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this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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I've always wondered if your consciousness would transfer over.
There'd be a consciousness, it would have your memories and be indistinguishable to you, but I can't understand where the chemical/physical parts of the brain turn into me perceiving and experiencing stuff.
Well consciousness is just chemical and electrical impulses. If you manage to re-create everything down to the molecule in the right area then you could completely rebuild the consciousness. Also means you'd be able to completely manipulate memories, experiences, basically anything held in the brain. Provided you had an intense enough neural mapping and deep enough understanding of the human brain to accomplish that. Luckily in the Trek universe, at least at the time of the 24th/25th century, that isn't possible.
Your current consciousness, the one you are thinking with right now, would end.
A clone of you would go on at the transport site, fully believing that it is you, and that everything was fine.
Reconstructive teleportation is just remote replicators with mind control.
Feel free to prove the discontinuation of consciousness scientifically while satisfying all philosophic schools of thought on the matter.
If you make a perfectly exact replica of yourself do you suddenly perceive the universe from two perspectives?
Presumably not without some means of information transfer, but that doesn't mean that a replica isn't you, because it could also mean that there are now two of you, both of which have an equally valid claim to the original identity, but which immediately diverge into identities distinct from eachother by virtue of having slightly different experiences after the split.
That doesn't answer the question. It's obvious that the clone of you isn't you, it's literally just a copy. Unless there is some magic technology that keeps your brain alive and moves it.
You are most likely vaporized. Although, faster-than-light travel literally breaks causation, and that's possible in the Star Trek universe. I think that's a bigger issue than transporters.
That depends on what "you" are. If you are just your brain or nervous system, as in the specific atoms and such that make up that brain, then sure, obviously those atoms can't be in two places at once, so you are wherever they are. On the other hand, if you are the structure of those atoms and particles, the way they are arranged, the patterns of movement they form as they go about their work, the information they contain by all this; then it stands to reason that a sufficiently perfect copy is the same as you, because if whatever makes you "you" is part that structure, whatever makes it "your" consciousness instead of someone else's, and the copy has exactly the same structure, then the copy must also contain whatever that part is that makes it "you" and not someone else, and therefore has to be you as well.
This isn't a settled question, so one sort of has to decide what answer one thinks is more likely, I personally think the second.
Consider a hypothetical for a moment. Suppose there are two people, I'll call them Bob and Bill for the purposes of distinguishing them. Suppose they get captured by some sort of mad scientist, who runs an experiment on them both. They wipe the brains of both people in such a way as to not completely kill them, but such as to remove every trace of their memories, personality, etc, essentially rendering them braindead, but without the physical damage that usually entails. Then, they painstakingly re-create those same neural pathways, same memories, personality, etc, but they recreate Bob's persona in what is originally Bill's body, and likewise, recreate Bill's memory and personality in Bob's. Which of these two people is now Bob (or if one thinks neither really are and that Bob is just dead, who at least has the better claim)? The one that has the physical brain, nervous system etc of the original Bob, but remembers and thinks exactly like Bill? Or the one that acts like Bob, and remembers being Bob, and probably thinks he is Bob and would insist on his being such, but does not have the same material in his brain as the original? If one of Bob's friends raids the lab trying to rescue him, which should he take back home?
That's all a semantic argument. It seems obvious that if your brain is "wiped" as you put it, you are gone. Cloning or copying you doesn't solve that, in the same way that you are not the same as your twin.
Your philosophical argument of "it's complicated" is just muddying the water. When twins are born they are two different people. No one ever says "I'm so confused, there are two of the same people!"
Twins are not perfect copies of each other's brain though, they are merely genetically identical.
Is this the point where we start talking about Theseus and his ship?
I mean, is there a scientific consensus on what constitutes consciousness? I thought that was a stumbling point on trying to pin down the various parts of the study of it. I wouldn't say brain activity ceases while sleeping like that other comment but I'm in the camp that thinks the break in consciousness/awareness-of-being in a ST transporter is not really different than the break when sleeping.
Easy, build the clone without destroying the original, then test if they share perceptions and memories. Show one a playing card and ask the other what card it was or something. Proving that two people don't have the same consciousness is pretty trivial, and I don't know of any philosophical schools that would dispute that.
It seems a silly question to ask, but interesting to think about because I can't think of a way to prove the intuitively obvious answer: how does one know that the duplicate doesn't somehow inherit the original consciousness, and some new one with the memories and personality of it doesn't get immediately generated in the original body?
My point is meant to be, that proving that two duplicates are not the same people as eachother, is not quite the same thing as proving that a duplicate is not the original person.
Consciousness is brain activity. New brain = new activity = new consciousness.
The activity of something is essentially information (consider how computer programs are ultimately just the activity of the components of a computer). If I copy information from one substrate to another, and do so with no changes, I don't have any new information. Applying that back to brains, assuming that consciousness really is only brain activity (which seems highly likely, but since we don't really understand the nature of consciousness, isn't completely proven), then I'd disagree with the new brain= new activity step
But you have a different instance of it. If there were no distinction, copyright wouldn't exist.
I think you're just talking about Thomas Riker
Yup, pretty much. It's a shame Star Trek recognizes and points out this problem but then chickens out of it actually having any consequences.
Same as sleeping. You could have been replaced by a clone every night while sleeping and never know it.
That sounds like a form of last Thursdayism. The entire universe could've been created last Thursday with everything made to seem older, including everyone's memories. These philosophies are usually shot down by occam's razor.
Agree for Occam's if someone is actually suggesting they are replaced nightly or your last Thursdayism, but as for conceiving of parallels to a made up teleportation technology and its philosophical implications, is the break in consciousness/self awareness for sleep not a reasonable comparison?
Occam's razor is choosing the simplest answer. There is no simple answer when it comes to teleportation. I'm not sure there is a full break in consciousness when we sleep. Consciousness may not even be the right word...
In this case I'm not defining consciousness as simply being awake, but instead defining it as the perspective from which each individual perceives the universe.
then we get to really specifically define individual, perspective, and perception (can you perceive while unconscious? I guess?), all sorts of fun knots to tie oneself into. I always thought the difference in sense vs. perception was the thinking about it, but if it's processed at all by the "unconscious" I guess it's still perception? I mean, I'm gettting twisted up thinking if my individual consciousness has a perspective from which it perceives the world
Occam's razor is just one tool though, not an end all be all answer. Complicated things happen.
I'm not sure it's really the same thing, because it's already pretty clear that something happens to consciousness when one is asleep, since that period is experienced differently than when awake, positing something like that about the nature of what happens to it doesn't add a bunch of unnecessary complexity the way that assuming the universe just randomly assembled to look far older than it is does.
Cloning isn't necessary. Every night your stream of consciousness could actually and permanently end and a new one is created upon dreaming/waking but you would never know it. This could be how it really works though we can't know that. You could continuously lose and create new consciousnesses every firing of a neuron.
True. This could be the first and only day of your life so far!
Same thing happens every time you go to sleep. If your consciousness exists you exist, right down to you worrying about continuity of consciousness.
Brain activity does not cease when you sleep.
I'd buy this argument if brain death happened every time you went to sleep. Being in maintenance mode doesn't count.
The thing is, we don't actually know that continuity is required for it to be the same consciousness. It might work that way, or it might be that sufficiently recreating the right brain patterns restarts the same consciousness in a new location, or something else entirely
Occam’s razor would dictate that I would not chance it.
That's assuming you know which exact parts do exactly what. Kinda like an encrypted zip file versus an unencrypted one.
You edit whatever set of bits/bytes you want in both, but only in one of them will you actually know whats going on.
But we do know there’s quantum weirdness to the universe, so I personally think you would need more than just a molecular copy.
It’s really the question of why am I the brain in this body? Why do I perceive existence, and why isn’t it just a sequence of reactions in a brain which can adapt to highly complex phenomenon.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace%27s_demon
It's just a more complicated example of the ship of Theseus, and honestly it comes down to if you believe in the concept of a soul.
To illustrate mechanically is a computer with the same model of hard drive with a copy of the data the same?
If you take the drive apart, ship its parts somewhere, and reassemble it, is it the same drive?
Yes. But that's not what's happening in teleportation. It doesn't use the same parts, but different ones arranged in the exact same way.
Depends on the teleportation system. In star trek you are comprised of the same physical material, just converted to energy and back. I could be wrong though, I'm no expert. I think a more interesting question is, would you be more ok being killed in one place, having your body be transported mundanely and being revived at your destination, or being cloned perfectly and then having the original killed? Theoretically the same to you either way
Not the same to you. As soon as the same tech can be used to clone, it feels fundamentally different.
You die in one place, and a consciousness that thinks it's you starts in another place. Does the order really matter?
Yes. Doing it in a different order means there's a version of me with different experiences. But even if you do it in the same order, that it can be used to clone means there is a me that dies and doesn't come back to life. Whereas if it can't be cloning, then it's just me.
I believe there have been numerous times where it’s confirmed that you are conscious and perceiving things while in the transport stream
Barclay got sweet tentacle hugs a few times during transport.
Play the game SOMA
Daniel Dennet: "Only a theory that explained conscious events in terms of unconscious events, could explain consciousness at all."
We don't understand just how this works just yet. But I'm confident that some day we will.