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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 9th, 2023

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  • Yeah, it’s a weakness in the comic, but you can fix it by imagining being frozen (in a sci-fi way that doesn’t form I’ve crystals that kill you) then thawed.

    You’d awake just like from sleep and there would have been a period of true nothing in between.

    Did you die and a new you was woken up? I say there is no “true you”. There’s a body having your memories and behavior, thinking it’s you and that’s all that matters. There is no magic piece that actually gets loost when you get frozen or teleported. A you enters, a you leaves, so nobody died and nothing is lost.

    There are no souls, there is no magic continuous bit that gets handed over to the next moment, there just the pattern, so as long as it persists, you are alive.


  • Believe me, I’ve been there. I’ve thought what you think for decades, but at some point it clicked and I knew.

    My point is that there is no part that makes the one that died “the only you”. Your “point of view” is an illusion. Your belief in your ego being a unique continuous thing is product of how our brains functions, not a fact.

    Think about the freeze example some more. Think about what would happen to “you” if you ship-of-theseus’d your brain while frozen by dividing all molecules randomly into two piles, adding copies of the respective other pile, and reassembling everything: what molecule holds the “you” particle?


  • A you died. A you remains. Nothing is lost, so calling it a “death” is like calling sleep “a small death”: purely philosophical and with no relevance to your ability to live your life after.

    It’s a trick of perspective. If you acknowledge that “you” is just a electrochemical reaction, you’re just like a computer program: only defined by what’s happening, not which CPU is running it.


  • No you can’t. Only through the logic of knowing that the transported one must be the copy. Both will feel like you do. If you eliminate that location part (e.g. like in “The Prestige”), nobody will know or care who is “copy” or “original” (if concepts like that even apply in whatever fictional mechanism that movie uses)

    I don’t know what you mean by the talk of “chemical process” and how it’s supposedly meaningful if one ends or not. I’m a brain believing it’s alive. If one recreates or simulates that brain’s functionality sufficiently well and puts it into roughly similar simulated or real body, that person is me.

    I’m saying that you’re essentially believing in souls. That the ego in your head that believes it’s an entity because it has access to your memory and philosophy is just an illusion. No less real, but not in any form required to be continuous.


  • If you interrupt a chemical process and then let it continue, it’s indistinguishable (and therefore identical) to letting it continue in the first place.

    If you’d e.g. freeze your body, it doesn’t matter if you call the frozen state “dead” or don’t: your life would continue if it’s possible to unfreeze you.

    Death or no death is meaningless if an indistinguishable individual resumes life after.


  • What makes that “new” consciousness less “you” than the old one? Why do you care if the atoms aren’t the same?

    If a perfect copy of me was made, both world be me, and then slowly diverge by different experience. But it doesn’t matter which one has most of the atoms of the body that existed before the duplication (or indeed if any of us was). They’ll both be “me”s with their own perspective and then they’d both continue to exist being “me” from their point of view.


  • When people talk about continuity of consciousness, they usually mean the ego, and believe that when teleporting “you die, but someone else completely indistinguishable from you but somehow not you” is born.

    I say that this little piece of magic “you”-ness that doesn’t make the jump just doesn’t exist.


  • What makes you think that “continuous consciousness” is a thing and not just the way it feels like to exist?

    Do you fell like you’re made out of cells? Do you feel the hormones influencing your thinking? Then why do you think that the perceived continuity of having an ego is a real thing that exists? No soul has been measured so far.


  • I’d go deeper and say that “continuous consciousness” isn’t a concept that makes sense. You only live in the moment, with access to part of your past selves’ memories.

    So there’s no distinction for you between “you have been destroyed and an identical copy of you has been constructed an imperceptible amont of time later” and “an imperceptible amount of time had passed in which nothing has happened to you”