Several decades back I read a SF story (by Fred Pohl?) where the crew of a near lightspeed craft needed to be continually replaced by new members teleported in, because the existing crew was being killed by radiation. For some nominal payment you stepped into a booth and a copy of you was teleported to the starship. You collected your payment and went and had a nice dinner or somesuch. Meanwhile your copy on the starship tried to cope while dying some horrible death.
The angst of who is me and who is alive and who is dead has kept me from trying teleportation or brain downloads. I know that, when the organic part is shut off, my personality will continue to live. But is it really me?
The Ship of Theseus has a rather interesting application to this concept, explaining a way to do brain downloads without any risk of losing "you".
We basically know for a fact at this point that the "soul" is not stored in any one brain cell--that is, you can lose any single brain cell and you're still who you are. Thus, if we take one brain cell, digitize it into some form in which it exactly replicates the function of the original, including ability to reconnect to other cells and so forth, it will continue to function as the original cell.
So you do this one by one for every single cell in the brain. In practice, this might be possible with nanotech or something of the sort.
Since no single cell can store consciousness, and you ever have one less cell than normal in your brain, "you" must logically be fine. Yet once the process is done, not an atom of the original "you" remains. The only way I've found to poke holes in this concept is the idea that there is something "not replicable" about brain cells, which seems unlikely--for example, it's doubtful that there is a significant quantum effect on consciousness. This would of course stop one from doing this, since quantum states cannot be duplicated.
OK so let's take out one cell of your brain and build two identical electronic braincell replacements (if braincells need randomness, let's say they're both connected to the same source of randomness, or use they same pseudo-random algorithm.) Let's connect them both to the remaining part of the brain, i.e., all the outgoing signals from the brain go to a switch that splits the signal and sends it to both electronic replacements, and all the incoming signals from the replacement cells to the brain go through a switch that asserts that the two inputs from the electronic braincells are identical and sends out just one copy to the original brain.
Now let's repeat the procedure for every remaining braincell, with the correction when the two electronic braincells should connect to one another, we connect them directly in both copies, without going through the switch. In the end of this procedure we will have two identical electronic brains, connected to the same input from the senses, and the same source of randomness so they work identically. We can make them to two completely different persons by bifurcating the input at some point, then the two electronic brains' states will bifurcate too. Which of the two is "you"? They are completely symmetric. And if neither is "you", then how is it different from your thought experiment?
I know that, when the organic part is shut off, my personality will continue to live. But is it really me?
This will be an interesting discussion to have with your other self; "Who of us is the real me?".
I think the question is largely irrelevant. The moment that you make an 100% exact physical copy of yourself there are obviously two "me"'s. Just that the other me doesn't have any connection to your "local" me anymore. From the POV of the original the copy is just another person that, by coincidence, happens to have the exact same expiriences and thought patterns as oneself. And vice versa.
Nonetheless that initial discussion would indeed be interesting to watch. Imagine you can create an instant-copy of yourself and are then immediately confronted with your other self. I bet the conversation would begin with a lot of "jinx" and "Uh, yeah, I was gonna say the exact same thing".
This will be an interesting discussion to have with your other self; "Who of us is the real me?".
The protagonist in Altered Carbon has this discussion, in the context of which set of memories are worth having, after he has to duplicate himself to another body to solve a crime.
Angier, who only ever cared about the glory of wowing an audience, went to more terrible extremes. In his version of "Transported Man," he created a double of himself every time he used Tesla's machine, and he rigged the trapdoor to drown the one onstage. He never knew if he would be the Prestige or the man in the box. The room where the machine is being kept is filled with water tanks, all of which hold a drowned double of Angier for every time he performed the trick.
Insightful perspective on what might happen if you gradually augmented your brain. Kurzweil covered a lot in The Singularity is Near; this narrative on consciousness is more playful. The brandy in the chocolate here is his existential musings on the Omega Point - blew my mind.
If you believe in an uncopyable soul, a teleporter like that about would be a way of creating actual, honest-to-god P-zombies. Fun!
On the other hand, if you don't, then it doesn't seem like it's such a big deal. Diaspora, by Greg Egan, has a lot of this kinda thing happening in it (in fairness, they're software minds, which simplifies things).
Let me use this opportunity to make a plug for another excellent writer. If you like Greg Egan, chances are you will like Stanisław Lem, who tackled some of the very similar questions in his work. One good place to start is: http://www.amazon.com/Star-Diaries-Further-Reminiscences-Tic...
If I'm imagining an electron that's also a skyscraper, my brain isn't creating a little one in my head. The fact that I can imagine a thing doesn't mean that it could ever exist as the thing itself. It just means that I'm choosing to assign (possibly contradictory) answers to questions about the thing.
Is it an electron? Y
Is it a skyscraper? Y
So how does that work? ...
Loved this article. Its the first such article in a long time that essentially sums-up my own thoughts on this topic. I also appreciate all of the other commenters (and HN overall) because everyone is commenting on this with respect, open-mindedness, and thought. Its way, WAY too common for people who don't really understand what's going on to say how this is all sci-fi, won't/can't happen, etc. The great thing about being one of the people that wants to upload is that eventually, all the people who don't believe I'm still alive will die off.
I think to the best of my knowledge that in teleporatation when one grabs the quantum information from the original location one destroys the physical content from the original location, then transmits the information to the second location, and rebuilds the original physical content. In other words the original physical content is destroyed in the act of analyzing the content. So there is not a danger of leaving a "copy of oneself" at the original location. Necessarily to measure quantum spin and so on, the original physical material is destroyed, or more precisely, is re-arranged into indecipherable form.
One question. If you know the exact location of all the particles as you do this, and you "teleport" them, but at the same time create a copy in the old location with the same quantum information, aren't you back to the same problem?
Had not thought about that. I suppose once one has all the quantum information one needs, one could "splice the signal" into an arbitrary amount of copies. Unless there was some entanglement going on. That is, if Origin Point and Destination Point where put into some kind of EPR entangled state to preclude both points having a "copy" at the same time.
The angst of who is me and who is alive and who is dead has kept me from trying teleportation or brain downloads. I know that, when the organic part is shut off, my personality will continue to live. But is it really me?