PyramidHead
Contributor
That's exactly the same thing as saying the timing of killing the button-pusher, and nothing else, decides what will happen after he dies. Any gap, no matter how small, will contain information not captured by the duplicate. A millisecond delay between duplication and disintegration is the difference between the original person reaping the benefits of $1 million USD and ceasing to exist forever. I don't really see how that concept holds up to scrutiny. It's much more parsimonious to say that, regardless of when the original is terminated, he can never be aware of what is going on in the duplicate's sensory environment because they are two different beings.
So if I go out on a pub-crawl, and get out of my tree, then come home and pass out; and when i wake up the following afternoon, I have no recollection whatsoever of anything that happened after 10pm, despite having pictures and witness evidence and a road cone in my bed and some unexplained bruises as proof that I did stuff during that time period between buying another round at 10pm and collapsing into bed at 5am, then you are saying that the discontinuity in my consciousness means that I am not the same person any more?
No; it is not SOLELY the discontinuity of consciousness that determines whether you are the same, and I never said it was. The post you are responding to was a criticism of Tom's position, which as I understand it boils down to: if no information is lost between duplication and destruction, there will be a singular consciousness that does not end upon the disintegration of the button-pusher, but if the button-pusher experiences anything on Earth before being destroyed, his duplicate will not remember it, so in that case there are two streams of consciousness and one of them has died. Personally, I don't think the information gap is relevant at all. Whether the duplicate is created simultaneously or 10 years later, the original person's consciousness depends upon having a functional nervous system. If and when that nervous system is destroyed, the original consciousness is no more.
Because that scenario leads to exactly the same result. bilby A gets in the machine; presses the button, then bilby A goes for a cup of coffee, chats up the pretty transporter technician, and then gets disintegrated. bilby B steps out of the transporter station on Mars with no recollection of the coffee or the transporter technician.
Perhaps they have a Skype chat. bilby A spends a few minutes cursing and swearing at bilby B for murdering him and stealing his money, wife and bank account; and then dies. bilby B takes a trip to Mars, gets an abusive Skype call from someone who looks familiar and apparently has a seriously bad attitude, and then gets on with his life.
That bilby B has no recollection of anything bilby A does is not particularly important; bilbys A and B have huge gaps in their knowledge of what bilby did before he ever set foot in the teleportation corporation building.
The teleporter takes one person, splits him into two indistinguishable parts whose only difference is their location, and then kills one of them. The survivor is the same person who walked into the transporter to begin with - and so is the deceased.
I'm with you so far. I will repeat that I am not claiming either one has more authority to say they are "more" bilby than the other. However, to stop the discussion at that point omits the salient fact that two identical people are still two, not one. They are tokens of the same type. I'm arguing that consciousness resides at the token level, not the type level.
Discontinuity of consciousness and loss of memory are already things we have experience of. Nothing that the machine does is distinguishable from these familiar phenomena.
I disagree on the second point. During normal sleep, brain activity does not shut down completely, nor does the brain decompose to a fine powder. The potential for the brain's consciousness (described by the arrangement of its neuronal architecture) to re-activate in the same brain is preserved.
My current model assumes that an individual consciousness is "tethered" to the brain in which it developed. The subjective experience of eating a mango is only experienced by the consciousness whose brain is connected to the taste buds of the same body that contains the brain. I do not directly experience anything that happens to your body the way that I experience what happens to mine. So far as we know, this is an inevitable consequence of whatever organizational complexity gives rise to self-awareness. It is possible to imagine this not being the case, so it is more than a semantic problem.
The variation scenario amply demonstrates that two people who can each legitimately say "I am bilby" will exist at a point in time between the duplication event and the disintegration event. However, since they are not only experiencing different things simultaneously, but those things are mutually exclusive, it must be true that it is like one thing to be the bilby on Earth and like something else to be the bilby on Mars. To bridge this fact to my conclusion, recall that we can only actually experience something by knowing firsthand what it is like to do it. Thus the bilby on Earth will never experience what it is like to have an extra $1 million USD, since his consciousness remains tethered to his brain, not to physically indistinguishable brains that may exist elsewhere in the universe.
And as there is no material difference between the variation scenario and the synchronized one, this must be true of the synchronized scenario too. Even if you are unconscious while being scanned, replicated, and destroyed, your consciousness will no more be able to "wake up" in the body of your double than it is able to wake up in another body tomorrow morning.*
*Please note that you are completely correct to say that the conscious experience of the duplicate will feel exactly as if he has gone to sleep on Earth and woke up on Mars. But that experience is not accessible to the brain of the person who was destroyed, even if their brains were perfectly identical right up to the moment of destruction.