm taller, have facial contour differences, I'm left-handed and he's right-handed etc.
From birth there were also strange and distinctive differences such as our fingerprints being identical but opposite (i.e. prints on my left hand are the same as those on his right etc).

We've never experienced the fabled cognitive twin neural link that people talk about, however I know a few female identical twins who claim to share some kind of connection (empathic in nature as far as it's been described -> think Sense8 without the telepathic communication) so I do wonder whether there's a gender bias to that, assuming it is a real thing.

We have had a lot of coincidental thought when we were much younger but I think much of that was a product of nurture being the shared life & environment we grew up in. After we split living together when we left home for Uni we've become so different as people (different career paths, relationships, environments & life experiences) that that hasn't really happened since.

Do I think there is some quantum link between us? Nah...

Do I believe we're two separate consciousnesses? Of course.

Do I believe that consciousness is defined by and rooted in some as-yet-to-be-understood quantum mechanics/phenomena? Absolutely!

Ya'll should check out Sir Roger Penrose's book The Emperor's New Mind (1989) which theorizes that consciousness is not algorithmic and thus, much of what we understand about the physical mechanisms of the human brain, whilst still governing a complex mesh of biological and physical functions, do not yet demonstrate the ability to drive or orchestrate what we understand as consciousness in the philosophical sense, and that there is something else going on, perhaps at the quantum level but through phenomena we have yet to either observe, intuit or hypothesize mathematically.

So what does that mean for teleportation? Well it's unclear, but depending on the nature of consciousness, without that base understanding, it's not even 100% clear that even if you can perfectly reconstruct the atomic structure you're actually going to be replicating the consciousness too as a by-product.

In some ways I would personally go so far as to contemplate that it would be impossible to do that, considering the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, surely it would be impossible to even perfectly replicate every attribute (position, velocity, spin) of every particle of every atom, of every molecule, of every protein of every cell in the human body. Imperfect replication maybe possible but then whilst it may guarantee parity across molecular structures, it certainly won't guarantee anything else beyond that so you never have any chance of seeing a "perfect" copy come out the other end.
 
Last edited:

DrAspirino

Banned
The question then is what "you" are

Your consciousness goes with you because your consciousness is an emergent property of your brain.

The existential question here is "what is consciousness" or "what is this feeling of me feeling like i'm inside my body". And that's pretty much impossible to answer.
It's called "proprioception", its our 6th sense and its literally that: the ability to sense the limit of your body and that you are inside your body. There are drugs that actually modify your proprioception and your consciousness "feels endless".

And to answer your first question, the dilemma has already been addressed: we're our consciousness. As simple as that. We're nothing more than über-complex biomachines.
 
Last edited:

AltOmega

Neo Member
I think the best answer to this was in a short story I read about a guy having the same misgivings about teleportation only to find its inventor in a bar drinking alone; the inventor told him that a unfathomable amount of his cells were dying and being replaced every second, what difference did it make if the location changed.
Obviously there was more to it than that but that always struck me as "the answer" even if I don't wholeheartedly agree with it.
 

Airola

Member
You die, and then you're alive again.

The question then is what "you" are

Your consciousness goes with you because your consciousness is an emergent property of your brain.


If you get copied, then there are now 2 of you. Which one is "YOU" is only a relevant question when there are 2 of you

At which point, the only time "YOU" are different from "HIM/HER" is when you become aware of the fact that you've been cloned.


The existential question here is "what is consciousness" or "what is this feeling of me feeling like i'm inside my body". And that's pretty much impossible to answer.


I think the resolution of this question requires us to abandon the idea of you having a "Soul" or singular identity and accepting it for the illusion that it is.

Cloning/teleporting doesn't "Kill" "You" because you are alive elsewhere. The temporary loss of consciousness shouldn't matter, right?

To the new lifeform, it would be literally no different from going to sleep, losing consciousness, and waking up a different day.


For all we know, that's all death is!

You're "unconscious" for an indefinite amount of time (8 hours or 8 billion years, makes no difference, you're unconsciousness) and then suddenly you aren't.

The teleportation question forces us to change our definition of what being conscious or having an Ego actually means.

I think the opposite is true. The resolution to this question requires us to take the idea of a soul seriously.

The fact that there could be an identical copy of you, physically 100% the same as you, but you couldn't feel yourself in being in those two bodies at the same time means there is something else making the sense and experience of self than what your physical body is made of. Claiming it's an illusion is way too easy way out of this problem. It doesn't take the necessary steps in logic but rather refuses to go where logic would point to, all the while trying to explain the single one thing every single person can say is true as untrue.
 

DunDunDunpachi

Patient MembeR
There's a great series called The Quantum Thief that explores several possible avenues of post-human consciousness:

- mind-clones (called gogols) are perfect copies of oneself, except that they obey a hierarchy where the "original" is still at the top of the pyramid. A complex machine, a space ship, a factory, or even an army of drones could all be piloted by a singular "person" duplicated millions of times, working in perfect unison.

- every few decades, transferring consciousness to a sleep-state where you earn money as a drone. Then resurrect after a few years of servitude to spend your money and enjoy life.

- crypto-consciousness, entangled with other members of your clan at the quantum level. Upon death, your brainstate (up to the point of death) is simply reknit by your other clanmates and put into a new avatar.
 

Keihart

Member
I think the opposite is true. The resolution to this question requires us to take the idea of a soul seriously.

The fact that there could be an identical copy of you, physically 100% the same as you, but you couldn't feel yourself in being in those two bodies at the same time means there is something else making the sense and experience of self than what your physical body is made of. Claiming it's an illusion is way too easy way out of this problem. It doesn't take the necessary steps in logic but rather refuses to go where logic would point to, all the while trying to explain the single one thing every single person can say is true as untrue.
i think you are giving yourself, or us really, too much credit.
You should always question perception, every sense can fool you and reality it's nothing more than our interpretation of the senses, which can wildly vary from person to person even.

How do you know that your sense of self is really that authentic? how do you know that a machine with a copy of how your brain work would not have the same sense of self? and to that matter, does that machine have a soul now?

I think that the assumption of soul it's the easy way out of the problem, it's what helps us cope with the fact that most probably what we perceive as special and unique, our consciousness, it's nothing more than the effect of a complex machine made of cells.

This topic has been beaten to death in philosophy and science fiction, cyberpunk genre it's full of it.

Edit Also:
 
Last edited:

Kamina

Golden Boy
Why would we use this technology if we have no idea how it works?
If you are basing this on Star Trek, keep in mind Star Trek isn't really all that realistic. Humans can have children with entirely alien species, all aliens breath the same atmosphere as we do, etc.
Star Trek explains that though.
There is an episode that confirms that most humanoid species are created based on the genetic material from the same precursor species.
There are many odd aliens who are completely different to humans though.
 

E-Cat

Member
Does it bother you that when you go to sleep and lose consciousness, you die and wake up another person?
 

MaestroMike

Gold Member
I would be interested in freezing myself and letting my stocks grow and have the dividends automatically re-invested and then waking up 50 years from now like Austin Powers with more wealth so I don't have to work.
 

Airola

Member
i think you are giving yourself, or us really, too much credit.
You should always question perception, every sense can fool you and reality it's nothing more than our interpretation of the senses, which can wildly vary from person to person even.

How do you know that your sense of self is really that authentic? how do you know that a machine with a copy of how your brain work would not have the same sense of self? and to that matter, does that machine have a soul now?

I think that the assumption of soul it's the easy way out of the problem, it's what helps us cope with the fact that most probably what we perceive as special and unique, our consciousness, it's nothing more than the effect of a complex machine made of cells.

This topic has been beaten to death in philosophy and science fiction, cyberpunk genre it's full of it.

If every sense can fool me, then what is that 'me' that gets fooled?
It is still 'you' who is sensing the 'illusion', there's no way around it.

Reality being "nothing more than our interpretation of the senses" still has the word 'our' in it. It still is a subjective sentence. It is OUR interpretation. We can call it an illusion as much as we want but it still is OUR interpretation, it is still interpreted by a self. My interpretation is made by only me and no-one else. Your interpretation is made by only you and no-one else. I am sensed by only myself. You are sensed by only yourself.

In a hypothetical situation where there's a copy of me, would you say it's more likely that the copy would sense itself apart from me sensing myself, or that both would sense each other as their self at the same time? I would think that these two people would more likely be their own selves apart from each other than both sensing their own being in two different places at the same time. It would be logically more sound choice.

I'm not buying into the illusion-misdirection and I'm not buying into the "but we're not special" misdirection either. To me, calling the sense of self an illusion is like saying a wood getting chopped is not really wood that's getting chopped, that it's just particles moving around in space. The sense of self is what every single one of us experiences and calling it an illusion serves no purpose in explaining what that experience is like.

And what "giving us too much credit" even really means? First of all, what's the problem with that? Secondly, whatever credit we give to ourselves shouldn't have anything to do with what the reality of our existence is. It is what it is. It's not as if the truth of our existence must become to the conclusion that we're not that important. If we are important we are important. If we aren't we aren't. We all still have this experience of self, regardless of our importance. That experience either is fully the result of our physical body or it isn't. Whether or not we're important shouldn't have any say in what the result to the question of self is.

There are much more evidence for the self being authentic than there is evidence for it not being authentic. Sure, the self can experience all kinds of hallucinations and craziness, but it's still that one single person who is experiencing all those things. If you believe you can rely on scientific calculations, even if a lot of time they are wrong and they are corrected, wouldn't you also have to rely on the reality of the person who is observing those calculations? If you can say the experience of self is an illusion, how can you say any scientific calculations are nothing more than illusions either? I mean, you probably are ready to make assumptions about the universe based on scientific calculations, but the experience of the self that's doing the calculations and observing the calculations is somehow not really real. On one hand we should always question perception but on the other hand we should just call the very thing every single one of us feels and senses an illusion and accept it as that.

I don't think it's impossible to make a clone of our bodies. But I think it's impossible to clone the sense of self. I can't see me sensing both myself and my clone at the same time, or my clone sensing himself and me at the same time. If the sense of self can't be copied into the clone, then the sense of self doesn't come from our physical bodies but there is something else to it. To think about this we don't even have to think about making a clone of our bodies, but we could just think of a possibility of every single cell being the same in two different persons. If there would, for some reason, be a person who has every single cell the same way than I have and it would be 100% identical to me, then if our sense of self is based on what we physically are both of us would have to sense being both of us at the same time. If we wouldn't sense being in two places at the same time, then there would be only two possibilities: 1) the sense of self comes from something else than what we physically are, or 2) the sense of self is not real. I would think the first option would be the correct option and I think the second option is impossible, and we can prove that impossibility daily by just existing and even pondering this question. Again, you can question your perception all you want but it's still that specific you who is doing the questioning.

What is it that makes you feel you are that specific body instead of some other body? I certainly don't feel being you and you certainly don't feel being me. What's the mechanism that has made me feel this body instead of me feeling your body and not this body at all? Why am I this body instead of a body somewhere in Africa, while this body would be experienced by someone else? Could this body exist without it being experiencing by some self? I don't think there's a physical mechanism for that, but I think the experience comes from some another system. The only other way to explain this would be to claim that self doesn't really exist and I think that's the most unscientific thing a person could ever say. Our scientific researches depend on us being the observers and interpreters of it and we are ready to accept we observe them and believe in them, but now the experience of self isn't what we first hand experience it to be but it's some sort of an illusion that doesn't really experience whatever automatic reactions the body constantly does.

Sure maybe that angle has been beaten to death in science fiction, especially in cyberpunk, but that tells more about the people who write them than the actual reality. In philosophy, yeah maybe it's beaten to death too, but I think you have failed to recognize what the corpse is ;)
 

Airola

Member
Does it bother you that when you go to sleep and lose consciousness, you die and wake up another person?

Consciousness isn't actually lost there. When we faint and say we lost consciousness it's just a figure of speech to explain the moment where you don't think, or at least don't remember you thought, and where you don't sense the world around you or what's in your mind, or at least you don't remember you did. Consciousness is not gone when you a sleeping but not dreaming. It still exists just as much as it existed when you were awake. It just doesn't work with your body at that specific moment, or at least you can't remember it worked with your body. Consciousness allows your body to rest.
 

Keihart

Member
If every sense can fool me, then what is that 'me' that gets fooled?
It is still 'you' who is sensing the 'illusion', there's no way around it.

Reality being "nothing more than our interpretation of the senses" still has the word 'our' in it. It still is a subjective sentence. It is OUR interpretation. We can call it an illusion as much as we want but it still is OUR interpretation, it is still interpreted by a self. My interpretation is made by only me and no-one else. Your interpretation is made by only you and no-one else. I am sensed by only myself. You are sensed by only yourself.

In a hypothetical situation where there's a copy of me, would you say it's more likely that the copy would sense itself apart from me sensing myself, or that both would sense each other as their self at the same time? I would think that these two people would more likely be their own selves apart from each other than both sensing their own being in two different places at the same time. It would be logically more sound choice.

I'm not buying into the illusion-misdirection and I'm not buying into the "but we're not special" misdirection either. To me, calling the sense of self an illusion is like saying a wood getting chopped is not really wood that's getting chopped, that it's just particles moving around in space. The sense of self is what every single one of us experiences and calling it an illusion serves no purpose in explaining what that experience is like.

And what "giving us too much credit" even really means? First of all, what's the problem with that? Secondly, whatever credit we give to ourselves shouldn't have anything to do with what the reality of our existence is. It is what it is. It's not as if the truth of our existence must become to the conclusion that we're not that important. If we are important we are important. If we aren't we aren't. We all still have this experience of self, regardless of our importance. That experience either is fully the result of our physical body or it isn't. Whether or not we're important shouldn't have any say in what the result to the question of self is.

There are much more evidence for the self being authentic than there is evidence for it not being authentic. Sure, the self can experience all kinds of hallucinations and craziness, but it's still that one single person who is experiencing all those things. If you believe you can rely on scientific calculations, even if a lot of time they are wrong and they are corrected, wouldn't you also have to rely on the reality of the person who is observing those calculations? If you can say the experience of self is an illusion, how can you say any scientific calculations are nothing more than illusions either? I mean, you probably are ready to make assumptions about the universe based on scientific calculations, but the experience of the self that's doing the calculations and observing the calculations is somehow not really real. On one hand we should always question perception but on the other hand we should just call the very thing every single one of us feels and senses an illusion and accept it as that.

I don't think it's impossible to make a clone of our bodies. But I think it's impossible to clone the sense of self. I can't see me sensing both myself and my clone at the same time, or my clone sensing himself and me at the same time. If the sense of self can't be copied into the clone, then the sense of self doesn't come from our physical bodies but there is something else to it. To think about this we don't even have to think about making a clone of our bodies, but we could just think of a possibility of every single cell being the same in two different persons. If there would, for some reason, be a person who has every single cell the same way than I have and it would be 100% identical to me, then if our sense of self is based on what we physically are both of us would have to sense being both of us at the same time. If we wouldn't sense being in two places at the same time, then there would be only two possibilities: 1) the sense of self comes from something else than what we physically are, or 2) the sense of self is not real. I would think the first option would be the correct option and I think the second option is impossible, and we can prove that impossibility daily by just existing and even pondering this question. Again, you can question your perception all you want but it's still that specific you who is doing the questioning.

What is it that makes you feel you are that specific body instead of some other body? I certainly don't feel being you and you certainly don't feel being me. What's the mechanism that has made me feel this body instead of me feeling your body and not this body at all? Why am I this body instead of a body somewhere in Africa, while this body would be experienced by someone else? Could this body exist without it being experiencing by some self? I don't think there's a physical mechanism for that, but I think the experience comes from some another system. The only other way to explain this would be to claim that self doesn't really exist and I think that's the most unscientific thing a person could ever say. Our scientific researches depend on us being the observers and interpreters of it and we are ready to accept we observe them and believe in them, but now the experience of self isn't what we first hand experience it to be but it's some sort of an illusion that doesn't really experience whatever automatic reactions the body constantly does.

Sure maybe that angle has been beaten to death in science fiction, especially in cyberpunk, but that tells more about the people who write them than the actual reality. In philosophy, yeah maybe it's beaten to death too, but I think you have failed to recognize what the corpse is ;)
More importantly, how can anyone tell the difference between a machine that pretends to be self conscious and one that actually is, without that how can we even begin to assume that there is something more to it then the illusion of consciousness ? or to be more precise even, let's talk self awareness. How can you prove that something that it's not self aware but pretends to be, isn't?

It's there any observable ( not even asking for demonstrable) trait that we can call soul or us or ghost? if not, how can you even start defining it to search for it and assume it exists.

The soul concept it's nothing more than a comfort concept just like gods, we needed those to cope, to make sense of things that we didn't know how they worked.

Edit: BTW, the path for gifting robots of self awareness might have come from philosophy, which i think it's fucking sick! ( as in awesome)
People are treating self awareness as the ability to simulate yourself, and this seems like a very tangible goal that represents what it is to be self aware.
 
Last edited:

LordKasual

Banned
I think the opposite is true. The resolution to this question requires us to take the idea of a soul seriously.

The fact that there could be an identical copy of you, physically 100% the same as you, but you couldn't feel yourself in being in those two bodies at the same time means there is something else making the sense and experience of self than what your physical body is made of.

Only if you assume that the feeling of "you" (as DrAspirino DrAspirino has given us a name for, "proprioception") is something that's special and NOT just a property of you having a functioning brain. If it isn't (and there's no reason to believe it is), then a 100% physically identical copy of you will simply feel like "YOU" the exact same way you do.....just through a different perspective.

What i'm suggesting is that this sensation of being rooted to a single body (having a "Soul" or the "Ego") is the true illusion. One that you can actually dispel for yourself with drugs, and experience the sensation of infinity.

You can just search around the internet on forums or Reddit for accounts of "Ego Death" achieved through meditation or psychedelics.

I've never done it myself, but what's interesting is that people who achieve are sometimes absolutely convinced that the loss of ego is/feels no different from death....and in alot of ways, it isn't any different.
 
Top Bottom