Science does not rule out a notion of personal identity that requires the location of an individual to be a continuous function, which would imply that the copy of me on Mars isn’t me, assuming I started on Earth.
You know, the first time I read this sequence post, I thought something similar. But then something clicked.
Yes, if you create a duplicate of me on mars, and then disintegrate the me that’s still on earth at some point afterward, that’s murder. But I realized that asking if that was killing me was a Wrong Question.
When the process that is me is duplicated, neither copy takes precedence. Both are me in every sense. The me that walks into the transporter has an equal chance of experiencing me-on-earth and me-on-mars after the machine does its thing.
This is counterintuitive, since it seems like the me-on-earth is the original me, but if there’s no such thing as “the same atoms” then the very idea that one of the identical mes is the original is physical nonsense. There being no “same atoms” explicitly disallows the me-process that continues in the earth-me-brain to be any more me than the me-process that continues in the mars-me-brain.
This doesn’t make it okay to kill earth-me after I step off the transporter pad. Until we know more about how consciousness works, I would suggest that allowing even one neuron to fire post-replication would make destroying earth-me murder. Better to err on the side of caution about something like that.
Fun fact, this applies equally to Uploading as it does to transporter replication. It was actually uploading that I was pondering when this clicked for me.
You know, the first time I read this sequence post, I thought something similar. But then something clicked.
Yes, if you create a duplicate of me on mars, and then disintegrate the me that’s still on earth at some point afterward, that’s murder. But I realized that asking if that was killing me was a Wrong Question.
When the process that is me is duplicated, neither copy takes precedence. Both are me in every sense. The me that walks into the transporter has an equal chance of experiencing me-on-earth and me-on-mars after the machine does its thing.
This is counterintuitive, since it seems like the me-on-earth is the original me, but if there’s no such thing as “the same atoms” then the very idea that one of the identical mes is the original is physical nonsense. There being no “same atoms” explicitly disallows the me-process that continues in the earth-me-brain to be any more me than the me-process that continues in the mars-me-brain.
This doesn’t make it okay to kill earth-me after I step off the transporter pad. Until we know more about how consciousness works, I would suggest that allowing even one neuron to fire post-replication would make destroying earth-me murder. Better to err on the side of caution about something like that.
Fun fact, this applies equally to Uploading as it does to transporter replication. It was actually uploading that I was pondering when this clicked for me.