In some far future time when we have the technology, there is an android not yet activated, sitting on the conveyor belt just waiting. You come along and your head is hooked up to a load of wires and then at the throwing of a switch, your consciousness is zapped out of your brain and transferred into the android. (By consciousness, I mean your memory, "I think therefore I am"). The android is now activated and your old body, without a cerebrally functioning brain, falls lifeless onto the floor. Your mind is in the android and so when you open your eyes and look into the mirror you see the face of the android staring back. You carry on with your life, you have the same memories, the same consciousness, your are just in a different body but otherwise you have no sensation of the death of your biological body, and your existence continues.
OK - all a bit speculative (a bit....??) but I am sure you can all imagine this scenario as part of this thought experiment.
Now let's repeat the story but with a slight change. Instead of your mind being transferred into the android, it is copied. Now your biological body is still alive and still has it's original consciousness. The android has the same, an exact copy of your mind.
So this time, when you open your eyes and look into the mirror, who do you see - yourself or the android?
If someone comes up behind biological you and shoots you in the head - are you really dead or do you live on with an uninterrupted consciousness in the android, as you would have done if your consciousness was transferred instead of copied?
Then why not say memory? The word consciousness is misused constantly, in just this way, by people wishing to 'prove' life after death. Scientists now see memory as your 'personality' - what defines who you are. You only need to talk to someone with Alzheimers to see this is true. Consciousness is just a sort of monitor on what your brain is up to, capable of making strategic decisions but little else.Originally Posted by Bunny
Why does the person fall lifeless to the ground in the first scenario? Surely memories would be copied, not transfered!
Straight after such a copy, the two 'yous' would start to have different experiences and form separate memories. Thus, there would be two different 'people', albeit extremely similar. So two different people look in the mirror and see themselves.
Last edited by Mulder; 17th July 2009 at 12:40 PM.
Star trek transporter accident you have two Will Rykers one continued on the Enterprise the other was trapped on a planet two exact duplicates but with differing experiences and it is the experiences and memories that make you a you and me a me. So I’m me and you are you no problem understanding this at all.
With respect, you are avoiding the thought experiment. There is no hidden agenda here, life after death or anything else. We can argue the semantics but I think it is otherwise clear what is meant by consciousness in this case.
This is really meant as a mental exercise, a bit of fun really as when you start to think through the scenarios, it starts to tie itself in knots.
I'm the one who watches the Star Trek movie and shouts out "hey Kirk, you've just defied 3 laws of physics".
actually, me too. Either that or "why do the program makers think a blood rubber face mask equals an alien".
Ye cannae change the laws of physics, captain!
I see the Star Trek connection but this thread is beginning to wander of topic at warp speed.
I'll play.
* Bang * You're dead.
The android wasn't you and isn't you ( he may honestly believe that he remembers living your life, but he's just wrong about that). As I see it, our criterion for personal identity is bodily. That is why it makes sense to talk, for example, about someone's suffering from amnesia and losing the memory of his personal history. If our criterion of personal identity were a matter of memory, we should have to say that the pre-amnesiac and the post-amnesiac are two different persons.
There's a huge literature about this stuff, and it's mostly Derek Parfit's fault:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Parfit
This is an argument that did not occur to me, but then again this is why I put this on the forum as I figured I would get a different view.
Are you therefore challenging the initial premise that "Your mind is in the android and so when you open your eyes and look into the mirror you see the face of the android staring back"? Are you saying that you would not be looking at your own reflection because you were dead. The clock as it were, would be started afresh as the android was activated with what was your consciousness (= memory, just for you Mulder).
I will follow the link and have a read.
What is looking at the android in the mirror is the android, not you. That is so whether you are already dead or still alive.This is an argument that did not occur to me, but then again this is why I put this on the forum as I figured I would get a different view.
Are you therefore challenging the initial premise that "Your mind is in the android and so when you open your eyes and look into the mirror you see the face of the android staring back"? Are you saying that you would not be looking at your own reflection because you were dead. The clock as it were, would be started afresh as the android was activated with what was your consciousness (= memory, just for you Mulder
I will follow the link and have a read.
There is a surface plausibility about the initial premiss, but IMO it is playing about with the personal pronoun you. This becomes obvious if you ask not how things seem to the person who opens his eyes to look in the mirror but how they look to an observer who has seen what is going on from start to finish.
That's good.
When this conundrum (well that's what I though it was before I posted it here anyway) was first given to me, it was in the third person "... Joe's consciousness... etc" I thought it worked better if one thought of it in terms of self.
I have thought this through before, trying to decide if people will ever become immortal using future technology.
I came to the unfortunate conclusion that the first individual will just produce a copy. The copy may be immortal but the first individual will cease to experience at the time of death.
That is pretty much what previous posters have said.
ETA
Just had an idea.
What if you replaced brain cells, a few percent at a time, with non-organic equivalents. Would your conciseness go on unchanged? Would you be the original individual at the end of the process?
Last edited by ZERO; 17th July 2009 at 10:08 PM.
I guess at the heart of all this is the concept of "self". If we are a bag of biochemistry (and all the evidence says that's all we are) then our thinking, our self awareness, our memories our "self" is all somehow based on a bunch of chemical reactions, albeit pretty complex ones. If these reactions were reproduced in some way, then that's exactly what they would be - a reproduction and so if the original bag of biochemicals ceased to react, then this would be, by definition, death. The reproduction bag of biochemicals would then carry on reacting, in their own right.
Now if you believed in a sole and you imagined the sole transferring from the person to the android, then you would have to believe that that individual's life was continuing uninterrupted. If the sole could be duplicated, then you get into all the difficulties about self, that the original thought experiment started out with.
Is this a logical argument against the existence of the sole? (You heard it here first folks). Now this is getting a bit metaphysical.
Without any evidence to go on it is hard to say what a soul can and can't do. Until such evidence is available I'll just go on thinking souls don't exist.
As for soles, I ate one once. I'm pretty sure it was real.
BTW, did you notice the edit to my last post?
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