Absurd Questions, Hopefully Unabsurd Answers

The transporter thing is eerie, but I think I'd use it. There's a part of me (probably an irrational part) that is turned off by it, because by it seems like I'd be killing myself. But when I think about it in practical terms, I don't see how it would be different -- from the point-of-view of actual experience -- to sleep.

When you go to sleep, before you enter REM state, you have a complete stoppage of consciousness. Then, later, consciousness starts again, complete with all memories from before. As-far-as you're concerned, you could be a "disk image" of yourself that's been moved from one hard drive to another. You're not, but from an experiential point-of-view, what's the difference?

Maybe the me who stepped in the transporter would die in some sense, but presumably it would be completely painless and there'd be no sense of dying. My "death" would have no negative impact on loved ones or dependents, because the me that stepped out the other end would completely take over where the old me left off, and he'd feel in every way that he was me.

In a way, he'd be more me than the me after sleep, because he'd have complete continuity. Whereas there is a feeling of a break in consciousness after sleep.

Finally, I suspect that if transporters were developed, they'd gradually get features added (like most machines). Version 1.0 transporters would create exact copies of people. But then some company would start selling one that would make improved copies: "step into the transporter, ladies and gentleman, and not only will you get from New York to San Francisco in the blink of an eye, but when you get out, your body will be cleansed of disease! If you had cancer in New York, you'll be cancer-free in San Francisco! If you had AIDS in New York, you'll be AIDS-free in San Francisco. You can also dial in desired attributes before traveling? Want to be smarter? Select how many IQ points you want to add, and our transporter will spit you out the other end smarter than you were before you started."

I would have a hard to resisting. I don't think I would resist.
posted by grumblebee at 3:21 AM on June 25, 2007 [3 favorites]

now we've all got pee in our mouth.
posted by quonsar at 5:08 AM on June 25, 2007 [2 favorites]

Did that make the bathwater level go up, or down?
posted by flabdablet at 5:09 AM on June 25, 2007

The question is for questions, not answers.

So I guess it's somewhat like Jeopardy then?
posted by grouse at 5:35 AM on June 25, 2007

Not like that, grouse.

"What is somewhat like Jeopardy, Alex?"
posted by Meatbomb at 5:42 AM on June 25, 2007

How is that thread even okay? Is it the "I'm writing a play" ruse?
posted by dame at 5:47 AM on June 25, 2007 [1 favorite]

Has that 'any question's okay if you're writing a book' thing become too widespread and well-known?
posted by box at 6:02 AM on June 25, 2007

I was enjoying people's attempts to validate the various derails by weakly throwing in their own ponderable question -which only sparked further branches of sidetracked discussions.
posted by yeti at 6:14 AM on June 25, 2007

Dear AskMe: I'm writing The Book of Love. Wanna screw?
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 6:38 AM on June 25, 2007

This reminds me of getting a crew cut at Fred the Barber's cubbyhole barbershop back in the day. He had mirrors on both walls. You could sit there and stare at the back of your head into infinity.

...bigger than twenty football fields stretched end-to-end, folded in space, twisted into a Möbius strip, and tattooed on Carl Sagan's left butt-cheek.

And that's one stinky butt cheek getting stinkier all the time at that.
posted by y2karl at 6:56 AM on June 25, 2007

Have we all read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead?
posted by artifarce at 6:58 AM on June 25, 2007 [2 favorites]

Oh whatever. That askme thread is fun. If there's any justice in the world, the admins will let it be.
posted by Afroblanco at 7:05 AM on June 25, 2007

SCDB: The idea that the universe is finite in volume is not always assumed to be true: We haven't a good way to check, really. The observeable universe is finite in volume and bounded: it's the hubble sphere, the sphere defined by how far light can have possibly travelled in the lifetime of the universe. Outside of that, we're dependent on the well established hypothesis that the universe everywhere is pretty much like the universe here, and it's generally assumed to be boundless, because we can't think of any rational way to bound the thing. So there's two possibilities: the universe is finite but boundless, or it's infinite and boundless.

The choice between these is pretty much speculation. Neither of them are ruled out, as far as I know.

----

As for the problem of identity, I'm firmly in the not worrying about transporters crowd. I used to think that sort of thing was problematic, but then I realized that I'm not sure I have that sort of continuity now, so the idea that I'd lose it in something like that seemed fairly silly. I'm a fan of the personal identity ideas that rely primarily on memory: I am the same person I was yesterday because I have the memory of being so and identify that memory as my own. The key is that there's no way to tell if your consciousness is actually continuous or if something like this happens: consciousness is 'run' by your brain, produces a result which is stored into memory, and then goes away. When next needed, consciousness is 'run' again, pulls out the memory of before, and assumes it's the same instance for lack of contradicting evidence. Repeat.

I say this because the idea of continuity of consciousness is dependent on the memory of such continuity, but where consciousness is the gatekeeper of such memory there can be no memories of the limits of consciousness. I think I'm the same mind that I was a moment ago, but I've no proof of this. The qualia of conscious existence is the most fleeting thing in the world, and trying to base personal identity upon it seems to me an entirely futile exercise.

Outside of what I can remember, I rely on bodily continuity, but not in a way that's bothered by a star trek style transporter.

It gets a bit funny with really advanced brain-computer interfaces, if you can shift memories around and share them between people, which is why I include the hedge about identifying a memory as my own. If such a future society decides to start identifying memories as self which were not recorded directly by the body someone is in, to have split histories and make personality a bit more fluid, I think this sort of definition will hold up. It'll get messy, but I think it'll work.
posted by Arturus at 7:12 AM on June 25, 2007

Gully Foyle is my name
And Terra is my nation
Deep space is my dwelling place
The stars my destination
posted by Divine_Wino at 7:15 AM on June 25, 2007

Wait, Divine_Wino is a Terra-ist?
posted by MrMoonPie at 8:03 AM on June 25, 2007

To all you "no problem with transporters" folks: if you were shown a clone of yourself and convinced that it had all your memories and was functionally indistinguishable from you, would you then happily enter a painless-suicide booth and allow the clone to take over your life? If not, how do you distinguish the situations? (If it's the transport thing, the clone can be moved to a destination of your choice before you're offed.)
posted by languagehat at 8:07 AM on June 25, 2007 [3 favorites]

Shut up, Hat! I was going to use the transporter to create my personal Brundle-clone army by hacking the disassembler. You're going to ruin everything!
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 8:25 AM on June 25, 2007

It depends. If the memories are already identical and all that jazz, does it follow that I'm also controlling my clone or has myself merely been transfered to the clone for the purpose of this little thought experiment?
posted by jmd82 at 8:25 AM on June 25, 2007

The "and convinced that" phrasing there is pretty important, languagehat. If I'm convinced, I'm convinced, right? So yeah, clone dies or I die, and it's a wash. But that's the source of the problem, the convincing part. Assuming I'm convinced solves the problem, but how am I to be convinced?
posted by cgc373 at 8:27 AM on June 25, 2007

cgc373: take "and convinced that" as true, yes. You're staring at a perfect existential clone. You know for damn sure that you're thinking the same thing he's thinking, and both of you with a perfect sense of identity as cgc373.

But you're not seeing through his eyes, you're seeing through yours. You can't read his mind. If someone shot you in the head just then, your life ends. Your clone stands, blinking and horrified, over your corpse, but you don't know that—you're dead. Continuity ceases. Case closed. Conversations with your clone may seem wholly natural to the clone—who is you, right, with no break in continuity perceived—and to people who know him. But you're not in on that conversation, because you're dead. Gone. Caput.

Depending on your metaphysics, you might be watching this from somewhere else, but that's a whole other unanswerable question.

Unless you presume that there is some shared consciousness between clones/transportees, transportation is death.
posted by cortex at 8:49 AM on June 25, 2007 [1 favorite]

A: It's a shitty chatfilter question that should be axed.
posted by klangklangston at 8:59 AM on June 25, 2007 [3 favorites]

Q: What does Mr. Crankypants think?
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 9:02 AM on June 25, 2007 [3 favorites]

If I were totally convinced the clone and I were the same, then I would say, "send the damn clone in the suicide booth." And you know what? If she went, she wouldn't be completely me, because I wouldn't go in the suicide booth.
posted by misha at 9:02 AM on June 25, 2007 [2 favorites]

Oh, and please don't axe the question, because I miss the Cliff Claven dialog from Cheers, and this is as close as we get these days.

Seriously, though, it's a really interesting thread.
posted by misha at 9:03 AM on June 25, 2007

But suppose Bobby goes through a teleporter. And Bobby's body is destroyed and a new body is created somewhere else. And the new body keeps saying "I'm Bobby!" And the new body acts exactly like Bobby and remembers all of Bobby's passwords (better than I can do, even) and even has the exact same DNA. If transportation is death, then this person who will argue until he's blue in the face that he's Bobby isn't actually Bobby. And while there may be plenty of reasons to want to avoid accepting that "Old" Bobby is the same person as "New" Bobby, he sure wouldn't want to.

I have the sneaking suspicion, unsupported by more than vague hand-wavings to Quine, that, if teleportation were a real possibility, we'd just find it extremely practical to accept that personal identity continued beyond physical annihilation and re-creation. And then it'd just be a case of creating the metaphysics necessary to support that desired conclusion.

Or, you know, maybe not.
posted by Ms. Saint at 9:08 AM on June 25, 2007 [1 favorite]

Oh sure, the transporter thing is all nice and rosy at first glance, but I think we all know what ends up happening.
posted by the other side at 9:09 AM on June 25, 2007

hat convinced me. No transporters. The only way around it would be for me to somehow be able to control the clone, which wouldn't be possible unless a) there is such thing as a soul (or something like it that conveys the me-ness of me) and b) the transporter could also transport that. I would have to be able to take control of the clone in order for it to be me. I really think that the mind is the product of the brain, though, so it would take some convincing to assure me that my control would pass into the clone at the time of transport/death.
posted by arcticwoman at 9:13 AM on June 25, 2007

All of you "I have a problem with transporters" people need to go read Douglas Hofstadter's latest book I Am A Strange Loop immediately. Then report back to this thread and explain it to me, patiently, using small words.
posted by Atom Eyes at 9:45 AM on June 25, 2007

To all you "no problem with transporters" folks: if you were shown a clone of yourself and convinced that it had all your memories and was functionally indistinguishable from you,

Of course its distinguishable from you. Its standing over there and I'm standing here. Our memories ceased being common a few minutes ago (or whenever the copy was made) So there are two distinct human beings - neither of which should be killed.

As I said in the thread, nobody knows how/if transporters will work. This problem may not even arise because you may need to *destroy* the original in order to create the clone in the first place. Yeah, some people may have a problem with that but I'm sure I wouldn't. I've been under general anaesthesia, a state in which arguably my consciousness ceased to exist. The persistence of identity is a complex illusion anyways.
posted by vacapinta at 9:47 AM on June 25, 2007

There's a sign stuck to the door of my local Caltex station that says "Seeing-Eye Dogs Welcome". Who is meant to read that?

The sign is made for the sighted who own dogs and want to bring them into the store.

"I'm sorry miss, you're not allowed to bring that dog in here."

"But she's a seeing eye dog, so she's allowed!"

"What makes you think seeing eye dogs are allowed in here?"

"I read it on the sign...er...."
posted by SassHat at 9:54 AM on June 25, 2007 [2 favorites]

I have the sneaking suspicion, unsupported by more than vague hand-wavings to Quine, that, if teleportation were a real possibility, we'd just find it extremely practical to accept that personal identity continued beyond physical annihilation and re-creation. And then it'd just be a case of creating the metaphysics necessary to support that desired conclusion.

Quine had views on teleportation and personal identity? Or Quine advocated "creating" metaphysics to support whatever conclusion we desired?

I think those hand wavings are pretty vague indeed.
posted by Kwine at 9:54 AM on June 25, 2007

Dear AxMe: I’m writing a play in which a bunch of people are chatting. Sort of like how people chat on a web forum. What chatty remarks would typify this kind of chat? –thxbye, d.mamet
posted by found missing at 9:58 AM on June 25, 2007 [1 favorite]

Everybody knows that Quine was a spaz.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 9:59 AM on June 25, 2007

languagehat, that's a great challenge. My answer is that, yes, I would be uncomfortable walking into the suicide booth, but not for reasons vacapinta brought up -- at least not if I slightly alter your scenario:

Someone shows me an exact clone of me that is "turned off" (maybe in suspended animation). It's not forming any new memories the moment. I'm assured (and, for the sake of this thought experiment, I believe) that any new memories I'm forming now will be transfered to my clone the second I step into the suicide booth -- and the moment I'm dead, he'll be awakened.

Under those conditions, which I think solve vacapinta's main concern, I probably still wouldn't do it, but my avoidance wouldn't be rational. I really can't think of a reasonable way to define "me" other than as "a being having my thought patterns."

I wouldn't step into the booth because I'm biologically "programmed" not to kill the body I'm currently in. It has nothing to do with rationality and it can't be over-ridden by rationality, at least not easily.

But despite my reluctance and hypocrisy, I still say the clone is as me as I am.

Ms. Saint, if future people consider "continuity of thought" to be all-important, what about my question, in the askme thread, concerning the past? If an event in the past is cut off from continuity -- no one alive remembers it happening, there are no surviving records of it having happened and there's no way to work backwards to it from current patterns. Did it happen?
posted by grumblebee at 10:08 AM on June 25, 2007 [1 favorite]

If transportation is death, then this person who will argue until he's blue in the face that he's Bobby isn't actually Bobby.

He's not Bobby1. He's Bobby2. Bobbys1 and 2 are functionally identically up to the point of creation of Bobby2, at which point their experiences diverge. Nothing that happens to Bobby1 affects Bobby2, or vice versa, to any degree further than what happens to one natural identical twin affects the other. That Bobby2 cannot be convinced he is not Bobby1 is little comfort to Bobby1.
posted by cortex at 10:12 AM on June 25, 2007 [1 favorite]

The problem with Quine is that he couldn't make up his mind but was convincing no matter what he said.

I suppose it'd be hand-waving to Early Quine, when he was still completely willing to tear down the pillars of the analytic/synthetic distinction. The Stanford Encyclopedia on that. I'll admit that I don't know too much about how much Later Quine was willing to accept.

What I would (if I'd have to be a bit less vague, which I don't wanna, because, man, am I lazy) reference is the whole "web of belief" thing (discussed beautifully in the book of the same name. No, Quine didn't talk about teleportation so far as I know, but he certainly talked about how even the most basic of beliefs can be revised. If my whole argument is that, if teleportation were to be possible, we'd probably revise our metaphysical beliefs relating to personal identity, then Quine's views on this would be pretty useful for me.
posted by Ms. Saint at 10:15 AM on June 25, 2007

Grumblebee, what I'd say is, there's a difference between personal identity and the existence of events. If I'm not mistaken, the situation you're suggesting is this: an event (presumably) occurs at time X, but, at time Y, no one remembers it.

Now, suppose it's this: Bobby once ate a piece of cake (mmm, cake). Then, two days later, he can't remember it. All the cake is gone, the plate is cleaned off, and no one else ever knew the cake was ever there. There are two different questions there: 1) was there ever a piece of cake and did it get eaten? and 2) is Bobby when he doesn't remember eating the cake the same person as Bobby who did eat the cake?

The first question could only be answered negatively (I think -- I don't really know what I'm talking about here) if the existence of the past events depends on anyone remembering it in the present.

The second question could could be answered negatively if a person's numerical identity over time depends on later stages of the person remembering earlier stages. In other words, if it is true that I am Ms. Saint because I have memories of the things Ms. Saint has done throughout her life -- going to school, eating cake, dancing jigs, etc.

And... I certainly have no clue what else to say about that.

Let me note: sometime, between last night and this morning, I grew grossly ill. Ugh. It could cause me to start spouting nonsense. Perhaps, even, retroactively.
posted by Ms. Saint at 10:30 AM on June 25, 2007

The first question could only be answered negatively (I think -- I don't really know what I'm talking about here) if the existence of the past events depends on anyone remembering it in the present.

I'm 95% sure I agree with this. Is there any useful sense in which we can posit that a past event happened if there's no record of it (in memory or clear causal link) in the present? I don't see how, but it's a weird thought.

It means, in effect, that I can do something now -- say drop a paperclip and pick it up -- agree to take the memory of my action with me to my death, and make the reasonable statement that, "one day, the paper-clip-drop will never have happened."
posted by grumblebee at 10:44 AM on June 25, 2007

Answers to questions given as answers in a thread about questions is pretty damn meta. And they certainly don't belong in the original question, since the OP is explicitly looking for questions as answers, not answers. So to speak.

Donald Rumsfeld:

"As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know."

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

posted by ericb at 10:49 AM on June 25, 2007 [1 favorite]

So, it isn't chatfilter if I say "I'm writing a play about a world where mankind is gone and the monkeys and bears fight over the world"
posted by Megafly at 1:05 PM on June 25, 2007

The second question could could be answered negatively if a person's numerical identity over time depends on later stages of the person remembering earlier stages.

Why this obsession with numerical identity? While being Turing complete is surely a fun property, it certainly isn't necessary for existence.

This obsession over identity is also silly. Though it is an interesting question, we as a society already have a very mature and nuanced relation with it. Why is there a statute of limitations, why are minors treated differently than adults?
posted by afu at 1:13 PM on June 25, 2007

why are minors treated differently than adults?

Minors can't afford good lawyers.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 1:17 PM on June 25, 2007

Under those conditions, which I think solve vacapinta's main concern, I probably still wouldn't do it, but my avoidance wouldn't be rational. I really can't think of a reasonable way to define "me" other than as "a being having my thought patterns."

The identity of an object is purely a function of space-time coordinates. The historical continuity of an object can be proved only by tracking the object through space-time and even this does now allow for any Platonic 'true identity' because the most one can ever say is 'this is the object that was previously observed at coordinates A, B, C, D, E...' The cloning debate is only a debate if you believe humans are a 'special' type of object that deserve to be defined by more than their coordinates. There's no rational reason to believe this so it's like arguing about God and other nonsense. As for the question of teleporters it would very much be a case of destroying one object and creating a new object (duh). Whether human society would accept such a technology is debatable, but it's doubtful that any moral objections could resist the economic advantages and people are actually very comfortable with impersonation (talking over the telephone etc). Knowledge that one's mother had been teleported couldn't do much against the intense feelings that exist for the idea of your mother.
posted by nixerman at 1:19 PM on June 25, 2007

What I would (if I'd have to be a bit less vague, which I don't wanna, because, man, am I lazy) reference is the whole "web of belief" thing (discussed beautifully in the book of the same name. No, Quine didn't talk about teleportation so far as I know, but he certainly talked about how even the most basic of beliefs can be revised.

The "whole 'web of belief' thing" is that all of our beliefs are interconnected and self-supporting, and is explicated most clearly, I think, in Chpt. 2+3 of Word and Object. It's true that any of our beliefs can be revised--even our belief in so-called "analytic" truths--assuming that we are willing to make drastic revisions in the remainder of the web, the costs of which can be very high. For example, we can believe that a=not a, assuming we're willing to not believe a bunch of other things, starting with classical logic with identity. What is unclear is how this is supposed to impact how we think about teleportation and personal identity. Maybe someone might think that there were some analytic truths regulating teleportation or personal identity, but I don't think that anyone thinks that.

If my whole argument is that, if teleportation were to be possible, we'd probably revise our metaphysical beliefs relating to personal identity, then Quine's views on this would be pretty useful for me.

That is, there's nothing distinctive about anything Quine says that seems to help here. Whether or not you buy anything Quine says about metaphysics or epistemology, you'd probably revise your beliefs about personal identity if teleportation were possible. Right?
posted by Kwine at 2:35 PM on June 25, 2007

Dame is right, the only reason that question remains is because the person knew the trick about saying you're writing a book. That used to be a joke based on a one off incident. Now it's just sad.
posted by shmegegge at 3:02 PM on June 25, 2007

I'm glad my thought experiment has gotten some people to rethink their position. I've never understood why so many people seem so comfortable with the idea of being destroyed, as long as an identical copy will continue to exist. Sure, it's fine for everybody else, but you personally are dead and gone. Not wanting to be dead and gone any sooner than need be, I ain't getting in the damn teleporter. Y'all have fun on Alpha Centauri without me.
posted by languagehat at 3:07 PM on June 25, 2007

Now what would be really great would be using the tech not for destructive but for duplicative teleportation: pop out a copy of yourself on the moon of Rigel 7, where he'll be immediately apprehended and mindstapled by Receiving; a half an hour after he comes across the pipe, he's reprogrammed to forget about the whole clonery business, and he makes his merry way on whatever task it is that you need doing and that you know only You can get done right.

Then he finishes up, reports in, and is summarily destroyed in a humane fashion without warning. And you don't even have to stand in line at the jetport.
posted by cortex at 3:15 PM on June 25, 2007 [2 favorites]

And by great I mean 'unspeakably evil', by which I mean 'really, really profitable'.
posted by cortex at 3:15 PM on June 25, 2007 [1 favorite]

languagehat, last night, while you were asleep I ran you through a machine which replaced all your cells with exact duplicates. There was a brief moment there in which you were actually dead but hopefully you're all better now.

I realize I shouldn't have messed with your identity like that. I'm sorry. It was wrong of me. If you like, tonight while you sleep I can reverse the process. What do you say?
posted by vacapinta at 3:36 PM on June 25, 2007

People seem to believe the following: if my body is destroyed, then I am destroyed.
People seem unwilling to believe the following: if my body is destroyed and an exact replica of my body is created a split second later, then I am still alive.
People, furthermore, seem to believe that the above are necessarily true for some reason or another.

So, suppose teleportation becomes possible. My point is that all the replicas of bodies going around saying "I am the original person! It's still me! I'm still me!" would end up altering our more basic beliefs about personal identity. What I'm using Quine here for is the basic framework about how so-called necessary truths are revisable depending on experience. You disagree with Quine and maintain that there are necessary truths that cannot be denied, and the argument I propose is in trouble.

It seems that all we disagree about, Kwine, is whether or not one's beliefs about the nature of teleportation rely on some so-called necessary truths. Your last sentence makes it sound as if revising one's beliefs about personal identity in light of teleportation would be more like revising one's beliefs about, say, whether or not there's a pizza joint on the corner and less like whether or not 2 + 2 = 4. (If you say that your last sentence doesn't imply this, then I believe you're begging the question that Quine is right and so-called a priori beliefs can be revised).

Now, I probably could also get what I need by vaguely waving towards Carnap or maybe even Peirce, as well as all those positivists I don't know too well because Ayer is too great a punching bag. But I don't remember enough of Peirce to talk about him comfortably, and I think both of them are more of a stretch than Quine. Besides, more people know Quine and I didn't want to sound too erudite. Furthermore, all I ever wanted was a vague hand-wave, and you certainly have to grant me a vague hand-wave.
posted by Ms. Saint at 3:46 PM on June 25, 2007

languagehat, are you just asking about the Ship of Theseus?
posted by dios at 4:02 PM on June 25, 2007

regarding languagehat's clone scenario: Only if the clone shared my memory up to and including the moment of painless-suicide. If the memory/history branches before my death, then we are meaningfully different entities. Where there is no such branching, I have no meaningful reason to consider us different entities.

It's very much like the identity ideas used in Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. There, people create backups of themselves at regular intervals so that when a particular body dies, they are recreated with all their memories up to the backup, and given information about what happened after the backup leading to their death, and they go on their merry way. There is a meaningful death involved here, that of the person defined by the memories and experiences accrued in the interim, but you remain mostly the same.

I'm okay with that.

For cortex's argument, I'm not assuming that there's a consciousness transfer so much as I think that what consciousness I perceive myself is mostly illusion anyway. It's fleeting, and I don't put my faith in it. Or, to think of it another way, consciousness is the arbiter of my self, but I don't think it is my self. It's much too fragile for that. I think that a perfect copy of myself has as much consciousness continuity with my present self as my present self does with any pervious version of myself, which is to say, not much at all.
posted by Arturus at 4:35 PM on June 25, 2007

languagehat, are you just asking about the Ship of Theseus?

No, that's an entirely different issue. I'm talking about the fact that my consciousness, my "me," inheres in this one particular body, and if the body's gone, it's gone. It doesn't matter to me whether everyone else thinks I've "continued" in another (identical) body; I'm just as dead. I feel that those who argue that it doesn't matter 1) carry what geeks think of as rationality way too far (like those people who deny the very existence of consciousness—sure, you can deny it for everyone else, they might all be robots or illusions, but how can you deny it for yourself?), and 2) wouldn't actually practice what they preach if they got the chance. It's easy to make cold-blooded hyperrational arguments when it's all theoretical, but I'll believe it when I see you step into the booth and get dematerialized.
posted by languagehat at 5:14 PM on June 25, 2007 [1 favorite]

I, for one, certainly wouldn't practice what I preach. Oh, goodness, what a nightmare that would be.
posted by Ms. Saint at 5:21 PM on June 25, 2007

my consciousness, my "me," inheres in this one particular body, and if the body's gone, it's gone.

Which raises the question, what is your body? Your body of today is largely not the same body you had, say, 20 years ago, or the one you were born with. The cells in most body tissues are continually replacing themselves. Brain cells are the exception, but even there, fluids are continually replaced so very little of the cell stays with "you" over time. That being the case, if "you" reside somewhere in a limited portion of the chemistry of your brain cells, we don't actually know whether "you" would also reside in an identical copy of your body (since that replication has never been accomplished). I wouldn't go into the booth either, unless I realized I was conscious of being both in my original body and the clone.
posted by beagle at 7:11 PM on June 25, 2007

I wouldn't go into the booth either, unless I realized I was conscious of being both in my original body and the clone.

Is everyone assuming you'd be the first one to try it? Then I wouldn't either. I fly on planes all the time but that doesn't mean I would have been a test pilot in the early 20th century.

But what if thousands of people are doing it and have done it. Your family, your friends. They're all hopping back and forth to parties in Sirius and Rigel but you stay earthbound convinced, as that Steven Wright joke goes, that they were all destroyed and replaced with exact duplicates.
posted by vacapinta at 7:17 PM on June 25, 2007

Which raises the question, what is your body?

A clever biological machine for keeping my brain running well enough to maintain my sense of self, at least as far as I know. Sleep is the real whammy here, but I keep waking up so that's something.
posted by cortex at 8:15 PM on June 25, 2007

I am very late to the party, but I've always been convinced of exactly what languagehat's been arguing, and I've attempted to explain this to various people in my life, to varying reactions.

Usually I am found using it to argue against mind uploading (or whatever you want to call it), though, which seems even more ridiculous to me.

Even were it demonstrably true that uploaded-you was as much like you as possible, normal-you would still be laying on the Uploading Room table, dead. Great for everyone else, bad for normal-you, who, unfortunately, you are.
posted by blacklite at 9:52 PM on June 25, 2007

And my rival has a twin.
posted by casarkos at 10:28 PM on June 25, 2007

I keep my brain in a big petri dish.
posted by The Deej at 10:40 PM on June 25, 2007

Without the sum total of my memories and experiences, I am not me. And what went into making me me includes my childhood, my marriage, my journey into parenthood, and the moments it took to write this post. Any clone of me that didn't have all of those elements would not be me. Which isn't to say it wouldn't be a person, or of less value, or worth less consideration in the suicide booth (which, if you read the other posts in here, should ideally be located on a bridge, facing a city).

IF you could put me through a transporter and I appeared on the other side with all of my memories intact except for the very brief transition period during the actual transportation process, I would transport.

All this talk makes me think of the old myths that creating an image (as in a photograph) of someone was akin to stealing a piece of his soul...
posted by misha at 10:42 PM on June 25, 2007

Even were it demonstrably true that uploaded-you was as much like you as possible, normal-you would still be laying on the Uploading Room table, dead. Great for everyone else, bad for normal-you, who, unfortunately, you are.

Come now, this doesn't make any sense at all. The people who decide who "you" are the people around you. If normal-you died suddenly and was replaced by an exact copy they would not perceive any discontinuity. And the copy-you would quickly accept this belief. Again, this is related to the general problem of impersonation. You would not perceive yourself as dying, you would perceive yourself as being copied and transferred and everybody else would agree with such an interpretation, reinforcing such a belief. The human tendency to accept such impostors is very, very, very strong. Everyday when your wife comes home from work you accept that she really is your wife, similarly when you talk to her on on the telephone, see her in a picture, or listen to others speak of her even though there is no rational basis for any of these beliefs. Victims of the teleporters would similarly believe in their continuity for the same reason we believe everybody in our life is really themselves: our intuition of the thinking self is so strong that we couldn't help but accept it even in the face of overwhelming evidence.

Without the sum total of my memories and experiences, I am not me.

Except for that what you think you are is nothing more than a collection of opinions. I'm sure that given the removal of certain memories -- that is say you were to forget certain events in your life that have been externally recorded, say on a video camera -- I could persuade you that you are in fact you even though you've forgotten said events. Nobody seriously believes that they are the sum of their memories because everybody understands that perfect recall is a myth. So what you are really is a kind of agreement where those that know you, including yourself, agree that you are in fact you. This basic truth is why people will accept a copy or impostor of you as the real thing. As long as you don't do anything too strange people are always willing to believe you are you because they believe they are themselves.

I'm talking about the fact that my consciousness, my "me," inheres in this one particular body, and if the body's gone, it's gone. It doesn't matter to me whether everyone else thinks I've "continued" in another (identical) body; I'm just as dead.

Again this is highly debatable. All the time people view recording of themselves -- either on video or audio -- and accept that the recording is actually a recording of them. So, no, nobody believes that their self inheres in their body because they behave in such a way that they can be safely impersonated. Every day you wake up and you deal with other people who you believe are people only because yesterday they were people.

If you imagine teleportation as projection where 'you' are being impersonated by something that looks like you then these questions about identity don't arise. It's only the fact that 'you' are being destroyed that puts people off. But again if the impersonation is just as good as the real thing -- that is, people accept recording of themselves as themselves -- then there is no real problem.
posted by nixerman at 11:29 PM on June 25, 2007 [1 favorite]

But, nixerman, you're getting hung up on the definition of 'you'. Yes, you're right, 'you' will continue. Everything will be fine in the world at large, 'you' will accept your own existence, you will be entirely comfortable with what happened. You will even volunteer to teleport all the time.

All of your arguments are about what is accepted and what is believed. That isn't the question here. Of course people can accept anything. If I somehow was turned into a small purple mouse, and could talk, people would accept that, eventually.

Just because there is a copy of you who continues does not mean that the original you continues. Just because there is a VHS tape (how retro of me) with me on it doesn't mean I will feel comfortable with my death.

It's lovely that perception is reality, but that only holds true in the world of perception. The state of my existence is an internal perception, or perhaps even something altogether separate from what we call 'perception': I have a consciousness. My consciousness is entirely separate from the fact that everyone thinks of me as a person.

Let's posit a world in which you are the only human being, and you are ageless. You're very clever, having invented every facet of human technology, and now you're about to transport yourself. All of the essential bits that make up you get disassembled and reassembled, somehow. NewYou acts like you, feels like you, thinks like you... but what happened to OldYou? Dissassembled bits. NewYou will never be able to find out, one way or another, if OldYou experienced death, or not. NewYou will never know if he is really OldYou or just a copy. The only one who will ever truly know is OldYou. What happens to his consciousness?

Without the sum total of my memories and experiences, I am not me. And what went into making me me includes my childhood, my marriage, my journey into parenthood, and the moments it took to write this post. Any clone of me that didn't have all of those elements would not be me.

Without both peanut butter, and jelly, you don't have a pb&j sandwich. Any sandwich without those two things is not a pb&j sandwich. However, importantly, a sandwich which happens to have peanut butter and jelly is not necessarily a pb&j sandwich.

I feel like everyone arguing for the embracing of teleportation is missing the essential indefinable enigma of human consciousness. Come at this from a self-preservation point of view. Let's say that teleportation only works when you enter a special Monitoring Cell and then you shoot yourself in the head with a gun. Totally ridiculous, I know, but let's say then you end up on Alpha Centauri. Perhaps the massive shock is an essential part of getting the mind into the right state to be properly and safely transported, and the transport is done a nanosecond before the bullet hits you.

Let's also say that it is a definite copy process, i.e., you can clearly see dead bodies being dragged out and disposed of, bullet holes and all.

Do you do it?
posted by blacklite at 12:02 AM on June 26, 2007

Consciousness is a standing wave, which is why surfing is so cool.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 12:57 AM on June 26, 2007

One thing I like about this argument is how both sides present their side of it as obviously, intuitively true.

"I don't care who else gets up and walks up from a nearby table. I'm dead. End of story."

"If you were to interrogate this new person, they'd tell you they walked through some portal and now they are standing here. Their continuity of memory is as strong as you and I remembering going to bed last night. The same person. Obviously."

But those aren't contradictory positions, except where the latter implies that the original's end of continuity doesn't matter. The comments about hyperrationality above are dead on: it's as if people are satisfied that if no one else can tell that they died on account of a perfect clone, they won't notice either. (Well, of course they won't—not because their clone hosts their private consciousness, but because they're dead on the floor.)

Clone me via transporter technology—create a new me. That new me will experience normal continuity of consciousness—it will wake up and greet the day and remember making a trip to the transporter, and will speak with friends and family about it and all is well. This is obvious, and wonderful for him and anyone else who was counting on the continued existence of cortex-the-perceivable-Other. So the second proposition is an acceptable statement.

But cortex-the-original-self-conscious experience is dead. My experience of the world has come to an end, as surely as if someone had chopped me up with an axe and taken my place through careful imitation and plastic surgery. So the first proposition is acceptable.

It's not that my take is obviously, intuitively true and the other is not; it's that the other take is obviously, intuitively true except for the key point of fucking dying on the table that the pro-transporter argument kind of fails to address because it's so busy being intuitive and obvious.
posted by cortex at 6:28 AM on June 26, 2007 [1 favorite]

What cortex said.

But what if thousands of people are doing it and have done it. Your family, your friends. They're all hopping back and forth to parties in Sirius and Rigel but you stay earthbound convinced, as that Steven Wright joke goes, that they were all destroyed and replaced with exact duplicates.

Are you deliberately missing the point? It's not a joke; they were all destroyed and replaced with exact duplicates. That's what this discussion is about. And yes, to you it doesn't matter that everyone else has been replaced by identical duplicates, just as to them it wouldn't matter if you were so replaced. The only person it would matter to is you. If you don't matter to you, that's cool. I matter to me.
posted by languagehat at 6:38 AM on June 26, 2007

So it's the awareness of having been replaced that bothers you, languagehat? Being aware of others' having been replaced isn't as worrisome, but the knowledge that you yourself have been so replaced upsets you?

For myself, if I know everyone has been replaced piecemeal and still self-identifies without worry, I think I'd be fine in the knowledge that I'm a replacement, too. If I know, on the other hand, that I'm the only person who's been subject to this new process and I'm a weird copy of myself, and nobody else knows or believes me when I tell them, I guess that's a sort of existential horror, and probably a crisis. I think that would freak me the fuck out.
posted by cgc373 at 6:55 AM on June 26, 2007

In fact, it is kind of freaking me the fuck out right now. Thanks a lot, absurd questioners! You've freaked me the fuck out!
posted by cgc373 at 6:57 AM on June 26, 2007

Quick, start drinking. It is the universal solvent for existential panic attacks. I am your doctor and I am giving you medical advice.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 7:01 AM on June 26, 2007

Being a replacement would be a worry for my replacement, not me. My worry is getting killt. My replacement's existential conundrum kind of humdrum by comparison.
posted by cortex at 7:04 AM on June 26, 2007

Any humdrum condundrum's best numbed with some rum, right, stav?
posted by cgc373 at 7:08 AM on June 26, 2007 [1 favorite]

Rewrite: Some rum'll numb a humdrum conundrum.
posted by cgc373 at 7:10 AM on June 26, 2007

So it's the awareness of having been replaced that bothers you, languagehat?

Sheesh, why is this so hard for people to get? It's being killed that bothers me. Just as it would bother me to have someone walk up to me right now with a gun, point it at my head, and pull the trigger, it would bother me to step into a "transporter booth" (aka suicide box) and be disintegrated. It's mildly interesting that in the latter case there would be a replica of me walking around, but really not that comforting.

Or, again, what cortex said.
posted by languagehat at 7:25 AM on June 26, 2007

cortex:it's that the other take is obviously, intuitively true except for the key point of fucking dying on the table that the pro-transporter argument kind of fails to address

languagehat:It's being killed that bothers me.

This is where we diverge and can never agree. Death is not something you experience. Yes, you can experience pain but you don't "experience" Death itself. Instead, one moment you're alive and conscious, the next moment: nonexistence. Except that that discontinuity has been bridged by having that consciousness appear somewhere else.

It's the realm of metaphysics I know. But I think for you guys there's distinctions between:

1) Being put to sleep (drugged) and put on a spaceship to be woken up years later. Same you?

2) Being frozen (suspended animation) and taken on a spaceship to be re-awoken later. Same you?

3) While in that frozen state, you're body is temporarily disassembled and then re-assembled exactly - down to the last atom! Same you?

4) Your body is re-assemebled, but using duplicate atoms. Shouldn't matter from 3) since an atom is an atom. Same you?

5) Instead of being re-assembled here, the instructions for re-assembling you are beamed to Alpha Centauri where you are re-assembled. Same you?

According to you guys, in one of those steps, consciousness has leaked out.
posted by vacapinta at 7:37 AM on June 26, 2007

Non-being is the most frightening thing in life.

My greatest fear is not to be. That is why Tillich's Courage to Be (the subject of this awesome post by one of Mefi's best posters) had such an impact on me, even though I haven't mastered the Courage Tillich suggests.
posted by dios at 7:52 AM on June 26, 2007

I don't have a problem getting the fear of death here. I used to be rather concerned by it myself. The key for me now is that I don't think I have the sort of continuity that is challenged by transportation in the first place, which is a point cortex addressed briefly above, but I haven't seen any good arguments against.

I agree with you that a transporter will disrupt what I'm going to call strong continuity. This is the idea that your consciousness is indwelt in your body, and is fully continuous for your life, excluding periods of unconsciousness, sleep, etc. You have some abstract self, which you identify through the present experience of qualia and internal monologue. You make the assumption that this abstract self is the same abstract self that you had a year ago, that over that period of time this abstract self has not ceased to exist, that it has had continuous awareness and existence.

Thing is, I don't see any evidence whatsoever to make this assumption. When I deny consciousness, I don't deny the experience of the abstract self as I've described above. This is very real, very important. What I am disputing is the assumption that this self is anything but trapped in a particular moment of time. I see no reason to not assume the counter of the strong continuity hypothesis, that every moment I am consciously aware of in fact possesses a distinct and unique abstract self, which is constantly 'dying' and being replaced. What continuity there is, is an illusion provided by the persistence of memory. This is weak continuity.

If strong continuity is correct, you're absolutely right. Transporters kill you. Hands down.

On the other hand, if weak continuity is correct, there's no meaningful sense in which a disintegration and reintegration somewhere else is any more of a death than what I experience all the time in everyday life.

That said, these are both unproved and possibly unprovable hypotheses. I prefer weak continuity because it strikes me as metaphysically more consistent with my materialism. I'm deprivileging my consciousness deliberately, because doing so makes intuitive sense to me.

Can I prove it? No. But no one's given me a reason to prefer the strong continuity hypothesis, other than existential squeamishness.
posted by Arturus at 7:57 AM on June 26, 2007 [1 favorite]

I suspect, vacapinta, that the anti-transporter folks will see an essential difference between (2) and (3). It's the disassembly that upsets them.

It all comes down to what "death" means. From where I sit, it means cessation of consciousness with no possibility of its return; so, irreversible brain death is death. OTOH, from my point of view, "dying" on the operating table and being "brought back to life" by skilled surgeons is manifestly not death.

I therefore can't see any essential difference between your five scenarios.

If I stepped into a transporter and the instructions for my reassembly were duplicated and beamed to two transporter receivers, or if there were a way to do the instruction-generation part nondestructively, ISTM that there would then exist two separate but equally genuine flabdablets who share a certain amount of common history. This would be cool for a while, but because each would be having his own life afterward, they would probably have to come to some arrangement about naming rights and property distribution.

If we decided to get a room and have sex, that would probably be incest, but it wouldn't be masturbation. Well, not all of it anyway.

This seems to me no weirder to contemplate than the ordinary process by which identical twins come into being; the difference is one of degree, not of kind.

On preview: dios, ISTM that non-being is no big deal; subjectively, it's essentially indistinguishable from deep sleep. I don't understand why it scares so many people so badly. What scares me is the idea of the various nasty ways to achieve non-being.
posted by flabdablet at 8:03 AM on June 26, 2007

vacapinta: I see what you're saying, and agree that it may just be a fundamental metaphysical sticking point in our otherwise mutually understand positions. Let me give this one more shot, regarding the above list:

In any of those states, it's arguable that instead of the cortex that went in there is a cortex' that came out; and it'd be the case that the self-conscious cortex' would have no reason to consider himself anything but cortex.

Add a bullet point to the list:

6) Falling asleep at night, and waking up in the morning.

If I go to sleep tonight, I have no way of knowing that I will not be killed painlessly while a-slumber and replaced with cortex'. If that were to happen, cortex' would get up, yawn, come to Metafilter, and comment, none the wiser, and all would proceed as normal. I, cortex, would never even know anything happened, because I was killed while unconscious. As you say:

Instead, one moment you're alive and conscious, the next moment: nonexistence.

In this case, as in all your cases above, death from the experiential perspective of cortex could be said to have been propositioned at the time I fell asleep (or was drugged, or frozen), and in the case of murder-in-my-sleep was actually made good on.

I discount out of personal belief the idea that my, cortex's, consciousness will transfer anywhere, so I call this death without qualification. Obviously, disagreement on this point changes the whole ballgame, but run with me for a short while longer on this:

The difference between sleep and stepping into a teleporter is that I have no choice but to sleep. Because I know I will sleep each night, I take comfort in my belief that the me waking up will be the me going to sleep; that when cortex falls into slumber, it is cortex and not cortex' who is waking up and remembering having gone to bed the night before. The proposition of whether to enter the teleportation chamber that we call sleep has been decided for me by nature, and there is no compelling evidence that cortex' is more likely the one to wake than cortex and nothing I could do about it anyway.

So there is the difference: if you were to ask me to step into a teleporter, you'd be asking me to confront an optional confrontation with continuity in a context where I have every reason to suspect that cortex will end and cortex' will begin. It is the opposite of sleep, depsite both containing the same proposition of transformation. To step into the teleporter is madness; to worry about sleep is madness of a different kind. Options 1-5 in your list above all fall on a continuum between the two, and whether and how I'd entertain a foray into any of those would depend an awful lot on the circumstances.
posted by cortex at 8:08 AM on June 26, 2007

It's being killed that bothers me. Just as it would bother me to have someone walk up to me right now with a gun, point it at my head, and pull the trigger, it would bother me to step into a "transporter booth" (aka suicide box) and be disintegrated.

This does come across as a simplistic model of what's going on. Given that you cannot in any way distinguish between being copied and actually being physically transported this belief that you're dying and a copy is being created is just a belief. It reeks of the primitive belief that cameras steal one's and the various religious objections against recording the human form.

Let's also say that it is a definite copy process, i.e., you can clearly see dead bodies being dragged out and disposed of, bullet holes and all.

You're playing perception games to distort what's really going on. What about the opposite extreme, what if you went to sleep and simply woke up in another place? What if I told you that OldYou is actually being transported and it's the copy, NewYou, that must be created in the old place and then destroyed to balance various equations. If we are working with a perfect transporter then by definition you can never prove one way or the other what actually happened in the suicide box and neither can anybody else and so your belief that you are dying is conjecture.

Just to be clear here the notion that there really an actual "thing" that called consciousness that inheres in a body is a very debatable notion. There is no empirical justification for such a belief -- nobody has ever photographed or captured a consciousness or 'self' -- and the only evidence that people ever offer for it is purely anecdotal. When you throw in phenomena like sleep and alcohol and various psychological phenomena then this notion becomes even more and more suspect. People who take the transporter to be a suicide box can do so, but they will have a hard slog convincing anybody -- including themselves -- that they've died and are now somebody 'else' and not their old 'self'. All the evidence on hand, lacking though it may be, will indicate otherwise. And frankly I don't see how anybody can rationally entertain the ghost in the machine model of consciousness. As far as I can see consciousness and the 'self' -- if one is willing to believe in such a thing -- cannot in any way be just a property of the body.
posted by nixerman at 8:09 AM on June 26, 2007

flbdablet: the fear is facing non-being that we know will be there. Of course non-being itself is painless, fearless, consciousness-less, everything-less.

Being -----------------XDeathX------------>>Non-being

Obviously everything to the right of X is cake. It isn't to be feared because it will be miserable or anything. The fear comes into play to the left of X, facing it, as we approach. We have to live life and face non-being, all the while knowing it is inevitable. At some point I will not be. That scares me because I like being. I don't want to lose it, but I will and it will be gone. Obviously at the point of X this fear ends. But leading up to it, there is great fear and trembling.
posted by dios at 8:11 AM on June 26, 2007

As long as what leads up to it isn't in and of itself unpleasant, I can't see a need for fear and trembling. I plan to pay as much attention as I possibly can to my last moments of consciousness and enjoy them as much as possible. ISTM that fear and trembling would be a complete waste of incomparably precious time.

I've had enough experiences with assorted useful chemicals to have formed a reasonable belief that, if I truly knew that death was imminent and inevitable, the moments leading up to it might well be the most mindblowing high it's possible for a human brain to achieve. In quite a few of these experiences, the only slightly sour note has been caused by the deep knowledge that at some point I'm going to have to stop surfing this particular experiential wave or I will die.

If you've never had similar experiences, I respectfully suggest to you that you introduce yourself to nitrous oxide, for starters. I have friends who tell me that ketamine is also very useful in this regard, though I've not had an opportunity to experiment with it myself. Don't do heroin, though, even though there are many stories of junkies who end up cursing out the paramedics who Narcan them back to life for spoiling their high :-)

I really do think that knowing that the final curtain was in fact where I was headed within the next few minutes, and that there was nothing at all I could or should do to change that, could actually be quite liberating.

In fact, it seems to me at least somewhat plausible that the religious notion of eternal paradise may in fact be an artefact of the dying brain's final loss of the feeling of time passing; the necessary precondition being that the occupant of said brain is having a good time right up to the end ("peace with God").

Dying is a trick I can only do once; that much is true. But that doesn't mean it needs to be a bad trick. It simply means I really ought to do all my other tricks first.
posted by flabdablet at 8:35 AM on June 26, 2007 [1 favorite]

There are a lot of words in this thread. Words I have no intention of reading. But I'm curious: has anyone pointed out the obvious flaw in this system, yet? Since we're going to be beaming the information required to recreate ourselves willy nilly around the universe, some smart-ass hacker is going to figure out how to intercept and decode us all, and before you know it the damn kids these days are downloading pirated versions of Paris Hilton and whoever is "in" that day, and everything goes to Hell.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 9:32 AM on June 26, 2007

I think what languagehat is getting at isn't whether or not it's the same you in some cute little identity crisis way. It's whether the him that is currently saying to you right this very moment "I'm not going into the transporter" would ever exist again. Sure, maybe some copy of him will emerge on the other side with perfect recollection of having refused to go into the transporter as if he had really experienced it himself, but he won't have. he will be another person, albeit identical, who only has reconstructed memories of the event he never lived. The one who lived it? Yeah, he's dead. He no longer thinks, and he will not experience whatever the new languagehat is experiencing. We like to pretend that there is no way to recognize this difference if languagehat is right, but that's not really true. We know as much about the experience or lack thereof after what we perceive as death as we do about the weather on a planet in alpha centauri 4 billion years ago.

If there is a soul that goes to either heaven or hell upon death, for instance, then the soul of the languagehat who is currently discussing this with you on this website will likely be in heaven looking at the duplicate him and going "I fucking said it was a rip off!"

But here's another way to look at it. If the transporter could take the information of "languagehat" and create him in another place WITHOUT disintregating him where he started, then there's significant reason to expect that it's not the same dude waking up on the other side.

But the major point is this: the idea that we cannot experience having given up our life to an identical duplicate relies entirely on the premise that a)there is no afterlife and b)there is no ability for consciousness to exist outside of the body.

The second of these premises actually can't be true if transporting were to actually exist without simply killing the original person and cloning him in another place. If we are to transport consciousness from one place to another it cannot be distributed among the disintegrated atoms of our body. We know enough about our own cognition to know that it is not divisible and reunitable in that way. A labotomized person can't have the original tissue put back and be fine again as if nothing had happened. so if we discover, through some unknowable form of super science, a way to transport consciousness from one place to another, and also to transport the body, then we will have invented or discovered a way for consciousness to exist outside of the body, and if that's the case then we are perfectly capable of being SEVERELY DISAPPOINTED when we step into one end of the machine and find that the other end doesn't hold what we knew as us any more.

of course, that's all speculation, but so is this entire conversation, so good fun wot?
posted by shmegegge at 9:35 AM on June 26, 2007

before you know it the damn kids these days are downloading pirated versions of Paris Hilton and whoever is "in" that day, and everything goes to ~~Hell~~ awesome.

You see what I did for you right there? I fixed that thing you had there that needed fixing.
posted by shmegegge at 9:43 AM on June 26, 2007

You see what I did for you right there? I fixed that thing you had there that needed fixing.

The exact sentence I would expect to hear from the person operating the receiving pod.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 11:30 AM on June 26, 2007

It's whether the him that is currently saying to you right this very moment "I'm not going into the transporter" would ever exist again. Sure, maybe some copy of him will emerge on the other side with perfect recollection of having refused to go into the transporter as if he had really experienced it himself, but he won't have. he will be another person, albeit identical, who only has reconstructed memories of the event he never lived.

Here's a thought experiment for you.

You're standing next to a large green box, about the size of a phone booth. One side is completely open; the interior is completely dark. Twelve feet away, at the other end of the room, is a similar box in red.

You poke a screwdriver into the open side of the green box. As the tip of the screwdriver enters the opening, it begins to look fuzzy and indistinct; you push it in a little deeper and the tip disappears from view altogether, as if you'd pushed it into muddy water.

You look over at the red box, and you notice the tip of a screwdriver sticking out of it. Waggle your screwdriver, and the tip poking out of the red box waggles too.

You push the screwdriver all the way into the green box, and you see an identical screwdriver emerging from the red one. You're looking at the red box, so it's only when you notice that there's a hand gripping the screwdriver handle that you panic and whip your hand back out of the green box.

Realizing that your hand is still perfectly fine, you stick it back in the green box, and wave. A hand, recognizably yours, is now sticking out of the red box and waving at you. You waggle your fingers. The hand waggles its fingers. You stick your arm in, up to the shoulder, and an arm emerges from the red box. You raise and lower your stuck-in arm, and see the red-box arm raising and lowering accordingly.

You withdraw your arm from the green box, and go and have a stiff drink.

When you return, you lob the screwdriver into the green box. It drops out of the red box and falls on the floor. You crouch down, reach into the green box and feel around for the screwdriver. Over on the other side of the room, you see your own arm feeling around on the floor. You feel fingertips meeting the screwdriver, and you grab it, pick it up, and step away from the green box. You're holding a screwdriver.

You push the green box over to the door of the room, so that the open side covers the doorway, and call to your faithful assistant: "Mr. Watson -- come here -- I want to see you."

Watching the red box, you see a door swinging open out of its side, then Mr. Watson's head pokes out and says "That's odd. As I was opening the door, I could have sworn the lights were off in here. What did you want?"

"Nothing," you say, and he leaves, shutting the door behind him.

You wheel the green box back away from the door, and stick your head through the open side. You don't feel anything strange, but you see yourself on the other side of the room, facing away, with your head and shoulders disappearing into the gloomy interior of a large green box.

So: do you pull your head back out of the green box, or do you walk straight on in and walk out of the red box, before going for your second stiff drink?

If we are to transport consciousness from one place to another it cannot be distributed among the disintegrated atoms of our body. We know enough about our own cognition to know that it is not divisible and reunitable in that way.

We know no such thing.

If consciousness is, as I and many others believe, something that sentient creatures do rather than something they are, it's quite reasonable to expect that it would, in principle, survive any disintegration/transport/reintegration process that's good enough to leave other bodily processes functional.

ISTM that the existence of the phenomenon of deep sleep is enough to refute the idea that consciousness is a necessary component of identity. Consciousness is regularly stopped and started in the course of ordinary living.

"I think, therefore I am" is fine, as far as it goes; but "somebody I trust reports having observed me deeply asleep at four o'clock this morning, therefore I was" is fine too.

People who currently have a severe fear of death, and who do not already subscribe to this point of view, would do well to consider it carefully.
posted by flabdablet at 5:02 PM on June 26, 2007

One aside, following on the sleep vs. transporter dichotomy—the argument that languagehat and I have both made against the idea of stepping into a transporter pretty much requires that transporters be nascent rather than established human-transport technology anyway:

We're taking the liberty of saying, "presented with the opportunity of stepping into a transporter, I would balk". But surely, if transport tech were to work well an inexpensively and the vanguard of transportees all came out the other side healthy and happy if existentially jumpy, it'd be come a moot point—indeed, they might all be Joe Blow' instead of Joe Blow, but none of them can know it, and Joe Blow isn't around to complain, and so things seem to have worked well. And so the question of countless deaths is elided as a matter of convenience, much as the question of sleep-as-death is now one solely for philosophers and loonies. (Imagine living in constant, mortal fear of sleep, convinced each day that you are the leftovers of yesterday's dead man, your nightmare repeating itself wearily every day! Yikes!)

The idea of using the tech duplicatively—which, really, seems like pretty much a given once you're willing to grant functioning transporter tech—would probably remain wildly unsettling and non-kosher in society, though. Whatever assurances may come from remembering your successful trips through a transporter pod would be likely be shaken by the existential clusterfuck of staring yourself in the face and arguing about who is really you. So that'd probably be regulated with an iron goddam fist, clones considered the highest form of contraband except where convenient to obfuscated military/industrial needs.

And in a completely non-snarky, not-a-big-deal way, using ISTM instead of just typing the damned thing out or some variation thereof is just plain driving me nuts. It's not a very long phrase in the first place!
posted by cortex at 5:20 PM on June 26, 2007

We know no such thing.

If consciousness is, as I and many others believe, something that sentient creatures do rather than something they are, it's quite reasonable to expect that it would, in principle, survive any disintegration/transport/reintegration process that's good enough to leave other bodily processes functional.

I suppose I used consciousness the wrong way. To put it another way: If we are talking about a disintegration of a body such that it's atoms can be shuttled about at mind-blinkering speeds and reassembled whole and unmangled elsewhere, then it seems to me that we are not talking about a box as you describe. A box as you describe would be more of a dune-esque "folding of space" type dealie or just straight up completely impossible magic. Now, the reason I say this is as follows: In order to maintain control of the hand coming out of the box there must be some maintained neural connection between said hand and one's brain. For that to happen, it must be space itself which is manipulated and not the one passing through it.

So yeah, in that example I'd have me a stiff drink or 10 and then do cartwheels through the box screaming "Eureka!" But if we're talking about an all or nothing you're-either-in-the-box-when-the-switch-is-flipped-or-you're-not disintegration with resulting reintegration on the other side, then I completely see reason to balk. For myself, if I saw someone else do it and come out the other side happy as a pig in shit and none the worse for wear, I'd step into any teleporter you'd throw at me. BUT, I'd wonder like hell if I was still the me that hadn't gone in yet. Further, if someone were to say they didn't trust it, even the me that came out of the box would say "Yeah, I can't blame you. For all I know I'm not even the original me." The very worst thing I can imagine would be the scenario where capital M E ME (or rather, let's say the bit of my thought that allows me to think of myself in the third person and is capable of perceiving my own thoughts outside of thinking them) that you'll sometimes hear people referring to as one's third eye or soul or what have you, is somehow not transferred but duplicated and that for some spiritual or metaphysical or whatever reason is well aware of the fact after it goes down. If you've ever seen The Prestige, you could see how that might be upsetting, if Hugh Jackman's plight were rather less corporeal and rather more Ethereal. They say there are no atheists in fox holes, and I'll go you one further and say there are no Spiritualists in Teleporters, and probably precious few agnostics to boot.
posted by shmegegge at 6:14 PM on June 26, 2007

A box as you describe would be more of a dune-esque "folding of space" type dealie or just straight up completely impossible magic.

Since any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, you should assume the latter. But if you want some kind of crude clue about what might be going on, look here.

In order to maintain control of the hand coming out of the box there must be some maintained neural connection between said hand and one's brain. For that to happen, it must be space itself which is manipulated and not the one passing through it.

In fact, that's the conclusion you'd come to, which is why you were willing to stick your head in there in the first place - but it's not what's going on. Too late, you realize that if it were, the box interiors would not be dark - you'd be able to see the view out of the red box by looking into the green one, and vice versa, and Watson wouldn't have noticed anything odd about the lighting. Apparently these boxes are specifically designed not to attempt transport of non-virtual photons.

Also: careful measurements would reveal that the mass of each box increases by precisely the mass of any object that enters it, and decreases by precisely the mass of any object that leaves.

So you realize that in the fuzzy-looking region inside the openings of the red and green boxes there is a tremendous amount of disassembly, signaling and reassembly going on, and it's done so well that all atoms behave as if all their neighbors remain adjacent, even though it may be that for at least some of the time they're actually being simulated by the teleporters.

This has gross effects - the head sticking out of the red box doesn't fall to the floor, because the red box is accurately simulating all the bonding forces that would normally be attaching it to the neck entering the green box - and subtle effects: all the intra-body signaling keeps working, too. But the physical connection between head and torso is all merely simulated.

So it now occurs to you that your entire head has already been disassembled and reconstructed. If you pull it out, it will be disassembled and reconstructed again and reattached to your original neck. If you walk straight into the green box, the rest of your body will get disassembled and reconstructed and reattached to your reassembled head. What are you going to do?

Personally, I would amuse myself for a while by standing sideways-on to the openings, with my left half at the green and my right half at the red, enjoying the bizarre double-vision effects while contemplating the nature of my present location and hoping the UPS was in good nick.
posted by flabdablet at 9:33 PM on June 26, 2007

Okay yes, in the perfect world where your box works however you want it to and is perfect and safe with no question whatsoever, sure. If the point of this exercise is seriously going to be for you to whittle away at your invention until it cannot possibly be questioned for any reason, then I don't have a whole lot of choice, do I?

Or we can just accept what I said before, that the door you can walk through seems spiffy as hell, and the box that zaps your entire self to parts uncertain is sketchy and leave it at that.

And I'm familiar with Bradbury, thanks.
posted by shmegegge at 8:29 AM on June 27, 2007

The only person it would matter to is you. If you don't matter to you, that's cool. I matter to me.

It occurs to me that the transporter thing is a red herring. I agree with languagehat and co. that a real person -- the person I feel myself to be -- would be destroyed. And that fact isn't changed by the fact that a new person would emerge who felt in his gut that he was me.

I think the real issue is -- is it a problem if a real person is destroyed?

Before continuing, let's dispense with a few issues: first, yes it's a problem if a real person is destroyed AGAINST HIS WILL. That's murder, and my guess is that most of us have a problem with that. But that's not what we're talking about here.

And yes, it is a problem for the survivors, if they miss the person, but that also isn't a problem here. As-far-as the survivors are concerned, the copy would be the same as the original. Even languagehat agrees with that.

So the only potential problem -- if there is a problem -- is to the original. He will cease to be.

I'll put this on a personal footing now, because I can only speak for myself: there's something odd about saying, "I don't want to be destroyed", because what does it mean to not want something?

It's a little hard to think about, but for me I'm pretty sure that it means, "I don't want something to happen now that I'll regret later."

That's not always the case. For instance, if I had a kid, I might not want certain things to happen to him after my death, even though I'll be dead and won't be able to regret them. But in this case, I'm just talking about me. When I say, "I don't want X to happen to me," I mean "I don't want X to hurt me later (or now)."

The thing is, I can't possibly regret my decision to walk into the transporter, because there won't be a me to walk feel regret. (The copy won't feel regret, because to him, it will feel as if he stepped in and stepped out somewhere else, feeling just fine.)

I guess I can be sad that, post transporter, I won't ever be able to kiss someone again or see a movie or listen to a Beethoven symphony. But I think even this is irrational thinking.

Because I've never experienced non-consciousness (I've been unconscious, but of course it didn't give me an experience), I can't imagine it. So when I try to imagine being dead, the best I can sum up is a vague feeling of being conscious "somewhere else".

So I imagine myself in this murky darkness, regretting the fact that I made the decision to walk into that transporter; regretting the fact that I'll never feel sand between my toes again while that son-of-a-bitch copy gets to ride the Cyclone at Coney Island!

But it won't happen that way. Being dead won't be a sea of regret. It won't be anything. Feeling sorry for the dead me is like feeling sorry of an unconceivable fetus. It's so sad that those two kids never had sex. Think of the poor baby that didn't get a chance to get born!

So the real issue here, for me, is whether or not it's rational to fear death. Obviously, I'm coming to this from the point-of-view of an atheist who has no belief in an afterlife. And I can't come up with any rational reason to fear death, especially when there's no pain associated and there's no detrimental effect to my loved ones.

I can still see languagehat over in the corner, smirking and saying, "Okay, then. Go ahead and step into the transporter. I dare you." And he has good reason to smirk, because given all I've said, I probably still wouldn't do it."

I can't shake off the tremendous need to keep this body alive. That makes sense. I'm "programmed" to keep it alive, whether that's rational or not. I would have a really hard time bunjee jumping, even if you could prove to me that it was 100% safe. Rationally, I'd have not problem with it, but I'd still feel a powerful urge not to do it. I'd also feel a powerful urge not to eat a chocolate candy made to look like a cockroach. Even if I saw it being made and knew it wasn't a cockroach.

I also find it nearly impossible NOT to imagine myself regretting the suicide, even though I know that rationally, it makes no sense.

So here's where I'm left: with a schism between my head and my gut. And some people (languagehat?) are going to say, "If it looks like a duck..." If I'm scared to a walk into the transporter, then that

Absurd Questions, Hopefully Unabsurd Answers June 24, 2007 9:20 PM Subscribe

Absurd Questions, Hopefully Unabsurd Answers
June 24, 2007 9:20 PM Subscribe