The transporter does not need to result in a you the way you are (relatively strictly) describing it. On a PC position, you can come out, and diverge immediately (becoming "someone else"). And this does not matter. — AmadeusD

It does matter though.

Let's, as you say, break it down, because there might be a degree of us talking past each other.

1) We agree that, under PC, there is a continuation of "you" if the person at destination is the same as the person at source (was)
2) We agree that there are hypothetical situations where, under PC, there is no continuation of you -- e.g. Abraham Lincoln walks out at destination. Or a turtle.

Now, what I take you to be saying is that:
A) If the person at destination has diverged a tiny bit, well, that's still a successful translation, the same as (1) above.

...but I am not prepared to grant that.

Because, the only thing we can know for sure about PC, from the transporter problem as it is usually phrased, is that an identical copy is a continuation of the self. Anything more than that is an extrapolation, and it's one that I would want a proponent of PC to give, with an argument, because the arbitrary and unknowable nature of that is the whole point of the imperfect transporter.

If you were to say that there is a period of time in which the source and destination person are indeed identical, even if that is just for a planck time, or even if they are not coexistent (e.g. destination person at t=1 is identical to source person at t=0), then fine.
Being identical and then diverging is answered with vanilla PC. Anything else is not. And that's why the distinction matters.

In differentiation, yes. I have explained that quite clearly too. Those aberrations don't change your sex. — AmadeusD

Once again, this statement of faith. But the problem is you've been hoist by your own petard.
Your claim was that sex is binary because of the SRY gene (never mind that biologists do not define gender this way).

But, oh look -- there are more than 2 observed genotypes for that gene. By your logic, we would have to concede that either there are more than 2 sexes, or that some people do not cleanly fit into one of the two most common ones. Unless we're going to engage in special pleading?

Humans are (in some studies) next-to-100% accurate in telling sex from facial features alone. What we need to do is trust that people will not lie about their sex. If that's a concern, then perhaps we do need testing. But that's not my position. My position is that we separate almost all private spaces by sex (for almost all of history). That is right. We should continue to do so. We understood there were bad actors before 2010 and almost every male weasling their way into a female space was promptly dealt with.

More males in female spaces is a bad idea. That's the headline. This isn't controversial. — AmadeusD

Firstly "next to 100%" is a red herring, because trans is rare and intersex is rare.

Secondly though, the point I was putting to you was that some people with the "male" SRY gene might look cisfemale and even have lived their lives assuming they were women (e.g. those with AIS). They might be married to a heterosexual male.
But, if we go with SRY gene as the determinator of strictly binary sex, then we are forced to consider them male and insist they go to men's bathrooms, men's prisons etc.

If, on the other hand, the SRY gene isn't the ultimate designator here, then that's the end of your argument. Because you're agreeing with me and the scientific consensus, that while most people can be trivially placed in a male or female bucket, there are special cases.

Which is it?

You are clearly not reading anything I have presented. THe SRY gene determines whether you are male or female. That's the end of that part of hte discussion.

During sexual differentiation your phenotype can be aberrant — AmadeusD

No it isn't the end of the discussion. Your own cite's exact words are:

"SRY is an intronless sex-determining gene on the Y chromosome. Mutations in this gene lead to a range of disorders of sex development"

(emphasis added)

I've not said anything at all about a DNA test. If you could ask a non-loaded question on the back of a fairly confused response to some biologically crucial information, I would be happy to treat hte "what we should do" type questions in good faith. — AmadeusD

I didn't say you had, I was saying it's the obvious implication of using SRY as the determinator of gender in society. If it's the wrong implication, then please explain why so, and also answer the actual question. Instead of, frankly, using indignation as an excuse.

Hmm, I don't think it changes anything. THe transporter need not 'work' for there to be an acceptable output. PC does that, avoiding hte problem of whether it 'works' entirely. That's why its the 'best' avenue for hte vast majority of people's intuitions. — AmadeusD

I'm not following you.

The psychological continuity position, as I understand it, does require being qualitatively the same. Abraham Lincoln walking out at destination isn't you. So it absolutely does matter whether the transport works or not.
On the subject of divergence; that matters too. If the copy is different to the original on creation, then it wasn't a successful copy, but if it diverges afterwards, that's fine; as our whole life is a kind of "divergence".

Of course we can get into the weeds of how similar is "the same" -- and that's exactly the point of the imperfect transporter.

If I've misunderstood you please elaborate.

I know this might seem like threadshitting but I just want to offer a conflicting view.

I've never seen "is there a god" to be one of the significant, or difficult, philosophical questions.

Whether a deity exists is a simple claim in itself, and doesn't actually affect much.

It only becomes important by association. Eg if we claim God is the cause of everything existing, then God becomes important because how / why anything exists is an important (and difficult) question. It's like if I were to say Whether midiclorians exist is the most important philosophical question, because midiclorians are the source of morality.

Otherwise it's just the claim that there's a big daddy figure. That there's no evidence for, and it's pretty easy to explain where the concept came from in terms of human psychology.

So you're just going to double-down and say that you can analyze the data better than people who do this professionally? Better than the people who wrote the papers?

In terms of using the SRY gene as the ultimate determinator, firstly your own cite indicates that that doesn't work in all cases, pointing out that mutations in that gene can lead to disorders of sex development i.e. the very thing we're talking about with intersex. Furthermore, it's just not practical; are we saying that if we find someone who looks cisfemale, and may have even lived her whole life as a woman, we must treat her as a man, insist she goes to men's toilets because of a DNA test?

That doesn't seem entirely wrong to me, it just begs the question of how could that possibly matter, if all it obtains in is a single planck-length type moment — AmadeusD

It matters a lot for people taking the PC position, because it means the transporter works.

Until the experiences diverge, Picard exists in two places with neither having greater claim to being the "real" Picard. Then, as soon as their experiences diverge, they are separate individuals, but both are a continuation of the original.
Under PC, it's quite rational to take a transporter trip.

Of course, if, one second after you said "Engage!", you find yourself standing on the source pad, about to be dematerialized, you'll feel rather differently about it. But that person's screwed in all 3 theories of continuity.

But at the moment immediately after B comes into existence, they have diverged. That's crucial, and being missed. — AmadeusD

Exactly -- they diverge when they diverge, and that is indeed after B comes into existence.

So a proponent of psychological continuity would typically say that there a period of time in which the consciousness truly exists in two places, but as soon as either entity receives stimuli from their new location, they've split into two entities.

Again: please bear in mind that psychological continuity is not my position. It's weird I'm having to defend and explain psychological continuity to proponents of bodily continuity, and vice versa, yet I don't believe in either position myself.

Not does your credulity prove it. — Patterner

But the point was, I was asking you for an explanation of how we arrive at the position of bodily continuity, and your response was to basically assert that it is obvious that separating our particles -- for any length of time and regardless of what happens afterwards -- results in our (permanent) death.

So I was illustrating to you that, no, you can't use that kind of statement as a premise as plenty of people disagree with it. So we're still missing an explanation, other than it just seems that way.

How many nanoseconds are needed to bring about simple death? — Patterner

Again, my contention is that the least flawed position right now is that there's never continuity. So to me it's irrelevant, as at every instant of time we have simple death, followed by a new consciousness that believes it has existed for years.

But under psychological continuity the time interval is irrelevant also. If your brain was formed again in a trillion years' time, then that's you.

It's only really an issue for bodily continuity to consider if I am still alive if my particles are separated for an infinitesimal period of time, and what level of connection is required etc.

They can't, as best as my knowledge goes. — AmadeusD

"As best as my knowledge goes" is critical here.
IANA expert on human biology (well a bit of neuroscience, but that's not so useful here). So we should defer to those who are, right? Instead of going by our gut, or whatever is the moral panic of the day.

First, I didn't say "that you are wrong." When quoting me, kindly don't misquote me. At least not intentionally. — Patterner

It wasn't meant to be a quote; quoting someone is *one* use of scare quotes.
But yes since some of those words were used by you, I acknowledge it wasn't that clear I was paraphrasing.

What if the process requires that the original remain alive for x seconds after the duplicate materializes elsewhere, then their particles disperse? — Patterner

Right-- that's a standard argument against psychological continuity that we've discussed upthread. And we've discussed the standard response; that as long as the two entities' experiences have not diverged then they are indeed the continuation of a single consciousness.
You may be incredulous of this explanation, but such incredibility would not disprove psychological continuity, nor tell us that under bodily continuity that even a nanosecond separation means simple death.

And again FTR: my position is neither bodily continuity nor psychological continuity

The person's life is lost in that nanosecond. If you disperse a person's particles, the person is dead. That does not require explanation or elaboration. It's an obvious fact. — Patterner

It's not though. Proponents of psychological continuity take the opposite line. e.g. Here's an article that from beginning to end implicitly assumes that as long as we can perfectly copy the quantum state of the original particles, then it is one and the same person before and after transportation.

Now, psychological continuity isn't my position. But you don't defeat that position by just saying "It's an obvious fact that you're wrong".

But once you say that a biological man can't be with females (in this case, prisons), aren't you opening the door to banning men from other female-only areas? — RogueAI

Firstly, prisons are a special case as:
1) We're talking about a population that has in many cases carried out violence towards women. Yes, a person can lose their right to be around women, at least until we have a chance to rehabilitate them. Prison is inherently about losing rights, it doesn't entail anything about the outside world.

2) Part of the concept of prison is that it's not just a holiday home where people are getting laid, as would be the case if prisons became unisex. That's part of the justification for separating the sexes. Now, the obvious counter-argument, is that homosexual sex happens in prisons, but of course, ideally that wouldn't either. The fact that we don't police prisons adequately in some cases is not an argument for giving up entirely and making it essentially impossible.

Secondly, let me be clear: I am not saying transwomen should be prevented from being in women's prison either. I think it's complex and necessarily case-by-case. I think it would be an injustice if a transwoman who looks cisgender female, and has committed a non-violent crime, is put in a men's prison where she is likely to be a frequent target.

But you can see we're looking at probably 8x the number v trans women — AmadeusD

There are far more than 8 times the number of ciswomen versus transwomen though. And if the number of transwomen killed is very low in Europe (as opposed to just a dearth of reporting figures; how many police forces even keep that data?), that's great. As your cite says though, the figure is much higher in the US, which has a lower population than Europe and is ahead of the curve in demonizing trans.

So, in total, it's actually a good argument for why we should be more tolerant and not become like the US.

Do the have an active SRY gene? You've asked the wrong question. — AmadeusD

Is that how human biologists define gender? Do you think that society would regard even someone capable of getting pregnant as male if they have that gene?

It is not possible to refute, because you can define it as always true, but it is incomplete. It doesn't answer who you will be after being transported or after cryonics. — SolarWind

No. I don't know what you mean by "define it to always be true".
As I've alluded several times at this point, there are at least 3 positions we can take on the continuity of consciousness: bodily continuity, psychological continuity and no continuity.
We can certainly come up with compelling (IMO) arguments againsts the first two, and I've summarized several of them in this thread.

I don't know what you mean by no continuity being "not possible to refute" other than you cannot think of a refutation. Nor can I, and that's the point.

Numerically the same body, not the same person. — hypericin

No; numerically the same person.

This might be the reason for the confusion here.
You seem to be interpreting "bodily continuity" as meaning something like "Let's only care about the body, and not the self". That's not what it means.
It means that the self is inherently tied to the physical substrate and therefore is also the self. (and further; that in the transporter problem there is no way to transport the self, although opinions tend to be mixed on what happens if you beam across the actual atoms of which the person is made).

Compared to non-trans male, trans women are fully four times more likely to commit a sexual offence. — AmadeusD

False. You're reading the stat wrong. What the stat said, was that among the prison population, of the crimes that people had been convicted of, that trans people were 4 times more likely to have been convicted of a sexual-related offense. That's not the same thing at all as saying that trans people in the general population are more likely to commit any crime, whether sexual or not.

But this is absolutely, objectively wrong. Every intersex person is either male or female. — AmadeusD

Glad to have a human biology expert here.
Go ahead then: what's someone with XXY chromosomes and a mix of internal and external genitalia?

If you had a stroke or a TBI, what determines whether you survive in any form, or whether your old self is gone? There is no hard line. Part of you is gone, that is all. Do you think some metaphysical argument can determine this? — hypericin

Once again: you're shifting to a different situation asking a different, qualitative, question.

For people that believe in bodily continuity, for example, any level of brain damage that doesn't kill them results in still the (numerically) same person, even if their characteristic (qualitative) self has changed a great deal.
However, those people would also trivially say that in the transporter scenario it doesn't matter if the person at the destination is qualitatively identical, they still are not the numerically same person.

Now, in the case of your position, of psychological continuity, it seems you are just avoiding the question and trying to answer a far simpler question. We aren't talking about qualitative identity, we are talking about numerical identity. And you have agreed that there's such a thing as simply being dead outright.
So the question is where the line is drawn between being dead outright and still existing in some form.
You're not addressing this question at all.

To make this clearer, what I'm saying is that if you're wanting to give me a "0-0.1-0.2-0.3...1" spectrum, then you need to say at what exact point survival obtains. It cannot be part here, more there. Either the person survives at point A or not. I do not see there is another way for this to run. You simply cannot survive and not survive. — AmadeusD

☝ This guy gets it
This is absolutely key to what I am saying with the imperfect transporter.

I have given you ample reasons why you can partially survive, in the psychological sense. — hypericin

Partial survival is survival. So, going back to the idea of a continuum, the implication of what you're saying is that 0.0000001 = "partial survive", which is a form of "survive". It implies that if the person walking out of the transporter has a single atom the same as the person at source, then the person at source has survived.
...It's a consistent position I guess, but I don't think most people would bite the bullet and claim that if Obama walks into the transporter, and Reagan walks out, then Obama has survived.

You think the you that's waking up tomorrow morning isn't really you? That if you go on a bender, you won't have to suffer the hangover? Someone else will? That's so obviously wrong. — RogueAI

Again, I don't claim to know, but it's the strongest position to take right now.
Both "bodily continuity" and "psychological continuity" have serious counter-arguments, which "no continuity" does not.

What's your argument against "no continuity"? Upthread, I begged someone, anyone to come up with a counter-argument to it. I don't want it to be true. But before this thread, I never heard an argument against it and that continues to be the case.

Assume psychological continuity is correct. If on your terms, if any degree of survival counts as survival, then if Napoleon came out of the teleporter, and he had the faintest, most fleeting and occasional memory of the teleportee, well then for you that is full survival. — hypericin

Not at all. I make no claim about how persistence works under psychological continuity, the whole argument is against it working as an explanation.
So, if you're asking me under "my terms" of whether Napoleon has survived, my answer is f-knows, it depends on what determines the difference between surviving in any form versus not surviving at all, and we have no idea what does, or could, determine that.

Nothing in your source seems to indicate what you are saying. It is silent on the rates at which trans individuals are perpetrators of violent crime. In general, groups that are more likely to be the victims of violent crime are also more likely to be perpetrators. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You're right that we need to separate out these two concepts.

So firstly, I guess you are accepting that trans are more likely to be victims of crime, as there's no counter-cite or rebuttal?

Secondly, in terms of frequency of committing crimes, I could only find this swedish study, that suggested that people who engaged in sex reassignment in the 1980s had a slightly higher incidence of crime than cisgender, but no difference among those who transitioned in the later (2003) group.
I couldn't find great data TBH -- police forces dont seem to keep this data -- so I'm happy to take back that part, as long as you also acknowledge that those alledging that transgender are more likely to be criminals also need to back that up.

Yes, The person stepping into the transporter will be 0.0 alive after the process. Their atoms were dispersed. There is no way to disperse someone's items without them dying. — Patterner

I am putting the point to hypericin, because it's an argument against psychological continuity. Perhaps put your point to him?

Apart from that, it seems again you're just asserting bodily continuity. What would take things further is an explanation or further elaboration. A couple of posts ago you suggested that freezing time would not end the self, but even a nanosecond of separation would. Why's that? What's lost in that nanosecond?

False. I have given you the reasons people are made uncomfortable. This occurs when anyone does it. [...]Anyone who approaches me as overbearing, childish and intrusive will get the same response. — AmadeusD

You are just trying to rationalize why you feel uncomfortable. Firstly, who cares, but secondly, this concedes the point.
I don't like the mannerisms or dress of lots of people on TV...it doesn't matter and it's not "woke". You were supposed to be explaining what's wrong with woke and are still just coming back to not liking Dylan's appearance.

But here are a couple of examples anyway — AmadeusD

OK, I'll give you one there; the peeping tom one. The others are just not relevant. A non-sexual assault that happened in a bathroom. What's the difference between that and a cismale assaulting a cisfemale, which is of course far more common?
But yeah, I'll stop saying there are zero examples.

We then have the multitude of problematic cases of males in female prisons, and the overwhelming concentration among those trans women who are prison, of sex crimes. IN the UK a trans women is fully four times more likely to be in prison for a sex crime than a non-trans male. — AmadeusD

I would agree that the prison service in the UK has got this wrong a couple of times; like the high-profile case of the the rapist who "transitioned" after being convicted. However, in general the data is that trans people are much, much more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators, and are at great risk in prisons. It's extremely misleading to depict them as predators.

Sex is real, and it matters. Not sure how that became controversial. — AmadeusD

Among who? Sounds like a strawman to me.
What I would say though is I have, and will continue to push back against the claim that sex is binary, because intersex is a thing. But in general, no, no-one is saying sex isn't real.

We both know there is no line.

You want to say, in the imperfect transporter, if survival is possible at all, there must be a line between survival and death, as death is surely possible given enough imperfection. There is no such line, any such line must be arbitrary. Therefore survival isn't possible.

But this is only true if survival is binary. If we think of survival in terms of a body living or dying, it is binary. If we think in terms of a soul transmigrating or not, it is binary. But if we think in terms of psychological survival (which is the only way anyone can survive a transporter) it is not. Survival in this case is a continuum between 0-1, not a binary on-off. — hypericin

(emphasis added)

This is the critical point right here.

I am exactly talking about that line, except I am talking about persistence of the self, not "the body". Like it or not, whether I survive in any form -- whatever that might be -- versus being as dead as Napoleon, *is* a binary.

Presumably you are happy to say Napoleon is completely dead today, right?
So, to put it in your "continuum" terms, Napoleon's level of alive is 0.0. And, in the imperfect transporter, the proposition that we are interested in, that is binary, is whether the person stepping into the transporter will be 0.0 alive after the process.

And it is very problematic for the position of psychological continuity for the reasons given; the line is arbitrary, yet important, and further yet: unknowable.

Finally, let's stop with the "we both know" -- try to get through a post without asserting someone else's inner beliefs.

What do you regard as the necessary and sufficient conditions (or properties) for being you? I suggest that this is a central issue in the transporter scenario. — Relativist

If you're asking me qualitatively, sure I can list off things like my personality, my memories etc.

In the context of this discussion on continuity of the self? Nothing. What I mean is: the most defensible position on the self is that consciousness is just a momentary phenomenon that comes packaged with the illusion of continuity.

No. This is clearly bollocks. I gave you several reasons, which have nothing to do with being trans. Please stop putting words in my mouth. — AmadeusD

Your reasons all boil down to you just finding her appearance "uncanny" to use your word. Yes, that is just you not liking the appearance of a transperson, you have not rationalized it at all.

Right o, I'll tell that to the victims and the millions of females it makes unsafe. — AmadeusD

What victims? Let's see the cite for someone pretending to be trans to SA women in a public toilet. I'll wait here.

I think all 'being trans' is pretend in some sense: You cannot change your sex. It is utterly impossible. There is no version of 'transition' which means anything if gender is a construct/spectrum that means nothing to us as sexes (which is fine, I don't quite have an issue with tha tposition). — AmadeusD

I think your understanding here is a bit confused. There's gender and there's sex, and transpeople are quite aware that changing their gender does not change their sex. They don't believe that going from Robert to Roberta instantly gives them a uterus.

You are yet again talking from your implicit soul perspective, where "instance of consciousness" is your word for soul. — hypericin

It's always a desperate debating tactic to rely on telling other people what they believe. And I even pointed out in the OP that people on both sides of this debate will tend to make their argument by accusing the other side of believing in souls.

For the fourth time, no I don't believe in souls. Not only am I an atheist, not only do I think that dualism is inherently flawed, but my background is in neuroscience; I have a post-grad degree in neuroimaging. So I don't want to have to address this straw man for a fifth time.

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.

Great, so we agree that there is a point at which you're simply dead. But you also believe that there is a point at which you survive with brain damage. This is the line we're interested in in the imperfect transporter. Where is that line: how does the universe decide, and how can we know where it is?

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

It's as clear an answer as I can give: I don't know, but the best supported theory of consciousness right now is that there is no such thing as continuity of consciousness. I am (numerically) not the same consciousness as went to bed last night, or began this sentence, and I won't be the being that wakes up from cryonics later.
And it was responding to your question, what do you mean by "your own question"?

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

I haven't paid for cryonics. You asked my opinion.

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?

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.

"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.

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?

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 :)

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?

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.

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?"

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

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.