From: Phillip Huggan (cdnprodigy@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Dec 27 2005 - 15:53:04 MST
These thought experiments ignore physics. A person who walks from A to B carries with them imbedded interactions with some or all of the rest of the universe. A person who teleports from A to B severs this interaction. This has nothing to do with consciousness. It is a fundamental property of matter in our universe. When you drag your computer mouse an inch or two along your mousepad to move an onscreen cursor, the mouse is still 99.99999% the same mouse that it was a few seconds ago. If you "teleport" the mouse a few inches along your mousepad, the new version is a completely different entity regardless if the original still exists, and regardless if the new mouse is completely identical as measured by the limits of whatever observational tools you have at your disposal. If you (somehow) quantum entangle the two mouses or use your patented handy-dandy multiverse generator, maybe things are different (break the original and see if the new mouse remains intact to tell for
sure). Same problem teleporting the matter that gives rise to our minds.
David Picon Alvarez <eleuteri@myrealbox.com> wrote: The upload problem is like one of the forms of the teleport problem. Say you
have means to transmit an exact copy (ignore QM issues for the sake of
argument here) of a person through an information channel, from place A to
place B, but the process is destructive. A person P at place A wishes to go
to place B. The person can either continuously move from A to B as we do
every day, or be transmited through the information channel, and
reconstituted at B, with perfect accuracy. What has happened to P? Is P
still P? Is it alive? Has it ever died?
In the case of uploading, this same information is collected about P, and
instead of P being transmited through an information channel and
reconstituted at B, P is reconstituted at A+, which is a virtual environment
simulated on a computer. Since, if you accept that P can be transmited from
A to B, you are already conceding that P is an essentially informational
object, what makes it impossible to instantiate P at A+? Your idea that
there's some magic in physics that generates self awareness is not supported
by any data. Information is what we can identify as making the difference.
Even if there were some quirk of physics, why could it not be emulated, same
as any other quirk of physics?
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