Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 12

[smcder]

My view is that we don’t know, at all. Our perceptions are models of what-is. I think our models are very course grained. So we probably would leave stuff out.

The questions is levels though. If we can copy what we need at a course grained level, then we’re fine. If our course grain copying misses fine grained important stuff, then we’re not. We don’t know. I agree.


My argument is not about value. My argument is that a copy of the pattern is what’s important, not what the pattern is embodied in. A copy of a book from LOA is just as objectively valuable as the original.


The man is dying because he slipped on a banana peel.

It’s unethical for the same reasons murder is unethical.

I’d love to see someone make that argument in court.

It’s not unlike the joke about the man who approaches another man on the street and says: “hey bill, you’ve gotten taller. And shaved your head. You wear glasses now!”

“My name’s Sam!”

“I’ll be, you even changed your name!”


This is a very important problem and one that our dear technicians may not be able to overcome. I’m not sure that the direction and momentum of a quark in an atom in a molecule in a cell in an organ in a body can e copied. But then again I’m not sure it couldn’t.

Could a cup of hot coffee even be copied, yes, good question. It may turn out to be more complex in its own way then a brain.

It’s unethical for the same reasons murder is unethical.

Which are...? I argue that if we show a man is just matter, then we can reduce the charge to destruction of property (IF the defendant can show he owns it and provide an ethical basis for "property"...i.e. that matter matters)

I’d love to see someone make that argument in court.

Grouch Marx probably did.

Could a cup of hot coffee even be copied, yes, good question. It may turn out to be more complex in its own way then a brain.

What is certain is that someone on here will argue that we can make a good cup of coffee without understanding how!

 

[smcder]

@Soupie - in terms of continuity of consciousness, Buddhism looks at the time scale for individual thoughts, or maybe more accurately awareness, in other words, we can experience a moment of only finite duration - I need to look the term up, but that implies consciousness is discrete, so where is it and where are we not just in dreamless sleep but in the gap between experience? This unit of time may be involved in the teleportation problem. It seems unavoidable, indeed you have posited that only one is conscious at a time during the process, that the earth original dies (at best) at the instant the planet y copy comes to consciousness. "I" would not want that. But sleep, the gap between awareness and aging don't bother my intuitive sense of "I" ...now, how do we either make this rigorous or expose it as false? Is it possible that the momentary gap in awareness, that actual minimum unit of time is what makes this rigorous?

 

[smcder]

Based on the laws we have today, he’s be entitele to nothing. However if copying ever became a thing, I’m sure there would be legal and social rules for entitlement.

"Based on the laws we have today, he’s be entitele to nothing."

Cite the code and any precedent supporting your proclama- er, I mean legal theory.

 

[smcder]

My view is that we don’t know, at all. Our perceptions are models of what-is. I think our models are very course grained. So we probably would leave stuff out.

The questions is levels though. If we can copy what we need at a course grained level, then we’re fine. If our course grain copying misses fine grained important stuff, then we’re not. We don’t know. I agree.


My argument is not about value. My argument is that a copy of the pattern is what’s important, not what the pattern is embodied in. A copy of a book from LOA is just as objectively valuable as the original.


The man is dying because he slipped on a banana peel.


It’s unethical for the same reasons murder is unethical.

I’d love to see someone make that argument in court.

It’s not unlike the joke about the man who approaches another man on the street and says: “hey bill, you’ve gotten taller. And shaved your head. You wear glasses now!”

“My name’s Sam!”

“I’ll be, you even changed your name!”


This is a very important problem and one that our dear technicians may not be able to overcome. I’m not sure that the direction and momentum of a quark in an atom in a molecule in a cell in an organ in a body can e copied. But then again I’m not sure it couldn’t.

Could a cup of hot coffee even be copied, yes, good question. It may turn out to be more complex in its own way then a brain.

"My argument is not about value. My argument is that a copy of the pattern is what’s important, not what the pattern is embodied in. A copy of a book from LOA is just as objectively valuable as the original."

And fine grainedness comes in here too. The embodied part, i.e. the original scrolls themselves, would have (in)valuable information - perhaps well beyond the immediate concern - about climate at the time they were buried for example...etc etc. Obviously a paperback copy would have none of the information that the material making up the scrolls would have.

 

[smcder]

Okay. Now we're getting down to the level of atoms instead of cells. This is where things get fuzzier. I would contend that once a person's biological systems take possession of new building blocks at the atomic or molecular level, then they become part of the person, and therefore, when they are used by the person's system's to repair or add to existing structures, the resulting structures are still 100% made of the the person's own materials, and therefore continuity of personhood in every respect is retained.

I suppose the question then becomes, at what level of complexity are we to suppose that a person's systems can take custody of something? The Darth Vader ( ship of Theseus ) allusion above is a really good example of that particular problem. But let's suppose the ship of Theseus is something much more complex, something capable of absorbing seawater and turning it into replacement parts all by itself on a microscopic scale. What then? At what point does the ship become the sea?

For me the question is if I am unconscious for some period every night and if there is a gap between my awareness, between each thought, why should I mind if while I sleep, someone cuts me up quark by quark and sends the pattern to planet y and builds an exact(ish) copy of me? Theoretically "I" would never know. And if I do mind, then why do "I" think I am the same person I was at age 20?

If I do "wake up" on planet y, what I would know is that "I" on planet earth was destroyed, I would remember up to some point (just as I have last waking thoughts each night) and then I would awake on planet y, those last and waking thoughts would seem only to be separated by an instant (which is how some experiences of anesthesia have seemed to me - in one case I would have sworn I came to finishing the sentence I started when I went out) but could be separated by any arbitrary length of time and I would know that I am only a few seconds old. Would I grieve for my old self or be grateful it hadn't happened to me? There is clearly some small difference in me physically each morning and larger differences over the last 20 years (unfortunately) and even in between each discrete thought.

 

[Soupie]

Would I grieve for my old self or be grateful it hadn't happened to me?

Do we grieve for our old self now?

I wonder if we would even have the intuition to grieve. I think for the copy it won’t feel (intuitively) as if the original died. You would feel like the original. As you say, like waking from sleep. Or as I said, it may even be smoother than waking from sleep.

no, I don’t think we’d feel grief. Grief wouldn’t seem appropriate. (But maybe intellectually.)

 

[Soupie]

"Based on the laws we have today, he’s be entitele to nothing."

Cite the code and any precedent supporting your proclama- er, I mean legal theory.

Redirect Notice

www.google.com

 

[Soupie]

I argue that if we show a man is just matter, then we can reduce the charge to destruction of property (IF the defendant can show he owns it and provide an ethical basis for "property"...i.e. that matter matters)

I suppose the person/body planning to be copied (which would probably be for the purpose of star travel) could agree to be destroyed. But then it would be suicide, not murder.

And why should they? They could enjoy life on earth and their copy could enjoy life among the stars. Sure, some trickery could certainly happen, but there would have to be safeguards.

 

[Soupie]

So the last copy is < hour before his death?? Or can he go back to previous backup?Backups(?) so that he can contest his own will?

Yes, he could go back just far enough to live but not so far that he looses too many memories.

 

[Soupie]

I can see the advertisement now:

You can travel the stars! There’s just one catch: you have to die first.

 

[Soupie]

I can see the advertisement now:

You can travel the stars! There’s just one catch: you have to die first.

And that seems really wrong: but I’ve been eating right, working out, getting my sleep, making sacrifices now, so my future self can enjoy the fruits of my labor. I now can’t experience what me then will experience, and vice versa.

But am I willing to die for my future self?

 

[Randall]

For me the question is if I am unconscious for some period every night and if there is a gap between my awareness, between each thought, why should I mind if while I sleep, someone cuts me up quark by quark and sends the pattern to planet y and builds an exact(ish) copy of me? Theoretically "I" would never know. And if I do mind, then why do "I" think I am the same person I was at age 20?

I would remember up to some point (just as I have last waking thoughts each night) and then I would awake on planet y, those last and waking thoughts would seem only to be separated by an instant (which is how some experiences of anesthesia have seemed to me - in one case I would have sworn I came to finishing the sentence I started when I went out) but could be separated by any arbitrary length of time and I would know that I am only a few seconds old. Would I grieve for my old self or be grateful it hadn't happened to me? There is clearly some small difference in me physically each morning and larger differences over the last 20 years (unfortunately) and even in between each discrete thought.

The key to answering the concerns above is in the usage of the word "I". Its use implies a continuity of personhood when no such continuity has taken place. For example, when you say, "If I do 'wake up' on planet y, what I would know is that 'I' on planet earth was destroyed ..." The actuality is that you will not wake up on planet y because you are dead. The word "I" is not interchangeable, because whatever ( or whoever ) does wake up on planet y after your death, is not you.

Perhaps if your copy attended your funeral, and could see you lying dead in your casket, they would accept that they obviously cannot be you, and are only a very good copy. What's more, they can never know for certain just how good a copy they are. For all your copy knows, some clever hacker may have inserted some hidden patterns into his makeup that make him very different than you. How would he even know?

 

[Randall]

And that seems really wrong: but I’ve been eating right, working out, getting my sleep, making sacrifices now, so my future self can enjoy the fruits of my labor. I now can’t experience what me then will experience, and vice versa. But am I willing to die for my future self?

The issue of dying for your future self may not be entirely trivial. Afterlives of this sort may be the actual state of affairs. We don't know for sure. So as I said in the Why Afterlives Are Impossible thesis, it may be beneficial to treat ourselves well while we live, so as to give our afterlife copies a better standing. This leads into some interesting notions about the morality of self-destructive behavior.

Because nobody else has hit upon it yet, I'm also going to restate the the sort of loophole I had alluded to earlier in the thread. What are the ramifications for this subject if time itself is quantized? In other words if what we experience as analog continuity is actually more like Planck time, where every moment is discreet, like the frames of a movie film?

The upshot would seem to be that we are always copies, each one slightly different than the one before, which would seem to mean that the whole notion of originals and continuity goes out the window. After all, if ten to the 43 power copies of you just popped into and out of existence in the last second, why should more copies be of any concern? I call this a "sort of loophole" because I think there are still issues. Or are there?

 

[Soupie]

The key to answering the concerns above is in the usage of the word "I". Its use implies a continuity of personhood when no such continuity has taken place. For example, when you say, "If I do 'wake up' on planet y, what I would know is that 'I' on planet earth was destroyed ..." The actuality is that you will not wake up on planet y because you are dead. The word "I" is not interchangeable, because whatever ( or whoever ) does wake up on planet y after your death, is not you.

The upshot would seem to be that we are always copies, each one slightly different than the one before, which would seem to mean that the whole notion of originals and continuity goes out the window. After all, if ten to the 43 power copies of you just popped into and out of existence in the last second, why should more copies be of any concern? I call this a "sort of loophole" because I think there are still issues. Or are there?

There is no continuity of substrate, either in the case of a normal lifetime or teleportation. The only difference is the time of substrate turnover.

Hell, if quantum fields are truly fundamental, and particles are akin to waves/perturbations in this non-classical substrate, the whole notion of substrate continuity goes completely out the window. A wave is a process, not a static, unchanging thing.

We don’t need this addition of the potential discreetness of time to have us question the continuity of the substrate embodying persons.

But there IS a continuity. What is continuous to a degree that matters, is the pattern of the person.

This isn’t really apparent now because we don’t have copies of this pattern running about (unlike books and films and paintings, etc) but some day we might. And the notion of what a person is will change accordingly.

 

[Soupie]

A thought experiment:

Scientists are experimenting with teleportation. While they have John in the teleportation chamber, it gets struck by—wait for it—lightening.

They rush to chamber. Slam open the doors. Our step two Johns. Both claim to be the original. Both claim to be John.

Are they both John? Can we tell them: no, you aren’t John the person. You are new persons.

They won’t feel like new persons. The notion is actually silly. They are John.

They will quickly become two different Johns as they live their life, but from the time of the accident, they were both John the person.

 

[Randall]

There is no continuity of substrate, either ...

Maybe there's a difference in perspective here that isn't being seen. I didn't use the word "substrate". I'm not even sure what you mean by substrate. If cells = substrate, then because cells are created by us out of our own materials, e.g. they are either divisions of our own cells or built by our systems from raw materials that we have taken possession of at the atomic level, cells prior to being copied by an external system always constitute a continuity of our substrate, whereas copies made by an external system have no such continuity. Therefore any notion that continuity of personhood is preserved when copying is done with external systems cannot be true.

 

[Soupie]

Maybe there's a difference in perspective here that isn't being seen. I didn't use the word "substrate". I'm not even sure what you mean by substrate. If cells = substrate, then because cells are created by us out of our own materials, e.g. they are either divisions of our own cells or built by our systems from raw materials that we have taken possession of at the atomic level, cells prior to being copied by an external system always constitute a continuity of our substrate, whereas copies made by an external system have no such continuity. Therefore any notion that continuity of personhood is preserved when copying is done with external systems cannot be true.

Okay. Now we're getting down to the level of atoms instead of cells. This is where things get fuzzier. I would contend that once a person's biological systems take possession of new building blocks at the atomic or molecular level, then they become part of the person, and therefore, when they are used by the person's system's to repair or add to existing structures, the resulting structures are still 100% made of the the person's own materials, and therefore continuity of personhood in every respect is retained.

We can slow down the copying/teleporting process so it takes days, weeks, years to happen. We can have the original destroyed while the copy is made.

The notion of “take possession of” new materials is arbitrary. We could mimic this in the copying process.

The idea that there is a continuity of substrate and that’s where personhood comes from is false. Personhood comes from continuity of the person (pattern).

 

[Soupie]

Thought experiment two:

ufology contends that personhood stems from the biological substrate.

John is put into the machine, it buzzes and shakes and belches: a moment later our steps a human that looks nothing like John and has none of johns memories, personality, etc. however this person consists of all of johns cells/atoms.

in the next room, a perfect biological copy of John steps out of the chamber. He has all of johns physical attributes, mannerisms, memories, iq, personality, etc.

Which one is John the person?

 

[Soupie]

Before you answer!

A copy of moby dick is put into a chamber. Out pops a copy of les mis.

meanwhile a copy of moby dick is brought into the room by a man named John.

which book is moby dick? Moby dick or les mis?

 

[Constance]

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