this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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"As far as you are concerned"
Correction: "as far as anyone else is concerned."
Consciousness IS continuity. If you are disentigrated and a perfect clone pops up somewhere to replace you... you died. Your current stream of consciousness ended and a perfect copy replaced you.
As far as all external observers are concerned it's still you. But from your own perspective? Well you won't have one anymore, you'll be dead.
...But the -me- that just popped into existence isn't going to perceive a gap in continuity at all. It may be a new -me-, but it has all the memories and experiences that -I- had just prior to being disintegrated. From the perspective of the new -me- there's no change at all.
Are you the same person as the person that went to sleep last night? How would you know that you weren't replaced by a clone with precisely the same memories and experiences? Or a clone that thinks that it has the same memories and experiences? I can remember last night, but can I prove that my memories are accurate?
While I agree with you it would -for me- still depend on how the process works. Suppose the new copy needs to be compared with the original after being constituted for safety reasons. So the original doesn't get destroyed before the copy is created. So for an instant there will be 2 'yous'. That makes jt less desirable for me. Now suppose the verification time -either due to technical or administrative purposes- takes minutes or hours? At that point I would not step into a transporter.
The fact that a clone would be seamlessly picking up my stream of consciousness after I die would be little consolation to me.
Sleep may be similar from a philosophical or external point of view. But I'm not sold that lack consciousness during sleep is in the same league as completely destroying, and then, rebuilding it.
Seriously tho, why does it matter? If you are annihilated and a down to the quark exact duplicate is created, what's the difference?
No difference for the rest of the universe, but the difference between life and death to my current stream of consciousness.
Imagine if the teleporter malfunctioned and created the duplicate on the other end but failed to disentigeate you. A worker notices you're still in the machine and says, "oops sorry, had a malfunction on this end. Give us a minute to fix the issue and we'll destroy you. No worries though, 'you' made it out the other end."
Wouldn't you do everything in your power to get out of that machine before they could fix it and kill you?
Yeah but that happens when you sleep
I'm not convinced they're at all the same. Consciousness may go dormant during sleep, and you may not remember it, but it's still a continuous, uninterrupted, stream of electricity.
This kind of teleportation would completely snuff out that fire and replace it with an identical one at another location. It's not the same as sleep.