Okay. All that is true. Yet they clearly still retain a certain sense of self. The same memories, experiences, personalities and such.
Remember reading about a guy who cloned several generations of cats, all the same stock. Each cat was clearly unique.
Maybe the distinction is that the experiences are basically the same going though it.
In any case. Why can’t they keep generic information on hand and and clone up a fresh body and plant the bits relevant to memory and experience and stuff?
Cloning is very different though. In cloning you aren’t exactly copying the neurons and their connections. That means the cloned cat will learn different things, be different, just from that very fact. All it takes is one or two small daily differences in routine as the kitten grows and bam, different personality.
It’s the classic struggle of how much is nature (genetics) and how much is nurture.
With teleportation the neutral pathways are copied. It becomes more of a question of what makes you “you”. Is there some spirit that gets left behind? Is it the memories that do get copied? Is it merely enough that you believe you’re you?
The issue is with the conscience and the soul. Essentially the question is: “If your whole body is taken apart atom by atom, does the soul get taken along with it?”
In this case, the soul can just mean ‘you’. The ‘you’ that is seeing through your eyes right now, and is giving you the current experience you are now experiencing. To give an easier example, let’s say you are copied exactly four feet to your right. Your copy will look exactly like you, have all your memories, yadda yadda yadda. It seems pretty obvious that ‘you’ won’t all of a sudden be seeing through your copy’s eyes, no? If you get vaporised, then, your conscience is not going to just teleport into your clone, right? At least there’s nothing to suggest that would happen.
Teleportation is just a fancy version of this in a different order. You are vaporised first, then your atoms are moved real fast to the new location, then your copy uses those atoms. There’s zero reason to think that the ‘you’ which was vaporised is ever coming back. Once it’s gone, it’s gone, or at least that’s the idea.
Whether you believe in the spiritual concept of a soul, or that your experience of the world is just a specific instance of electrical charges in some fancy meat, both seem to suggest that once the anima departs, it will never return. A new anima must instead be made.
Except, in your final statement that’s kinda false? The “Anima” is just the electrical signals of the meat suit. That’s it, that’s the “you”. There is 0 evidence that’s ever been produced of any kind that there is any existence of a soul or spirit beyond “trust me bro.”
In this case you have 2 exact copies of “you” and milliseconds later those two copies diverge as new neurons are formed. As soon as they start forming their own experience at that point each one is different, their own “me” (from their points of view). No need to make up some higher level of meaning such as a soul.
We are all just brains riding around in an electrical meat suit, listening to chemical signals from the bacteria in our guts and some how finding meaning and purpose in an uncaring universe. That’s a helluva a lot more amazing and meaningful then a cosmic space daddy giving us “us”
I’ve been trying to be faith-agnostic about it, as in the signals in your brain, some weird angel possession a meat mech, whatever. There is a clear phenomena where ‘you’ come into existance and get to look through your eyes. ‘You’ get to experience the world through these signals, and the full explanation of how that becomes a first person perspective observing the world is still not cleanly explained. That’s the anima, the soul, ‘you’.
Teleportation both, destroys your body completely and so when the copy gets made on the other side it’s not going to be the same you even if you use all the same atoms, and only interacts with the physical world so no spiritual soul would be brought along with it.
Basically, you will go into the teleporter, they’ll fire it up, and then you’ll stop being able to see, think, feel, or do anything relating to existence because you stopped existing. A new anima will be created when the copy of your physiology is constructed on the other end. ‘You’ never come back.
What does it matter if there’s new “anima”. I am me. It doesn’t matter if it’s my original body or another body. It’s whatever is my current frame of reference for the corresponding meat bag that I inhabit.
I really don’t understand the whole “well I died, and this isn’t me”… are you conscious? Lucid? Retain your memories? Then what does it matter?
“Well what if the original is still around or there are two copies?” Again, it doesn’t matter, because at that point they are two physically distinct entities. You only inhabit one of them and the moment you start experiencing different stimuli, you’re two separate people. Granted at that point there are some legal and logistical issues, but it’s not a metaphysical one.
You don’t seem to get my point. We’re talking about the instance of you reading this comment right now. As in ‘you’. That’s the anima.
If that anima is destroyed you cease to exist, because you are that anima. The reassembled you will not be ‘you’, because ‘you’ were destroyed when you were vaporized. You’re not just gonna come back from that. So whether that anima is obliterated or not should matter to you.
Your ability to observe the world is based on the current instance of your whole self in its current configuration, and if that configuration is completely obliterated, you’re gone. It doesn’t matter if they make a copy of you after - even with the same atoms.
Then by that logic, you die every time you lose consciousness or go to sleep. If I’m in one body, lose consciousness and awaken in another body, it’s really no different because I’m still me.
It doesn’t matter if it’s the same atoms or not, I am me.
Maybe you do, and your existence only lasts a day, and you’re just oblivious that you’ll disappear when you lay down tonight. Or maybe we can acknowledge that you never fully lose all brain activity when asleep and that that matters.
You are a current instance of you only, held together by temperal and spacial coherence. If either of those then you cease to exist. Ergo, teleportation and time travel both kill you.
The transporter only works due to a magic box called the Heisenberg Compensator. It does some kind of end run around the fact that you can’t precisely know both the position and momentum of a particle. The question of “how does it work?” is answered with “very well, thank you”.
Anyway, neurons are known to rely on quantum mechanics for part of their signalling. You do have to copy them very exactly or you won’t have the same person on the other side. The Heisenberg Compensator seems to be a tech that only works with transporters and nothing else. Whatever magic is happening inside there, you wouldn’t be able to use it to copy a neural pattern, store it away for an extended time, and stick it in another body.
The cat thing is basically the difference between reinstalling the same application on a different computer vs doing a RAM dump save state and moving all the data to another computer and running it there.
If you duplicate all the existing neural pathways, they behave the same even if it’s a copy. If you allow new pathways to form from the same exact genetic codebase, it still ends up slightly different due to random chance and the experience of the copy compared to the experience of the original.
Transporters are save state backups. Even if it exclusively rebuilt you from different molecules, everything would still behave the same as the original would have. Ergo, Thomas Riker, who is exactly the same (memories, preferences, desires, etc.) up until the transporter accident - where the vastly different experiences resulted in vastly different personal growth.
Your question pretty much answers the other. If they were destroying and making a copy at the destination, then there could be 20 Piccards, or they could always bring the dead right back to life at any age they’d want. They could just re-maie a person any time.
Since that never happens, it means they must be converting them into energy or something like that, and then reassembling, and not making a copy
Here’s what I don’t get.
Okay. All that is true. Yet they clearly still retain a certain sense of self. The same memories, experiences, personalities and such.
Remember reading about a guy who cloned several generations of cats, all the same stock. Each cat was clearly unique.
Maybe the distinction is that the experiences are basically the same going though it.
In any case. Why can’t they keep generic information on hand and and clone up a fresh body and plant the bits relevant to memory and experience and stuff?
Cloning is very different though. In cloning you aren’t exactly copying the neurons and their connections. That means the cloned cat will learn different things, be different, just from that very fact. All it takes is one or two small daily differences in routine as the kitten grows and bam, different personality.
It’s the classic struggle of how much is nature (genetics) and how much is nurture.
With teleportation the neutral pathways are copied. It becomes more of a question of what makes you “you”. Is there some spirit that gets left behind? Is it the memories that do get copied? Is it merely enough that you believe you’re you?
The issue is with the conscience and the soul. Essentially the question is: “If your whole body is taken apart atom by atom, does the soul get taken along with it?”
In this case, the soul can just mean ‘you’. The ‘you’ that is seeing through your eyes right now, and is giving you the current experience you are now experiencing. To give an easier example, let’s say you are copied exactly four feet to your right. Your copy will look exactly like you, have all your memories, yadda yadda yadda. It seems pretty obvious that ‘you’ won’t all of a sudden be seeing through your copy’s eyes, no? If you get vaporised, then, your conscience is not going to just teleport into your clone, right? At least there’s nothing to suggest that would happen.
Teleportation is just a fancy version of this in a different order. You are vaporised first, then your atoms are moved real fast to the new location, then your copy uses those atoms. There’s zero reason to think that the ‘you’ which was vaporised is ever coming back. Once it’s gone, it’s gone, or at least that’s the idea.
Whether you believe in the spiritual concept of a soul, or that your experience of the world is just a specific instance of electrical charges in some fancy meat, both seem to suggest that once the anima departs, it will never return. A new anima must instead be made.
Except, in your final statement that’s kinda false? The “Anima” is just the electrical signals of the meat suit. That’s it, that’s the “you”. There is 0 evidence that’s ever been produced of any kind that there is any existence of a soul or spirit beyond “trust me bro.”
In this case you have 2 exact copies of “you” and milliseconds later those two copies diverge as new neurons are formed. As soon as they start forming their own experience at that point each one is different, their own “me” (from their points of view). No need to make up some higher level of meaning such as a soul.
We are all just brains riding around in an electrical meat suit, listening to chemical signals from the bacteria in our guts and some how finding meaning and purpose in an uncaring universe. That’s a helluva a lot more amazing and meaningful then a cosmic space daddy giving us “us”
I’ve been trying to be faith-agnostic about it, as in the signals in your brain, some weird angel possession a meat mech, whatever. There is a clear phenomena where ‘you’ come into existance and get to look through your eyes. ‘You’ get to experience the world through these signals, and the full explanation of how that becomes a first person perspective observing the world is still not cleanly explained. That’s the anima, the soul, ‘you’.
Teleportation both, destroys your body completely and so when the copy gets made on the other side it’s not going to be the same you even if you use all the same atoms, and only interacts with the physical world so no spiritual soul would be brought along with it.
Basically, you will go into the teleporter, they’ll fire it up, and then you’ll stop being able to see, think, feel, or do anything relating to existence because you stopped existing. A new anima will be created when the copy of your physiology is constructed on the other end. ‘You’ never come back.
You say there is zero evidence, but there are, just use introspection, you are you. Cogito ergo sum.
Make 2 “copies” it’s obvioys they aren not both you. Maybe neither.
I’ll walk 😁
Cogito ergo sum. Latin for the internal “trust me bro”
They are each themselves perfectly “you” until the first neuron forms independently.
There isn’t some nebulous soul they are sharing, no “I have a soul and those two don’t”.
They are all the same “Chemical impulse”machines until their split experience causes different neurons to form.
Well let’s turn the table, you can’t prove the opposite either.
There’s no evidence that continuous consciousness isn’t an illusion due to memory being good enough.
Sure, and if ot is so, then teleport is ok. But if it isn’t, which can’t be disproven, teleport is nono.
You can’t prove a negative. But we know how neurons work -
What does it matter if there’s new “anima”. I am me. It doesn’t matter if it’s my original body or another body. It’s whatever is my current frame of reference for the corresponding meat bag that I inhabit.
I really don’t understand the whole “well I died, and this isn’t me”… are you conscious? Lucid? Retain your memories? Then what does it matter?
“Well what if the original is still around or there are two copies?” Again, it doesn’t matter, because at that point they are two physically distinct entities. You only inhabit one of them and the moment you start experiencing different stimuli, you’re two separate people. Granted at that point there are some legal and logistical issues, but it’s not a metaphysical one.
You don’t seem to get my point. We’re talking about the instance of you reading this comment right now. As in ‘you’. That’s the anima.
If that anima is destroyed you cease to exist, because you are that anima. The reassembled you will not be ‘you’, because ‘you’ were destroyed when you were vaporized. You’re not just gonna come back from that. So whether that anima is obliterated or not should matter to you.
Your ability to observe the world is based on the current instance of your whole self in its current configuration, and if that configuration is completely obliterated, you’re gone. It doesn’t matter if they make a copy of you after - even with the same atoms.
Then by that logic, you die every time you lose consciousness or go to sleep. If I’m in one body, lose consciousness and awaken in another body, it’s really no different because I’m still me.
It doesn’t matter if it’s the same atoms or not, I am me.
Maybe you do, and your existence only lasts a day, and you’re just oblivious that you’ll disappear when you lay down tonight. Or maybe we can acknowledge that you never fully lose all brain activity when asleep and that that matters.
You are a current instance of you only, held together by temperal and spacial coherence. If either of those then you cease to exist. Ergo, teleportation and time travel both kill you.
I understand your view, I just think i fundamentally disagree with what makes “you” “you”. Good thought problem to chat about
It’s one of my favorites to argue on.
The transporter only works due to a magic box called the Heisenberg Compensator. It does some kind of end run around the fact that you can’t precisely know both the position and momentum of a particle. The question of “how does it work?” is answered with “very well, thank you”.
Anyway, neurons are known to rely on quantum mechanics for part of their signalling. You do have to copy them very exactly or you won’t have the same person on the other side. The Heisenberg Compensator seems to be a tech that only works with transporters and nothing else. Whatever magic is happening inside there, you wouldn’t be able to use it to copy a neural pattern, store it away for an extended time, and stick it in another body.
Except when it happens, like in strange new world, or the next generation.
They store living beings for extended periods in the pattern buffer.
In Strange new worlds it was a hyper advanced thing, in TNG it was Scotty.
The cat thing is basically the difference between reinstalling the same application on a different computer vs doing a RAM dump save state and moving all the data to another computer and running it there.
If you duplicate all the existing neural pathways, they behave the same even if it’s a copy. If you allow new pathways to form from the same exact genetic codebase, it still ends up slightly different due to random chance and the experience of the copy compared to the experience of the original.
Transporters are save state backups. Even if it exclusively rebuilt you from different molecules, everything would still behave the same as the original would have. Ergo, Thomas Riker, who is exactly the same (memories, preferences, desires, etc.) up until the transporter accident - where the vastly different experiences resulted in vastly different personal growth.
Your question pretty much answers the other. If they were destroying and making a copy at the destination, then there could be 20 Piccards, or they could always bring the dead right back to life at any age they’d want. They could just re-maie a person any time.
Since that never happens, it means they must be converting them into energy or something like that, and then reassembling, and not making a copy