Is it still me?

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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after goin through all the posts in the science forum about immortality and teleportation and identity and started to do some wonderin…

lets say you got your super molecular swapper machine that you picked up at walmart last week, and you turn it on on your body. what this machine does is swap every single teeny tiny bit of matter in your body with anouther peice that resembles it in every single way. so what your left with at the end is a totally remade body of your own… or is it even you anymore?

i would think it must be, because a process like that happens all the time as our body constantly dies and rebuilds itself tons of times over your lifetime. and i dont see any sudden change in my conciousness during my life. its one constant smooth ride.

so lets say then that the super molecular swapper machine saves every peice of matter that it knocks out and freezes it at absolute zero. so while your body is being remade with all these new peices of matter, your old one - peice of matter by peice of matter - is frozen at absolute zero. then suddenly you bring in your super-catalyst-insta-reheater that you also got at walmart (they had a big sale) and when your body is done being remade peice by peice your buddy flicks the switch and all the sudden your body made of the origonal peices of matter comes to life, just as if nothing at all had happened.

now the question is… where do you wake up? with the supercatlayst-insta-reheater? or with the super molecular swapper machine?

if ANYONE posts about this not being scientifically possible, eye will slap you, because its irrelevent to the question.

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— There was a movie called free jack that vaguely explored some of these possiblities… (It featured Mick Jagger too!)
— I am reminded of the components vs. unity thread and the postulation of consciousness as an emergent property…
— I say that you wake up in the deep freezer at Wally World’s Big World of Cryogenics (Prices were falling below absolute zero that day). (reminiscient of vanilla sky).

—There is no reason to suspect that a transfer of consciousness will take place.(remember to shave with Ockham’s razor). Consciousness is not some disembodied activity that can float around from one group of cells to another. ConscioUSNESS (sic!) is in fact dependent on those cells. The antithesis would be an anachronism reminiscient of scholasticism. Besides the differences between the two bodies would gradually become greater, this happens even in identical twins due to differing environmental influences, etc.

— Note that such devices were outlawed in 2525 due to the fact that people were committing crimes and then cloning themselves to avoid detection, one notorious individual even made 638 exact duplicates of the frozen Pamela Anderson much to the chagrin of feminist advocates Worldwide.

— This has been a good hypothetical question. For me it has further engendered the hypothetical corollary question: What if consciousness could be shared by several organisms of a species, maybe even ALL of the organisms of that species? (does Invasion of the body snatchers play upon the fear of this?) Think of the ethical possibilities! The individual body would lose importance, consciousness would be one, eternal with the species (I’m reminded of the dude on Star Trek NG who can change his molecular structure and all of his kind meet in a pool sometimes…). Communication would be species-wide and instantaneous. (The reverse side of THIS coin bears a terrifying image!). Maybe at this far point in evolution disembodiment of consciousness will admit of possibility, but i am of the opinion that it will always require matter, or at least energy of some sort at some later point…

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i disagree i think that you wake up with the moleqular swapper machine. imagine you were concious during the whole moleqular swapping machine was in use? would there be a point in the procedure when you were not you any longer?

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Don’t take this personally Frighter, but I think you’ve been reading too much John Locke.

In my opinion, if you had a machine that copied your body on August 13th, 3:33:33pm, 2003 then that body would be numerically identical to yours. That is to say, it is a copy of your body, but it is not you. In theory, that body was you for a split second on the above date, from which point it ceased to be you because of its separate consciousness and spatial/temporal existence apart from you - which is to say it is having its own individual experiences that differ from yours. This assumes many things. 1) That there is that machine that can copy matter. 2) Probably the greatest and most dangerous assumption on your part, that consciousness would continue unhindered.

Frighter stated:

The reasons for you not noticing your change in consciousness are many and varied. Firstly, your body doesn’t die all at once but certain cells die off and get replenished. Furthermore, it isn’t ALL your cells. Your skin cells die off and replenish through a seven year cycle - or so modern science has us believe. Secondly, you don’t see any change in your consciousness cause you are that consciousness. You cannot put yourself outside of it, to analyse or criticize it. One way to test yourself is to think to yourself at certain times in the day “Was I just conscious of being conscious a moment ago?” - to which you will often find yourself answering “No.” - one can’t focus on whether they are conscious at all times. For all you know your consciousness was stopped for 30 seconds and started at the exact place it left off, how would you know the difference. This is especially curious when thought of in moments when you are daydreaming or having a complex thought that takes much of your attention. There is also that thing called sleep in which you really couldn’t have a clue whether you were conscious for the whole time or not. Many consider sleeping to be a state of no conscious or an extremely minimal one. Lastly, if a machine copied you, it would have to be able to copy the electrical signal in your brain as well, otherwise the conscious smooth ride you speak of would be interupted. Locating this serge and copying it to another body in the exact same place, is in my opinion, atleast 50-500 years of technical advancements after a machine that can copy our body.

Freezing our body to absolute zero has many problems and assumptions that come with it as well. So far, we have no evidence of anything being at absolute zero temperature. Correct me if I’m wrong, but was it Copernicus, Ptolemy, or…who said that “if you give me a spot in the universe that stands still, I will move Earth any within the universe you wish”. Some think that if only one atom froze to absolute zero, then the entire universe would change. The most relevant of all these assumptions, to your point, is that if we were frozen to absolute zero - no matter how much you heated us, it wouldn’t start our heart going again, nor our brain. We would be dead.

Frighter asked:

I would say, given all your assumptions, that the person would wake up when their consciousness was back on-line. Which, if I followed you correctly, would be after we were reheated. So we would wake up next to a reheater.

But, you probably didn’t want to hear any of that. So I will say, “Yeah! Our bodies would, like, be duplicated man. We could have tons of clones walking around doing everything for us, you know. We could make them do all the things we don’t have the guts to, and we could play pranks on them. All the consciousness’ of all the clones, dude! They would be, like, connected man, and, and, we could like talk to each one of our clones and hear them in our head. That would be awesome. Oh, oh, but the most radical thing would be that we could all be feeling and learning everything the other one was feeling and learning…yeah, yeah. Cowabunga!!!”

What’s your take?

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anyway, you have mentioned the many technical barriers that would need to be scaled before this was possible. im not expecting an experiment to be carried out tomarrow. of course nothing can hit absolute zero. and your right the machine would have to hold all the current states of every peice that is held. if the peices that were being “pushed” out of the origonal body were small enough i still say that you would still be beside the copier machine. remember this is not an instantanious process. hell lets say that the process even takes 50 years to compleate. would you still say that you would wake up next to the re-heater? i think you cuold even be totally concious while this machine is operating, and it owuld not make a difference. the person that wakes up when the new body has been reconstructed would be somone else, even though every single bit of his body is made up of yours.

i think that the problem here is the concept of “you” and “I”. they just dont make sence to talk about in a situation like this.

Whats your take? :evilfun:

oh yeah, ive never read john locke before. so no offence taken =)

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Uh oh :frowning:

I can hear this one comin. Did anybody mention spark of life yet?

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— Magius, Archimedes said something similiar about moving the world with a lever. All he required was a big enough lever and a place to stand.
— We are more than the sum of our parts. Consciousness in every observed case hitherto is a local activity, specific to a certain group of cells.
—Einstein said something like “imagination is better than brilliance”. Hypothetical situations like these help us to clarify our thoughts.
— Obscure Reality. I talked about that with my wife! Even if you could identically clone yourself, would all of the chemical processes start of themselves? (once again (sic!) reminded of a horror film. was it called the reanimator or something?) A lot of those original components were in motion! How do you reproduce that? Recall, (heisenberg’s uncertainty principle?) that if you know a particle’s velocity you don’t know it’s direction and vice versa. How can a static duplication recreate a dynamic organism? I mean A=A only for a nanosecond before it turns into something else, after all, “You can’t step into the same river twice.” as Heraclitus aptly noted. Any device that could overcome those myriad engineering conundrums would presuppose devices of even greater potential!

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i said in my post. i KNOW this is not scientifically possible. that is plainly obvious. but that does not negate the question.

sure like mr. Heisenburg said we cannot know the precise location and speed of any particle, but that does not mean that at any paticular moment an electron does not in fact have a specific speed and location. imagine something like in star trek where they have a heisenburg compensator for the teleporters. my matter replacer machine comes with one installed.

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— I’m not so sure. How can you know that this is not scientifically possible? It may be possible despite the problems, just not discovered yet, but perhaps you mean’t not currently possible with the knowledge we have available.

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Frighter stated:

I’m a little confused, I thought your original question was not where you would physically be or appear, but where you would come back to consciousness.

Frighter asked:

Well yeah. The first doo higgy copies your body in a frozen state. The heater brings you back from the frozen sleep state, so it’s not until you are reheated that you will wake up - hence you wake up to the heater re-heating you.

Frighter stated:

Okay, well hold on now. The original body also gets frozen doesn’t it? Didn’t you say that the body needs to be frozen before it can be copied? If so, then both the original and the copy are going to be frozen right? Otherwise, why have a reheater? Hence, both bodies will not WAKE UP until they are reheated - coming to be conscious as they are heated.

Frighter stated:

Sure they make sense, what aspect of “you” and “I” troubles you?

What’s your take?

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okay. i hope i still do this correctly, msn just opened a new page in this window and erased my origonal post which was almost done.

you have 2 machines.

Machine A-

This machine has the ability to read the most basic unit of matter existant in the universe in its current state, remove it and then replace it with anouther identical peice of matter that was is in the exact same state as the origonal.

Machine B-

This machine has the ability to take any peice of matter and store it in its current state until the machine is turned off at which time the matter that has been stored will begin to act as it normally would as if nothing has even happened.

Now, so what you do is set Machine A to sequentially scan and replace every single peice of matter in your body and send it to Machine B to keep it in stasis, in the exact same positions as they were being scanned in. Eg. as it finishes scanning your foot, there will appear to be a foot frozen in place in machine B.

So you then turn on Machine A and let it do its work. You are CONCIOUS while this machine does its work. The machine moves through your entire body and scans and replaces every single bit of matter that you are made of. When it finishes scanning and replacing every bit of matter in your body there will then appear your body in a frozen state in machine B made of all of the same of matter as your body in machine A was. in essence, you were moved peice by peice into machine B while keeping every bit fo matter in the same state as it was in machine A…

Now the question is, where is your conciousness. Are you in stasis in Machine B? or sitting in Machine A twiddling your thumbs just as you had been while this whole process was taking place.

The way i see it you cannot say that you are in either body, because neither body really is you. Your whole concious experience is really just what happens when the matter in your head is doing what it does. The only thing i think you can really say it that a similar concious experience is being experienced in both bodies.

When i read back on this i think agreeing with this is as materialistic as you can get. Its seeing the universe as nothing more then stuff interacting. People are not “people”. people do not exist. people is a word that our concious experience uses to represent what we describe as a person. A bottle is not a “bottle”. What we see as a bottle is just a collection of stuff interacting (or well in this case, not so much interacting, just sittin there).

When you look at the above problem as trying to discern where that “person” is i dont think you can say either of them is. If you disagree and confidantly think that “you” are in machine B. WHen does the new organism no longer become “you” as its matter is slowly replaced. Is it when half of the matter has been replaced? three-quarters? or mabye just when the brain has been successfully replaced. And what about the body that is still half compleate in machine B? When it is just a foot in there, is that you? what about when its got both of your legs? or mabye it needs to just hit the neck?. I dont think an answer for any of these questions can be arrived at because its all relative. THe only thing that you can say for certain is that here is a clump of matter here, and anouther clump of matter here.

So yeah. i hope this clears things up.

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I agree with you Frighter, you should try reading some Parfit, he’s espousing vaguely the same view as yours, with some technical differences. See Reasons and Persons for his whole arguments, you will find yourself sympathetic with much of it.

In my view numerical identity has always been something which has plagued questions of personal identity, which is unfortunate as in my view it is wholly irrelevant. All that is needed is qualitive identity, so for your complicated example you never lose conciousness, but you also regain it when you are reheated. The problem with that sentence is the use of you, it is singular so makes no sense, but talking of a singular identity is absurd, if you allow that a person can be copied with no loss of the “spark of life”, “consciousness magic fairy dust” or other such anti-materialistic suggestions you immediatly allow for multiple instances of yourself existing at any one time.

Conciousness is not something you own, both bodies will have conciousness, both derived from a single conciousness at the point before the start of the experiment, but distinct and seperate as soon as the second body, made up of the original atoms, is revived. From that point on they are seperate people.

That doesn’t follow from your arguments at all, people can still be people, as they consist of the collection of thoughts that make up you. It is thus an abstract concept, and in a way it iself exists. Thus, when you die, though the material is still there, the person is not. It is sstill perfectly coherent to talk of people and bottles when you are a materialist like me.

Your final paragraph reminds me greatly of Parfit, but the point is it never stops being you as the transformation is preceding so slowly and you never lose consciousness.

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If you are nonlocal consciousness and you entered the thawed body configuration, yes. It’s still you. Better have ways to verify it’s you before/after. Otherwise, other nonlocal consciousnesses wandering about waterless places gon snatch “you” up… or… sneak back in with you. They prowl these places looking for fulcrums who donate their bodies to science while alive. Sharing is caring… sure, they’ll be down with rhetoric and propaganda - until all you can taste is the rainbow heh. Or something.

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p.s. y’all see the movie Prestige?