Sorry about that ridiculous watermark.
this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
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But I have the same consciousness
So does the copy
Fundamentally, no. It doesn't matter if the copy is identical in every way, it's physically separate.
The fact that one is the "original" and one is the "copy" doesn't matter. The fidelity of the copy doesn't matter. It's literally just the fact that it's different meat.
The copy will believe it's me, and will for any outside observer be identical to me, but I will still exist as a separate entity. Up until the next instant, where the clone-and-kill machine enters the next phase, kills me, and I'm gone, and there's a new copy of me out there with a new consciousness, living my life. But the version of me who was me is dead.
What happens if it doesn't kill me instantly? What happens if I get to look my transporter clone in the eyes? We won't have the same consciousness, we'll have two separate copies of the same consciousness. And then it kills me. And I watch myself die.
Yes. You watch yourself die, and you continue being you.
You're always doing exactly that already.
Every moment of every day. You replace yourself, with a new self.
Except the person who died is dead, and they stay dead. The person who died's final moments will be seeing their clone standing over them, and their memories will diverge.
They're clearly different meat, different consciousnesses in that moment. They won't know what the other is thinking, they will have to speak to communicate.
How are they not separate people in that moment?
They are separate individuals.
They are also the same person.
Identity and individuality don't need to be linked. Neither is dependent on the other.
Exactly. Even as a new me lives on, with the same identity, it isn't the same individual. The Me who walked into the teleporter will die, and never wake up again.
I don't care about the continuity of my identity, I care about the continuity of my consciousness. My identity changes over time, but it's always Me who experiences that identity.
I would rather have my identity radically change, but continue to be the one to experience it, than have my identity continue, but have it be a part of a different consciousness.
Your consciousness is always different. Ever changing. Never fixed.
In fact it's the change in your consciousness that inspires an change in identity.
Maybe. We might be getting into the weeds of unknowable philosophical questions here.
My belief is that my consciousness now is more or less the same as when I was young. But then, there's no way to know that, as we only exist in the current instant. It's possible I sprung into existence when I woke up this morning.
And yet I think that the claim "there's no continuity of consciousness, the You that existed yesterday is not the same You that exists now" is just as unprovable and thus unknowable as the claim that I am the same Experiencer that I always have been. We have no understanding of what consciousness even is.
To be honest I'm not really sure what consciousness "changing" means. I'm curious what you mean by that. In my mind, either it is or it isn't the same. It's just the thing that experiences my identity, my body, qualia. It's awareness itself.
I think some of the difficulty here boils down to the impossibility of defining consciousness itself.
Think of it like this. I have a computer hard drive. I can make a perfect clone of this computer hard drive. Every single one and zero accounted for on a separate disk. While these hard drives contain the same information, changes to one do not cause changes in the other. While they contain the same data, they are not the same hard drive.
If you have two drive in a RAID 1 array. They have the same data. If one dies, it doesn't matter. Everything important is preserved without interruption.
But I'm not in a RAID array with my teleportation clone. As far as the data contained within my brain goes, nothing is lost if I die the very instant that my clone is made, but I posit that what makes my mind my mind isn't just the data held within it.
There's a part of my brain that argued with itself when it reread that, because if the ongoing chemical reaction is what makes my mind my mind, then if I were cloned a la Farscape season 3, then both starmans have claim on being the starman. Even then, I feel like that only helps to illustrate the fact that my mind is both the data and the uninterrupted chemical process. If both clones are made of the same ongoing chemical process but have different data in them, then they're not the same starman as each other, even if they are the same starman as they were just before the cloning.
The data is what makes me the starman that I am right now, while the ongoing chemical process is what makes me the starman that I was yesterday, and that I'll be tomorrow. Good talk, I love a discussion that makes me further my own opinions on personhood