The Best Things I've Seen Recently

[sanspoof]

The best metatalk thread (about transporters); the best Todd Alcott post (about how Darth Vader is totally gay for Boba Fett); the best new Ang Lee trailer (WW2 Shanghai); the best dinosaur skull cast collection, the best Transformersthemovie post.

Comments

[diaryarena]

oh man those posts by "flabdablet" were great; finally reducing the "BUT I'LL DIE IF I'M TELEPORTED!" argument to its ridiculous core: how much of yourself has to go through before you're not you any more? OH JUST THE BRAIN-MEATS? HA HA LAME. seriously fun.

[sanspoof]

Dang it, thanks for losing my comment, livejournal.
Anyway, I was saying that I liked his posts because they brought the concept closer to the 'brain replaced slowly, bit by bit' concept rather than the normal transporter one.

[logos_ponos]

Oy, don't have time to read through the thread, but mklee, some friends and I had a long discussion about teleporters, and I'm still convinced that, given the Star Trek notion of transporters, you definitely die while another instance of you is created at the other end. That instance may carry on as normal, as though your memories and the new instance's memories were continuous, but your stream of consciousness, perception, feeling, etc. come to a definite end.

[sanspoof]

That was definitely one side of the thread. I am also of this opinion, and I think that there's no obvious way around this without somehow connecting the two ends, with current or some force-replicator or what have you (as in flabdablet's example and follow-up).
In this case, there's always a connection, whether simulated or normal, between two parts of the body on either side of the transport, which keeps your brain's electrical impulses going and thus keeps you conscious continually, even if by the end you've replaced your entire body multiple times by jumping back and forth.

[jwgh]

In order to duplicate someone some sort of information will need to be transferred, so there will be some sort of continuity -- unless there isn't (the pattern gets stored someplace for a while before the new individual is assembled or whatever), but would that make a difference in terms of identity?

I tend to think that continuity is at least partly an illusion, on a quantum level, at least. (One could reasonably reply that consciousness isn't a quantum-level phenomenon, and so my objection is pointless. To which I would say that I agree with the first part, but I still think that it has relevance, but I'm not sure why, so I think I'll shut up about it.)

Mostly I agree with whoever in that discussion said that if transportation technology became a reality, and particularly if the related technology of people-duplicators were real, then current notions of identity won't make a lot of sense and people will have to come up with new rules of thumb about them.

[sanspoof]

Yeah, it's all kind of this terrible mire of things I don't really understand well enough to talk about. There's probably all manner of stuff I hadn't thought of, and I don't really have a whole lot of insight into how the brain works, so... yeah. It kind of is more productive in some ways to just figure out the societal implications.

[jwgh]

It would be kind of funny if before you went into a teleporter you had to make out a will leaving all your property to the doppelganger that came out at the other end.

[diaryarena]

There's definitely precedent in the "being of sound mind" clause: it's already assumed that you have to verify that you are the person you THINK you are.