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I double down and transport over regardless of the dilemma, and don’t pull the lever. Is that immoral of me? I don’t know… it is me?
I transport back and presume that all these choices were done by two other people, not me.
Will you even have free will once you are ported over?
Well, you never had free will to begin with, so…
Y’know, the more I think about free will as a religous concept, the more I’m convinced it’s supposed to be an allegory for how to treat others, like a more convoluted Golden Rule. The source was shifted to “God” simply to make the garbage people that don’t normally care about others hesitate before they just ignore others’ advice on how to treat people.
The reasoning is pretty simple: Nobody can actually do anything they want because others will interfere. Individuals restrict others’ freedom all the time. If you’re restricting others freedoms, you’re doing an even worse version of judging others. The Bible pretty clearly says to leave such critical stuff that idiots can screw up in God’s hands, because idiots can and will screw it up.
Same with free will. Peoples’ freedom is, according to religous teachings, a gift from God. They describe such things as “from God” solely because idiots respect their flavor of Sky Daddy over other human beings.
If it’s actually a gift from God, then it makes little sense that humans can simply remove a gift an all-powerful diety bestows. So… either historic humans are insanely stupid and bad at logic … or it’s actually an allegory for not trying to control others so much.
So Andy Weir’s “The Egg”. It’s a good philosophy.
My concept of free will and determinism is that there are both in a way. What we see manifest at our level as free will is at its core determinism, driven by how the environment has evolved our personality to react and think about things. When asked to think of a color we quickly come up with a choice, made by either a preference for or a recent memory of, yet if asked when we actually chose that color at the thinking level we can’t find a single point where there were others to pick from, we just “came up with it”. Our free will is a conglomeration of things beyond our control.
That’s pretty much exactly why I think it’s more about a lesson on how to treat others. Humans fundamentally believe they’re free to choose things, regardless of their religious affiliation. We always tell ourselves we want this and that, and decided x and y, etc. Regardless of the reality of free will, we all think we have it.
The only genuine purpose of saying Free Will is a gift from God I can think of is simply to make the dummies that want to force behavior on others hesitate about stepping on “God’s domain”.
It really depends on how the teleportation works. If it’s folding spacetime to make it so that I can step instantaneously through the gap, that’s definitely still me. If it’s just like a portal cutting temporarily through Hell ala WH40k or Event Horizon, it’s probably still me, but I might be suffering from demonic posession. If I’m being completely atomized, converted to electricity, and transmitted to the other tube to be reconstituted as an exact copy, then I am a copy.
IMO, even the digitally sent person could be the original, depending on the philosophical concepts being applied (same ship of theseus style questions). If it’s just the process of reading your atoms to that level of detail that makes you disappear, and the only information that is literally ‘you’ is being transferred over and reconstituted in a similarly one-way-by-function process, it’s almost more of a phase shift to digital and back than a copy. Pretty much just side-stepping matter’s inability to travel without acceleration.
If the machine is basically ‘digesting’ the person only to send over the results for reproduction, though… that’s definitely a copy. Pretty sure Trek describes their transporters as the latter? They’re definitely killing a bunch of people in that show. ha Though to answer it with any kind of conclusive result, I’d think we’d need a technical description for how it works, and it cannot exist, so… lol
the thing is though, everyone older than like a year is already a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy… Our bodies are the ship of theseus, it’s only by pure statistical inevitability that some handfull of atoms inside us are the exact same ones we were born with.
Nonono, that’s taking a step backwards toward the Ship of Theseus instead of the teleporter question. Everyone agrees there is a continued experience regardless of whether someone says, “yup that’s still exactly your body”.
The entire point of the teleporter question is… where is “your” mind and identity defined? If it’s only a prescription for how a body looks and behaves, then it doesn’t matter. If it’s someone’s own, personal, literal consciousness and continued sense of ‘self’ by that specific consciousness, it does matter if YOUR consciousness is coming out still attached to the body.
It wouldnt matter since the person pulling the level would be an exact copy of me and there would be no remaining original… Unless.
:checks to see if side burns are real:
I get to die and save a bunch of people? I’m in!
I love this
Is your continuity of consciousness broken by the teleporter?
what even is consciousness?
As far as I can tell an emergent characteristic of the nervous system that evolved as an advantage over instinct/intuition/heuristics arrived at subconsciously
I mean, does it really matter? For all intents and purposes, the person coming out of the teleporter is me. They’ll have continuity of consciousness. You can argue about “oh it just kills you and makes a person exactly like you” like maybe so, but does it matter?
For the question posed it doesn’t really matter no. Assuming it works the way we expect it to in sci-fi and it’s an exact copy, for all intents and purposes it is you. There is nothing ethereal about the human consciousness—if everything is exactly as it should be, then you have all the pieces of “you” that are needed.
The teleporter dilemma only matters to the being using the device initially. If you’re vaporized, you die. You don’t have continuity of consciousness with a different set of atoms perfectly arranged to be you, even if they perceive that to be the case on the other side. Still you, just not the you that gets to continue to exist.
Now imagine it malfunctions and doesn’t vaporize you before creating the copy, but just creates the copy at the end point leaving you still standing in the transporter. Still you? If not, what’s changed?
then there’s two mes which immediately start to diverge into different people due to their different experiences, and the one left behind eventually joins the Maquis.
I mean, I can just kill myself the normal way
Eh, I also go to sleep occasionally (every day) and have no assurance my conscience transfers over to the next morning (or noon).
rose tyler be like
SOMA be like
My sense of self is inherent to the material it inhabits, but is able to transcend it for microseconds at a time.
The answer to this is quite simple.
But first, we have to talk about parallel universes…
It’ll be Brundle-Fly.
Oh shit
Plot twist: The lever was set for the train to move to the sidetrack. Who caused the train to squish the people, you or theseus’ you? O.o
No.
It will be your inni
