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Lego robot controlled by artificial worm brain developed by OpenWorm project
(www.ibtimes.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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You're coming at this from a slightly askew angle. Consciousness is holographic - that is, it's complex behavior arising in the interaction of a more complex system. There's nothing "more" to it than what we see. The transporters from startrek, which destroy then reproduce exactly, would change nothing about your experience. You're just a complex arrangement of atoms, and it doesnt matter where that arrangement occurs so long as it's unique. There is no "you", there's just "stuff" stuck together in a way that lets it think that it can think about itself. A perfect reproduction would result in the same entity, perfectly reproduced.
It would, but I remain convinced that the continuity of my experience would end, same as if I died, and the entity who came out the other side would believe itself to be me, and believe itself to be unscathed, but actually exist only until the next time it got into a transporter, when the cycle would happen again.
why? what property is altered that would 'end continuity'? kinda just sounds like a personal delineation.. a personal preference. like being annoyed at being 'interrupted'.
Think of an alternative scenario, not transportation but rather duplication. The original stays where it was, but a copy gets created elsewhere. To the copy, it will seem as if it got transported there. To the original, nothing will have happened.
Now you kill the original.
The only difference is the timing of ending the original.
Ah, but it wouldn't be a copy of the original. In a hypothetical star-trek transporter accident that results in a duplicate, there would be an instant of creation where the dupe and original would be truly identical - and then the question would be which one of those two is 'you'? They'd be experiencing identical things, so how could you tell them apart? What would even be the point, they're identical, there is by definition no difference between them. The differences would only come once the duplicate is exposed to different (for lack of a better term) 'external stimuli' than the original, like different angles of seeing the transporter room or the sensation of suddenly and rapidly growing a goatee. Your perception wouldn't continue with the duplicate because your experience would be different than that of the duplicate's (for example, you wouldn't have mysteriously grown a goatee).
If you destroyed the original and then made the duplicate, it would start at that moment of total equivalence, but there would be no deviation. There'd just be one version, that was identical to the original, moving forward through time. 'You' would just go on continuing to be you. Consciousness isn't a 'thing' - it's not magic, its just a weird state that arises in sufficiently complex systems. You and I and everyone else in this thread aren't special, we're just extremely densely packed networks that have the ability to refer to themselves as an abstract concept.
It's a similar thing to the classic "But how do I know that what I see as the color green is what you see as the color green" question. The answer is that the "color green" that we see isn't real, 'green' is just a nerve impulse that hits a network. Each photoreceptor just sends a signal. If we were computers the world would be represented as an array of values, which results in the much clearer "How do I know what I see as G_101.34 is what you see as G_101.34" just isn't quite as punchy a question.