Havok wrote:Kamakazie Sith wrote:Transporters do not kill you. If anyone has a copy of TNG Realm of Fear you can watch Barkley transport over from a first person perspective. There is no break in consciousness.
This. Despite all the other arguments, this has not been explained in the context of those arguments, nor been countered. It seems like it has been largely ignored.
Only Stark touched on it with his 'consciousness during the swirly parts' post. But that doesn't explain the episode away at all.
...Yeah. Assuming that we're tracking
what happens to Barclay, and not "what Barclay perceives," that's a clincher. The catch is that if there's a five second period during which there is no conscious Barclay, then we're not going to see that period through his eyes, any more than we see the events passing around our viewpoint character when he's unconscious.
SapphireFox wrote:As I have stated before that the argument on the intangible aspects is flawed as an untestable, unprovable, and unfalsifiable concept. It's YOUR argument that is based on the transfer of an intangible "Soul/self-awareness/me-ness" between the original and the copy not mine.
How?
I'm not arguing for souls here. I'm not arguing for any self-awareness that takes any form outside the electrical activity within the brain. What I
am arguing for is the existence of programs as abstractions, in the sense that the C program "
Hello, World!" exists. I can point to instances of "Hello, World!" I can even write out its code. But a copy of "Hello, World!" is not the same beast as the program "Hello, World!" itself. The instance of the concept is not the concept itself, any more than a falling rock is the law of gravity.
If I erase a copy of "Hello, World!" and write another copy, I have not destroyed "Hello, World," nor have I created it. All I've done is
move it. The person who wrote it for the first time can be said to have created it, and the person who destroys the last extant copy (including copies that are stored in computer or human memory) can be said to have destroyed it, but so long as a copy of it exists, "Hello, World!" exists.
I explained this part when you asked the "ship and typewriter" questions. As for the question, no I am not the same "typewriter" that I was when I was five. I am a completely different "typewriter" than I was then. To you the concept of identity is fixed like a format. ex(he is an .html she is xml he is running windows she is running GWBasic) My concept of identity is fluid as we "hybridize" and "change parts". ie(grow, change, and gain experiences). My concept of identity is part of the whole but your concept is that the whole is part of identity. To me identity formed from the whole you seem to believe that identity can be separated from the whole and taken up by another whole.
Yes, I do, because the idea of fluid identity, used as you use it, can lead to absurd conclusions. For example, if you are not the same person you were at five, are you the same person you were halfway between five and your present age? What about halfway between
that age and your present age? And so on? If identity is hybridizable, then we're left with "A is the same person as B, and B is the same person as C, but A is not the same person as C."
Now, we can finesse our way out of that by saying "A is 99% the same as B, and B is 99% the same as C, therefore A is 98% the same as C." Which is reasonable; you're comparing two people's identities in the same sense that you would compare their genotypes- they're similar but not exactly identical. But then for practical purposes you have to be willing and able to say that for some value of X, "A is X% the same as B"
means "A is B." For a sufficiently close resemblance, the two identities must converge into one, or identity is instantaneous, because you are not
exactly the same person you were even a microsecond ago.
If identity is to mean anything at all, there has to be a horizon of "sufficient similarity" within which identities converge to one for practical purposes. But that leads us right back to the problem of figuring out just how similar two people have to be before they count as the
same person, rather than one original and one copy.
Lets look at what you wrote.
Simon_Jester wrote:Very well. In turn, I present my view of the subject:
1) The transporter disintegrates a person, which is fatal; the transporter subsequently reintegrates the person, which is anti-fatal and therefore brings them back to life.
Now you yourself state that the transporter kills a person by disintegration.(something I have been arguing all this time) You claim in your very next statement says that it resurrects a person. How can this be when the original is crisped on the pad and the clone can scrape up the originals microscopic remains from the pad? How can you be sure that you are the original if you can retrieve your own disintegrated remains? How can you be so certain that what came out of the transporter is the same who or what that went in?
If I could find a satisfactory testing procedure to show that I was, in fact,
not the same person (such as comparing the results of brain scans), this would be a fairly compelling argument. If no such procedure can be found, then I will be satisfied that I am the same person if I believe myself to be the same person, because I see no harm in behaving as if I were the person I remember being.
But I think you've misunderstood my point. A subject disintegrated by a transporter is, in my eyes, not permanently dead. The state they are in is best compared to "clinical death" on an operating table: the subject is reduced to a state at which they are kept in existence only by outside intervention, and in which they will cease to exist if that intervention goes wrong. But if the transporter works properly, you never undergo information-theoretic death: the technology exists to undo the (very extensive) harm that has been done to you, just as the technology exists to undo the act of stopping the heart of a patient who undergoes heart surgery.
Reversible "death" is not the same as irreversible
death, from a philosophical standpoint.
4) Transporter copies may be flawed to varying degrees, ranging from extremely subtle, microscopic errors (TNG: Realm of Fear) to major personality alterations implying significant changes in the structure or contents of the brain (TOS: The Enemy Within). A sufficiently extreme alteration may produce an individual who is similar to the original, but for practical purposes might as well be an entirely different person (the "Evil Kirk" of The Enemy Within).
This part is probably damming part against the clone being original, since what comes out is NOT always who or what went in.
This is not, however, evidence that what comes out always IS NOT who or what went in. If I beam Kirk up from the planet, something may go wrong and leave me with zombie-Kirk or evil-Kirk or six identical Kirks or Kirk from an alternate universe. The process is not without its bizarre and improbable risks. But
I may also end up with a normal Kirk. The normal Kirk I get cannot be distinguished from the normal Kirk I started with; I see no reason to accuse this Kirk of being a fake and denying him access to the bridge on the grounds that he is not the captain.
Which, as Kamikaze Sith pointed out, would be the appropriate response if the Kirk I get "isn't really" Kirk.
This is what happens with the transporter according to your arguments.
1. the transporter disintegrates the subject and through the process all data for the process is collected
2. the transporter uses the data to construct a clone at the transport site
3. concurrently with 2 the ethereal intangible "soul/self-awareness/me-ness" aspects are transferred from the original.
4. transport complete the copy since it posses the intangible aspect is considered the original and thus the original not dead
Can you see the problem with this? You continue to use the intangible aspects in your argument even when we both think they should not be used. Can you understand why I call this a "Jesus Machine". A defibrillator restores a pulse to life that is still there, this thing gives life where none existed before.
The only intangible thing being transferred is a name tag: "This is (a) Captain Kirk." That's not an essence or soul at all; that's just a description. It's like saying "this is a lump of granite" or "this is the script for
A New Hope."
If I beam a copy of a movie script from point A to point B, I still have a copy of a movie script. Even if it the only copy in existence, the movie script
still exists; the process of making a copy and destroying the original did not destroy the abstraction that is "the script." I can demonstrate this by writing a script, then transcribing it, then burning the original. I still have the script.
My argument is that saying "This is Captain Kirk" is like saying "This is the script for
Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan." Destroying a copy and creating a new one does not make the new one any less an authentic version than the old one was, because the identity of an item (or a person) is defined by
what it is, not where it's been.
I apologize if you feel I have been insulting in my comments, but I NEEDED you to understand how this stupid and insulting sounded. defibrillators and the like don't make life after it has been terminated nor do they destroy the body they restore what was already there.
For older definitions of "life" and "death," defibrillators do very much make life after it has been terminated. Existing technology has forced us to modify the definitions in order to preserve the concept of "death" as something that cannot be reversed, as opposed to being an extreme form of unconsciousness. Future technology may force us to change the definition even farther. I submit that transporters would force us to rewrite the definition almost entirely.
But for
some (bad) definitions of "death," or for a definition corresponding to "clinical death," a transporter brings about temporary "death." However, it does not bring about the permanent death of an individual, even though it brings about the permanent death of
an instance of an individual.
If I took some DNA from a person who died in heart surgery and created a clone of him would you still say the original was not dead and if I showed him the body of the original would he say the original was not dead?
That depends. So far, you haven't told me whether he shares the same mind, and I associate identity strongly with minds. Assuming for the sake of argument that they do, and working the argument back to the transporter:
I can point to the pile of ashes that was Captain Kirk and say "
That Captain Kirk is dead" in the same sense that I say "That copy of the script has been destroyed." However, I am then obliged to point to the guy wearing a Starfleet captain's uniform who just beamed up to where I am and say "
That Captain Kirk is alive," because he is in fact standing there going all William Shatner on me. That guy passes any "Is this or is this not Captain Kirk?" test I can devise, and therefore
must be a genuine Captain Kirk.
And given the presence of a genuine Captain Kirk, I cannot say that "Captain Kirk is dead," because dead men don't smack me upside the head with a campy doubled-fist punch for calling them dead men. Nor do they reply that history considers them dead and ask who they are to argue, or any of the other things that (a) Captain Kirk might do in response to being told he's dead.
Granted,
this Captain Kirk is not the original Captain Kirk, much as my copy of
Hamlet is not Shakespeare's rough draft with all its beer stains and crossed out words. But my copy of
Hamlet is still
Hamlet, and this guy is still Captain Kirk.