But that wasn't your argument. That was the other Speakpigeon, the one who used to exist a few days ago.
And this is the problem I think. You're trying to claim that the new version of you on Mars is the same person because it has the same memories, but that ignores any concept of objective truth and falsehood.
No the problem may be that we are talking about different things. Because of your claim here I just realised I've lapsed in my use of the word "person".
So, without going to much into the details, I'm not interested as to whether something is the
same person as something else. It all depends on how in detail you want to construe what fundamentally a person is. If you think of a person as a social construct for example, the law may have to decide whether these are the same person or not. So instead, me, I started from the claim in the OP that the original and the double "do not share a single consciousness", which wouldn't be true from the subjective perspective, at least initially, because the machine is assumed to have produced a perfect duplicate mind of the mind of the original person.
A person who takes peyote and thinks they are a falcon doesn't actually turn into a falcon, despite their conscious impressions otherwise, and the understanding that they haven't turned into a falcon is fundamental to our understanding of that event and that experience. Similarly, we must have the capacity to be wrong about how our conscious experience of reality effects reality. So when we have an original, and a duplicate, the idea that they have the same internal experience doesn't in itself prevent one from being the duplicate, and one the original, and if they both claim to be the original, one of them is still, in fact, wrong.
That's only true if you have specified in the appropriate way what a "person" is, something the OP hasn't done.
Me I started from the premise that the OP was about the subjective perspective of the person, on the situation. Within that perspective, and on rational grounds, there's no difference between being the original's mind and consciousness and being the double's mind and consciousness, unless you think there is something else to consciousness not processed by the machine, which seems not to be the case of
PyramidHead. I also pushed the envelope by assuming that the double and the original could be kept identical throughout their lives. Here again, their minds and consciousnesses being identical, there would be no difference from a subjective perspective and no rational argument for preferring being the original rather than being the double. I also accepted that as soon as there would be a difference, for example beyond the initial duplication process, or if the original is left alive for a while, then of course you have two different subjective perspectives.
In the case where the two versions overlap, it seems obvious that the person who walked into the booth, who then walks out of the booth, talks to mars, and then dies, is not the same person as the one on Mars. They may be identical at the point of creation, but that isn't enough to make them the same person.
And their subjective perspectives at this point is indeed different so obviously one will believe he is the guy on the Earth and the other will believe is the guy on Mars. Yet, if the machine could somehow maintain their mind identical they would still have no rational ground to decide which one they are.
If not, on what basis can you argue that having a copy appear on Mars changes anything for the guy getting disintegrated down on earth?
The guy who awakes in the morning can do nothing for the guy who went to sleep yesterday and is no more.
But he is the guy who went to sleep.
That's a matter of convention. The law may have to decide on this, it's not a fundamental issue. It's a social issue.
As a point of brute fact, that is what happened. Change is not the same as death. Or to put it another way... we change all the time. Duplication appears to be qualitatively different. What reason do we have for treating the two as the same?
Moment-to-moment change is not the same as death but that doesn't make the mind of some person today identical to the mind of the same person yesterday. The question wasn't whether moment-to-moment change is or not the same as death but whether change from moment-to-moment within the same person is substantially different from change between the original and the double. If the person pressing the button inside the booth is not immediately killed then we have two people with identical minds and initially identical subjective perspective on reality (consciousness). Whether two such identical consciousnesses are the same or not, I don't think we know the answer to that and the OP didn't specify the terminology used.
And yes, I'd regard identity as being something separate from both physical form and conscious continuity.
Good for you but that's a metaphysical view.
PyramidHead expressed a similar view in the OP:
Note that it may still be true that both beings can legitimately claim to be the same person: they both have the same physical makeup as of minutes ago, so they share all the same memories, opinions, scars, personality traits, etc. But since it is obvious that, after the duplicate is created, being the button-pusher involves a vastly divergent set of first-person experiences compared to being the duplicate, they do not share a single consciousness. After the duplication event, even if the button-pusher is not destroyed, his first-person perspective will never represent what it is like to be the duplicate.
Rationally speaking, I don't know if there is such a thing as a person, persisting over time and change. To be sure I guess I have the same feeling that there is as you guys probably do but I don't seem to know it as a fact and I doubt very much you do either.
EB
PS. I also noted in my first post that this was only arguments on a rational level. What I do in real life is probably something else altogether.