Consciousness A can be identical to Consciousness B. But A is not B. Identical things are not the same thing. That applies to consciousnesses as much as it applies to mass produced items that are so precisely manufactured that they are indistinguishable. It's easy to understand this. You only need to count. — Patterner

But that's what I've been saying. Note that this is what is meant by the term numerical identity versus qualitative identity. I have clarified over and over again that I am interested in numerical identity.

Furthermore, I can't square what you're saying now with your earlier statement "Inheriting memories is how the persistence of consciousness is accomplished".

If you are looking at your duplicate, with a consciousness identical to yours, then there are two consciousness. When you are disintegrated, only one will remain. You will be dead. — Patterner

Again, everyone on all three sides of this debate would agree that if there's a state of affairs where there are two people whose experiences have diverged (as they must be if entity 1 is having the experience of looking at entity 2), they are now separate, and one will not jump into the body of the other.

So...it still just seems like you aren't following the transporter problem.

I don't know what to do with this thread. This thread is meant to be about a variation of the transporter problem, but I just seem to be having to explain the original problem, over and over again.

It's like I have a theory of a new allotrope of carbon, but all the responses are questioning the existence of atoms.

That's not something you experience when you get into the transporter. — SolarWind

No-one said it was. I don't follow the point you're making. — Mijin

I thought it was about the “path of the first-person perspective”. And that path either leads somewhere or into nothingness (death).

If person X has the memories of person Y implanted, are they then the continuation of person X or person Y? — SolarWind

If you're asking my opinion specifically on memories, no, I don't consider memories to be the critical factor in determining instances of consciousness. — Mijin

What else?

It's like I have a theory of a new allotrope of carbon, but all the responses are questioning the existence of atoms. — Mijin

Perhaps your "new allotrope of carbon" isn't as interesting as you supposed.

Yep threadshitting is always an option

I don't know what to do with this thread. This thread is meant to be about a variation of the transporter problem, but I just seem to be having to explain the original problem, over and over again.

It's like I have a theory of a new allotrope of carbon, but all the responses are questioning the existence of atoms. — Mijin

I came in after a few pages, and joined the conversation that was in progress. Thread drift is inevitable, as they say. I'll read your OP before posting again.

Thanks. And I don't mean to be arsey, just got a bit frustrated there :)

No problem. Forums can be like that.

Well, I've read your first couple posts a few times. But I don't see that my comments would need different than what over been saying.

Now here's the problem: there has to be a line somewhere between "transported" and "not transported". Because, while "degree of difference" might be a continuous measure, whether you survive or not is binary (surviving in a imperfect state still counts as surviving). — Mijin

You do not survive. The "degree of difference" is not between you at the beginning and you at the end. It is between you at the beginning and the copy of you at the end. Maybe the copy of you will be perfect. Maybe it will be so flawed that it can't be considered a copy. Like if Lincoln appears at destination.

Remember I am talking about your own perspective. So if Picard uses the transporter, I am talking about the perspective of the Picard that entered at the source, not whether the rest of the bridge crew considers it to be the same Picard. — Mijin

The Picard that entered at the source no longer has a perspective, because he no longer exists.

Am I not addressing the original problem?

Am I not addressing the original problem? — Patterner

Somewhat addressing...I think you're still not quite there, but I've also thought of another way to cover this:

In the original, vanilla, transporter problem, I have labelled the two main positions that people tend to take as "Sent" -- a singular instance of consciousness is sent to Mars, and "Killed" -- the original instance of consciousness is destroyed, and a new instance of consciousness is made on Mars.

We could also describe the two positions a bit more precisely as "Psychological continuity" -- what matters is memories, and as long as there is continuity of memories that's the same instance of consciousness, and "Bodily continuity" -- what matters is the seamless continuation of the body itself.

Now: the "imperfect transporter", that I have proposed, is an argument against Sent / Psychological continuity. And what you just outlined in your last post is basically bodily continuity. Ergo, my argument doesn't apply to your position.

However, the couple of wrinkles here are:

1. You have previously said: "The continuity of self is due to the memories" i.e. taking the exact opposite position on the transporter hypothetical. This is a thing that I am struggling to make sense of.

2. It's easy to just assert a position on this. The critical thing is how you arrived at that position, and how you would go about answering follow-up questions e.g. "What if the transporter spits the original particles across space?" "What if I separate your particles for one nanosecond?"

Now: the "imperfect transporter", that I have proposed, is an argument against Sent / Psychological continuity. — Mijin

I still don't think this works.

while "degree of difference" might be a continuous measure, whether you survive or not is binary (surviving in a imperfect state still counts as surviving). — Mijin

Is it really binary? If you have a major stroke, does all of you survive? If you have a stroke such that you completely assume the identity of Abraham Lincoln, does any of you survive?

We are accustomed to thinking of survival in bodily terms. And in bodily terms the answers would be "yes" in both cases. But this is just a habit, it might be the wrong metric here. If we thought of identity in psychological terms , the answers would be "no".

So I think this is only a problem if you assume bodily continuity from the outset.

Is it really binary? If you have a major stroke, does all of you survive? If you have a stroke such that you completely assume the identity of Abraham Lincoln, does any of you survive? — hypericin

Again, this is talking about the distinction that I have explicitly said is not the focus of the imperfect transporter.

Let's start from this: you accept that there is such a thing as death, right? So Aristotle, right now, is simply dead. He's gone. Agreed?

Now, the line that we are interested in, in the imperfect transporter, is whether I will simply die -- be in the same status as Aristotle -- or whether I will arrive on Mars with brain damage.

And it's binary. The proposition, P, is "In the same state as Aristotle -- dead dead". That's either true or false. It doesn't matter if someone has brain damage or not, P is still false for that person.

So it's unlike the easier, and less important, question of whether we as a third party consider the person at Destination to be characteristically the same person, whether P is true is literally life or death.

Given the two perspectives on continuity, Bodily and Psychological:

Aristotle
Bodily: dead
Psychological: dead

Stroke victim
Bodily: alive
Psychological: partial

Massive stroke victim
Bodily: alive
Psychological: dead

Perfect transporter
Bodily: dead
Psychological: alive

Imperfect transporter
Bodily: dead
Psychological: partial

Radically imperfect transporter
Bodily: dead
Psychological: dead

Aristotle is of the same status as a radically imperfect transport: dead. Both perspectives agree. But this doesn't preclude degrees of survival in the imperfect transporter, assuming that psychological continuity is what is relevant. This would not require the universe to set a hard line between what counts as survival or not. Psychological survival is continuous, not binary, and so there is no need for it to do so. Bodily survival is also continuous in the ship of Theseus sense, but binary in the familiar sense that bodies can endure only so much damage before they lose the ability to maintain homeostasis, which is what death is.

1. You have previously said: "The continuity of self is due to the memories" i.e. taking the exact opposite position on the transporter hypothetical. This is a thing that I am struggling to make sense of.

2. It's easy to just assert a position on this. The critical thing is how you arrived at that position, and how you would go about answering follow-up questions e.g. "What if the transporter spits the original particles across space?" "What if I separate your particles for one nanosecond?" — Mijin

Your continuity ends when your particles are separated, regardless of the scenario or any considerations.

The reassembled person, or exact replica, will not feel other than the original. And anybody who knew the original will not know it's not the original. (Assuming they are not aware of what happened.) But, regardless of what happened next, the person ended when their particles were separated.


I really don't know how I can state it more clearly. And I really don't think you don't understand what I'm saying. I think you just disagree.

Imperfect transporter
Bodily: dead
Psychological: partial — hypericin

No; you're either alive or dead, and, if you're alive, we can talk about the level of consciousness that you're enjoying.

ISTM that there are two different things you could be saying here, and I don't think either work:

1. "Bodily" and "Psychological" are attributes. This is making the claim you can by physically fully dead yet psychologically alive in some sense, which is meaningless.

2. (The more correct description IMO) That "bodily" and "Psychological" are two different theories on instances of consciousness and you are just summarizing the two positions.
In which case saying "partial" for psychological is just a dodge: are you alive or not?

Your continuity ends when your particles are separated, regardless of the scenario or any considerations. — Patterner

OK, so you are retracting the point about memory being the critical thing. That's fine.

I really don't know how I can state it more clearly. And I really don't think you don't understand what I'm saying. I think you just disagree. — Patterner

I understand what you're saying: it's bodily continuity. What I'm saying is that you don't seem to have much of an argument behind it; it seems an ad hoc opinion and when I ask you hypotheticals, they seem to be coming off-the-cuff. Let me ask you this: if I could freeze all neural activity in your brain and restart it, is that the same instance of consciousness?
I'm asking this to clarify whether it is an active neural connection that matters or just literally the atoms of which I am made.

Also: I wonder if I should just get out of the way at this point. Because it seems that you, @Patterner, are taking the bodily continuity position, while @hypericin is taking the psychological continuity position.
Maybe try putting your points to each other :)

Your continuity ends when your particles are separated, regardless of the scenario or any considerations.
— Patterner

OK, so you are retracting the point about memory being the critical thing. That's fine. — Mijin

It isn't as though there is no connection between the physical brain and memories. Continuity of memories is accomplished by subjectively experiencing information that is physically stored in the brain. If you disperse the particles of the brain, there is no information to subjectively experience.

if I could freeze all neural activity in your brain and restart it, is that the same instance of consciousness? — Mijin

Are you freezing it by freezing time?

If an exact duplicate is made so both original and duplicate exist, are both originals? I don't see how that can be. — Patterner

I think the very concept of original and duplicate breaks down entirely. — flannel jesus

Can you explain what you mean? — Patterner

Human sense-making arises out of our daily praxis: selective attention and all that. Our terms cluster around that, too. We think in terms of original and copy, because the technology is hypothetical, and we go by our daily praxis. If you want to guess (and guess is the best we can manage, I think) what our intutions would be were to live in a society where duplication technology is possible, you need to radically question your immediate intution.

I see at least two issues:

Social responsibility:

We have the new situation where two people share the same dispostion to act on top of the same memories. Up to the point of the copying event there was only one person. After that event there are two people, both of which share the same personal connection to the same singular past. Under our present original/duplicate concept, only the original really does have that connection, while the duplicate only thinks he has that. Do you think this makes for sustainable social organisation? The thing is that, I think, different events pull in different directions:

A married man duplicates himself. Is the duplicate married?
A murderer murders a man. Is the duplicate responsible for the murder?
A person who owes me a dollar is duplicated. Who owes me a doller, and how many do I get back?

There are a million of these situation that all influence each other. What do rights and duties to you have? Does the original-duplicate distinction remain practically relevant equally across all domains? What sort of social conflict can we expect. Would the "duplicate" status enshrine itself as a new minority, for example?

Note that however this is going to organise, people are going to try to game the system, and that in itself will influence how the system evolves. And at some point the last person who was born into a duplicate-technology-free society will be history, and everyone will take it as unquestioned routine that duplicates exists.

The Relationship between the scanned data, the continuous person, and the assembled person:

If we understand the data well enough to temper with it, there will be potential applications. For example, if the duplication technology scans the space that's the person and reassembles that space one for one, it would often reassemble more than just the person. Relevant here is medical stuff: it would reassemble stuff like food being in the process of being digested, air in the lungs, parasites, pace makers, etc. Everything. Some of those things are part of the person, some not - some (such as oxygen in the air and nutrients in the fodd) will soon be part of the person, and so on.

Now imagine I have cancer; I make a duplicate but edit out the cancer. I can now be jealous of my cancer-free person. There is what is theoretically possible; there is what people would do; and there is what people would then feel about what it is that people will do. There's going to be a new normal at some point, but it's hard to see what that is.

The cancer example from the previous example shows a soical-psychological difference, I think, between the teleporter case and the duplication case, as in the teleporter case only one, the assembled person, remains - thus jealousy is impossible, and data-tampering might be viewed, by some at least, as a less risky procedure than an operation. But if you retain your cancer and the copy doesn't? It gets even weirder, depending on the person: for example, if the duplicated person is altruistically inclined, the copy might feel guilty for not having cancer, while the original might be happy for the person, and they both might have a good laugh at the absurdity of the sitution, since they also share that ironic distance to what they consider real.

We can have what-if relationships to our alters (whether we're the original or the copy doesn't matter) in a way we can have to no-one else, not even identical twins (since they don't share a first-person history up to a duplication event).

***

I was born in the seventies, and as a kid I was naturally drawn to SF. So I've been thinking about this almost all my life. The more prominent source of the transporter question for people is probably Star Trek, and I certainly watched that. But the transporter never seemed very interesting to me; it felt like a convenience device, both on cool-tech aspect and the story beats ("evil Kirk" was more fun that plausible, so I didn't really switch on my brain for that, not even as a kid).

For me, the SF source of the transporter is actually the 1958 version of The Fly. (I'm fairly sure me talking about parasites and half-digested food above comes ultimately from that first impetus: the difference what you think of as yourself, vs what a machine would. This was much more interesting to me than anything Star Trek did. That, and I was also an animal nerd as a kid.)

2. (The more correct description IMO) That "bodily" and "Psychological" are two different theories on instances of consciousness and you are just summarizing the two positions.
In which case saying "partial" for psychological is just a dodge: are you alive or not? — Mijin

Not theories of "instances of consciousness" but theories of personal continuity. What is relevant to personal continuity, bodily continuity, or psychological continuity?

"Partial" is not a dodge. I am saying that in the imperfect transporter case, the subject experiences zero bodily continuity and partial psychological continuity. Whether that constitutes (partial) survival depends on whether bodily or psychological is the relevant continuity.

Survival is not binary in the psychological sense. You can lose some of yourself, but not all of yourself, in a brain injury.

Great post, Dawnstorm.

But the transporter never seemed very interesting to me; it felt like a convenience device — Dawnstorm

I believe Gene said he came up with the transporter because he couldn't figure out how to land the ship.

Goodman's discussion of authenticity seems entirely relevant, even if it shows up contrasts as well as parallels. Or contrasts for you, and parallels for me. — bongo fury

More so, now that I have the privilege of browsing the renowned book. The suspicion grows that Parfit reifies consciousness, as a substance capable of continuity (relation R) or discontinuity, instead of hanging it ultimately on bodily activity. Styling his theory "reductionist" seems wrong, on that score.

He comes close to examining the analogy with painting, but is keen to dismiss it:

Suppose that an artist paints a self-portrait and then, by repainting, turns this into a portrait of his father. Even though these portraits are more similar than a caterpillar and butterfly, they are not stages in the continued existence of a single painting. — Parfit, p.203

Er, why not? Why aren't they a perfectly fine analogy with gradual personal transformation?

The self-portrait is a painting that the artist destroyed. — (cont.)

Oh. Why, exactly?

In a general discussion of identity, we would need to explain why the requirement of physical continuity differs in such ways for different kinds of thing. But we can ignore this here. — (cont.)

Hmm.

Needless to say, Goodman's book, fairly famous for bringing to bear (on aesthetics) a deal of previous work on identity and structure, isn't referenced in this book.

A subtly related problem is the conception of memory: as an implanted mental picture, with a natural and causal (as opposed to conventional) manner of depicting its object. Not a radical conception, of course; perfectly in line with Locke and Hume. But this results in a view of neuro-psychology as revealing that

The causes of long-term memories are memory-traces. It was once thought that these might be localised, involving changes in only a few brain cells. It is now more probable that a particular memory-trace involves changes in a larger number of cells. — Parfit, p.220

Perhaps there were then and still are plenty of neuro-scientists inclined to this view. I'll take correction on this, because I'm out of touch with psychology, but I'm vaguely aware of a tidal drift in psychological theory (since Bartlett in the thirties) completely away from that idea of a trace, analogous to a frame of imprinted vision or sound, and towards the contrary idea of memory (and perception too) as a continual project of constructing and testing and revising little mental performances. A drift which would be in agreement with Goodman's "language theory of pictures". (And probably modern trends like Bayesian predictive coding.) And which makes sense, if you reflect on the simple observation that animals have hardly ever, if ever, evolved a black box recorder. (Parrots a counter-example?)

This point of view makes, on the other hand, nonsense of the kind of thought experiment (however familiar) wherein,

[...] neuro-surgeons develop ways to create in one brain a copy of a memory-trace in another brain. This might enable us to quasi-remember other people's past experiences. — (cont.)

Enable us to have similar thoughts, sure. To rehearse (somewhat) similar mental performances. Not enable us to be confronted with a similar scene, though. Not in reality, obviously, but more crucially not perceptually: we shall not be confronted with a memory-scene, susceptible to forensic examination like a real picture.

Quasi-remembering other people's past experiences deflates to endorsing their autobiographical assertions. (In a word language or picture language.) And, we should add, the same is true for our own remembering. The only forensic authenticity available is the "autographic" identity of the person mentally rehearsing the assertions.

Which might be expected to not count for much. Napoleon's own recollections of (i.e. his dispositions towards verbal or pictorial assertions about) Waterloo we would expect to be as badly biased as my own delusional ones. Still, they have the distinction (even if not necessarily a virtue) of having formed through the cognitive efforts of an embodied brain actually there at the scene.

We've no grounds to discount the possibility that personal continuity defined spatiotemporally will make an important epistemic difference to memory. Just as (as Goodman argues) we can't know that autographic authenticity (defined similarly) won't make an important aesthetic difference to a picture.

if I could freeze all neural activity in your brain and restart it, is that the same instance of consciousness?
— Mijin
Are you freezing it by freezing time? — Patterner

Does it matter? What is the rule you're going by for deciding if there's continuity of consciousness?

"Partial" is not a dodge. I am saying that in the imperfect transporter case, the subject experiences zero bodily continuity and partial psychological continuity. Whether that constitutes (partial) survival depends on whether bodily or psychological is the relevant continuity. — hypericin

But your position seems to be that psychological continuity is key, right? So in your view, is that person still alive?

And again for clarity: I can ask two questions about getting into the imperfect transporter: "Did I survive" and, if yes, "In what form did I survive?"

In this context, "partial" could only be mapped to saying: yes, you survive, and that the nature of your consciousness depends on the nature of the damage. The problem is, this is implicitly saying that I am always transported. So, if Abraham Lincoln walks out at Destination, I'm surviving through his eyes, despite the only association between me and him being that some person claimed the transporter would send me.

I see at least two issues:

Social responsibility:
The Relationship between the scanned data, the continuous person, and the assembled person: — Dawnstorm

You raise interesting points, Dawnstorm. I think it's worth remembering though that this isn't really a feasible technology, so we never really need to think about it from a pragmatic point of view (though it of course is a great topic for sci-fi; I enjoyed the movie Anti Matter, for example)

The reason I invoke the transporter, and the imperfect transporter, is to test our ideas of how we define personal identity and what constitutes an instance of consciousness. It's like riding on a photon, or Laplace's demon. It's unlikely to ever happen.

A slightly more feasible scenario might be qualitatively copying the personality and memories of someone into a digital format. But in that scenario we'd probably have already had several massive bombshells for society, like needing to accept the possibility of Strong AI.

if I could freeze all neural activity in your brain and restart it, is that the same instance of consciousness?
— Mijin
Are you freezing it by freezing time?
— Patterner

Does it matter? What is the rule you're going by for deciding if there's continuity of consciousness? — Mijin

Why not expand the thread with cryonics? That's much more feasible than the transporter.

If I have myself frozen, will I wake up in a hundred years, or will it be my copy?

Why not expand the thread with cryonics? That's much more feasible than the transporter.

If I have myself frozen, will I wake up in a hundred years, or will it be my copy? — SolarWind

Sure, I can give my opinion on that: I don't claim to know; the information is insufficient right now. But, based on what *is* known right now, it seems the best answer is that there is never continuity of consciousness in any circumstances.
The person that wakes up in a hundred years' time isn't me, but nor is the person that will finish this sentence that I am typing now.

What's your opinion?

The person that wakes up in a hundred years' time isn't me, but nor is the person that will finish this sentence that I am typing now. — Mijin

Excuse me, but I don't think you understand your own question. That's not an answer.

Cryonics costs many thousands of dollars. You expect to see the world in a hundred years, not a copy of yourself walking around.

You also expect to wake up in the same body after you sleep. And there are two possibilities: waking up or dying in your sleep.

if I could freeze all neural activity in your brain and restart it, is that the same instance of consciousness?
— Mijin
Are you freezing it by freezing time?
— Patterner

Does it matter? What is the rule you're going by for deciding if there's continuity of consciousness? — Mijin

Yes, if matters. If you freeze the brain with cold, then you've killed it. There is no continuity of memory, or life, from one moment to the next.

If you freeze time, there is no "one moment to the next". No time during which the brain was dead, alive, or anything else. When you start time again, the very next instant comes without any break in continuity.

In this context, "partial" could only be mapped to saying: yes, you survive, and that the nature of your consciousness depends on the nature of the damage. The problem is, this is implicitly saying that I am always transported. So, if Abraham Lincoln walks out at Destination, I'm surviving through his eyes, despite the only association between me and him being that some person claimed the transporter would send me. — Mijin

No. You are yet again talking from your implicit soul perspective, where "instance of consciousness" is your word for soul. Assuming psychological continuity is key, you survive only to the degree that the new person's psychology resembles the old. Abraham Lincolns would not resemble it at all, so you would be completely extinguished.

But your position seems to be that psychological continuity is key, right? So in your view, is that person still alive? — Mijin

I'm not so sure anymore, I'm moving away from that toward the bodily continuity camp. The kind of argument that is swaying me: suppose the original wasn't dematerialized, by accident. The original would have no clue what was going on with the teleported person. From the original's perspective, the copy is a completely separate person that just so happens to resemble them, like a supremely close identical twin. Then, the mistake is realized, and the original is subsequently killed. Why should killing the the original change that the copy is a separate person?

Inheriring memories is how the persistence of consciousness is accomplished. It's not an illusion. It's just not what people generally think it is if they haven't thought or read/heard much about it. — Patterner

Are you totally sure? I've not read the proceeding conversation, but this seems to be a little bit off the mark to me.
We don't, generally, look at a person suffering from Alzheimer's or similar as lacking consciousness. Is that the take you go for? Not a problem if you say yes - legit position, I just don't see it.

I'm not so sure anymore, I'm moving away from that toward the bodily continuity camp. The kind of argument that is swaying me: suppose the original wasn't dematerialized, by accident. The original would have no clue what was going on with the teleported person. From the original's perspective, the copy is a completely separate person that just so happens to resemble them, like a supremely close identical twin. Then, the mistake is realized, and the original is subsequently killed. Why should killing the the original change that the copy is a separate person? — hypericin

This is, almost exactly, the Branch Line case. The machine malfunctions causing a terminal heart deterioration in you, while beaming your blueprint to be printed on Mars. It gets printed. You2 walks out on Mars with your exact memories up the moment you walked in. You get to live three days while your clone on Mars goes about their business. Which one is you, tends to be the question. I think they are both "you" without need for identity, due to Relation R being what matters. The second part of this is figuring out whether you care that You dies. If someone will continue to be your children's dad, the exceptional lawyer you are, will continue to write that book you're working on etc... You wont be missing from the world. But still - as Mijin noted - You - the exact phenomenal outlet - will cease. That's terrifying to me, fwiw.

Your bold position seems to allow for a transplanted brain, with entirely different biography, to become someone they have literally no concept of in the brain. Is that right? I realise you're not set on it, just exploring things.