we need teleportation frankly

    • Moira_Mayhem@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Not really.

      We exist as a contiguous, always active self-modifying chemical cascade. This is a scientific fact.

      Our sense of consciousness is what we refer to as our selves. This is pretty concrete philosophical conjecture.

      Any teleporter device that rearranges atoms breaks this contiguity. This is scientific fact.

      If a teleporter device that rearranges atoms can be invented (and I believe it can but not for a long time) to move a human, then the human that arrives on the other end of the teleport will not be the ‘you’ that looks out from your eyes now as the contiguity is broken. It will THINK it is you, will have your memories, but your current consciousness wouldn’t ‘jump’ to that newly created homunculus. It would simply cease to exist. You think this is philosophy but it is a scientific fact.

      I’m not arguing for the existence of a ‘soul’ here, just stating the simple truth that a machine that reassembles atoms into you isn’t making a you that exists now, but rather a just-born being who thinks its been living your life.

      And the you that exists now ceases to be.

      Please don’t try the ‘falling to sleep’ argument, at no point during that time does the complex bioprocess that makes up our being cease.

      • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        If there is a distinction there should be a difference. Given that a teleported human is indistinguishable from the prior non teleported human there is no difference and thus no distinction.

        • Moira_Mayhem@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Incorrect, the consciousness of the original human is gone, and the consciousness of the new human is operating under memories it did not directly experience.

          No distinction from the outside, and from the inside a different consciousness, one that didn’t exist the moment before.

      • MxM111@kbin.social
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        6 months ago

        Consciousness can be thought as software running on hardware (your brain). You do not destroy software by destroying hardware.

        Whether you agree with this or not is not relevant to this discussion, since my point is that whether the above statement is true belongs to philosophy, not to science.

        • Moira_Mayhem@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Um that’s a nice metaphor and all but that’s all it is. You pretend like its a profound statement when just 150 years ago they would have used the wax phonograph metaphor.

          The map isn’t the territory no matter how hard you pretend it is.

          • MxM111@kbin.social
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            6 months ago

            Again, what we engaging is a philosophical discussion. And it is not a metaphor, it is analogy.

            And while the map is not the territory, the question is what consciousness is. Is it the territory (brain) or the map (software)? It is very easy to argue that AI gives us a good indication that consciousness might appear somehow in AI systems too at some time, and there, there would be no question that it is a software.