Questions to consider: Would you feel the same way about using a Star Trek transporter? What if you replaced neurons with computer chips one at a time over a long period instead of the entire brain at once? Is everyone in a constant state of “death” as the proteins that make up their brain degrade and get replaced?
The million dollar question: Do I stop experiencing?
If I were to be disassembled by a Star Trek transporter, I’d stop experiencing. That’s death. If some other particles elsewhere are reassembled in my pattern, that’s not me. That’s a copy of me. Yes, I think a Star Trek transporter would kill me. Consider this: If it can assemble a new copy of me, it is essentially a copier. Why is it deleting the original version? That’s a murderous copier.
I remember researching whether the brain is replaced with new cells over the course of one’s life and I believe the answer to that is no. I forgot where I read that, so I can’t cite it, but due to that, I’m not going to operate from the assumption that all of the cells in my brain are replaced over time.
However, if one brain cell were replaced in such a way that the new cell became part of me, and I did not notice the switch, my experiencing would continue, so that wouldn’t be death. Even if that happened 100,000,000,000 times (or however many times would equate to a complete replacement of my brain cells) that wouldn’t stop me from experiencing. Therefore, it’s not a death—it’s a transformation.
If my brain cells were transformed over time into upgraded versions, so long as my experience did not end, it would not be death. Though, it could be said to be a transformation—the old me no longer exists. Epiphany 2012 is not the same as Epiphany 1985 because I was a child then, but my neural connections are completely different now and I didn’t experience that as death. Epiphany 2040 will be completely different from Epiphany 2012 in any case, just because I aged. If I decide to become a transhuman and the reason I am different at that time is because I’ve had my brain cells replaced one at a time in order to experience the transformation and result of it, then I have merely changed, not died.
It could be argued that if the previous you no longer exists, you’re dead, but the me that I was when I was two years old or ten years old or the me I was when I was a zygote no longer exists—yet I am not dead. So the arguer would have to distinguish an intentional transformation from a natural one in a way that sets it apart as having some important element in common with death. All of my brain cells would be gone, in that scenario, but I’d say that’s not a property of death, just a cause of death, and that not everything that could cause death always will cause death. Also, it is possible to replace brain cells as they die, in which case, the more appropriate perspective is that I was being continued, not replaced. Doing it that way would be a prevention of death, not a cause of death. I would not technically be human afterward, but my experience would continue, and the pattern known as me would continue (it is assumed that this pattern will transform in any case, so I don’t see the transformation of the pattern as a definite loss—I’d only see it that way if I were damaged) so I would not consider it a death.
The litmus test question is not “Would the copy of me continue experiencing as if nothing had happened.” the litmus test question is “Will I, the original, continue experiencing?”
Here are two more clarifying questions:
Imagine there’s a copy of you. You are not experiencing what the copy is experiencing. It’s consciousness is inaccessible to you the same way that a twin’s consciousness would be. Now they want to disassemble you because there is a copy. Is that murder?
Imagine there’s a copy of you. You’ve been connected to it via a wireless implant in your head. You experience everything it experiences. Now they want to disassemble you and let the copy take over. If all the particles in your head are disassembled except for the wireless implant, will you continue experiencing what it experiences, or quit experiencing all together?
I used to think this way. I stopped thinking this way when I realized that there are discontinuities in consciousness even in bog-standard meat bodies—about one a day at minimum, and possibly more since no one I’m aware of has conclusively established that subjective conscious experience is continuous. (It feels continuous, but your Star Trek transporter-clone would feel continuity as well—and I certainly don’t have a subjective record of every distinct microinstant.)
These are accompanied by changes in physical and neurological state as well (not as dramatic as complete disassembly or mind uploading, but nonzero), and I can’t point to a threshold where a change in physical state necessitates subjective death. I can’t even demonstrate that subjective death is a coherent concept. Since all the ways I can think of of getting around this require ascribing some pretty sketchy nonphysical properties to the organization of matter that makes up your body, I’m forced to assume in the absence of further evidence that there’s nothing in particular that privileges one discontinuity in consciousness over another. Which is an existentially frightening idea, but what can one do about it?
Sleep, total anesthesia, getting knocked on the head in the right way, possibly things like zoning out. Any time your subjective experience stops for a while.
Actually, I expect that our normal waking experience is also discontinuous, in much the same sense that our perception of our visual field is massively discontinuous. Human consciousness is not a plenum.
Temporarily going unconscious is not the same as permanently going unconscious. Whether we temporarily go unconscious or not does not entail permanent unconsciousness being or not being death.
Now, some questions of mine: you said “If I were to be disassembled by a Star Trek transporter, I’d stop experiencing. That’s death.”
When you fall asleep, do you stop experiencing? If so, is that death? If it isn’t death, is it possible that other things that involve stopping experiencing, like the transporter, are also not death?
We need to focus on the word “I” to see my point. I’m going to switch that out with something else to highlight this difference. For the original, I will use the word “Dave”. As tempting as it is to use “TheOtherDave” for the copy, I am going to use something completely different. I’ll use “Bob”. And for our control, I will use myself, Epiphany.
Epiphany takes a nap. Her brain is still active but it’s not conscious.
Dave decides to use a teleporter. He stands inside and presses the button.
The teleporter scans him and constructs a copy of him on a space ship a mile away.
The copy of Dave is called Bob.
The teleporter checks the copy of Bob before deleting Dave to make sure he was copied successfully.
Dave still exists, for a fraction of a second, just after Bob is created.
Both of them COULD go on existing, if the teleporter does not delete Dave. However, Dave is under the impression that he will become Bob once Bob exists. This isn’t true—Bob is having a separate set of experiences. Dave doesn’t get a chance to notice this because in only fractions of a second, the teleporter deletes Dave by disassembling his particles.
Dave’s experience goes black. That’s it. Dave doesn’t even know he’s dead because he has stopped experiencing. Dave will never experience again. Bob will experience, but he is not Dave.
Epiphany wakes up from her nap. She is still Epiphany. Her consciousness did not stop permanently like Dave’s. She was not erased like Dave.
Epiphany still exists. Bob still exists. Dave does not.
The problem here is that Dave stopped experiencing permanently. Unlike Epiphany who can pick up where Epiphany left off after her nap because she is still Epiphany and was never disassembled, Bob cannot pick up where Dave left off because Bob never was Dave. Bob is a copy of Dave. Now that Dave is gone, Dave is gone. Dave stopped experiencing. He is dead.
Ah! So when you say “If I were to be disassembled by a Star Trek transporter, I’d stop experiencing” you mean “I’d [permanently] stop experiencing.” I understand you now, thanks.
So, OK. Suppose Dave decides to go to sleep.
He gets into bed, closes his eyes, etc. The next morning, someone opens their eyes. How would I go about figuring out whether the person who opens their eyes is Dave or Bob?
This is exactly backwards. I recognize a copier because it makes copies. That’s how I know something is a copier. If I need to know whether something is a copier before I can decide whether what it creates is a copy or not, there’s something wrong with my thinking.
If you had stepped into a teleporter and pressed the button, how would you know that it killed you?
I wouldn’t, naturally.
Of course, if Dave steps into an incinerator and presses the button, Dave also doesn’t know that the incinerator killed Dave. Dave is just dead, and knows nothing.
OTOH, if Dave steps into a non-incinerator and presses the button, Dave knows it didn’t kill Dave.
And the way that Dave knows this is that something is standing there, not-dead, after pressing the button, and that something identifies as Dave, and resembles Dave closely enough.
This happens all the time… I have pressed many buttons in my life, and I know they haven’t killed me, because here I am, still alive.
And I expect this is exactly what happens with a properly functioning teleporter. I press the button, and in the next moment something is aware of being Dave, and therefore not dead. It just happens to be in a different location.
If I need to know whether something is a copier before I can decide whether what it creates is a copy or not, there’s something wrong with my thinking.
Okay, so would you recommend I check under my bed tonight for anything that might make a copy of me and disassemble the original? I need something more to go on. I’m having a hard time not equating this with worrying about boogeymen.
if Dave steps into an incinerator and presses the button, Dave also doesn’t know that the incinerator killed Dave.
Actually, for at least a few seconds, possibly a few minutes, Dave would be screaming in agony and he would most certainly notice that he is experiencing death by incineration.
OTOH, if Dave steps into a non-incinerator and presses the button, Dave knows it didn’t kill Dave.
Unless the non-incinerator happens to be a human copier, and Dave did not recognize it at first.
something is aware of being Dave, and...
Yes, exactly. The original Dave has died in such a way that he didn’t even notice. Dave2 definitely doesn’t want to think that an exact copy of himself died just a moment ago, and really definitely doesn’t want to have to worry that he will need to cease experiencing in order to “go back” to where he came from, so due to normalcy bias, Dave2 declares that the fact that Dave2 exists means that Dave1 never died, and enjoys the confirmation bias that this non-sequitur gives him until he ceases to experience when “loaded” back onto his space ship.
Okay, so would you recommend I check under my bed tonight for anything that might make a copy of me and disassemble the original? I need something more to go on. I’m having a hard time not equating this with worrying about boogeymen.
Indeed! And you should equate it with worrying about boogeymen. It’s a silly thing to worry about.
The question is why it’s silly.
I would say it’s silly, not because I haven’t noticed any boxes marked “human copier” under my bed, because every time in the past that I’ve woken up I’ve resembled the person who went to bed so closely that it’s been ridiculous to worry that I might not be the same person.
Dave would be screaming in agony and he would most certainly notice that he is experiencing death by incineration.
Nope.
Dave would notice that he’s experiencing being incinerated, certainly, if the incinerator were as slow as you describe. But he would not experience death by incineration. He wouldn’t experience death at all. Here’s how I know: as long as Dave is experiencing anything, Dave isn’t yet dead. And if he’s not dead, he certainly can’t be experiencing death.
The original Dave has died … due to normalcy bias, Dave2 declares that the fact that Dave2 exists means that Dave1 never died … enjoys the confirmation bias that this non-sequitur gives him
(nods) Just like his predecessor did the night before when he went to bed, and Dave woke up in his place.
But of course, as above, that was too silly to worry about, just like boogiemen.
Indeed! And you should equate it with worrying about boogeymen. It’s a silly thing to worry about.
Okay, I guess you were trying to say that my concern about being disassembled after being copied as a method of “transportation” is the equivalent of worrying about boogeymen?
But he would not experience death by incineration.
“OH GOD I’M DYING AHHH!” < I call this experiencing death. Different definitions, I guess. If you want to get technical about it, and talk about death in a solely tangible way, sure Dave isn’t dead when he’s thinking about that. But Dave is experiencing death emotionally and intellectually. He knows he’s in the process of dying, that death is inevitable. He also feels emotional (and, well, physical) pain that amount to an experience worthy of symbolizing death. Maybe it would be more grammatically correct though if I said he is experiencing dying. In any case, I meant to differentiate this from transporter death because with transporter death, Dave believes that he is going to survive the “transportation” and doesn’t feel any emotional or physical pain, so there’s no knowledge of or suffering about his death.
But of course, as above, that was too silly to worry about, just like boogiemen. So is this.
If I offered you the free use of a device that could make a copy of you and put it anywhere you want and cause the current you to be disassembled and dispersed in the surrounding environment, (2-way trip) would you use it?
I call this experiencing death. Different definitions, I guess.
(shrug) OK, sure. Incidentally, by your definition, many many people walking around today have experienced death. Hell, I’ve experienced death myself.
Anyway, using your definition, if I stepped into what I thought was a molecular disassembler that would kill me, and it disassembled me slowly enough that I experienced the process of being disassembled, I would “experience death” by your definition, and I would know I’d experienced it the same way I know I experience the taste of cheese when I experience the taste of cheese. Later, I would look around the teleport receiver booth and say “Huh. I’m not dead? Cool” and go on with my life.
That is, I would have “experienced death” but not actually died, just as many many people do in real life when they wake up after heart attacks, accidents, etc.
If I offered you the free use of a device that could make a copy of you and put it anywhere you want and cause the current you to be disassembled and dispersed in the surrounding environment, (2-way trip) would you use it?
Assuming that it reliably creates that copy? Absolutely. Far more convenient than airplanes.
(By “reliably” here I just mean that I trust it to actually create a close-enough copy, and not to instead create some imperfect copy that does not resemble me closely enough to satisfy my preferences regarding consistency over time.)
If I offered you the free use of a device that could make a copy of you and put it anywhere you want and cause the current you to be disassembled and dispersed in the surrounding environment, (2-way trip) would you use it?
Assuming that it reliably creates that copy? Absolutely. Far more convenient than airplanes.
Yes.
I already know what your bumper sticker in the future is going to say:
I break (down) for transporters!
Now, say the transporter has a malfunction at the exact fraction of a second between the time when Dave2 has been verified as a complete copy and the time when Dave1 is going to be disassembled.
The technician says it’s going to take three hours to fix. You go out and catch a movie. After the movie, you go outside and stretch, and you see that it’s a beautiful day. You have two options:
More than that… if I arrive at the transporter complex and am told that this is an option, that I can duplicate myself and send one copy to my destination while the other one stays here, I absolutely prefer to be duplicated… no reason for a conveniently timed technical failure.
Indeed, I might postpone the trip altogether and spend the next week right here hanging out with myself and having threesomes with our husband and meeting with lawyers to figure out what we do with our funds and material goods.
Relatedly, given a button that I know creates two perfect copies and then picks one of the resulting three Daves at random to destroy an hour later, I press it. At the time of pressing the button, I’m indifferent as to which of the three copies gets selected for destruction… they are all me. After pressing the button, one of me goes “Crap! I’m going to die in an hour!” and is unhappy about it, and the other two of me go “Whew! Dodged that bullet!” but feel bad for the third of me. On my account it does not matter in the least which one of the three “was the original me,” assuming there’s even any way to tell, which there may not be.
Now, a question for you.
I enter a spaceship traveling to Alpha Centauri in suspended animation, along with all my friends and loved ones. We could have teleported instead, but we’ve been convinced by your account that this would be suicidal, so we opted for the slower but safer route. While we lie in frozen sleep, the spaceship has a technical failure in mid-flight which reduces the ship and everything in it to constituent atoms. The ship’s captain has the option of using the ship’s transporter to beam us from the doomed ship to the surface of Alpha Centauri.
As far as I can tell, on your account, there’s no particular reason why she should do so… either way, we’re all going to die. Sure, if she does so some complete strangers will pop into existence on Alpha Centauri, but what has that got to do with her? The birthrate on Alpha Centauri is more than high enough already, creating more new people isn’t particularly valuable. Is that right?
Suppose she does so, though, for whatever reason. So someone identical to me (but who on your account is not me, since I died on the ship) wakes up in a thawing chamber on Alpha Centauri, alongside a bunch of thawed people who are identical to my friends and loved ones, and all of us are under the (on your account deluded) belief that we are the same people who entered coldsleep. We throw a big party to celebrate our safe arrival on a new world.
During that party, we turn on the news and learn for the first time about the ship’s actual fate. We are presumably horrified at the sudden discovery that we’re not who we thought we were. The person with my memories looks at the man whom, a moment earlier, he’d thought was his husband, and becomes convinced it’s actually a complete stranger… that they never actually got married. Indeed, they just met a few minutes ago, at the beginning of this party. He’s been making out for the last five minutes with a complete stranger! All around the room, similar realizations are being made, as what had previously been a celebration of safe arrival becomes a wake for me and my friends, who are on your account irretrievably and tragically dead.
Scenario meant to discover whether the experience of life is valued
Relatedly, given a button that I know creates two perfect copies and then picks one of the resulting three Daves at random to destroy an hour later, I press it. At the time of pressing the button, I’m indifferent as to which of the three copies gets selected for destruction… they are all me.
Okay, so I guess what you’re saying here is that what you value about being alive is NOT the experience of life.
How do you feel about this scenario:
You and your husband are planning to go to a really awesome event soon. Maybe it’s the Singularity summit, maybe your favorite rock star is having a concert, maybe it’s the birth of a new baby you guys have been wanting for a long time. Imagine whatever sort of event you’d enjoy most.
You’re really looking forward to it!
Then work calls and says “Dave, two days from now, we need you to do this really important job 3,000 miles away from your ordinary work site. We couldn’t get you a plane ticket on such short notice, but fortunately we have a transporter.”
You agree, as it is your job.
Now you hang up the phone and your husband comes over, saying “I can’t believe we’re actually going to have this event soon! Isn’t it exciting!”
“Yeah, of course!” You say. But something feels wrong.
You realize that you are going to be disassembled by the transporter BEFORE the event happens.
YOU won’t experience the event whatsoever. A copy of you will be there instead.
Is this acceptable?
I certainly don’t want to live a lifestyle where we use transporters to go everywhere and each instance of me only experiences until the next transport. My life would never be long enough to experience any satisfaction. That’s reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland’s absurd circumstance: “Jam tomorrow, jam yesterday, but never ever jam today.”
A new instance of me can experience a future event I’ve been planning for tomorrow, and a past me may have experienced a continuous life before transporters, but most instances of me would just be slaving away during the few hours or days in which they experience, doing things like working or buying groceries, so that other temporary instances of myself can reap the rewards. The instances that do get a reward still wouldn’t get to experience the fulfillment of planning out a goal and following through—this is really important to me for satisfaction.
Scenarios meant to explore instance differentiation and the relation to continuous experience
While we lie in frozen sleep, the spaceship has a technical failure in mid-flight which reduces the ship and everything in it to constituent atoms. The ship’s captain has the option of using the ship’s transporter to beam us from the doomed ship to the surface of Alpha Centauri.
Okay, so (just ignoring for a moment the fact that the transporter itself has just been vaporized, I guess I’ll assume it’s intact) I assume you’re saying the option is to reassemble those people out of their original particles. (Because if not, it isn’t any different from the transporter with technical failure argument, and I’d say that their experiencing ceased when they were disassembled, which is unacceptable, so they’re dead.).
First, I’d like to say that re-assembling the people, no matter what with, may be better than letting them die because that still saves them from four out of the five elements of death above.
So what we’re arguing about is not whether this rescues their genes, their influence in the world, their selves, or their bodies (that’s inconsequential in this case), but whether it saved their ability to experience.
I’m seeing several ways for this to go. The transporter could re-assemble them by putting the exact same particles into the exact same relative locations, or by putting the mass of particles from the accident into whatever locations (mostly not the same locations).
Putting the same particles into the same relative locations:
This, I think, would be the same as turning a computer on and off. I don’t have any reason to think I have a “soul” that would “escape” in this case, and I see no reason to differentiate a me made of the exact same particles as me from a me made from the exact same particles as me. In other words, a copy was never made. The re-assembled me is not a new instance—it is the original. I theorize that me1′s experience would continue.
Putting the mass of particles into different locations:
This is sticky. If I have some of the same particles, but not all of them, is it me1? What if I have all of the same particles but they’re in different locations? That’s really, really sticky. This calls into question: What is experience? To answer this question, I have to ask “What is consciousness?”
I have an idea. If we had enough technology to send a person’s entire pattern to a new location, surely it would require less bandwidth to send only their thoughts or commands to the remote location. Also there would be no risk of being damaged due to copying errors. A brainless body could be constructed there (either in the exact likeness of the person, or in a form designed to make optimal use of resources), and the original person could control it using a mind reading interface such that they experience what the remote avatar is experiencing.
This would be more efficient and less risky, don’t you think?
It still doesn’t answer the sticky question of “Would my experience be continuous if my particles were disassembled and re-arranged?” but I think it addresses the practical transportation problem behind this (also, you’d likely get to inhabit a variety of avatars, which would be cool) but back to the original question:
If all of my particles were disassembled and re-arranged, would I have a continuous experience or not? I had been basing this on whether there would be a new instance or not. But this confuses me as to whether there’s a new instance, and makes me ask whether being disassembled and re-assembled exactly the same way might mean I lose continuous experience even if I am the same instance.
So I have to answer the question of “What is continuous experience?” and “How does it work?”
Unfortunately, I see no way of testing for whether a consciousness is having a continuous experience, since it follows that new instances will pick up where previous instances left off, causing them to have the illusion of continuous experience, and disassembled instances will be dead and therefore incapable of responding about whether they’re having an experience. Not that I could test it anyway without a transporter, but this means I can’t imagine a scenario and reason out whether a disassembled instance of me would experience or not after being put back together exactly the same way.
Do you see a way to reason that out, or do you have a clarifying question we could ask?
Okay, so I guess what you’re saying here is that what you value about being alive is NOT the experience of life.
Nope, that’s not what I’m saying at all. All of the Daves have the experience of life, and I absolutely do value it, which is why I press the button that I expect to create more of it.
YOU won’t experience the event whatsoever. A copy of you will be there instead. Is this acceptable?
No, that simply isn’t true. I will in fact experience the event (assuming I can get back from my work assignment in time, or assuming that my employer uses a nondestructive teleporter such that I can both experience the event and do my job).
Okay, so (just ignoring for a moment the fact that the transporter itself has just been vaporized, I guess I’ll assume it’s intact)
No, sorry, I was unclear. The engine is going to overload in ten minutes, say, and the captain has the choice of transporting us off the ship before it explodes. Which, on your account, is not worth bothering with, since we’re going to be just as dead whether she does or not.
This [teleoperating remote bodies] would be more efficient and less risky, don’t you think?
Sure. Given the choice of telecommuting this way, rather than teleporting my body back and forth, I would probably choose tele-operating a remote body, assuming the experience was comparable.
Do you see a way to reason that out, or do you have a clarifying question we could ask?
No, not really, especially since you’re in the habit of not answering the questions I do ask. Either way, though, no: I think you’ve created a confusion here that is unresolvable as long as you hold on to your belief that there is some essence of selfness (continuous experience, identity, real-me-ness, whatever) that is undetectable and unduplicatable but somehow still important.
Your model creates the possibility that I am not the person I was a moment ago and there’s simply no fact about the world that would resolve the question of whether that possibility is actual or not. This seems absurd to me: if nothing depends on it, I simply don’t care whether it’s true or not; if we insist that that is what it means to be “really me”, then I must accept that maybe I’m not “really me” and I’m OK with that.
I haven’t touched on personal identity—for clarity I’m not equating that with continuous experience nor am I even equating continuous instance distinctions with continuous experience at this point. (I guess I’m interpreting personal identity either like “self” or identity the way it’s used in “identity theft”—like a group of accounts and things like SSNs that places use to distinguish one person from another. I’m not using that term here and I’m not sure what you mean by it.).
I’m not trying to figure out whether my “self” maps to certain particles. I feel sure that “self” is copy-able (though I haven’t formally defined self yet). However, I am separating self from continuous experience (like you can see in my Elements of Death comment).
What I am trying to do is to figure out whether the continuous experience of my current instance is linked to specific particles. The reason I am asking that question is made apparent in my transporter failure scenario.
No, temporary unconsciousness is not the same thing as permanent unconsciousness; you perceive yourself to return to consciousness. The tricky part is unpacking the “you” in that sentence. Conventionally it unpacks to a conscious entity, but that clearly isn’t useful here because you (by any definition) aren’t continuously conscious for the duration. It could also unpack to about fifty to a hundred kilos of meat, but whether we’re talking about a transporter-clone or an ordinary eight hours of sleep, the meat that wakes up is not exactly the meat that goes unconscious. In any case, I’m having a hard time thinking of ways of binding a particular chunk of meat to a particular consciousness that end up being ontologically privileged without invoking something like a soul, which would strike me as wild speculation at best. So what does it unpack to?
It’s actually very tricky to pin down the circumstances which constitute death, i.e. permanent cessation of a conscious process, once you start thinking about things like Star Trek transporters and mind uploading. I don’t claim to have a perfect answer, but I strongly suspect that the question needs dissolving rather than answering as such.
Questions to consider: Would you feel the same way about using a Star Trek transporter? What if you replaced neurons with computer chips one at a time over a long period instead of the entire brain at once? Is everyone in a constant state of “death” as the proteins that make up their brain degrade and get replaced?
The million dollar question: Do I stop experiencing?
If I were to be disassembled by a Star Trek transporter, I’d stop experiencing. That’s death. If some other particles elsewhere are reassembled in my pattern, that’s not me. That’s a copy of me. Yes, I think a Star Trek transporter would kill me. Consider this: If it can assemble a new copy of me, it is essentially a copier. Why is it deleting the original version? That’s a murderous copier.
I remember researching whether the brain is replaced with new cells over the course of one’s life and I believe the answer to that is no. I forgot where I read that, so I can’t cite it, but due to that, I’m not going to operate from the assumption that all of the cells in my brain are replaced over time.
However, if one brain cell were replaced in such a way that the new cell became part of me, and I did not notice the switch, my experiencing would continue, so that wouldn’t be death. Even if that happened 100,000,000,000 times (or however many times would equate to a complete replacement of my brain cells) that wouldn’t stop me from experiencing. Therefore, it’s not a death—it’s a transformation.
If my brain cells were transformed over time into upgraded versions, so long as my experience did not end, it would not be death. Though, it could be said to be a transformation—the old me no longer exists. Epiphany 2012 is not the same as Epiphany 1985 because I was a child then, but my neural connections are completely different now and I didn’t experience that as death. Epiphany 2040 will be completely different from Epiphany 2012 in any case, just because I aged. If I decide to become a transhuman and the reason I am different at that time is because I’ve had my brain cells replaced one at a time in order to experience the transformation and result of it, then I have merely changed, not died.
It could be argued that if the previous you no longer exists, you’re dead, but the me that I was when I was two years old or ten years old or the me I was when I was a zygote no longer exists—yet I am not dead. So the arguer would have to distinguish an intentional transformation from a natural one in a way that sets it apart as having some important element in common with death. All of my brain cells would be gone, in that scenario, but I’d say that’s not a property of death, just a cause of death, and that not everything that could cause death always will cause death. Also, it is possible to replace brain cells as they die, in which case, the more appropriate perspective is that I was being continued, not replaced. Doing it that way would be a prevention of death, not a cause of death. I would not technically be human afterward, but my experience would continue, and the pattern known as me would continue (it is assumed that this pattern will transform in any case, so I don’t see the transformation of the pattern as a definite loss—I’d only see it that way if I were damaged) so I would not consider it a death.
The litmus test question is not “Would the copy of me continue experiencing as if nothing had happened.” the litmus test question is “Will I, the original, continue experiencing?”
Here are two more clarifying questions:
Imagine there’s a copy of you. You are not experiencing what the copy is experiencing. It’s consciousness is inaccessible to you the same way that a twin’s consciousness would be. Now they want to disassemble you because there is a copy. Is that murder?
Imagine there’s a copy of you. You’ve been connected to it via a wireless implant in your head. You experience everything it experiences. Now they want to disassemble you and let the copy take over. If all the particles in your head are disassembled except for the wireless implant, will you continue experiencing what it experiences, or quit experiencing all together?
I used to think this way. I stopped thinking this way when I realized that there are discontinuities in consciousness even in bog-standard meat bodies—about one a day at minimum, and possibly more since no one I’m aware of has conclusively established that subjective conscious experience is continuous. (It feels continuous, but your Star Trek transporter-clone would feel continuity as well—and I certainly don’t have a subjective record of every distinct microinstant.)
These are accompanied by changes in physical and neurological state as well (not as dramatic as complete disassembly or mind uploading, but nonzero), and I can’t point to a threshold where a change in physical state necessitates subjective death. I can’t even demonstrate that subjective death is a coherent concept. Since all the ways I can think of of getting around this require ascribing some pretty sketchy nonphysical properties to the organization of matter that makes up your body, I’m forced to assume in the absence of further evidence that there’s nothing in particular that privileges one discontinuity in consciousness over another. Which is an existentially frightening idea, but what can one do about it?
(SMBC touched on this once, too.)
What do you mean by discontinuities? I have not heard about this.
Sleep, total anesthesia, getting knocked on the head in the right way, possibly things like zoning out. Any time your subjective experience stops for a while.
Actually, I expect that our normal waking experience is also discontinuous, in much the same sense that our perception of our visual field is massively discontinuous. Human consciousness is not a plenum.
Yeah, I was trying to get at that with the parenthetical bit in my first paragraph. Could probably have been a bit more explicit.
Ok are you saying that temporarily going unconscious is the same as permanently going unconscious?
Would you assert that because we temporarily go unconscious that permanent unconsciousness is not death?
Temporarily going unconscious is not the same as permanently going unconscious.
Whether we temporarily go unconscious or not does not entail permanent unconsciousness being or not being death.
Now, some questions of mine: you said “If I were to be disassembled by a Star Trek transporter, I’d stop experiencing. That’s death.”
When you fall asleep, do you stop experiencing?
If so, is that death?
If it isn’t death, is it possible that other things that involve stopping experiencing, like the transporter, are also not death?
We need to focus on the word “I” to see my point. I’m going to switch that out with something else to highlight this difference. For the original, I will use the word “Dave”. As tempting as it is to use “TheOtherDave” for the copy, I am going to use something completely different. I’ll use “Bob”. And for our control, I will use myself, Epiphany.
Epiphany takes a nap. Her brain is still active but it’s not conscious.
Dave decides to use a teleporter. He stands inside and presses the button.
The teleporter scans him and constructs a copy of him on a space ship a mile away.
The copy of Dave is called Bob.
The teleporter checks the copy of Bob before deleting Dave to make sure he was copied successfully.
Dave still exists, for a fraction of a second, just after Bob is created.
Both of them COULD go on existing, if the teleporter does not delete Dave. However, Dave is under the impression that he will become Bob once Bob exists. This isn’t true—Bob is having a separate set of experiences. Dave doesn’t get a chance to notice this because in only fractions of a second, the teleporter deletes Dave by disassembling his particles.
Dave’s experience goes black. That’s it. Dave doesn’t even know he’s dead because he has stopped experiencing. Dave will never experience again. Bob will experience, but he is not Dave.
Epiphany wakes up from her nap. She is still Epiphany. Her consciousness did not stop permanently like Dave’s. She was not erased like Dave.
Epiphany still exists. Bob still exists. Dave does not.
The problem here is that Dave stopped experiencing permanently. Unlike Epiphany who can pick up where Epiphany left off after her nap because she is still Epiphany and was never disassembled, Bob cannot pick up where Dave left off because Bob never was Dave. Bob is a copy of Dave. Now that Dave is gone, Dave is gone. Dave stopped experiencing. He is dead.
Ah! So when you say “If I were to be disassembled by a Star Trek transporter, I’d stop experiencing” you mean “I’d [permanently] stop experiencing.” I understand you now, thanks.
So, OK.
Suppose Dave decides to go to sleep. He gets into bed, closes his eyes, etc.
The next morning, someone opens their eyes.
How would I go about figuring out whether the person who opens their eyes is Dave or Bob?
Well, first, is there a human copier nearby? If not, you’re probably Dave.
How about this: If you had stepped into a teleporter and pressed the button, how would you know that it killed you?
This is exactly backwards.
I recognize a copier because it makes copies. That’s how I know something is a copier.
If I need to know whether something is a copier before I can decide whether what it creates is a copy or not, there’s something wrong with my thinking.
I wouldn’t, naturally.
Of course, if Dave steps into an incinerator and presses the button, Dave also doesn’t know that the incinerator killed Dave.
Dave is just dead, and knows nothing.
OTOH, if Dave steps into a non-incinerator and presses the button, Dave knows it didn’t kill Dave.
And the way that Dave knows this is that something is standing there, not-dead, after pressing the button, and that something identifies as Dave, and resembles Dave closely enough.
This happens all the time… I have pressed many buttons in my life, and I know they haven’t killed me, because here I am, still alive.
And I expect this is exactly what happens with a properly functioning teleporter. I press the button, and in the next moment something is aware of being Dave, and therefore not dead. It just happens to be in a different location.
Okay, so would you recommend I check under my bed tonight for anything that might make a copy of me and disassemble the original? I need something more to go on. I’m having a hard time not equating this with worrying about boogeymen.
Actually, for at least a few seconds, possibly a few minutes, Dave would be screaming in agony and he would most certainly notice that he is experiencing death by incineration.
Unless the non-incinerator happens to be a human copier, and Dave did not recognize it at first.
Yes, exactly. The original Dave has died in such a way that he didn’t even notice. Dave2 definitely doesn’t want to think that an exact copy of himself died just a moment ago, and really definitely doesn’t want to have to worry that he will need to cease experiencing in order to “go back” to where he came from, so due to normalcy bias, Dave2 declares that the fact that Dave2 exists means that Dave1 never died, and enjoys the confirmation bias that this non-sequitur gives him until he ceases to experience when “loaded” back onto his space ship.
That’s one insidious death.
Two, actually. :p
Indeed! And you should equate it with worrying about boogeymen. It’s a silly thing to worry about.
The question is why it’s silly.
I would say it’s silly, not because I haven’t noticed any boxes marked “human copier” under my bed, because every time in the past that I’ve woken up I’ve resembled the person who went to bed so closely that it’s been ridiculous to worry that I might not be the same person.
Nope.
Dave would notice that he’s experiencing being incinerated, certainly, if the incinerator were as slow as you describe. But he would not experience death by incineration. He wouldn’t experience death at all. Here’s how I know: as long as Dave is experiencing anything, Dave isn’t yet dead. And if he’s not dead, he certainly can’t be experiencing death.
(nods) Just like his predecessor did the night before when he went to bed, and Dave woke up in his place.
But of course, as above, that was too silly to worry about, just like boogiemen.
So is this.
Okay, I guess you were trying to say that my concern about being disassembled after being copied as a method of “transportation” is the equivalent of worrying about boogeymen?
“OH GOD I’M DYING AHHH!” < I call this experiencing death. Different definitions, I guess. If you want to get technical about it, and talk about death in a solely tangible way, sure Dave isn’t dead when he’s thinking about that. But Dave is experiencing death emotionally and intellectually. He knows he’s in the process of dying, that death is inevitable. He also feels emotional (and, well, physical) pain that amount to an experience worthy of symbolizing death. Maybe it would be more grammatically correct though if I said he is experiencing dying. In any case, I meant to differentiate this from transporter death because with transporter death, Dave believes that he is going to survive the “transportation” and doesn’t feel any emotional or physical pain, so there’s no knowledge of or suffering about his death.
If I offered you the free use of a device that could make a copy of you and put it anywhere you want and cause the current you to be disassembled and dispersed in the surrounding environment, (2-way trip) would you use it?
(shrug) OK, sure. Incidentally, by your definition, many many people walking around today have experienced death. Hell, I’ve experienced death myself.
Anyway, using your definition, if I stepped into what I thought was a molecular disassembler that would kill me, and it disassembled me slowly enough that I experienced the process of being disassembled, I would “experience death” by your definition, and I would know I’d experienced it the same way I know I experience the taste of cheese when I experience the taste of cheese. Later, I would look around the teleport receiver booth and say “Huh. I’m not dead? Cool” and go on with my life.
That is, I would have “experienced death” but not actually died, just as many many people do in real life when they wake up after heart attacks, accidents, etc.
Assuming that it reliably creates that copy? Absolutely. Far more convenient than airplanes.
(By “reliably” here I just mean that I trust it to actually create a close-enough copy, and not to instead create some imperfect copy that does not resemble me closely enough to satisfy my preferences regarding consistency over time.)
Yes.
I already know what your bumper sticker in the future is going to say:
I break (down) for transporters!
Now, say the transporter has a malfunction at the exact fraction of a second between the time when Dave2 has been verified as a complete copy and the time when Dave1 is going to be disassembled.
The technician says it’s going to take three hours to fix. You go out and catch a movie. After the movie, you go outside and stretch, and you see that it’s a beautiful day. You have two options:
Go to the transporter and get disassembled.
Avoid getting disassembled by the transporter.
What do you choose?
I choose #2, of course.
More than that… if I arrive at the transporter complex and am told that this is an option, that I can duplicate myself and send one copy to my destination while the other one stays here, I absolutely prefer to be duplicated… no reason for a conveniently timed technical failure.
Indeed, I might postpone the trip altogether and spend the next week right here hanging out with myself and having threesomes with our husband and meeting with lawyers to figure out what we do with our funds and material goods.
Relatedly, given a button that I know creates two perfect copies and then picks one of the resulting three Daves at random to destroy an hour later, I press it.
At the time of pressing the button, I’m indifferent as to which of the three copies gets selected for destruction… they are all me.
After pressing the button, one of me goes “Crap! I’m going to die in an hour!” and is unhappy about it, and the other two of me go “Whew! Dodged that bullet!” but feel bad for the third of me.
On my account it does not matter in the least which one of the three “was the original me,” assuming there’s even any way to tell, which there may not be.
Now, a question for you.
I enter a spaceship traveling to Alpha Centauri in suspended animation, along with all my friends and loved ones. We could have teleported instead, but we’ve been convinced by your account that this would be suicidal, so we opted for the slower but safer route.
While we lie in frozen sleep, the spaceship has a technical failure in mid-flight which reduces the ship and everything in it to constituent atoms. The ship’s captain has the option of using the ship’s transporter to beam us from the doomed ship to the surface of Alpha Centauri.
As far as I can tell, on your account, there’s no particular reason why she should do so… either way, we’re all going to die. Sure, if she does so some complete strangers will pop into existence on Alpha Centauri, but what has that got to do with her? The birthrate on Alpha Centauri is more than high enough already, creating more new people isn’t particularly valuable.
Is that right?
Suppose she does so, though, for whatever reason.
So someone identical to me (but who on your account is not me, since I died on the ship) wakes up in a thawing chamber on Alpha Centauri, alongside a bunch of thawed people who are identical to my friends and loved ones, and all of us are under the (on your account deluded) belief that we are the same people who entered coldsleep. We throw a big party to celebrate our safe arrival on a new world.
During that party, we turn on the news and learn for the first time about the ship’s actual fate.
We are presumably horrified at the sudden discovery that we’re not who we thought we were.
The person with my memories looks at the man whom, a moment earlier, he’d thought was his husband, and becomes convinced it’s actually a complete stranger… that they never actually got married. Indeed, they just met a few minutes ago, at the beginning of this party. He’s been making out for the last five minutes with a complete stranger!
All around the room, similar realizations are being made, as what had previously been a celebration of safe arrival becomes a wake for me and my friends, who are on your account irretrievably and tragically dead.
Yes? Is this how you envision the situation?
Scenario meant to discover whether the experience of life is valued
Okay, so I guess what you’re saying here is that what you value about being alive is NOT the experience of life.
How do you feel about this scenario:
You and your husband are planning to go to a really awesome event soon. Maybe it’s the Singularity summit, maybe your favorite rock star is having a concert, maybe it’s the birth of a new baby you guys have been wanting for a long time. Imagine whatever sort of event you’d enjoy most.
You’re really looking forward to it!
Then work calls and says “Dave, two days from now, we need you to do this really important job 3,000 miles away from your ordinary work site. We couldn’t get you a plane ticket on such short notice, but fortunately we have a transporter.”
You agree, as it is your job.
Now you hang up the phone and your husband comes over, saying “I can’t believe we’re actually going to have this event soon! Isn’t it exciting!”
“Yeah, of course!” You say. But something feels wrong.
You realize that you are going to be disassembled by the transporter BEFORE the event happens.
YOU won’t experience the event whatsoever. A copy of you will be there instead.
Is this acceptable?
I certainly don’t want to live a lifestyle where we use transporters to go everywhere and each instance of me only experiences until the next transport. My life would never be long enough to experience any satisfaction. That’s reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland’s absurd circumstance: “Jam tomorrow, jam yesterday, but never ever jam today.”
A new instance of me can experience a future event I’ve been planning for tomorrow, and a past me may have experienced a continuous life before transporters, but most instances of me would just be slaving away during the few hours or days in which they experience, doing things like working or buying groceries, so that other temporary instances of myself can reap the rewards. The instances that do get a reward still wouldn’t get to experience the fulfillment of planning out a goal and following through—this is really important to me for satisfaction.
Scenarios meant to explore instance differentiation and the relation to continuous experience
Okay, so (just ignoring for a moment the fact that the transporter itself has just been vaporized, I guess I’ll assume it’s intact) I assume you’re saying the option is to reassemble those people out of their original particles. (Because if not, it isn’t any different from the transporter with technical failure argument, and I’d say that their experiencing ceased when they were disassembled, which is unacceptable, so they’re dead.).
First, I’d like to say that re-assembling the people, no matter what with, may be better than letting them die because that still saves them from four out of the five elements of death above.
So what we’re arguing about is not whether this rescues their genes, their influence in the world, their selves, or their bodies (that’s inconsequential in this case), but whether it saved their ability to experience.
I’m seeing several ways for this to go. The transporter could re-assemble them by putting the exact same particles into the exact same relative locations, or by putting the mass of particles from the accident into whatever locations (mostly not the same locations).
Putting the same particles into the same relative locations:
This, I think, would be the same as turning a computer on and off. I don’t have any reason to think I have a “soul” that would “escape” in this case, and I see no reason to differentiate a me made of the exact same particles as me from a me made from the exact same particles as me. In other words, a copy was never made. The re-assembled me is not a new instance—it is the original. I theorize that me1′s experience would continue.
Putting the mass of particles into different locations:
This is sticky. If I have some of the same particles, but not all of them, is it me1? What if I have all of the same particles but they’re in different locations? That’s really, really sticky. This calls into question: What is experience? To answer this question, I have to ask “What is consciousness?”
I have an idea. If we had enough technology to send a person’s entire pattern to a new location, surely it would require less bandwidth to send only their thoughts or commands to the remote location. Also there would be no risk of being damaged due to copying errors. A brainless body could be constructed there (either in the exact likeness of the person, or in a form designed to make optimal use of resources), and the original person could control it using a mind reading interface such that they experience what the remote avatar is experiencing.
This would be more efficient and less risky, don’t you think?
It still doesn’t answer the sticky question of “Would my experience be continuous if my particles were disassembled and re-arranged?” but I think it addresses the practical transportation problem behind this (also, you’d likely get to inhabit a variety of avatars, which would be cool) but back to the original question:
If all of my particles were disassembled and re-arranged, would I have a continuous experience or not? I had been basing this on whether there would be a new instance or not. But this confuses me as to whether there’s a new instance, and makes me ask whether being disassembled and re-assembled exactly the same way might mean I lose continuous experience even if I am the same instance.
Maybe continuous instance != continuous experience.
So I have to answer the question of “What is continuous experience?” and “How does it work?”
Unfortunately, I see no way of testing for whether a consciousness is having a continuous experience, since it follows that new instances will pick up where previous instances left off, causing them to have the illusion of continuous experience, and disassembled instances will be dead and therefore incapable of responding about whether they’re having an experience. Not that I could test it anyway without a transporter, but this means I can’t imagine a scenario and reason out whether a disassembled instance of me would experience or not after being put back together exactly the same way.
Do you see a way to reason that out, or do you have a clarifying question we could ask?
Nope, that’s not what I’m saying at all. All of the Daves have the experience of life, and I absolutely do value it, which is why I press the button that I expect to create more of it.
No, that simply isn’t true. I will in fact experience the event (assuming I can get back from my work assignment in time, or assuming that my employer uses a nondestructive teleporter such that I can both experience the event and do my job).
No, sorry, I was unclear. The engine is going to overload in ten minutes, say, and the captain has the choice of transporting us off the ship before it explodes. Which, on your account, is not worth bothering with, since we’re going to be just as dead whether she does or not.
Sure. Given the choice of telecommuting this way, rather than teleporting my body back and forth, I would probably choose tele-operating a remote body, assuming the experience was comparable.
No, not really, especially since you’re in the habit of not answering the questions I do ask. Either way, though, no: I think you’ve created a confusion here that is unresolvable as long as you hold on to your belief that there is some essence of selfness (continuous experience, identity, real-me-ness, whatever) that is undetectable and unduplicatable but somehow still important.
Your model creates the possibility that I am not the person I was a moment ago and there’s simply no fact about the world that would resolve the question of whether that possibility is actual or not. This seems absurd to me: if nothing depends on it, I simply don’t care whether it’s true or not; if we insist that that is what it means to be “really me”, then I must accept that maybe I’m not “really me” and I’m OK with that.
What motivates you to link personal identity to your specific particles? Any two atoms of the same type are perfectly indistinguishable.
I haven’t touched on personal identity—for clarity I’m not equating that with continuous experience nor am I even equating continuous instance distinctions with continuous experience at this point. (I guess I’m interpreting personal identity either like “self” or identity the way it’s used in “identity theft”—like a group of accounts and things like SSNs that places use to distinguish one person from another. I’m not using that term here and I’m not sure what you mean by it.).
I’m not trying to figure out whether my “self” maps to certain particles. I feel sure that “self” is copy-able (though I haven’t formally defined self yet). However, I am separating self from continuous experience (like you can see in my Elements of Death comment).
What I am trying to do is to figure out whether the continuous experience of my current instance is linked to specific particles. The reason I am asking that question is made apparent in my transporter failure scenario.
Note to self: “I break (down) / break down / breakdown / brake down / brakedown for transporters!” all get zero Google results. Yay.
Now they don’t.
No, temporary unconsciousness is not the same thing as permanent unconsciousness; you perceive yourself to return to consciousness. The tricky part is unpacking the “you” in that sentence. Conventionally it unpacks to a conscious entity, but that clearly isn’t useful here because you (by any definition) aren’t continuously conscious for the duration. It could also unpack to about fifty to a hundred kilos of meat, but whether we’re talking about a transporter-clone or an ordinary eight hours of sleep, the meat that wakes up is not exactly the meat that goes unconscious. In any case, I’m having a hard time thinking of ways of binding a particular chunk of meat to a particular consciousness that end up being ontologically privileged without invoking something like a soul, which would strike me as wild speculation at best. So what does it unpack to?
It’s actually very tricky to pin down the circumstances which constitute death, i.e. permanent cessation of a conscious process, once you start thinking about things like Star Trek transporters and mind uploading. I don’t claim to have a perfect answer, but I strongly suspect that the question needs dissolving rather than answering as such.