I don't understand everybody worrying about whether their consciousness moves with us. We literally don't even know what it is, we have no provable theory or idea of what it is. As far as I can tell, your consciousness is something your brain does, not something that exists external to your body, otherwise that's basically believing in spirits.
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Hell yes. Yes please. Please.
Depends on how the teleportation worked and also how our consciousness worked. I’m not against the idea of creating exact copies of myself who, from their point of view, are indistinguishable from the me they were copied from. I am, however, against the idea of deleting the original me, which from my point of view would be indistinguishable from death,
Transferring consciousness is different from copying consciousness, even if the copy is flawless.
This is the same answer as the question of uploading our consciousness to a computer.
To my limited understanding, the us that exists is just a network of neural connections. If you could somehow copy that network exactly, you could conceivably create a complete personality copy of an individual, but that’s not the same thing as moving their consciousness.
Doesn't Star Trek's transporter solution involve converting your atomic structure to Energy, beaming that energy to another place, and reconstitution your body using the same atoms? If so, that's not really dying anymore. Just re-arranging your original atoms.
Isn't it still kind of the same thing though?
Star Trek calls that "matter stream" energy your "pattern". Pattern sounds a lot like Information. Data. Which is very easy to transmit and duplicate. Data can also be lost or corrupted.
So it's as if they convert all your atoms to a file, then FTP your file to somewhere else where the technology turns your pattern back into matter.
"You" can't exist as just data, so at that point you're already dead. I think...
There are episodes where your pattern is stuck in the pattern buffer. You're only information being stored at that point.
Just because they can un-burn you at the end doesn't mean your body isn't destroyed when you leave. Even if the atoms were just re-arranged and not converted to energy, you're still getting pureed and then reconstituted. Hard to argue you're not dead when your brain has been completely disassembled.
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Here's another great video on the transporter problem!
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/KUXKUcsvhQc
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
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Well, if the technology actually existed, it would solve that whole "soul" question.
We would know pretty quickly if we transported humans and they came out the other side as soulless aberrations because their original just got killed.
So yeah, I would 100% use it after it first proved once and for all that the sum of our consciousness really is all the synapses and signals and grey matter in our heads. Because if so then what does it matter if your original matter has been erased and then recreated. Your clone is just as much you as you are you at that point.
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If I were afraid to use the teleporter I’d be afraid to go to sleep. And I ain’t going there, so yes I would use the teleporter.
Also PSA for anyone using an iphone: it’s unaware of the word “teleporter” and will autocorrect it to teleported.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=nQHBAdShgYI
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.