I don’t understand where the “paradox“ part comes in:<p>You have a mind and are conscious. You now create a copy of your mind and let it run on some other hardware, e.g. the teleported body. You are still conscious in your old body and a new entity is created in the other body. You can also create ten new copies, with ten consciousnesses , you will still be conscious in your old body. You now destroy your body - you’re dead.<p>I surely don’t think Kirk has a great job.
When you reboot a computer, is it the same program running or is it a new program that simply has access to the previous program's stored memory?<p>When you wake up in the morning, are you the same person who went to sleep, or merely a person with access to that past person's memories?<p>Indeed, besides your memory, which could just as easily have been created from a copy of you, is there any evidence of your conscious existence before this infinitesimal moment? Who is to say that a new iteration of you isn't created with every cascade of firing neurons and immediately destroyed with the next?
In my current understanding, after studying material from some "consciousness explorers (Waldo Vieira, Joshua David Stone, Ingo Swann, George King, Edgar Cayce, Jane Roberts, Dolores Cannon, Robert Monroe, and others)", consciousness is a multilayer and very very complex system.<p>Some of those layers reside in the brain, some exist independently from the brain and remain for eternity even after the brain shuts down.<p>In that sense there is no paradox at all. The machine would only be able to copy a few "layers" of consciousness. The resulting copy of you would be an empty shell because the "master layers" can't be copied, as they're made of "data" that isn't "finite".<p>Just my view. This is not absolutely verified by Science, and for me, it will take a long time to happen. Even then, there are some scientific experiments that validate, in part, this view: Controlled astral projection experiments, controlled remote viewing experiments etc.
My favorite thought experiment when it comes to consciousness is: if you could replace your brain’s cells, one at a time, with nanomachines that mimic the function of the original cell, at what point do you die?<p>Or do you stay conscious, and stay you, but with an artificial brain?<p>Ship of Theseus with nanotechnology basically :)
That paradox implies that it's possible (even theoretically) to "records your molecular composition" and then "re-creates you ... each atom in exactly the same relative position". However, my understanding is that such things are not possible because of quantum Uncertainty principle - one cannot simply discard atom's momentum, as that would kill person being recorded, IMHO.<p>Doesn't that solves the paradox, does it?
The premise is already wrong. Any kind of copy mechanism will be imperfect. Even if we just consider classical physics (which is obviously a very coarse approximation), there is no mechanism that could scan every atom of your body at precisely the same time. Invariably, there will be an intervall ("all atoms have been scanned between t0 and t1"). Now relatively basic math tells us that the development of a complex dynamic system can change arbitrarily with small changes in the starting parameters. Maybe there could be an argument about the statistical behavior of the system (for instance, it is very unlikely that the copy would immediately lose an arm or a leg), but the state of mind would definitely not be identical.
This also should work backwards, temporally, if you want to look at time linearly.<p>Parfit's extrapolation and commentary on morality is dubious, however there are no citations on this, so maybe the author(s) are projecting?<p>That aside, it's a big responsibility either way.<p>From a societal perspective, the UFP has probably had a lot of time to structure rigid laws and clauses to protect its citizens. Starfleet has a non-interference prerogative (a little ironic) which suggests their perspective as a society has shifted to accommodate the tele-tech.<p>From a moral perspective Robert Angier can swing any direction for his murder or suicide whereas Sam Bell is most definitely a victim of murder.<p>But from a personal perspective, is Simon Jarrett still at the bottom of the ocean, his battery draining until the inevitable collapse? Or is he among the stars with new friends and a new sense of liberty?<p>I would argue both, but only if Jarrett is cognizant of his actions. If Jarrett understands that he is condemning himself, then both Jarrett and Jarrett share a personal responsibility to each other.<p>Perhaps Jarrett is envious that Jarrett gets to live a full and happy life, and perhaps Jarrett feels guilty about this, and the personal duality persists. Maybe Jarrett accepts the decision he made to send himself to space, but Jarrett is still guilty. Is Jarrett still responsible for leaving Jarrett to die?<p>"what matters" is almost entirely consistent, but establishes a negotiable dissonance where infinite Jarretts have a social bond within the same stream of consciousness.
I don't see any paradox here. The principle could be the same as in computer science: You can move data either by copying or referencing. In a world that having teleportation (like MMO games, or real-world if we figure it out somehow) the principle should not be any different.<p>1. Moving by copy: Create new data which looks exactly the same (deep copy), and put the data in desired new address. So teleporting by copy is just create the exact same character in the new position, and then make the old one disappear.<p>2. Moving by reference: The data is the same, it's the pointer to the address we're updating. So teleporting by reference is like there's an external table of characters, and the world is just referencing them with positions. Teleportation is a process that originally the position that points to the character was A, then the teleportation creates a new position B, and reference the exact same character and then remove position A.<p>In short expect(character).toDeelEqual(teleportedCharacter) should always be true, but expect(character).toBe(teleportedCharacter) should be true if it's referencing, but false if it's copying.<p>Although it could be either way I don't see any paradoxes in both.
The Machine: <a href="https://existentialcomics.com/comic/1" rel="nofollow">https://existentialcomics.com/comic/1</a>
There is no paradox.<p>The copies are independent persons.<p>Not only do you not get into the same river twice, it's also always a different person from one moment to the next.
A concept, that of granular time, by the way, which also is just a tool for the brain to make the outside world easier to navigate.<p>The sense of temporally overlapping unity of consciousness is a useful trick of the body to think of itself as an acting subject in its model of the world.
The agent of the body's interests in it.<p>In the brain, there is no distinction between software and hardware.
If you build a machine whose software rewires the hardware and the hardware rewrites its software in real time under the influence of the outside world and some, over thousands of generations more or less hardwired structures, you get closer to what the brain and mind do and are.<p>So, sorry no uploading of a somehow separate consciousness into a machine.
Even if possible, you would have two beings.
One still pure social/wetware. One, the 'copy' of the former, ended up in an artificial hell.
This whole thing of what's you and what's not you, we may be discovering the real mccoy at some point. Whether if we are really actually a new person every morning, just reloaded with the old guy's stuff, or not. And surgeries and walking up from them, maybe as a new person as well.<p>I'm not sure it will be of any importance, just like we * have * human rights and yet there's still millions of humans living out there without human rights.
>Parfit's conclusion is similar to David Hume's view and also to the view of the self in Buddhism<p>This comment is odd to me, because the idea that the self tracks similar physical bodies seems to me like the <i>opposite</i> of my intuitive idea of reincarnation (not that I'm a Buddhist).<p>If you are reincarnated, you are completely different and yet the same soul, right?<p>It's like a complete inverse of this idea some people have that interchangeable bodies share a soul.
I like Sean Carroll's post from 2009 on this topic (and some comments there are interesting):<p><a href="https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2009/12/15/who-are-you/" rel="nofollow">https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2009/12/15/who-are...</a>
The Parfit version is one of the central ideas expressed in Douglas Hofstadter's "I Am A Strange Loop", which is a loose followup to "Godel, Escher, Bach" except centered around Hofstadter's ideas about consciousness and "life". I personally was a little cold on I Am A Strange Loop despite being a great lover of GEB, but I would recommend the book to others who liked GEB, and the Parfit short story stuck with me.
Your are comprised of atoms. You drink some vodka and those atoms don’t <i>affect</i> you, they <i>become</i> you. Then you piss them out. Well, you piss yourself out and flush yourself away.
Matter/energy transportation (Star Trek style) would likely kill you and then create a clone of you at the destination that would think it is you. Dimensional transport (Stargate style) is the only type of teletransportation that I would consider. It might also be easier just to tell people to watch The Prestige to understand this.