You know those sci-fi teleporters like in Star Trek where you disappear from one location then instantaneously reappear in another location? Do you trust that they are safe to use?

To fully understand my question, you need to understand the safety concerns regarding teleporters as explained in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQHBAdShgYI

spoiler

I wouldn’t, because the person that reappears aint me, its a fucking clone. Teleporters are murder machines. Star Trek is a silent massacre!

  • livus@kbin.social
    1·
    11 months ago

    Thanks for taking the time to explain to me in such detail. I’m finding this perplexing because to me it’s the exact opposite. I was raised non-theist and find ‘souls’/non material components completely impossible to believe in. And if l am only those then it isn’t me if it gets destroyed.

    Consciousness isn’t the self. The self is a complex organism that is very much alive and functioning even when it is asleep. If you are in fact a doppelganger you have no way of knowing and neither does the Anomander who died. And that is why I wouldn’t risk teleportation.

    The arguments of @Zetaphor eksewhere in here describe it better than I can.

    This question all comes down to your opinion of what makes a person a person, whether that means we have something greater than the collection of our atoms, or whether we are simply the emergent outcome of the complex arrangement of atoms. If you subscribe to the former then you also need to believe that this machine is somehow capable of either transporting/transplanting that “soul” for lack of a better expression. Where if you subscribe to the latter than this is most certainly a suicide cloning machine.

    • Anomander@kbin.social
      0·
      11 months ago

      If you are in fact a doppelganger you have no way of knowing and neither does the Anomander who died. And that is why I wouldn’t risk teleportation.

      Which, conversely, is also why I don’t care about teleportation. If I have no idea before and I have no idea after and for all intents and purposes I am still me in the new location … all the parts that I can engage with, all the parts I care about - they’re all coming up fine. I might as well have fallen asleep on a plane, or blacked out after a few too many at the pub. When consciousness returns, I am in a new location.

      In that explanation you quoted, I fall firmly into the former camp. I don’t think we have special-ness that transcends the meat, but that the consciousness is wholly rooted in it - and so I think that moving the meat from one place to another achieves the result of moving the consciousness from one place to another.

      My main difference is that I don’t believe a “soul” transported or transplanted - or exists to be lost. The consciousness that is my sense of ‘self’ is the sum of my meat and my memories, and those are preserved.

      • livus@kbin.social
        1·
        11 months ago

        If I have no idea before and I have no idea after

        Well, the doppelganger at least will have no idea after so it will be the same for it. You having ideas will no longer be a thing, because you will no longer exist.

        moving the meat from one place to another

        If it literally involves moving the exact same meat from one place to another with all the exact same molecules, that’s different.

        But it seems more likely it involves reconstituting/copying someone.