Do transporters kill?

[SCRawl]

From Barclay-B, who steps off the receiving end of the transport system, he would perceive no loss of consciousness. Just like I don't notice the passage of time between when the anaesthetist (sp?) puts me out and wakes me up, Barclay-B will notice nothing amiss.

(It's interesting to note that while I do believe in the continuity of consciousness between going to sleep and waking up, I would have no way to prove it. In the case of the transporter, though, without the meatbag to hold the consciousness, I just don't see how it can be maintained throughout the whole process.)

As for seeing "through Barclay's eyes", er, what eyes? There is a point during transport during which he has no eyes, and no brain, and no consciousness, unless you believe that consciousness can exist without a brain to house it.

Don't know. Don't care. That's what the scene shows. Regardless, even if Barclay did loose consciousness that does not support the cloning hypothesis.

What, are you sticking your fingers in your ears and going "I can't hear you!"? If you take the position that Barclay is continuously conscious because you can see through his eyes continuously, you have to account for the fact that at least briefly he doesn't have any eyes to see with. His physical body does not travel that distance through space; it travels as a matter stream.

As for the second part, he loses consciousness because he has no brain to contain it. Unless you take the position that consciousness can exist outside of the meat brain, and can somehow account for it, then your argument fails, and Barclay-B is just a copy of Barclay-A.

In addition, the scene where we see the form moving through the matter stream. It's movement is not interupted during the process. That form represents the trapped people...

I don't blame you for not remembering -- it was months ago, after all -- but I did address that very point:

...if we held Barclay suspended -- in mid transport -- at the point where matter starts to lose its cohesion...

That's what they end up doing to Barclay -- hold him in the beam before he gets taken apart. Not during, not after, before. Later, while he's actually on the transporter pad, you can even see from Barclay's perspective: he can see the sparkly stuff as well as the transporter room. My verdict: he hasn't been disintegrated at that point in the process. If he had been, then he wouldn't have been able to see, because he wouldn't have had eyes.

In other words, the person travelling by transporter dies at some point (from his perspective) past the point at which Barclay was held during the experimental procedure we saw in that episode. The rest of the world doesn't care, because, well, for all intents and purposes that person hasn't changed at all.

There is "an outside energy source" -- what now? To pick a round number, 100kg of Riker starts out on the planet when transport begins, and once it's all done, there's 100kg of Riker on his ship and 100kg of Riker still on the planet. Where did the extra 100kg come from? It clearly can't all be from him. And I didn't say that the original matter could not be used, but rather that it is "not always used to form the copy", using this instance as evidence to back up my claim.

When Commander Riker starts to beam out an energy beam interacts with the beam which causes the creation of Thomas Riker. Thus, it supplied the extra matter that the transporter rearranged back into Riker. Since clones won't have your memories this would explain why Thomas Riker did.

As I've stated several times already, I don't hold that it's important that the original matter be used (on a normal basis) to create the copy at the end of the transport process. I merely pointed out a time when this clearly could not have been the case.

As for this nonsense about clones and memories, I don't know where you're getting this from. The word "clone" has been used for the sake of expediency; I have always conceded that the copy at the end of the transport process is completely identical to the original, such that no external test could ever distinguish between them. The one important difference between them is that the original is gone. If I step onto the pad, thinking "I'm me, I'm me, I'm me..." the person (whom I've referred to as "me" for this debate) doing that thinking dies at the instant that my body turns into a matter stream. The copy at the other end might still be going on thinking "--me, I'm me, I'm me..." but he's not "me".

[Kamakazie Sith]

What, are you sticking your fingers in your ears and going "I can't hear you!"? If you take the position that Barclay is continuously conscious because you can see through his eyes continuously, you have to account for the fact that at least briefly he doesn't have any eyes to see with. His physical body does not travel that distance through space; it travels as a matter stream.

Yet, he is somehow able to see. I can't account for something that hasn't been explained. It just is.

I don't blame you for not remembering -- it was months ago, after all -- but I did address that very point:

And I addressed that as well where it shows the entire transporter process from start to finish. You see the origin background fade out and then the new background fade in.

As I've stated several times already, I don't hold that it's important that the original matter be used (on a normal basis) to create the copy at the end of the transport process. I merely pointed out a time when this clearly could not have been the case.

As for this nonsense about clones and memories, I don't know where you're getting this from. The word "clone" has been used for the sake of expediency; I have always conceded that the copy at the end of the transport process is completely identical to the original, such that no external test could ever distinguish between them. The one important difference between them is that the original is gone. If I step onto the pad, thinking "I'm me, I'm me, I'm me..." the person (whom I've referred to as "me" for this debate) doing that thinking dies at the instant that my body turns into a matter stream. The copy at the other end might still be going on thinking "--me, I'm me, I'm me..." but he's not "me".

If the original matter is reformed then it is the same person. Unless you believe in a soul or some other superstitious nonsense like that, but that position is hardly one for this debate.

Again, you say that the original is gone, but you offer up zero evidence to support this.

[Channel72]

If the original matter is reformed then it is the same person. Unless you believe in a soul or some other superstitious nonsense like that, but that position is hardly one for this debate.

It's ironic that you say this, since it is your position that requires the existence of a soul, or some other state of being/personal ID tag which transcends your material body. If human consciousness is an entirely material phenomenom, (and it is), then your consciousness ends as soon as the transporter beam dissasembles your brain.

The fact that we see Barclay's POV throughout the entire transport complicates the matter, but really this scene can't be interpreted literally since, as SCRawl mentioned, Barclay's eyes themselves can't possibly be operational once they are converted to a matter stream. The best possible interpretation here is to assume this scene isn't to be taken literally; it's meant to convey more or less what's going on for the benefit of the audience, similar to how the lip movements of aliens seem to synchronize with the Universal Translator, or any scene which portrays some kind of inaccurate POV recollection.

Again, you say that the original is gone, but you offer up zero evidence to support this.

Zero evidence? The evidence is that the transporter disassembles your brain. You can't possibly survive such an event, by any definition of "survive." Therefore, the transporter kills you. The fact that it creates an identical organism later in a different location using your pattern is really irrelevant. The fact is, the original organism that stepped into the transporter is no more. The only way you can argue that the transporter doesn't kill you is through semantics: you can extend the definition of "self" to include any physically identical organism. However, this defintion is extremely problematic, since it fails to take into account a potential cloning device that doesn't destroy the original organism being cloned.

[Kamakazie Sith]

It's ironic that you say this, since it is your position that requires the existence of a soul, or some other state of being/personal ID tag which transcends your material body. If human consciousness is an entirely material phenomenom, (and it is), then your consciousness ends as soon as the transporter beam dissasembles your brain.

Not really. My position is that if you take matter and convert it into energy then convert it back to matter and somehow are able to restart those life functions then that person is the same. You went into the transporter, and YOU came out.

So the question is if it reassembles your brain using the same matter and is able to restart your process? Are YOU still dead. If yes then why is that not the same person who went in?

The fact that we see Barclay's POV throughout the entire transport complicates the matter, but really this scene can't be interpreted literally since, as SCRawl mentioned, Barclay's eyes themselves can't possibly be operational once they are converted to a matter stream. The best possible interpretation here is to assume this scene isn't to be taken literally; it's meant to convey more or less what's going on for the benefit of the audience, similar to how the lip movements of aliens seem to synchronize with the Universal Translator, or any scene which portrays some kind of inaccurate POV recollection.

I'll concede that. I was looking for some ST episodes where people have existed as energy and were conscious, but I haven't been able to find them. If I do then I will reopen this argument.

Zero evidence? The evidence is that the transporter disassembles your brain. You can't possibly survive such an event, by any definition of "survive." Therefore, the transporter kills you. The fact that it creates an identical organism later in a different location using your pattern is really irrelevant. The fact is, the original organism that stepped into the transporter is no more. The only way you can argue that the transporter doesn't kill you is through semantics: you can extend the definition of "self" to include any physically identical organism. However, this defintion is extremely problematic, since it fails to take into account a potential cloning device that doesn't destroy the original organism being cloned.

I'm arguing against the idea that the transporter clones people, or the person arriving at the site is not the same person that went into the transporter. If you convert matter to energy and the convert it back to matter it is the same person. If you want to say it kills people. Sure, it kills people and then brings them back in a painless fashion. To me death is a permanent state and not temporary...

[Wyrm]

What I said was that the matter to produce the copy does not always come from the original. I did not state that that matter never comes from the original. We aren't arguing anything here, and anyways I do not hold that the original matter is important to the continuity of consciousness, with the exception that its (at least nominal) structure is critical to that continuity.

There are many situations in everyday life that people lose that continuity of concsiousness, like being knocked out, yet it's a far strech to say that they are dead or different people when they come out of unscionsciousness, isn't it?

If I replace the lumber holding my house together piece by piece, my roof will still stay where it is and perform its necessary functions. If I wink every piece of lumber out of existence and replace it with identical lumber a short time later, my roof will cave in, and even if this process creates a new roof in place of the old one the old roof is gone. (It's not a perfect analogy, I freely admit.)

One should never reason by analogy, and your analogy isn't even imperfect. Consciousness is a product of the brain, and does not exist apart from it, but we knew that going in. Your break of consciousness has no consequences except to philosophers who think maintaining continuity of consciousness is somehow important, even though they don't run around claiming people who have been knocked out are in fact zombies upon waking.

(It's interesting to note that while I do believe in the continuity of consciousness between going to sleep and waking up, I would have no way to prove it. In the case of the transporter, though, without the meatbag to hold the consciousness, I just don't see how it can be maintained throughout the whole process.)

Which is why I said "knocking out," either by drugs or physical trauma, and not "go to sleep." Knocking someone out interrupts their consciousness. Do try to keep up.

You've gone to rather serious lengths to miss my point for some reason, so I'll try this again.

If I step onto the transporter pad and someone immediately takes a phaser and disintegrates my head, then the thing I shall call "me" is gone, yes? We can agree on this much, I hope.

Yes. Your body dies because it exsanguinates and suffers neurological trauma to its autonomic nervous system. Your head will soon follow, even if you transport it back onto your body seamlessly. We agree, but not for the same reasons.

If I step onto the pad and the accident I described earlier happens, and this process includes no discontinuity of consciousness (i.e. my body is never disintegrated, my physical form retains all of my vital functions continuously) then the "me" is still intact: the copy is me, down to the most basic level, but I am "me", the self-aware being. The copy is just like any other person I might meet on the street, with the exception that we are alike in all physical (and even psychological) respects.

The "copy/original" distinction behaves badly in instances of perfect duplication and needs to be carefully defined before we may proceed. Since your "me" is based on the concept of "original", it too is badly behaved and must be carefully defined before we may use it.

But as I stated earlier, I can't see through his eyes, or add his ongoing experiences to my own.

Sophistry. If I anesthetize your eyes, you can't see through them either. Does that mean your eyes aren't your own anymore? If I knock you out, you don't add any experiences to what you already have. Does this mean your brain is no longer yours?

That copy is a new person, with his own new definition of "me" (though, of course, he thinks he's the original just as much as I do).

Is there some physical test I can perform to say which one is the copy and which one is the original? If not, then the distinction is unphysical by definition, and as a strict materialist I cannot accept it. Why should I accept your definition of "me" as a non-reentrant entity? Just to make you feel good?

What happens during a normal transporter process, though, is that I step onto the pad, they make a copy somewhere else, and just as that copy is made I get my body dissolved, and there is no more "me".

And since your concept of "me" is based on badly behaving concepts like "copy/original," perhaps your definition of "me" is wrong and needs to be replaced.

[Wyrm]

Zero evidence? The evidence is that the transporter disassembles your brain. You can't possibly survive such an event, by any definition of "survive." Therefore, the transporter kills you.

Only if "survive" requires you to remain intact bodily, which it does not. That makes your assertion no different from special pleading.

The fact that it creates an identical organism later in a different location using your pattern is really irrelevant. The fact is, the original organism that stepped into the transporter is no more.

Based on a special pleading fallacy. The only requirement "survives" places on me is that my life processes have to continue after all is said and done, and they don't even need to be perfectly continued. In transporters, they do. Get over it.

The only way you can argue that the transporter doesn't kill you is through semantics: you can extend the definition of "self" to include any physically identical organism.

And since I am a materialist, and there's nothing in my definition of "self" that says I can't be reentrant, yeah, I accept that for as long as they remain identical — which they won't be for long. But there's nothing wrong or contradictory about that.

However, this defintion is extremely problematic, since it fails to take into account a potential cloning device that doesn't destroy the original organism being cloned.

Only because you insist that people cannot be reentrant. Why should I accept this?

[Channel72]

Based on a special pleading fallacy. The only requirement "survives" places on me is that my life processes have to continue after all is said and done, and they don't even need to be perfectly continued. In transporters, they do. Get over it.

And here you're simply committing a fallacy of equivocation when you use terms like "me" and "my", since I clearly don't accept your definition of "self." Given a person P, you claim that we can define P's "self" to include both P and any physically identical organisms, whereas I dispute this definition. Rather, "selfness" is a property of a particular instance of P, not all instances of P. This definition is more useful than yours, since consciousness is a property of a particular instance of a brain state. Destroying a brain-state instance terminates the consciousness, and therefore kills an instance of P. Just because another instance of P can be created somewhere else doesn't change the fact that the brain-state of the original instance was terminated, and therefore the original instance ceases to experience anything further.

Your claim that each instance is reentrant would require consciousness to be some kind of shared property among instances, but it clearly isn't. This is demonstrable by simply noting that if we were to create a copy of P using a cloning device, both instances of P would have their own unique brain states.

[SCRawl]

What I said was that the matter to produce the copy does not always come from the original. I did not state that that matter never comes from the original. We aren't arguing anything here, and anyways I do not hold that the original matter is important to the continuity of consciousness, with the exception that its (at least nominal) structure is critical to that continuity.

There are many situations in everyday life that people lose that continuity of concsiousness, like being knocked out, yet it's a far strech to say that they are dead or different people when they come out of unscionsciousness, isn't it?

Yes, and while I used the specific example of being asleep, I should have extended it to all occasions during which a person is not conscious. Let me be slightly clearer: I admit that it is not possible to prove that a person does not cease to exist in the manner I have described when a person loses consciousness through a mundane process (such as sleep, anaesthesia, or coma), but I do not believe that this cessation takes place. The crux of my argument, though, is that dissolution and re-constitution of the right parts of a person's central nervous system will necessarily bring about that cessation.

If I replace the lumber holding my house together piece by piece, my roof will still stay where it is and perform its necessary functions. If I wink every piece of lumber out of existence and replace it with identical lumber a short time later, my roof will cave in, and even if this process creates a new roof in place of the old one the old roof is gone. (It's not a perfect analogy, I freely admit.)

One should never reason by analogy, and your analogy isn't even imperfect. Consciousness is a product of the brain, and does not exist apart from it, but we knew that going in. Your break of consciousness has no consequences except to philosophers who think maintaining continuity of consciousness is somehow important, even though they don't run around claiming people who have been knocked out are in fact zombies upon waking.

I'm trying to describe a position, not reason one out. And I would not describe this is a merely philosophical issue; for the person whose physical form is being disintegrated and reintegrated over a distance, it's a very real problem. Your comment about being zombies is completely misplaced, by the way, and is a bad strawman attempt: I never suggested that the copy has no free will, but rather that the consciousness of the original cannot be transferred to the copy.

(It's interesting to note that while I do believe in the continuity of consciousness between going to sleep and waking up, I would have no way to prove it. In the case of the transporter, though, without the meatbag to hold the consciousness, I just don't see how it can be maintained throughout the whole process.)

Which is why I said "knocking out," either by drugs or physical trauma, and not "go to sleep." Knocking someone out interrupts their consciousness. Do try to keep up.

I amended my statement just now. I make no distinction between sleeping and being knocked out for the purposes of this discussion.

If I step onto the pad and the accident I described earlier happens, and this process includes no discontinuity of consciousness (i.e. my body is never disintegrated, my physical form retains all of my vital functions continuously) then the "me" is still intact: the copy is me, down to the most basic level, but I am "me", the self-aware being. The copy is just like any other person I might meet on the street, with the exception that we are alike in all physical (and even psychological) respects.

The "copy/original" distinction behaves badly in instances of perfect duplication and needs to be carefully defined before we may proceed. Since your "me" is based on the concept of "original", it too is badly behaved and must be carefully defined before we may use it.

No, not at all. I am not basing the existence of "me" on the fact that I am the original (or, as in the case of most Starfleet personnel, the (n-1)th copy, for the nth trip through the transporter). I base it on the fact that to maintain self-awareness I must house my mind within my brain, in a manner which is not well understood at all. If that brain vanishes, that self-awareness does too. Re-starting my brain sounds great, but I just can't bring myself to believe that my self-awareness can bridge that gap.

But as I stated earlier, I can't see through his eyes, or add his ongoing experiences to my own.

Sophistry. If I anesthetize your eyes, you can't see through them either. Does that mean your eyes aren't your own anymore? If I knock you out, you don't add any experiences to what you already have. Does this mean your brain is no longer yours?

But those eyes (or my mind, or whatever) are quite clearly still attached to me; my loss of their use does not remove them. When I recover I will still be "me". My new double and I were exactly the same a few seconds ago, and now differ only in location and experiences since the transporter accident, and yet we must be distinct beings. We might be interchangeable according to any external test you might imagine, but we are clearly not the same person. If you really think that I'm wrong about this, you might as well stop arguing with me, because we'll never come to a consensus.

That copy is a new person, with his own new definition of "me" (though, of course, he thinks he's the original just as much as I do).

Is there some physical test I can perform to say which one is the copy and which one is the original? If not, then the distinction is unphysical by definition, and as a strict materialist I cannot accept it. Why should I accept your definition of "me" as a non-reentrant entity? Just to make you feel good?

And yet the mind exists, or at the very least seems to exist. If you are a proponent of a completely deterministic universe then the notion of free will does not exist, and so the concept of a mind is irrelevant; we are all simply computers executing a sophisticated piece of software. That's not how it seems to me; either I have free will or it's a very convincing illusion of it. My brain is sufficiently well evolved that I am (or at least I seem to be) slightly more than the sum of my parts. It's not unphysical, but it is hard to pin down. Show me in the brain the part that contains the mind, and I'll concede all points in this discussion.

What happens during a normal transporter process, though, is that I step onto the pad, they make a copy somewhere else, and just as that copy is made I get my body dissolved, and there is no more "me".

And since your concept of "me" is based on badly behaving concepts like "copy/original," perhaps your definition of "me" is wrong and needs to be replaced.

I find it difficult to define "me" sufficiently well that it applies outside my own experience. I have tried. Assuming you are a self-aware being, you can define it for yourself, and probably in terms which are exactly the same as mine.

[Kamakazie Sith]

Yes, and while I used the specific example of being asleep, I should have extended it to all occasions during which a person is not conscious. Let me be slightly clearer: I admit that it is not possible to prove that a person does not cease to exist in the manner I have described when a person loses consciousness through a mundane process (such as sleep, anaesthesia, or coma), but I do not believe that this cessation takes place. The crux of my argument, though, is that dissolution and re-constitution of the right parts of a person's central nervous system will necessarily bring about that cessation.

Why? If it is the same material being disassembled and then reassembled how can it not be the same consciousness?

I'm trying to describe a position, not reason one out. And I would not describe this is a merely philosophical issue; for the person whose physical form is being disintegrated and reintegrated over a distance, it's a very real problem. Your comment about being zombies is completely misplaced, by the way, and is a bad strawman attempt: I never suggested that the copy has no free will, but rather that the consciousness of the original cannot be transferred to the copy.

If I were to terminate your neural processes and then ten years from now reactivate them are you saying that would no longer be you? If so, why? You realize that consciousness is simply a product of our brain. If you take disassemble and then reassemble the same cells, etc and restart it then that consciousness would be the same. What information do you have that suggests this wouldn't be true?

No, not at all. I am not basing the existence of "me" on the fact that I am the original (or, as in the case of most Starfleet personnel, the (n-1)th copy, for the nth trip through the transporter). I base it on the fact that to maintain self-awareness I must house my mind within my brain, in a manner which is not well understood at all. If that brain vanishes, that self-awareness does too. Re-starting my brain sounds great, but I just can't bring myself to believe that my self-awareness can bridge that gap.

Why can't you? Do you think that self-awareness is some mystical idea? I would say that if you could dig a body out of the ground and regenerate the cells to full health and restart their body processes then that person would be the same person they were in every way including consciousness that they were before they died.

But those eyes (or my mind, or whatever) are quite clearly still attached to me; my loss of their use does not remove them. When I recover I will still be "me". My new double and I were exactly the same a few seconds ago, and now differ only in location and experiences since the transporter accident, and yet we must be distinct beings. We might be interchangeable according to any external test you might imagine, but we are clearly not the same person. If you really think that I'm wrong about this, you might as well stop arguing with me, because we'll never come to a consensus.

Your hypothesis relies on a transporter accident which was acted upon by an outside energy source. If the matter that was disassembled and then reassembled is the very same matter then it is not a copy. It is the original. Same thing for the consciousness and the mind that housed it.

And yet the mind exists, or at the very least seems to exist. If you are a proponent of a completely deterministic universe then the notion of free will does not exist, and so the concept of a mind is irrelevant; we are all simply computers executing a sophisticated piece of software. That's not how it seems to me; either I have free will or it's a very convincing illusion of it. My brain is sufficiently well evolved that I am (or at least I seem to be) slightly more than the sum of my parts. It's not unphysical, but it is hard to pin down. Show me in the brain the part that contains the mind, and I'll concede all points in this discussion.

So, you're basically admitting here that consciousness is beyond physical and is something else? Why does free will even factor into this? I'm not sure what free will has to do with this discussion. You do have free will. You can decide what to do with your life. You have choices. The fact that your consciousness is a product of your brain is irrelevant towards that fact.

[Wyrm]

Yes, and while I used the specific example of being asleep, I should have extended it to all occasions during which a person is not conscious. Let me be slightly clearer: I admit that it is not possible to prove that a person does not cease to exist in the manner I have described when a person loses consciousness through a mundane process (such as sleep, anaesthesia, or coma), but I do not believe that this cessation takes place.

Based on... what exactly?

The crux of my argument, though, is that dissolution and re-constitution of the right parts of a person's central nervous system will necessarily bring about that cessation.

And my crux is that it doesn't matter except to philosophers and other fuzzy thinking individuals if consciousness is interrupted for there to be an identity. Do you consider people who are put into cold-sleep conscious? If not, then by your argument their selves are obviated and if revived they will be people not their former selves. If so, WHY IN FUCK'S NAME DO YOU THINK CONSCIOUSNESS CONTINUES IN INERT, FROZEN BRAIN TISSUE?

I'm trying to describe a position, not reason one out. And I would not describe this is a merely philosophical issue; for the person whose physical form is being disintegrated and reintegrated over a distance, it's a very real problem. Your comment about being zombies is completely misplaced, by the way, and is a bad strawman attempt: I never suggested that the copy has no free will, but rather that the consciousness of the original cannot be transferred to the copy.

And in what sense has it not been transferred to the copy? Do you have a unique spiritual ID card that if lost means you cannot manipulate your body anymore and are lost to limbo forever, leaving a mere creature behind? Sorry, SCRawl, your argument is clearly based on dualism, which has no foundation whatsoever. Your matter and the arrangement thereof is all there is to you, and if copied, copies you too. That means that there are two of you, and each is the real you in every sense of the word. I know that sounds wierd, but there's nothing contradictory about it.

I amended my statement just now. I make no distinction between sleeping and being knocked out for the purposes of this discussion.

Which flies in the face of everything we know about neuroscience. When you're sleeping, your consciousness is altered, but still there. When you're knocked out, your consciousness is interrupted and becomes impotent action potentials zipping about your brain. Eventually they will self-organize back into consciousness, but while you're knocked out, you are not there.

No, not at all. I am not basing the existence of "me" on the fact that I am the original (or, as in the case of most Starfleet personnel, the (n-1)th copy, for the nth trip through the transporter). I base it on the fact that to maintain self-awareness I must house my mind within my brain, in a manner which is not well understood at all.

Again with the sophistry that somehow unconsciousness is consciousness!

If that brain vanishes, that self-awareness does too. Re-starting my brain sounds great, but I just can't bring myself to believe that my self-awareness can bridge that gap.

Then you should be accusing people who come out of comas and people just recovering from concussion imposters, because they have been unconscious, which means their consciousness and self-awareness has been interrupted by definition.

But those eyes (or my mind, or whatever) are quite clearly still attached to me; my loss of their use does not remove them. When I recover I will still be "me".

And if you never recover? Are they yours still?

My new double and I were exactly the same a few seconds ago, and now differ only in location and experiences since the transporter accident, and yet we must be distinct beings. We might be interchangeable according to any external test you might imagine, but we are clearly not the same person.

Again you use terms as if I agree to your meaning. While it is clear that there are two individuals there, it is not clear that they are two people unless we fix what we mean by "person."

If you really think that I'm wrong about this, you might as well stop arguing with me, because we'll never come to a consensus.

It has become clear to me that you are a dualistic twat and that you only deserve mockery.

And yet the mind exists, or at the very least seems to exist.

Yeah, minds exist, but Star Trek notwithstanding, we have never seen minds apart from matter, the same way we never see chemistry apart from matter. They require no separate existence not contingent upon mere matter.

If you are a proponent of a completely deterministic universe then the notion of free will does not exist, and so the concept of a mind is irrelevant; we are all simply computers executing a sophisticated piece of software. That's not how it seems to me; either I have free will or it's a very convincing illusion of it. My brain is sufficiently well evolved that I am (or at least I seem to be) slightly more than the sum of my parts. It's not unphysical, but it is hard to pin down. Show me in the brain the part that contains the mind, and I'll concede all points in this discussion.

Fallacy of division: the brain is conscious, therefore one part of the brain is responsible for it. It's all involved, cupcake, but that doesn't mean that there's this seperate thing called a "mind" that is not transfered along with the matter. Damage to any part of the brain damages mental function and faculties, and can drastically change a person.

That said, if I were to choose one part of the brain that is most involved in consciousness, it would be the reticular activating system, specifically the thalamic reticular nucleus. Damage to that region means an irrecoverable coma, and changes to its firing pattern correspond to changes in states of consciousness. It's a strong candidate for dictating the overall management of consciousness.

I find it difficult to define "me" sufficiently well that it applies outside my own experience. I have tried. Assuming you are a self-aware being, you can define it for yourself, and probably in terms which are exactly the same as mine.

Such subject-centric definitions are useless to us, as suspected, but I take umbrage with the stance that my definition will be similar to yours. Mine is able to deal with genuine interruptions of consciousness, which do happen dispite your beliefs, while yours cannot, obviously.

[SCRawl]

I've lost the will to go around and around with you, point by point. I find your continuous nit-picking and semantics-whoring to be prohibitively tiresome. Try this one.

I'm trying to describe a position, not reason one out. And I would not describe this is a merely philosophical issue; for the person whose physical form is being disintegrated and reintegrated over a distance, it's a very real problem. Your comment about being zombies is completely misplaced, by the way, and is a bad strawman attempt: I never suggested that the copy has no free will, but rather that the consciousness of the original cannot be transferred to the copy.

And in what sense has it not been transferred to the copy? Do you have a unique spiritual ID card that if lost means you cannot manipulate your body anymore and are lost to limbo forever, leaving a mere creature behind? Sorry, SCRawl, your argument is clearly based on dualism, which has no foundation whatsoever. Your matter and the arrangement thereof is all there is to you, and if copied, copies you too. That means that there are two of you, and each is the real you in every sense of the word. I know that sounds wierd, but there's nothing contradictory about it.

Nothing contradictory about it. Huh. So if we take the (not hypothetical, since it actually happened in the canon) incident involving the Rikers again, we should expect that, since both of them were the same person in every way that apparently matters to you, each of them is indistinguishable from the other, including to themselves. I'm going to phrase my response to that in the form of a dramatic exercise.

Biff stepped on to the transporter pad. He was nervous: "So, chief, you're sure this is safe?" he asked, for perhaps the twelfth time that morning.

"Perfectly, sir", the transporter chief responded. "We're just testing out an upgrade. The organic modules came out just fine, and your name came up on the duty roster to do a live test. It'll just take a moment. Ready when you are, sir."

Lt. JG Biff calmed himself. "Energize," he said. Just as he did so, as the transporter chief slid his fingers in a practiced manner on the panel, the red alert indicator lit up behind the chief's station. It was the last thing he saw before the familiar sparkly pattern completely obscured his vision. When it cleared, he found that he was in transporter room three, instead of room two, where he'd started. The test was an apparent success.

"Great job," Biff said to the new transporter technician, as he stepped off the platform and towards the door. "I look forward to reading the report." He was quickly stopped by a pair of yellow-shirted security officers as they stepped into the transporter room, blocking his path.

"Please come with us," said the senior of the two security officers. "There's been an incident." Surprised and bewildered, Biff accompanied them to a secure area deeper within the ship. He was even more shocked when he saw what appeared to be himself already sitting at a briefing room table!

"Er, what just happened?" asked Biff as he entered the room.

The transporter chief was already there, and was prepared with an explanation: "There was a power surge in transporter room three, and in order to preserve your pattern it was necessary to engage a second confinement beam. At that moment, it appears that the bridge signalled a red alert, I'm not yet sure why. Activating the deflectors caused a rebound effect, and, long story short, we ended up with a Lt. Biff in both transporter rooms. I don't need to tell you that that's one Lt. Biff too many, so I'm going to ask you both: do you want to live?"

The red-shirted lieutenants locked eyes for a moment, shocked to hear the question. "Yes," they both said simultaneously.

"I'm not surprised," said the transporter chief. "That complicates things." He pulled a small disk from his pocket, tossed it in the air, and caught it before it hit the ground. "Heads," he said. He pulled out his hand phaser, set it to level eight, and aimed it at the chest of Lt. Biff (the one who ended up in transporter room three, to be known as Biff-3 for now).

"Wait, stop!" screamed Biff-3, his hands held out in a half-defensive, half-pleading gesture. "Don't I get a say in this?"

"Why would it matter to you," asked the chief. "You're both the same person. The transporter created an exact copy of, well, one of you, right down to the quantum states of your fundamental particles. I don't see why you're complaining." Biff-3 squeezed his eyes shut, and awaited the inevitable.

Aside from the silly ending, this very situation could have happened using the same phenomena we observed in the Star Trek canon. Is Biff-2 the same person as Biff-3? Do you really think Biff-3 thinks so?

[Wyrm]

Nothing contradictory about it. Huh. So if we take the (not hypothetical, since it actually happened in the canon) incident involving the Rikers again, we should expect that, since both of them were the same person in every way that apparently matters to you, each of them is indistinguishable from the other,

Except they're are distinguishable from each other, you dualistic twat. One has spent decades trapped on some planet, the other has become a commander. One will have experiences that the other has not, know things the other does not. That will cause a definite difference in the way they respond to the high-tech physical test that is... um, asking questions.

including to themselves. I'm going to phrase my response to that in the form of a dramatic exercise.

<snip>

The transporter chief was already there, and was prepared with an explanation: "There was a power surge in transporter room three, and in order to preserve your pattern it was necessary to engage a second confinement beam. At that moment, it appears that the bridge signalled a red alert, I'm not yet sure why. Activating the deflectors caused a rebound effect, and, long story short, we ended up with a Lt. Biff in both transporter rooms. I don't need to tell you that that's one Lt. Biff too many, so I'm going to ask you both: do you want to live?"

The red-shirted lieutenants locked eyes for a moment, shocked to hear the question. "Yes," they both said simultaneously.

"I'm not surprised," said the transporter chief. "That complicates things." He pulled a small disk from his pocket, tossed it in the air, and caught it before it hit the ground. "Heads," he said. He pulled out his hand phaser, set it to level eight, and aimed it at the chest of Lt. Biff (the one who ended up in transporter room three, to be known as Biff-3 for now).

"Wait, stop!" screamed Biff-3, his hands held out in a half-defensive, half-pleading gesture. "Don't I get a say in this?"

"Why would it matter to you," asked the chief. "You're both the same person. The transporter created an exact copy of, well, one of you, right down to the quantum states of your fundamental particles. I don't see why you're complaining." Biff-3 squeezed his eyes shut, and awaited the inevitable.

Aside from the silly ending, this very situation could have happened using the same phenomena we observed in the Star Trek canon. Is Biff-2 the same person as Biff-3?

Yes, up until the point where you flipped the coin and told Biff-3 of your decision that he was the one to get axed. You induced the difference between the two. The difference was not there to begin with.

Now here's a question back: would the story have proceeded any differently it if it was Biff-2 that was heads? If not, then the difference between them would still be unphysical by definition until you decided to break that symmetry.

Do you really think Biff-3 thinks so?

Why are his feelings relevant? Those are just millions of years of biological adaptation talking. People don't want to have their atoms thermally scattered, because final death is the usual outcome.

And you have utterly failed to explain why this is contradictory.

[DatBurnTho11]

This is a really cool conversation. I hope you don't mind my $0.02

I think the point that SCRawl was making (in that really fascinating story ) was not that there would be an overall difference on the larger scale whether Biff-2 or Biff-3 would survive the transporter incident, because as both acknowledged, they are exactly identical "right down to the quantum states". It's also besides the point that Biff-3 would not appreciate being killed by a phaser, as both acknowledge that there is a human aversion to being killed. In other words, the question of whether Biff-2 or Biff-3 is the same person is valid, but the crux of the issue revolves around Biff's contradictory feeling's about being dismantled.

I think the better comparison is Biff-1 and Biff-3. If Biff-1 was terminated by entering the matter stream, which he did, though grudgingly, willingly, then why wouldn't Biff-3 want to have himself killed by phaser?

You might say that Biff-1 knew that he would 'live on', in some sense in his transporter duplicate, and thus felt that the destruction of his body was acceptable. But this is the exactly dilemma being posed to Biff-3. Though Biff-1's transporter duplicate does not yet exist and Biff-2 is standing right next to Biff-3 during this conversation, the end result of each action is the same. In both situations, it is guaranteed that Biff will live on through this encounter, from the perspective of the external observer. Of course the story would not have proceeded any differently if Biff-2 would have died! But that is not the issue at all. The moral dilemna comes from the inconsistencies between the lieutenant's behavior between being transported and being phasered, though both would have resulted in his dismantlement.

Now of course Biff-3 has his feelings of "millions of years of biological adaptation talking", but then again, as you said yourself, the reason for this aversion to being disintegrated by phaser is that "final death is the usual outcome"! That's the issue exactly! Why does Biff-1 willingly enter the transporter that will result in his body being dismantled while Biff-3 resists his body being dismantled by phaser fire? Both will know that their consciousness will live on in another body!

You might say that an "artificial difference" was induced between Biff-2 and Biff-3 by their few seconds of divergent experiences. I guess that is a valid point, but I think it is far superseded by the issue of Biff(s) considering dismantlement by the transporter as acceptable while dismantlement by the phaser unacceptable. In other words, you could argue that Biff-2 and Biff-3 had slightly different 'souls' or 'streams of consciousness' or whatever and so Biff-3 didn't feel that his 'soul' would adequately live on in Biff-2. But to me that's just as much as an assumption as that which Biff-1 had to initially make when he consented to be dismantled hoping that his 'soul' would live on in his doppelganger, despite the fact that they would have divergent experiences as soon as his transporter duplicate walked off the platform!

Personally, I would never use a transporter. Just thinking about it freaks the hell out of me. But I do like the point made earlier about sleeping. We don't have any real evidence that the consciousness of dave98472 that woke up this morning is the same as that which fell asleep last night. But, I like to think that consciousness is an emergent property of stream of throught (helps me sleep at night), and that interrupting that stream of consciousness completely (brain death, molecular disassembly) results in the loss of that consciousness. Of course I can't have any evidence for it, because consciousness is an extremely abstract and subjective topic. But I do know that consciousness seems to result from brain activity. Though that still sounds slightly abstract, through reductionism, we can understand that it is ultimately the firing of certain synapses between neurons in the brain.

If this is true, you can definitely make a new person with the same arrangement of neurons, but that sequence of thought will need to start again (if you can even do that), and the old sequence of thought will be lost. In other words, from an external perspective nothing will have changed! That argument is completely irrelevant for this conversation! But from a personal perspective, as the person defined by a sequence of thoughts/feelings/etc. it would result in the end of my existence. Again, just my $0.02, and my opinion, I can't really give much more proof than that.

Anyway, continue the conversation. I will be reading eagerly.

[SCRawl]

<snipped, but referenced>

The new guy gets it -- what's your excuse, Wyrm?

[Wyrm]

I think the better comparison is Biff-1 and Biff-3. If Biff-1 was terminated by entering the matter stream, which he did, though grudgingly, willingly, then why wouldn't Biff-3 want to have himself killed by phaser?

Oh boy, here it comes. The 'live on' argument.

Now of course Biff-3 has his feelings of "millions of years of biological adaptation talking", but then again, as you said yourself, the reason for this aversion to being disintegrated by phaser is that "final death is the usual outcome"! That's the issue exactly! Why does Biff-1 willingly enter the transporter that will result in his body being dismantled while Biff-3 resists his body being dismantled by phaser fire?

Your argument is totally predictable, and I have answered this before. The transport process is reversable. Phaser disintegration is not. If you are dissolutioned in a transport stream, the process can be reversed and your life continues on as if it never was interrupted. It is therefore not a permanent cessation of life as is necessitated by "final death." The two processes are in no way comparable.

Both will know that their consciousness will live on in another body!

Strange but true — sort of. If you are a materialist as I am, then your consciousness does live on in the other body, period, as everything physical is copied with sufficient fidelity. Quite simply SCRawl's argument is that something is stripped from the perfect copy — some qualia, conscious essense, or something or other, but not inherent in the matter of the person or its arrangement. (It basically follows the major premises of a philosophical zombie, hence my use of them.) But that's a dualistic argument that has no foundation whatsoever. On the other hand, my argument is that these qualia/whatever is not stripped because there's nothing to strip away from the perfect copy. SCRawl's nontransferable consciousness is unverified, unphysical poppycock and no one should take it seriously.

There's also this funny thing that happens when you have perfect copy machines: the particular instances of the copied thing start to lose their distinctiveness. While you can tell there are two of them, you lose the ability to tell which one (if any) is "original" and which ones are "copies." This is because in order to decide whether something is a copy, you have to physically compare it against a standard —an exemplar— which is the original. Also, copies tend to degrade the more the copying is removed from that exemplar — twentieth generation copies are much less like the exemplar than the first generation copies. But with perfect copies, all the copies pass muster and are equivalent to the exemplar, and furthermore there is no generational degradation. You can choose any as the new exemplar and every one will pass muster, including the supposed original.

When this happens, the "original/copy" distinction, and along with it, "same/other" start to become blurred and start misbehaving. Is it really another body, or are all bodies in fact an instance of a platonic ideal, including the supposed "original"? Since your 'live on' argument uses an incoherent concept, it itself is incoherent.

You might say that an "artificial difference" was induced between Biff-2 and Biff-3 by their few seconds of divergent experiences. I guess that is a valid point, but I think it is far superseded by the issue of Biff(s) considering dismantlement by the transporter as acceptable while dismantlement by the phaser unacceptable.

Again, because transportation is reversable while the phaser is not reversable.

In other words, you could argue that Biff-2 and Biff-3 had slightly different 'souls' or 'streams of consciousness' or whatever and so Biff-3 didn't feel that his 'soul' would adequately live on in Biff-2. But to me that's just as much as an assumption as that which Biff-1 had to initially make when he consented to be dismantled hoping that his 'soul' would live on in his doppelganger, despite the fact that they would have divergent experiences as soon as his transporter duplicate walked off the platform!

'Souls' and the like are dualistic bullshit of which there is no evidence whatsoever, and I have absolutely no problems with breaks in 'streams of consciousness'. There's nothing of imporatance stripped away by the transporter because there's nothing of importance to be stripped away. Or rather, what SCRawl and you suppose is stripped is quite literally nothing at all.

Personally, I would never use a transporter. Just thinking about it freaks the hell out of me. But I do like the point made earlier about sleeping. We don't have any real evidence that the consciousness of dave98472 that woke up this morning is the same as that which fell asleep last night. But, I like to think that consciousness is an emergent property of stream of throught (helps me sleep at night), and that interrupting that stream of consciousness completely (brain death, molecular disassembly) results in the loss of that consciousness.

You can interrupt the stream of consciousness without inducing brain death. That's exactly what general anesthesia does. The brain lapses into a state that only the ignorant can call 'conscious'.

Of course I can't have any evidence for it,

You don't seem to recognize this as a problem, but it is.

because consciousness is an extremely abstract and subjective topic.

Real consciousness has quite observable salient features. We can detect it, and even interrupt it, yet we treat people with interrupted consciousnesses the same as people with uninterrupted conscousnesses.

That said, characterizing consciousness is difficult, I freely admit.

If this is true, you can definitely make a new person with the same arrangement of neurons, but that sequence of thought will need to start again (if you can even do that), and the old sequence of thought will be lost. In other words, from an external perspective nothing will have changed!

From every physical perspective, nothing has changed. This makes everything that could be changed literally unphysical. I don't believe in the unphysical: no evidence at all for it.

That argument is completely irrelevant for this conversation!

It is commendible that you at least recognize it.

But from a personal perspective, as the person defined by a sequence of thoughts/feelings/etc. it would result in the end of my existence. Again, just my $0.02, and my opinion, I can't really give much more proof than that.

Keep the 2¢.

====

The new guy gets it -- what's your excuse, Wyrm?

I find it interesting that you think I'm making excuses when you consistently fail to answer my questions. Like where in the world my supposed contradiction lies. Or what happens to the consciousness of a cold-sleeper.

[SCRawl]

Both will know that their consciousness will live on in another body!

Strange but true — sort of. If you are a materialist as I am, then your consciousness does live on in the other body, period, as everything physical is copied with sufficient fidelity. Quite simply SCRawl's argument is that something is stripped from the perfect copy — some qualia, conscious essense, or something or other, but not inherent in the matter of the person or its arrangement. (It basically follows the major premises of a philosophical zombie, hence my use of them.) But that's a dualistic argument that has no foundation whatsoever. On the other hand, my argument is that these qualia/whatever is not stripped because there's nothing to strip away from the perfect copy. SCRawl's nontransferable consciousness is unverified, unphysical poppycock and no one should take it seriously.

See, this is where you just don't get it. I don't say that anything is stripped via the transporter process -- not exactly. The guy that steps off the transporter pad (call him Biff-2 for now) is just as conscious (or self-aware, or whatever, I'm not sure I have the vocabulary to do it justice) as the guy that stepped on (call him Biff-1) at the sending end. Biff-2's existence is just as valid as Biff-1's. But if Biff-1 were to have some sort of immortal soul -- a concept I reject, by the way, with nothing but parsimony to back it up -- and asked him (in Valhalla, or the afterlife of your choice) five seconds after the transport process what happened, he'd say something like "I have no idea. I just stepped on the transporter, said 'energize', and ended up here. And, hey, look, there's like 5000 more of me here too, all younger than me by small increments, one for every time I took the transporter. Holy shit." But of course there would be no way to ask Biff-1 a question -- his journey ended, and was taken up by a perfect copy, some distance away, on a transporter pad, with no one the wiser.

The new guy gets it -- what's your excuse, Wyrm?

I find it interesting that you think I'm making excuses when you consistently fail to answer my questions. Like where in the world my supposed contradiction lies. Or what happens to the consciousness of a cold-sleeper.

Because your questions are all about picking nits, and I find them tiresome. And I don't find your inability to see my point interesting -- I find it frustrating, like when I try to teach my four-year-old how to pick up her toys when she's done with them.

I'll try with the two you mentioned most recently:

To your question about where your contradiction from that example lies, I thought it would be obvious. I brought up the example of the Rikers, since it best illustrates the fact that both copies cannot be the same person. At the instant just after transport, both are identical in all external respects save for their locations: Thomas on the planet, and William on whatever ship he was on. But if they really were identical, they would be completely interchangeable. If you were to exchange them a few moments after transport, each of them would probably think something like "hey what the hell, I was just on the bridge/planet, what am I doing here?" And yet, aside from a few minute changes due to their environments they are identical. Each one doesn't quite see it that way, though, since each is a self-aware (or sentient, or conscious, or whatever the right word is) being.

Regarding the frozen brain and continuity of consciousness, yeah, I don't know. When you refer to "cold-sleep", are you talking about some sort of sci-fi stasis for the purposes of long space flights? Or is there a real-world application I haven't heard of? My understanding of human body tissues and cold was that freezing people killed them. That doesn't sound particularly reversible to me.

[DatBurnTho11]

You are absolutely right Wyrm. There really is no physical evidence or experiment that would demonstrate any distinction between the original product and the duplicate product from a perfect replication machine. I do not believe this was ever in any doubt.

I think the primary disconnect between your two arguments stems from an irreconcilable difference in definitions for continued existence. This is most evident in this quote:

The transport process is reversable.

Now in one sense this is undeniable. You put in one dave98472 and you get one dave98472 out. The process of the destruction of a dave98472 in the starting platform is reversed by the creation of a dave98472 at the ending platform. Perfectly reversible. However, there is grounds for an argument saying this is not the same dave98472. That is not that they are in any way distinct, the original and duplicate could be completely identical without being the same.

Now I know this is starting to get into weak semantics, and if we would go through any hard empirical analysis it's obvious the materialist side would win. This is because no one would care if when you transport a wrench if the 'same' wrench would be brought up on the receiving end as long as it is identical. You can even bring up computers. If the computer is running some program (analogue to stream of consciousness) and you transport it, as long as you get an identical computer running the identical program with the identical data stored on its device, no one would care that it is the 'same'. If that is all you define consciousness as, not the undisrupted sequence of thoughts, but the identical physical structure required to produce those thoughts, then it is undeniable that transportation does not result in a loss of consciousness. And of course this is what is backed up by an analysis of evidence, physical experimentation, etc. because it relies on a concrete definition of continued existence rather than a more abstract one.

But, and I believe you ignored this form my post, or just dismissed it, someone else may have another definition for what constitutes his continued life and that would be the uninterrupted chain of thoughts. I may be totally wrong on this, but I think even the most severe sedation (if it doesn't bring brain death ) still has some form of brain activity which might be interpreted as continued thought. Personally I wouldn't freeze myself either, baring the same consideration. You might bring someone back to life that's practically identical to me in capacity to thought. But I don't think he would be the 'same' as me.

I think bringing up the word 'soul' did a real disservice to my argument and I apologize for being unclear. I believe that souls are the result of people's wishful thinking that they will live on past death, etc. That can be defined as 'dualistic nonsense', because it presumes that the mind, though it is somehow connected to the brain is not at all reliant upon the brain. It even goes further by saying that the mind, once 'freed', can go off and live an existence on its own. Actually my post would be completely defeated by the presence of a soul, in which case dying would just free my soul from its body and I would head off to the afterlife just fine, which is not what I meant by saying "end of existence".

So in short. Materialists can use a different definition of what constitutes life and then argue that life is not lost in transportation. I'm totally fine with that, that's your opinion. But if your definition of continuing existence is that it requires a stream of consciousness, then transporters would mean the end of one's existence.

[Kamakazie Sith]

See, this is where you just don't get it. I don't say that anything is stripped via the transporter process -- not exactly. The guy that steps off the transporter pad (call him Biff-2 for now) is just as conscious (or self-aware, or whatever, I'm not sure I have the vocabulary to do it justice) as the guy that stepped on (call him Biff-1) at the sending end. Biff-2's existence is just as valid as Biff-1's. But if Biff-1 were to have some sort of immortal soul -- a concept I reject, by the way, with nothing but parsimony to back it up -- and asked him (in Valhalla, or the afterlife of your choice) five seconds after the transport process what happened, he'd say something like "I have no idea. I just stepped on the transporter, said 'energize', and ended up here. And, hey, look, there's like 5000 more of me here too, all younger than me by small increments, one for every time I took the transporter. Holy shit." But of course there would be no way to ask Biff-1 a question -- his journey ended, and was taken up by a perfect copy, some distance away, on a transporter pad, with no one the wiser.

What's been bothering me is this whole Biff-1, 2, 3, etc. To me there isn't a 1, 2, or 3. There's Biff. Biff went in the transporter and Biff came out of the transporter. The examples used to support the 1, 2, 3 designations are transporter accidents which are not the normal function and are very very rare.

Biff isn't copied. He's changed from a state of matter to a state of energy and then back.

[Wyrm]

See, this is where you just don't get it. I don't say that anything is stripped via the transporter process -- not exactly. The guy that steps off the transporter pad (call him Biff-2 for now) is just as conscious (or self-aware, or whatever, I'm not sure I have the vocabulary to do it justice) as the guy that stepped on (call him Biff-1) at the sending end. Biff-2's existence is just as valid as Biff-1's.

Yes. This we agree, because for me Biff-2 is the same person as Biff-1. Can we table that, at least?

But if Biff-1 were to have some sort of immortal soul -- a concept I reject, by the way, with nothing but parsimony to back it up -- and asked him (in Valhalla, or the afterlife of your choice) five seconds after the transport process what happened, he'd say something like "I have no idea. I just stepped on the transporter, said 'energize', and ended up here. And, hey, look, there's like 5000 more of me here too, all younger than me by small increments, one for every time I took the transporter. Holy shit." But of course there would be no way to ask Biff-1 a question -- his journey ended, and was taken up by a perfect copy, some distance away, on a transporter pad, with no one the wiser.

And here's your unsupported assertion: that Biff-1's existence ended on the transport pad. You state this as if I actually agreed with this premise, when I don't — this is basically what the whole damn thread is about, and I've been on the other side of it! You don't get to do an end run around it and not get called on it, and you don't get to whine when I do call you out on it.

Further, you do nothing to back this argument of yours up but by the false premise of the discontinuity of Biff's consciousness on both sides of the transport, as if it meant a damn thing to me.

It's obvious to me that you have never been truly unconscious, while I have. The time spent unconscious is a blank — and I don't mean I see nothing but dark and feel nothing from my body or from my senses for some undefinable period of time, I mean that that the time I spent unconscious simply doesn't exist for me. One moment I was chatting with my dentist about text adventures, the next I snapped into awareness in the dentist's office and my wisdom teeth were removed. Same thing happened the next time I was anethetized.

Your brain knits together your experiences into your stream of consciousness, and it does it automatically and unconsciously — indeed, this knitting together is what seems the consciousness is, and would happen exactly the same way in the copy as it did in the original (appropriate cautions for "copy/original" apply). Your subjective consciousness (which you claim is severed during transport, but it seems not at any other time during life in gross defiance of the evidence and the definition of "consciousness") is almost certainly merely an artifact of how your brain puts its experiences together. In the copy, its brain will put together its experiences in exactly the same way and you would get an identical subjective consciousness. The journey is not over for Biff-1 because it is literally nothing but what has already been copied in perfection to Biff-2's brain.

This is what YOU don't get. This is what you directly have to answer instead of glossing over it as you have been doing.

I find it interesting that you think I'm making excuses when you consistently fail to answer my questions. Like where in the world my supposed contradiction lies. Or what happens to the consciousness of a cold-sleeper.

Because your questions are all about picking nits,

Bullshit. The loss of conscoiusness on an STL sleeper ship is obviously a big hole in your 'continued consciousness' argument, and you know it. That's why you avoided answering and making a lame excuse of a nit-pick when anyone with a brain could recognize it for what it was: a direct attack on your notion of perpetual continued consciousness. I challenged you repeatedly over what, exactly, physical doesn't get transferred to the copy, to your answer of borderline dualistic bullshit — statements that the mind exists and such, which in a materialistic universe would get transferred too as it is a manifestation of physical processes.

Not only that, I directly answered your fucking challenge about where the mind comes from in the brain, namely by pointing out how much of a loaded question it is —the false premise of its foundation— and then answering which region of the brain is most likely responsible for the gross properties of consciousness: the thalamic reticular nucleus, and the entire reticular activating system.

Do you get anything in that last part, moose brain? I answered your goddamned challenge! Now where's my fucking concession?

And I don't find your inability to see my point interesting -- I find it frustrating, like when I try to teach my four-year-old how to pick up her toys when she's done with them.

Your statement would be more convincing if I had not answered many if not all of your points in this very thread before you reentered it.

I'll try with the two you mentioned most recently:

To your question about where your contradiction from that example lies, I thought it would be obvious. I brought up the example of the Rikers, since it best illustrates the fact that both copies cannot be the same person.

Why? Because you've decided that they don't, even though I'm under no obligations to hold to your bullshit definitions?

At the instant just after transport, both are identical in all external respects save for their locations: Thomas on the planet, and William on whatever ship he was on.

The differences in their environments will immediately begin to differentate them, and thus will no longer be identical in physical form as the memories are encoded first in action potentials, and then in permanent structural changes in their brains.

But if they really were identical, they would be completely interchangeable. If you were to exchange them a few moments after transport, each of them would probably think something like "hey what the hell, I was just on the bridge/planet, what am I doing here?" And yet, aside from a few minute changes due to their environments they are identical.

A few moments is enough time to form memories and make the two Rikers unidentical, you fucking twat. Those few minute changes are directly germaine to the kind of transposition you propose, and thus they would be noticed by the Rikers using my definition of self.

And there's still nothing contradictory about my viewpoint so far. Where's the conclusion I must both deny and affirm at the same, as per the definition of a contradiction?

Each one doesn't quite see it that way, though, since each is a self-aware (or sentient, or conscious, or whatever the right word is) being.

If they were fucking camcorders that started operating immediately after the transport concluded, and then the camcorders were switched, then you can replay that small segment of tape and see something happend too. And this is for an inanimate piece of uninteligent hardware.

There's nothing contradictory here. I agree that they would have different experiences, because same person ≠ same experiences. I am the same person I was five years ago, yet I have accumulated five more years of experience more than me-five-years-ago. It only contradicts YOUR notions of self and person, but I'm not required to adhere to them because I have stated that they behave oddly in these situations and need refinement.

Regarding the frozen brain and continuity of consciousness, yeah, I don't know. When you refer to "cold-sleep", are you talking about some sort of sci-fi stasis for the purposes of long space flights? Or is there a real-world application I haven't heard of? My understanding of human body tissues and cold was that freezing people killed them. That doesn't sound particularly reversible to me.

Don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about, you twat. I'm talking about suspended animation, as would be implemented aboard STL sleeper ships. While it is fantastic technology, it's much less fantastic than transporters. And don't dodge the question and what it entailed: assuming that you could revive a body none the worse for wear after a thousand years of transport to another system in a sleeper ship, is the person who got out of the tube the same person who got in? Was he or she conscious during that time?

=====

You are absolutely right Wyrm. There really is no physical evidence or experiment that would demonstrate any distinction between the original product and the duplicate product from a perfect replication machine. I do not believe this was ever in any doubt.

And here you should have ended.

Now I know this is starting to get into weak semantics, and if we would go through any hard empirical analysis it's obvious the materialist side would win.

At this point I'm waiting for you to stop your argument, because... really, that's the end of it. Materialism is the only worldview the evidence supports, and you've already stated it would win.

But, and I believe you ignored this form my post, or just dismissed it, someone else may have another definition for what constitutes his continued life and that would be the uninterrupted chain of thoughts.

Of course I dismissed it! In real life, peoples' thoughts do get interrupted through trauma, disease or drugs (anesthesia), yet we still ascribe them the same personhood as people who have never experienced such things. Do you not see why this is a problem for any sort of definition of continued personhood?

I may be totally wrong on this, but I think even the most severe sedation (if it doesn't bring brain death ) still has some form of brain activity which might be interpreted as continued thought.

Mere action potentials zipping through the brain is not consciousness and does not constitute thought no matter how you slice it. You regain consciousness when your reticular activating system gets itself in order.

Personally I wouldn't freeze myself either, baring the same consideration. You might bring someone back to life that's practically identical to me in capacity to thought. But I don't think he would be the 'same' as me.

Again, stated without any proof whatsoever. Your brain is a self-organizing system. Your subjective consciousness is an artifact of the way your brain assembles your experiences. We've had people come out of deep comas before, and while they are impaired, this is attributed to original brain damage and brain atrophy from disuse — neither of which will occur in a suspended animation scenario. There is no original brain damage, and brain atrophy requires an animate brain.

So in short. Materialists can use a different definition of what constitutes life and then argue that life is not lost in transportation. I'm totally fine with that, that's your opinion.

Since it's the only position with any foundation, it's the only one tenable here.

But if your definition of continuing existence is that it requires a stream of consciousness, then transporters would mean the end of one's existence.

As would prepping them for surgery. No, mere brain activity does not constitute consciousness by any conventional definition.

[DatBurnTho11]

I have to hand it to you Wyrm, you really present a formidable argument for materialism. I'm not sure I can continue positing my argument about stream of consciousness continuity in this debate in opposition to the empirical data that can be brought up against it. It becomes especially difficult when you consider that any argument pressed against objective data analysis ultimately breaks down into semantics and personal opinion as I said earlier. I would have like to have seen your response to the 'identical but not the same' point I made in my last post, but I believe the definition you posit for materialism makes any significance in the difference between 'identical' and 'same' moot.

As I am really not knowledgeable enough on the "conventional definition" of consciousness, I will not press the point. I'll concede and contentedly watch along the sidelines.

[Rossum]

After reading Wyrms above post, I get the impression that transporter technology (as seen in Star Trek) would immediately create an ethical and philosophical debate which would eventually win out towards the materialism pesrspective that favors the idea that transporters don't result in the destruction of the individual. Or at least it would strip away another one of humanities illusions regarding the self.


Transporter technology has a great number of benefits or potential uses such as moving people to or from orbit, or allowing safe medical operations that are normally impossible, or even the potential to duplicate people, alter/repair DNA, or make people younger to fight off the effects of age.

People who make use of this would have an evolutionary advantage over those who refuse the technology. If you want to move from Earth to a colony on another planet then you would either have to take the Transporter or use a more expensive shuttle during the trip to get on the ship to travel there. Likewise, there may be treatments for diseases or injuries that a medical transporter could provide that are difficult or risky to do otherwise. A person who makes use of Transporter technology in a way that doesn't kill, disable, or sterilized them (which are a problem but in the series are reltivly rare and a decent society would work to prevent them) should be able to live longer and have children on planets that those who refuse Transporter technology would be unable to access.

Thus, from an evolutionary standpoint, using Transporters is a good thing because it helps the organism travel far enough and live long enough to continue and spread the species to areas previously unavailable. It could be likened to the use of anesthetics, surgery, or vaccinations. Such things can be painful, uncomfortable, and occasionally have complications but the benefits on the whole far outweigh the occasional drawbacks. Those who refuse to make use of them are free to do so and simply don't get the benefits while not being subject to the drawbacks.

Granted when I say 'from an evolutionary standpoint' I fully recognize that Earth has a wide variety of species like salmon, praying mantises, or octopi whos reproductive cycle directly or indirectly results in their death. If by some chance Transporters do in fact 'kill' the person entering the device then at least the person exiting the device remains genetically human and possesses all the knowledge and skills of the original. If you were given the chance to emigrate to a newly colonized planet where you could marry, raise a family, and potentially spread humanity to another world to create a new future with unlimited potential... and there was the 'risk' that stepping through the Transporter to send you there would result in the cessation of your consciousness and a copy of yourself would raise a family and so on... would you step through the Transporter?

In short, I would argue that if Transporters at the least help continue the species and culture of the organism being Transported then the individuals illusion of self can take a back seat. Or to be more precise, people willing to make use of the technology could spread farther and be healthier than those who refuse and thus their descendants would be more numerous and widespread. If you value your illusion of self more than you value propagating your family line on other planets (or whatever other activities Transporter use would allow) then feel free to stay home and let other people do their thing.


Plus, we are constantly learning new things about the brain and developing more complex AIs. An AI that runs on a computer could be programmed to have all the thoughts, personality, and dreams of a human, and if the computer it runs on is switched off then it would be even more inactive than the human brain then we go to sleep. Would we consider the instance of the AI that starts up when the computer is turned back on to be a separate AI and that turning the previous one off was an act of murder? Or would we accept that the occasional deactivation of the AIs operating computer is necessary for maintaining and repairing its hardware?

I admit that I personally would be a bit wary of stepping through a Transporter... at the very least as wary as I would be stepping into an airplane. There is the risk that something could go wrong, and there is the fact that continuation of consciousness concept does kind of bug my illusion of self.

I mean, the only way to really 'verify' if consciousness is destroyed in the Transport process would actually be to locate the consciousness and keep track of 'where it goes' during the Transport process. If you can actually find some kind of weird afterlife where the souls of the dead go and you see that there are hundreds of copies of people who use the Transporter along with just one copy of people who don't use the transporter then there are still some serious philisophical implications and concerns that make the Transporters seem tame in comparison. Actually, if a persons soul goes to Hell every time the lay down to sleep, or go into a coma, or get knocked out, or get anesthetized for surgery and they grow a new one when they wake up then the idea of an immortal soul and Transporter copies becomes even less of a problem in comparison. Or better yet, if there is a Hell or a heaven... would that actually make you want to use Transporters less?

Imagine, humans are all going to die anyway regardless if or not they use Transporters or not. If using the Transporter kills you painlessly and sends your 'soul' to the afterlife then hey... you died painlessly and you still have an instance of yourself in the living world doing whatever it is that you were doing before. When the hairy red devils with bull horns and bat wings and big pitchforks try dragging you off for your eternal torment then you might run into several dozen or hundred of your exact copies in the same circle of ironic punishment that you are being dragged off to. Plus, in a little while, you might get another copy of yourself tossed into the same lava-filled dungeon that you are being kept in.

Congratulations! If you happen to like yourself then you've got a huge number of friends to keep you company in the horrible mockery of justice that is the afterlife! Heck, once you get a few thousand of yourselves down there you can start working on an escape plan! Have everybody working on lockpicking and eventually one of your soul-copies should be able to escape and free the others. You could form your own army and rush the devils when they are dragging in your 5,782nd instance of you for punishment. Once your army is free, you can search for more Transporter users and bust them out of Hell. Soon an army of the dammed numbering in the billions could be freed... many of them would be in the military or whatever other organization makes heavy use of Transporter technology. Alot of them would be copies of eachother... could be some problems as a result of communication but still that's a heckofa of a lot more warm bodies than would be in Hell without Transporters making a mess of the human life cycle.


But hey, that above wankfest assumes that humans do have immortal souls that care about what happens to them after they die. If we don't have immortal souls then I assume we wouldn't care what happens to us if we die... but our friends and loved ones would be able to see an instance of our material bodies that has a hopefully decent paying job on a space ship, or had started a home on a newly colonized planet, or has stepped out of the medical transporter that removed all of our cancer cells.


I guess what I'm saying is that Transporters do have some risks and questions about them, but the risks are technical in nature and should be solved with science while the questions are philosophical in nature and would probably be 'solved' by religion. Trying to comprehend how the human brain works tends to make the average humans brain hurt... so we would almost prefer thinking that we have immortal souls that get tortured by demons forever than to consider that our thoughts and dreams are the byproduct of an oversized collection of nerve cells mindlessly rewiring itself.

[ThomasP]

This is always a fun discussion. I think this part sums it up best from my POV:

Your brain knits together your experiences into your stream of consciousness, and it does it automatically and unconsciously — indeed, this knitting together is what seems the consciousness is, and would happen exactly the same way in the copy as it did in the original (appropriate cautions for "copy/original" apply). Your subjective consciousness (which you claim is severed during transport, but it seems not at any other time during life in gross defiance of the evidence and the definition of "consciousness") is almost certainly merely an artifact of how your brain puts its experiences together. In the copy, its brain will put together its experiences in exactly the same way and you would get an identical subjective consciousness. The journey is not over for Biff-1 because it is literally nothing but what has already been copied in perfection to Biff-2's brain.

Awareness is, objectively, nothing but a pattern of data expressed in neurons. We cling to it because all our intuitions and self-preservation instincts tell us that it's important, but as with Wyrm's example of going under for anesthesia, those intuitions are also an illusion.

I think in light of this the question is not whether a transporter kills you (I think that you can arrive at different answers for different values of "kill"). To me the question is whether or not "being killed" by a transporter matters. Even if you are, what does it matter? The information and process that is "you" stops and is then restarted. It seems horrific intuitively, even though objectively there is no difference.

In practice I can't see any real objective way to say that there's any relevant difference. It might offend religious and spiritual sensitivities, but I think in the presence of such technologies (or related issues like mind-uploading and duplication) it would quickly become an afterthought. A lot of "squick" things can be overcome with familiarity.

[SCRawl]

See, this is where you just don't get it. I don't say that anything is stripped via the transporter process -- not exactly. The guy that steps off the transporter pad (call him Biff-2 for now) is just as conscious (or self-aware, or whatever, I'm not sure I have the vocabulary to do it justice) as the guy that stepped on (call him Biff-1) at the sending end. Biff-2's existence is just as valid as Biff-1's. But if Biff-1 were to have some sort of immortal soul -- a concept I reject, by the way, with nothing but parsimony to back it up -- and asked him (in Valhalla, or the afterlife of your choice) five seconds after the transport process what happened, he'd say something like "I have no idea. I just stepped on the transporter, said 'energize', and ended up here. And, hey, look, there's like 5000 more of me here too, all younger than me by small increments, one for every time I took the transporter. Holy shit." But of course there would be no way to ask Biff-1 a question -- his journey ended, and was taken up by a perfect copy, some distance away, on a transporter pad, with no one the wiser.

What's been bothering me is this whole Biff-1, 2, 3, etc. To me there isn't a 1, 2, or 3. There's Biff. Biff went in the transporter and Biff came out of the transporter. The examples used to support the 1, 2, 3 designations are transporter accidents which are not the normal function and are very very rare.

I keep using the instance of the duplication of Riker and other transporter accidents because it illustrates my point best. We know that these things have happened, and their repercussions lead us to new avenues of thought.

To recap: in the event that I keep referring to, one Riker was beamed back to his ship, and the other was left to rot on the planet. At least one of these individuals is not the same as the person who was asking to be beamed up in the first place. How do I know this? Well, let's simplify: say I have two apples, which are completely identical in every test I can throw at them. I pick up one of them. It is identical to the other apple. But is it the same apple? You could say "yes", but then how could it be the same apple, since the other apple is still sitting where I left it. They are fully interchangeable, since they are identical in every way, but I submit that the one I'm holding is not the same as the one I did not pick up. If I eat that apple, the other apple will still be there, because, although the apples are identical, what affects one does not necessarily affect the other. This is a purely physical difference.

If we get back to the Rikers, clearly one Riker was left on the planet and the other departed on his ship, each ignorant of each other's existence for several years. The one later called Thomas is not the same as the one who was continuously referred to as William, because one is on the ship and one is on the planet. At the moment of transport they are identical in every way, and fully interchangeable, but they cannot be the same entity. If Thomas were to kill himself by falling down a chasm, William would still continue to exist, because he isn't Thomas. If you subdivide the universe into two portions, defined as "on Thomas' planet" and "everything else", they will each fall into different circles on that Venn diagram. They are distinct individuals in that sense: indistinguishable, but distinct.

This leads us to another conclusion: since they are not the same person, at least one of them is a copy, if only because they can't both be the original? There was, after all, just the one William Riker when he put on his space-underwear on that fateful morning, and by the end of the day there were two. At most one of them is the original, I have just reasoned, so what is the other one, and which one is which? Both are clearly self-aware beings, possessing free will, and are equally valid instances of that person. It would be no less a crime to kill either one of them, and yet at least one was just energy the day before.

Biff isn't copied. He's changed from a state of matter to a state of energy and then back.

You don't see that as a copy? If you reduce a person to energy and reconstitute them some distance away -- which is the mechanism that the transporter is supposed to use -- how is that not copying them? Here's the step-by-step process:

1. Step on pad (optional)

2. Transporter machine scans your body in about a second or two, reading where every particle is in your body, what it's doing, and what its quantum state is. (This would normally violate the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, but they've apparently found a way around this limitation.)

3. Transporter turns your entire body into some sort of energy state, or breaks it down into its fundamental particles, and beams this soup down (or up, depending on where the traveller is going). This part is unclear, at least to me, as to exactly what it's supposed to mean, but I don't think that knowing the exact mechanism is necessary to proceed.

4. Transporter takes the energy (or particles, or whatever) that you were composed of and uses the pattern from step 2 to create a new you.

My position has always been that at the end of step 3 you're dead, and that step 4 just creates another person who is indistinguishable from you, but, as I stated earlier, is still a distinct individual. Obviously, if you never proceed to step 4, you're clearly dead or, at least, not alive; we've seen them do that in TOS at least once -- Chekhov suggested leaving someone in mid-transport forever, in what he called "nonexistence". Obviously, though, you believe that the individual can survive between step 3 and step 4. But let's try a little thought experiment, shall we? If the transporter operator got into the Romulan ale a little before his shift and decided to start churning out multiple copies. It must be possible: the William/Thomas Riker episode tells us that much. So which one is the "real" person? By "real", I mean the distinct individual who started out at step 1.

(If there's some misunderstanding about "real", let's try this thought experiment. Let's say that I create an exact copy of you, in the manner of the transporter, and then disintegrate you -- the one I copied, that is. You would still be very dead, yes?)

The only way I can conceive of an individual surviving between steps 3 and 4 is if it is possible for that mass of particles (or energy, or whatever) to be alive, and I just can't make myself believe that. Maybe in the Trek universe it's possible, but without a physical structure to organize things it doesn't make sense, at least not to me. Energy just doesn't organize itself, after all.

[SCRawl]

I think in light of this the question is not whether a transporter kills you (I think that you can arrive at different answers for different values of "kill"). To me the question is whether or not "being killed" by a transporter matters. Even if you are, what does it matter? The information and process that is "you" stops and is then restarted. It seems horrific intuitively, even though objectively there is no difference.

That's probably the most level-headed thing I've read so far in this thread.

[SCRawl]

It's obvious to me that you have never been truly unconscious, while I have. The time spent unconscious is a blank — and I don't mean I see nothing but dark and feel nothing from my body or from my senses for some undefinable period of time, I mean that that the time I spent unconscious simply doesn't exist for me. One moment I was chatting with my dentist about text adventures, the next I snapped into awareness in the dentist's office and my wisdom teeth were removed. Same thing happened the next time I was anethetized.

Au contraire. I have had something very similar to your experience. I can recall counting backwards from ten as they passed the nitrous oxide (and, I'm told, injected the sodium pentathol), fighting just to see how long I could stay awake. I don't think I got past eight. My next thought was something like "am I under yet?", though of course the better part of an hour had passed, and my wisdom teeth were in a jar. I believe I know what it means to be unconscious.

Am I the same individual now as I was before I got into that chair? I can't say that I know for certain. I do feel like the same person, though of course having lost consciousness I can't verify it with perfect accuracy. I know that it would seem exactly the same to me, the post-operative SCRawl, whether or not the self-awareness of the person I was came to an end that day.

Your brain knits together your experiences into your stream of consciousness, and it does it automatically and unconsciously — indeed, this knitting together is what seems the consciousness is, and would happen exactly the same way in the copy as it did in the original (appropriate cautions for "copy/original" apply). Your subjective consciousness (which you claim is severed during transport, but it seems not at any other time during life in gross defiance of the evidence and the definition of "consciousness") is almost certainly merely an artifact of how your brain puts its experiences together. In the copy, its brain will put together its experiences in exactly the same way and you would get an identical subjective consciousness. The journey is not over for Biff-1 because it is literally nothing but what has already been copied in perfection to Biff-2's brain.

This is what YOU don't get. This is what you directly have to answer instead of glossing over it as you have been doing.

I believe I do get it. And as I answered just above, I can't say that I know for certain whether or not this discontinuity takes place during a more mundane loss of consciousness. I do know that at least it has a chance of not happening, whereas for a brain which has been disintegrated and re-copied from a stored pattern it doesn't have the least chance of surviving in the manner I've been wrangling over.

Bullshit. The loss of conscoiusness on an STL sleeper ship is obviously a big hole in your 'continued consciousness' argument, and you know it. That's why you avoided answering and making a lame excuse of a nit-pick when anyone with a brain could recognize it for what it was: a direct attack on your notion of perpetual continued consciousness. I challenged you repeatedly over what, exactly, physical doesn't get transferred to the copy, to your answer of borderline dualistic bullshit — statements that the mind exists and such, which in a materialistic universe would get transferred too as it is a manifestation of physical processes.

What, you're pissy because I don't like your red herring? I have no idea about what mechanism you're discussing for your sleeper ship. Trek doesn't use one, and if they did, the basic method is not clear to me. Do they really freeze the bodies solid, creating, as you put it, "inert brain tissue" (or something like it -- I can't be bothered to find it right now)? If that's it, then everything I know tells me that that kills people, as in permanently and irrevocably dead. Or do they just cool them down so that most metabolic processes stop? And is there any supplemental "might as well be magic" technology involved? At least for the transporter we know and can agree on the basic premise; for the sleeper STL ship, you want me to make some sort of admission based on a vague mechanism. The hole you've created in my argument is an imaginary one, and I'm under no obligation to fill it for you.

And the word "consciousness" is not completely suitable. I know that I've used it repeatedly, but the problem is that I don't have the precise word to describe what I mean for what is lost when a transporter process occurs. Okay, in one sense, a mathematical one, you could say that nothing is lost: guy1 steps on pad, transport, guy2 steps off other pad. Guy2 will be an individual in the same manner as guy1, except that guy1 stopped being an individual at the word "energize". There's an individual at all times, except for the brief moment during transport when there's only ones and zeroes, so both sides of the equation balance.

Not only that, I directly answered your fucking challenge about where the mind comes from in the brain, namely by pointing out how much of a loaded question it is —the false premise of its foundation— and then answering which region of the brain is most likely responsible for the gross properties of consciousness: the thalamic reticular nucleus, and the entire reticular activating system.

Do you get anything in that last part, moose brain? I answered your goddamned challenge! Now where's my fucking concession?

In other words, it's your best guess. Maybe even a good guess. But neuroscience as a discipline doesn't know which part of the brain contains the mind, probably because there isn't just one part, like you already mentioned in your "gotcha" response. Mine was always a sucker's bet; you took it, and thought you could bluff me off the pot. Nice try.

At the instant just after transport, both are identical in all external respects save for their locations: Thomas on the planet, and William on whatever ship he was on.

The differences in their environments will immediately begin to differentate them, and thus will no longer be identical in physical form as the memories are encoded first in action potentials, and then in permanent structural changes in their brains.

The more fundamental difference is that, since both are individuals, they are not completely interchangeable. If I offer two completely identical Wyrms -- let's say that it's you and a perfect copy of you standing next to each other -- an apple, only one can have it, which means that the other one can't. Again, the situations are reversible if you look at things in a merely mathematical way: one of the Wyrms got an apple. But if you're not the one who got the apple, is it the same to you, since you don't have an apple and the other one does? Do you not see how this makes them not the same person, thus causing the contradiction I accused you of making?

You know, I think I've come closer to understanding the nuances of your position. I believe that some of our differences have been more about nomenclature than substance, though of course you're free to disagree. Like you, I am a materialist, and I never stated or meant to imply that there was anything supernatural to the existence of the human mind. But individualism in the sense I've described in this post (and a couple of posts ago) does exist, and is the basis for my lining up on the "yes" side to the question in the thread title.