Question for atheists: What happens when we die?

[Sikon]

Copying something that precisely would be a feat anyway.

To add to that, I suspect a scanner machine like that in some science-fiction might not only be difficult but actually perhaps simply impossible. I can't think of any method by which the equivalent of a Star Trek transporter making an exact copy could probably be carried out, not scanning by any part of the EM spectrum, particle beams, or anything else. I don't think anyone else can either, not if they consider all of the practical issues. A MRI or CAT scan isn't even close.

The closest technique I could see would be freezing a brain after vitrification, slicing it into a very large number of thin sheets (somehow without destroying much of it in the process), then running arrays of electron microscopes over it to reconstruct its structure in a computer, a process that would normally tend towards astronomical expense for the trillions of connections, if even possible.

A variant would be disassembly of the brain with nanorobots, though even such wouldn't automatically mean the information obtained would be that close to exact.

After all of the trouble for questionable methods like the above, there still seems to be no point compared to instead doing gradual replacement.

Instead stimulating some neurogenesis seems likely within decades. Even if the goal was eventually gradual replacement with nanotech artificial neuron equivalents as opposed to biological new neurons, that would still be more plausible than somehow scanning all at once and exactly copying a person's brain.

[R. U. Serious]

To me, because these two entities will be experiencing different realities the moment after this coping thing takes place, and that alone to me makes them seperate.

Then you haven't been reading the topic, or at least my posts on that. In this post:
http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic. ... 83#2307383
I explicitly mention and discuss that point. To paraphrase: If you let time pass after the duplication, it raises questions yes (the two diverge into certainly being different persons), but that's not what the issue is about. It's about the specific single moment, where the duplication occurs. where everything physical is identical. And given that everything that is (on prinicipal) observable is identical, there is nowhere the difference could "be", other than if one believes into something akin to souls that exist outside of the observable universe (whatever that would mean...).

but actually perhaps simply impossible.

I agree that such a machine would likely be impossible to build. It would certainly require a degree of control over matter that seems implausible, to say the least.

[R. U. Serious]

I still haven't seen why perfect-cloning someone and then not destroying the original is any different.

Because when time passes, the person that exists twice, once each inside the two physical entities diverges. And then you two different persons. See the post I referred to above:
http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic. ... 83#2307383

If you get cloned in such a manner, you will see, hear, and feel through the senses of one of the two, not both, and any uncertainty about which is the "true" one is utterly irrelevant to that fact.

Yes, because any senses, any thought, anything a brain or a self does, requires passage of time, which in turn means the two persons are diverging. THe discussion here has the assumption, that the original physical entity is destroyed before it changes at all, and reconstructed in that same "state" as the second entity. There is by definition no time where the original could continue to change into something that i different from what's reconstructed at the other site.

So if you destroyed one of the two at the moment of cloning, why would you think that you would continue to see, hear, feel through the senses of the other clone when you wouldn't have if both were still around?

That doesn't make any sense, and I am not aware of anybody proposing that's what happening. Seems like a strawman to me.

I understand that the proponents of this argument do not believe in a soul or consciousness outside the physical brain, although I do not understand how this argument could fail to require such a thing,

It's because the consciousness is a "functional output" of the brain. If you transfer the complete "software", the complete state (memory) onto identical hardware, the output will be the exact same.

which is why I was trying to leave it to the readers to decide for themselvse.[....] or storms off with an "I can't even talk to you" like R.U. Serious.

Wow, that's pretty backwards. I was agreeing with you that further debate is fruitless. Yet when I am doing it it is "storming off", and when you do it, it is a thoughtful "letting the reader decide".

[R. U. Serious]

Actually I misread the following sentence:

So if you destroyed one of the two at the moment of cloning, why would you think that you would continue to see, hear, feel through the senses of the other clone when you wouldn't have if both were still around?

Here is my answer, if I read your sentence as you probably intended it:

The problem is the ambiguity of "you" in that sentence. In the former scenario the "you" would exclusively refer to the person "in"* the older pyhsical entity, because it would have diverged, from the person in* the duplicated physical entity, because they would both be existing at the same time. In our scenraio, there is only a single "you" which is in* the older physical entity, duplicated and at the same moment one of the duplicates is destroyed, so that there is still only a single "you" to refer to.

* When using the term "in", it is hopefully clear that this is merely a conversational shorthand for the person/consciousness which is the "output" (or one of the outputs) of the processing of the physical entity.

[Kuroneko]

Let me misquote Mark Twain to sum up my thoughts on death: I was dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and it didn't bother me a bit. Why should I be afraid of dying?

Interesting philosophy, but I will continue to fear death anyway.

Is it the fear of your actual passing away, or the fact that you won't be around your friends and family anymore for eternity once it happens? I find a lot of people who fear death merely hate the idea of parting with their loved ones, rather than the act of dying.

To generalize, A not being bad does not preclude it from being worse than B. The symmetry argument actually shows that the state of being dead is not bad in itself, but it does not mean that no harm was done--generally speaking, the state of being alive is better.

--

So if you destroyed one of the two at the moment of cloning, why would you think that you would continue to see, hear, feel through the senses of the other clone when you wouldn't have if both were still around?

That doesn't make any sense, and I am not aware of anybody proposing that's what happening. Seems like a strawman to me.

For all intents and purposes, I claimed it, although perhaps not explicitly. If the process really is instantaneous (in whatever reference frame) in that it does not allow any aforementioned divergence between the two, then there will be psychological continuity between them, and the entire process becomes functionally identical with teleportation. This conclusion is certainly a consequence of the view that "you" are not the brain matter itself but its conscious process/"output".

[R. U. Serious]

Yep, see my correction, with that I agree.

I was first reading the sentence to mean something else when I disagreed with it (namely that after the divergence into two different selfs, that one of them could "magically" see through the eyes of the other - but I am sure that's not what was intended and just my misreading it).