this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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In one episode of startrek ng a glitch ends up creating two copies of Riker (transport is apparently aborted, he's recovered back to the ship, but the transporter on the other side materializes "him" too - bad handshaking in comms do that kind of thing in real life transactions too).
Both believed they were the original (and one believes he was abandoned on the planet).
Same goes for using it as a replicator (if the information can be sent as data, it can also be copied, stored and rematerialized multiple times). The aforementioned episode makes that canon.
Then if you're not dead, who are you after multiple copies are created? If your conscience was effectively transported to the copies, do you now have split personalities? Because each copy will live a different life from this moment on.
Assuming the original ceased to exist, and the other - or others - are copies is more consistent imo, because assuming you "are" the produced being on the other side doesn't work for multiple copies.
I don't know. From my understanding, Thomas Riker is indeed the same person as William - in the very first instance after transporting. After that, their experiences are different and their consciousnesses diverge to form different people. I'm not the same person I was two seconds ago, even without transporting, while sitting motionless in my chair.
Split personalities, btw, would mean two personalities in the same brain, that's not what's happening here.
But if your personality was transported to to two bodies, that is literally splitting a personality, which will diverge from there. Not the same meaning used for the term in real life, but effectively a splitted personality. If you have one somehing and it becomes more than one, it was split.
It's a copied personality. The same brain structures recreated in two identical bodies. Is that an issue?
No issue, I'm not confronting you.
imo we're having an interesting philosophical chat about a completely hypotetical situation, and I don't think there's a right or wrong. That's why I spread some "imo" around.
I just pointed out that if you consider that "you" didn't die because you are still the person on the other side, then when copies are made (something possible in that reality), then "you" become more than one person (split you, or split personality).
It all boils down to what we consider "I", I guess. It seems I consider "I" as a continuum from birth to death, a set of continuous conscience and experiences - if I'm braindead then start from scratch today, I don't consider that individual is "me" anymore; it's just my body, now belonging to another person. The previous "I" died, and even if others see that body as "me", for "dead me" that's not the case.
You on the other hand seem to consider that "you" are what you are at this moment. So the copies (or the single rebuilt if the transporter doesn't glitch) are not "you" anyway, because as you said, you are not the same person as a second ago, sitting in your couch. So dying here and being rebuilt there makes no difference.
Just different takes on "self" conscience.
I've been on the internet for too long, so based on experience I start vaguely suspecting confrontation in any exchange longer than two comments :)
The Riker problem is of course interesting and I don't know what I'd do in that situation ~~(other than make out - just like Will and Tom did)~~ or how I think I/we would decide who gets to be the "real one", for lack of a better term. I'm very glad I won't ever have to figure that out. But yes, that's probably what my view implies: there'd be two of "me", exact copies. Like when I copy a file to two different hard drives and then delete the source. There'd be no "real" one, they're both the same file, just in different places.
I'll have to think about your view because, I have to admit, I'm having trouble really seeing it and that's annoying me. It's just too different from how I think, I suppose. Thank you for giving me some food for thought then :)
Well thank you; we then exchanged good thought sandwiches.
I think what we are musing about with this impossible situation boils down to defining the nature of conscience (awareness of existence), which has been discussed for centuries with no absolute single definition. If we could prove with no doubt that any of us is right or wrong, we'd probably be the first to get a Philosophy Nobel prize.