/sci/ - Science & Math

What cat?

Well you'd be dead and a new you would now exist wherever you needed to be, so nobody (yourself included) would give a shit that you were dead.

But I totally wouldn't use one either.

>>3666795
A cat is fine too.

>>3666800
Yeah, but that doesn't change the fact that I don't WANNA be dead.

It's not really a problem since consciousness travel along with you anyway.

"You" are neither unique nor continuously existing in time. You are a consciousness - a phenomenon created by the physical processes of a living brain. When you sleep, that consciousness ceases to exist. In the morning, your brain creates a similar but still significantly altered consciousness.

Nevertheless, we call this string of consciousnesses from day to day "you". Then what are "you"?

Basically, you're a dualist, because you suppose that "you" must always exist somewhere, and cannot be copied.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus#Cultural_differences

I remembered once, in Japan, having been to see the Gold Pavilion Temple in Kyoto and being mildly surprised at quite how well it had weathered the passage of time since it was first built in the fourteenth century. I was told it hadn't weathered well at all, and had in fact been burnt to the ground twice in this century. "So it isn't the original building?" I had asked my Japanese guide.
"But yes, of course it is," he insisted, rather surprised at my question.
"But it's burnt down?"
"Yes."
"Twice."
"Many times."
"And rebuilt."
"Of course. It is an important and historic building."
"With completely new materials."
"But of course. It was burnt down."
"So how can it be the same building?"
"It is always the same building."
I had to admit to myself that this was in fact a perfectly rational point of view, it merely started from an unexpected premise. The idea of the building, the intention of it, its design, are all immutable and are the essence of the building. The intention of the original builders is what survives. The wood of which the design is constructed decays and is replaced when necessary. To be overly concerned with the original materials, which are merely sentimental souvenirs of the past, is to fail to see the living building itself.
—Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See, p. 149

The discussion also comes up in /tv/-threads on the movie "The prestige".

Unrelated to the following argument
>This copy would have all of your memories and would be unaware that it's a copy of a person who was just de-atomized
is kinda wrong. If I copy myself than the copy (or "me" if you like) knows that it a copy. But that's beside the point.

A funny thought is that the sentence "I have been copied" can't be said in this context. If the original particle configuration is no longer there and the copy is "just a copy" in a different place, than this copy can't say "I have been copied", because it's not that "I".

Okay, now the question: I can't agree with you.
You are afraid of getting lost, even if you realize that the copy will think as if it's you. Okay, but then you must convincingly argue why you now and you in 3 seconds should have to be considered the same person. In this line of thought, you always kill yourself if you learn something new.
Especially if you think that there is no soul in the spiritual sense and everything that makes you is basically complicated physics/chemisty, then why are you afraid of momentarily non-existence. You don't lose anything, you just skip time other people experience.
I don't see the argument why you would not do it/what you lose.

If you set out to learn how to play yoyo by the end of the day, then you are more different, than if you copy-transport youreself from place A to place B.

>>3666829
>>When you sleep, that consciousness ceases to exist.

This is a conflation of two different definition of "consciousness". There's the "am I awake or asleep" sort of consciousness, and then there's the "am I able to comprehend my own existence as an individual being/am I self-aware" consciousness.

>>3666783
"I teleported home one night with Ron and Sid and Meg, Ron stole Meggie's heart away, and I got Sidney's leg."

apologies to Douglas Adams

oh, and btw. this also reminds me of this talk:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPicL1AWrs8&feature=channel_video_title

Of course I would.

>>3666829

This post already said what I came to say, but OP: You're positing that there is more to "you" than the physical materials that constitute your body. And lots of people believe that, but as far as science can tell, they're all wrong.

Here's the standard thought-experiment that helps with this: Suppose I had such a machine, but I used it for just a single neuron. That is, I took a neuron out of your brain, built a perfect copy, and put the copy back in, all effectively instantaneously. Are you still you? Of course you are.

Suppose I do this with two neurons, one after the other. A hundred. A thousand. You're always still you. You're not 99% of you just because 1000 of your neurons are artificial. But if that's so, why should I matter if I do it with all of your neurons?

Taking it a step further, from a quantum-mechanical perspective there is no difference between two of any sufficiently small particle. Two indistinguishable particles are literally identical, to such an extent that to say "this is the original" and "this is the copy" is simply wrong. At that scale, two indistinguishable particles are the same particle, and it's only your macro-scale intuition which is telling you otherwise. But your intuition is wrong.

but you're already a copy, OP. none of your atoms are permanently bound to you. You are not your parts, you are the configuration of those parts. (aside from that, every moment your configuration changes as well).

There's no difference between transporting/copy and just standing still

>>3666846
>This is a conflation of two different definition of "consciousness". There's the "am I awake or asleep" sort of consciousness, and then there's the "am I able to comprehend my own existence as an individual being/am I self-aware" consciousness.
No, both of those types are completely absent in deep sleep. REM sleep is closer to full consciousness. Being sedated or having a seizure is even below normal deep sleep as far as consciousness.

>>3666834
>>You are afraid of getting lost, even if you realize that the copy will think as if it's you. Okay, but then you must convincingly argue why you now and you in 3 seconds should have to be considered the same person. In this line of thought, you always kill yourself if you learn something new.

But this seems like a philosophical argument. Mine is much more fundamentally basic: Would I survive the transporter beam, or would it kill me. Yes, learning something new changes who you are, to some small extent, but it doesn't literally kill you and replace you with a separate you in the process.

>>3666887
don't look now, but all of your skin is sloughing off and being relplaced by new cells which have been created using the food you eat

for a board that mocks biology, the bio iq is decidedly inferior

are you telling me '/sci/entists' don't know what a merkaba is? scientists,.. lol. i'll stick to meditation

>>3666887
>But this seems like a philosophical argument. Mine is much more fundamentally basic: Would I survive the transporter beam, or would it kill me.
Exact same argument. It's all about your arbitrary definition of "self", which is violated all the time.

What makes you "you"? Is it being composed of the same atoms? Those are exchanges constantly. Is it having the same structure and properties? You change constantly. Is it having a consciousness that exists continuously? It disappears every time you are in deep sleep or under anesthesia. Is it having continuous vital signs? Those can be interrupted, and you can still come back.

What are "you"?

>>3666891
>> Being sedated or having a seizure is even below normal deep sleep as far as consciousness.

I've had a seizure. And I have to say it was indeed the most death-like experience I ever had. I went from sitting at my computer tika-tika-tika-i'm-on-the-internet!-tika-tika to -- nothing. Death-like nothing where all is black emptiness and I wasn't even there to be aware of it.

When I woke up on the floor - couldn't have been more than two or three minutes later - it was nothing at all like waking up from sleep. It was like coming into being again from nothingness, and another minute or so before my brain descrambled enough for me to figure out who I was, what had happened, etc.

I still don't understand how mere sleep-unconsciousness means you cease to be, though. You still dream, as you. And you never wake up fundamentally different than you were the night before.

Plus, you know, there's that whole you're not dead thing.

>>3666927
We're not arguing that sleeping makes you not you, we're arguing that going through a transport doesn't make you not you, for example the same reason sleep doesn't.

>>3666927
>You still dream, as you.
Not in deep sleep. That's a REM cycle.

>And you never wake up fundamentally different than you were the night before.
This just isn't true. Your brain changes over the night. It's just usually not a large change in your consciousness and personality.

>>3666912
Well, for the sake of this argument, I define "me" to be the single individual consciousness that inhabits this body right now, and would cease to exist and cease to know or feel anything if I were to die. Even if it's death by transporter beam.

I'm just not a big fan of the "well, you're still you since your exact duplicate just stepped out of the transporter on the other end. HE may not be aware he's just a duplicate, but my consciousness was just obliterated through death on my end.

A copy's still a copy.

>>3666829
wait...
are you trying to say that we... as we percieve our living existence and consciousness... are practically dead every night and then come back in the morning

>>3666938
Another anon here.

Right. The point is that we are intelligent consciousnesses, and we aren't continuous in time or uncopyable. It just seems that way to us, in the same way the Earth was obviously flat. I mean, look around sometime. It looks really flat.

>>3666887
>Yes, learning something new changes who you are, to some small extent, but it doesn't literally kill you and replace you with a separate you in the process.
define "kill".
If you are just the configuration of the energy/particle that makes you up, then shifting your body from earth to mars doesn't "literally kill you" at all.
(Dependent on the definition of "kill", you could also say that you die when you learn something new, but then you die in any moment in time, so that's a rather useless discussion)


But I just came up with a qestion and I'd like to hear your perspective:

If Marty McFly travels back in time, does he die?
If Bill and Ted travel back in time and end also up in Europe, do they die?

>>3666946
Depends on what you mean by "dead". IMO death means that your consciousness ceases AND your information is lost. If your information isn't lost, your consciousness can start again later (like after sleeping).

So basically, you (the consciousness) can cease to exist, but you're not dead (irreversibly gone) until your information is lost.

>>3666783
You don't *know* that, and nobody *can* know that for sure until such a time as such a device exists (unlikely), and even then you won't really *know*, it's 100% subjective, and you can't prove or disprove that we have a soul or not.

Is this some sort of stealthy religion trolling attempt? Are you trying to subtly direct everyone into a discussion about whether or not we have a soul, and therefore God, and therefore creation vs. evolution? If so then you've been spotted, and therefore you fail. Nice try.

>>3666941
>Well, for the sake of this argument, I define "me" to be the single individual consciousness that inhabits this body right now, and would cease to exist and cease to know or feel anything if I were to die. Even if it's death by transporter beam.
You're still not being clear. What makes you think the transporter kills you? That the same atoms aren't involved? Normal living violates that anyway. That the pattern is changed and re-created? You're not continuous in time anyway. If your arm is removed, and then replaced with an identical copy, is it not your arm?

If your brain is temporarily deconstructed, and then reconstructed, it's still "you".

>>3666953
>>If Marty McFly travels back in time, does he die?
>> If Bill and Ted travel back in time and end also up in Europe, do they die?

It's been so long since I've seen those movies that I can't recall the mechanisms by which they traveled. My concern is purely about the Star Trek universe transporter, which, to the ability today's scientists have been able to create it, works by literally destroying the particle at point A in order to move it to point B.

As far as I can recall, Marty just got into a DeLorean and drove there, so no, he's not dead. I can't recall at all how Bill and Ted did it.

>>3666961
>>Is this some sort of stealthy religion trolling attempt?

Nope. This is not about "souls". It's about consciousness in the scientific sense only.

>>3666971
>As far as I can recall, Marty just got into a DeLorean and drove there, so no, he's not dead.
It seems like you're stuck on physical continuity. Are you familiar with the Ship of Theseus?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

suppose we have nanobots that can regenerate you, you take a bullet in your brain, then regenerate.
are you dead?

>>3666971
both kind of travel in a manual sense. But there are also time travel versions where they just beam around.

In star trek there are 14 or more versions of time travel. However I think it's strange to talk about dying in the context of time traveling.

And conderning spatial traveling: I'm sure Q could just shift the universes content 1 cm to the left - Everything would die!!

>>3666974
What is that scientific sense? The exact definition is very important here, as it's all about what "you" are.

>>3666956
>>Depends on what you mean by "dead". IMO death means that your consciousness ceases AND your information is lost.

Right, and this is exactly where I disagree. To me, it's irrelevant that my information lives on, if *I* don't.

To make this as basic as possible: I, this consciousness typing this right now, do not want to die. That's as far as it goes. And the only question is whether a transporter is really somehow transmitting your whole exact being and consciousness from point A to B, or just transmitting a copy by killing the original in order to obtain the data necessary to reconstruct another you at point B.

>>3666990
> To me, it's irrelevant that my information lives on, if *I* don't.
Then you die every time you fall asleep, as your information is there, but "you" are not. And by saying that death can happen even WITHOUT your information being lost, I really don't know what you mean by "death".

>>3666974
First you have to prove that consciousness is a quantifiable thing, don't you? There currently isn't any way to do that.

What I'm getting at is that OP's fear of using this purely fantasy device (or other fantasy devices like it) is exactly that: an irrational fear, unless someone devises a way to define consciousness as something other than a manifestation of the physical structure of the individual's brain.

>>3666989
The best I can define it is as "consciousness", in the sense of "If I put myself through a transporter, would *my current self-consciousness* come out on the other end, or would my current consciousness cease to be and just go black, the same as if I was run over by a truck?

>>3666974
>It's about consciousness in the scientific sense only.
I don't think so.
If it's just about consciousness and you define it to be a function of your particle/energy-configuration and not the particles themselfes, then you'd probably have no problem with shifting that configuration around in space.

>>3666996
You are still not defining what "you" are. You're just asking a question about it.

What are "you"?

the main catch is:
can you bring back memory, knowledge and experience?Our very existence as we know and fancy is based on shit we remember, because it's the only thing that makes you "YOU". Some people with amnesia showed completely different personality after losing their memory.
I wouldn't want to be recreated as blank sheet.

>>3667027
If it can't copy your brain accurately enough to retain memory, then no, it's not "you" anymore. But an atom-by-atom identical reconstruction certainly retains all the same memories and properties.

You'll die.

Look. Have this thought experiment. What if instead of transporting you, the transporter simply made a clone of you right before your eyes.

Are the anons in this topic saying there is no difference implying that you are going to experience what the clone experiences because it is exactly like you? No, you are still experiencing the life of the brain and body you are in. If the clone kills you is your perception immediately going to switch to that of the clone's? No, you're just going to die and there is going to be an exact copy of you that continues living.

This doesn't mean there is a soul, it just means that you are still confined to the experience of your body. The transporter machine will kill you. The thing that comes out the other end will think it's you because it is, it has all the same memories and experiences. But the person that came before it is going to die and not experience the rest of the clone's life cycle.

Thats not too hard to comprehend.

>>3667044
Though I admit, by this standard, that people who suffer traumatic brain damage sometimes cease to be the same person, as large portions of memory, capability, and traits are lost or deeply changed. Which is what people who know them often say.

>>3667045
You're pretending that your consciousness is continuous in time.

You're not. By your definition, you die every time you fall asleep.

>>3667051
Right. And say we had the ability to store that person's pre-trauma brain and download it into a copy of that person's body created by a transporter-type device.

The restored person would think he's the original (though he'd have to deal with being able to see another "him" laying in a hospital bed), but the true original is still laying there drooling on himself, his consciousness a complete clusterfuck just waiting to die.

>>3667045
Copied people are not the same person, obviously. They don't share a consciousness.

But destructive copying doesn't violate any of the definitions of self that normal living doesn't. If I did it while you were sleeping, you wouldn't even be able to tell anything had happened, though your body was destructively scanned and then remade during the night.

>>3667062
>true original
The distinction has no value. You probably disagree, but why?
>>3667064

>>3667054

They aren't the same thing at all. Your entire neural network is destroyed when you die. When you sleep you're effectively going into a coma but there is still a linearity of conciousness. There is still mental activity.

>>3667064

I would be dead, of course I wouldn't know. There would be a clone of me that lived on and had all my memories so he wouldn't experience anything, but the person you destroyed would be dead. I don't think this implies there is a soul, I think it implies the opposite. That is a strict materialist idea, if you kill me I'm not going to experience the life of my copied brain. Theres going to be another me though that has no experience of death, but the first person is going to die and thats it for him. Shits done, he doesn't experience life anymore.

>>3667071
>When you sleep you're effectively going into a coma but there is still a linearity of conciousness. There is still mental activity.
Not during a grand mal seizure, there isn't. Unless you think all neurons firing randomly preserves the patterns you associate with "you".

And it's theoretically possible to halt all brain activity, and yet not lose the information, and then bring the person back.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/mark_roth_suspended_animation.html

I just don't understand these arguments. It's as if you're all arguing that consciousness doesn't exist, and as long as we can come up with a machine to keep creating clones, we'll each exist forever, just because the clone looks and thinks like us.

Your body is always making new cells to replace the ones that die off. About every seven years, your entire body, brain, eyes, kidney, testicles, ect, are replaced at a cellular level, yet you never notice it.

While it sounds unlikely that we would be able to have a dual-conscienceness with our "original body" and our "copy body", we don't necessarily have evidence in either respect. How do you even track conscienceness?

This paradox and others are solved by the theory which says there's no individuality, we're living everybody simultaneously, past and future. Been arguing for this theory for 5 years now. Gets old.

>>3667096
What are you?

I am the consciousness produced by my brain. If my information is not lost, an indentical brain can be recreated, and the consciousness it produces is me. If my brain is copied, then they are both "me", and then proceed to diverge into distinct people.

There is a very common and intuitive illusion about human consciousness, but we are neither unique nor continuous in time.

>>3667093
If I destructively scan your brain and then recreate it, in what sense are you not the same person anymore?

>>3667091

I do think it's an interesting idea to wonder what happend when you "die" and then are reanimated (my uncle died last year for some amount of minutes and then was revived), but I personally can't comprehend how it is the same thing as being destroyed and clones. This mostly on a philosophical level though since I'm not a neuroscientist, I don't know what comparisons could be made between death and revival in the same nervous system as opposed to death and the creation of a physically removed but identical nervous system.

To me it just doesn't seem like you'd live on through the clone. It seems like the clone would be totally correct in thinking that it is you because it is a perfect copy, but the person that was destroyed would have effectively committed suicide and the clone would be a different awareness.

Anyone who thinks mind copying is confusing really should real this story.

http://sifter.org/~simon/AfterLife/

We're going to have to discard some of our time-honored illusions, just like the Earth being flat and the center of the universe.

>>3667131

Ignore all the typos, I'm typing fast.

>>3667131
>To me it just doesn't seem like you'd live on through the clone. It seems like the clone would be totally correct in thinking that it is you because it is a perfect copy, but the person that was destroyed would have effectively committed suicide and the clone would be a different awareness.
I understand that this is a very intuitive impression, but it isn't supported by evidence.

The only definition of identity that I can find that doesn't lead to retarded contradictions is the functional identity. I am the consciousness that is like me. When I fall asleep, I'm not dead, even though my consciousness is gone, because in the morning a sufficiently similar consciousness will be produced - my information was not lost.

>>3667131
Well, assume your theory is correct. About half the posts in this thread say that it happens all the time already. What's the difference if it happens in a teleporter?

>>3667122
Your position doesn't cohere especially well with what we observe. There IS some kind of separation between people, and defining "me" as "everyone" isn't an especially useful concept.

>>3666927
>>3666832
Good posts.

>>3667135
I've read that story. Thought-provoking stuff.

>>3667131
>To me it just doesn't seem like you'd live on through the clone. It seems like the clone would be totally correct in thinking that it is you because it is a perfect copy, but the person that was destroyed would have effectively committed suicide and the clone would be a different awareness.

And the earth seems flat.

The fact of the matter is that you are thinking of your consciousness as something singular which is in some way not created by matter. And you're wrong. And that's why you're getting confused. Your entire mind is literally your brain. Identical brains, identical minds. It's the same consciousness.

>>3667200
Another anon here.

I agree, but I'd add that it's the process of consciousness itself that is me - equivalent brains that produce the same conscoiusness are probably possible. Like having a wetware biological brain or an equivalent electronic brain that produce the same dynamics and encode the same information.

Okay, speaking of sleeping and conciousness, how can I make myself safely pass out? I have passed out once when I was donating blood but now I'd like to study the experience a bit more. Best way to do it is on myself. Any idea how?

OP, if you haven't already, I highly recommend you read "The Mind's I". The very first chapter constitutes of exactly this kind of problem, and several of the other chapters deal with self-conciousness and the like.

It doesn't provide any answers of course, and will probably just raise a lot more questions.

>>3667212
Oof. Well, applying general anesthesia to yourself is a risky process, and I wouldn't recommend it. You could experiment with various things that deprive your brain of oxygen just enough to cause unconsciousness (like compressing your carotid artery), but depriving your brain of oxygen isn't a great idea either.

What exactly do you want to explore here?

>>3667216
Found a link for it in PDF format. Downloaded it and it looks legit.
http://www.mediafire.com/?kyxlvnezntk

>>3667225
Are there any safe drugs that temporarily prevent memory formation? I mean, besides getting extremely drunk and passing out.

>>3667240
here, to be clear I'm not
>>3667212

>>3667216
>>3667234
I started reading this, and the first part seems to be EXACTLY on-topic. Also Douglas Hofstadter is awesome.

>>3667225
Basically just try out how long im passed out, how I percept time before and after passing out, my thoughts and feelings during that altho these might be sort of corrupted if I do it intentionally.

When I passed out once right before it I felt like everything slowed down. And after gaining consciousness I dont think I even knew what was going on for the first couple of seconds. Thats why I want to try it again. To see if its like that every time etc.

However there is no way in hell I'd do it if this could lead to some permanent brain damage.

>>3667240
but you have memory of being drunk... it's just you can't remember, (lol)

>>3667272
Yeah, that's just the thing. Lots of things that induce unconsciousness are also a potential threat to the physical health of your brain.

I'm not especially knowledgeable about what your options are. The only one I've ever done is the carodit artery thing. The first time I did it was as a little kid in school while we were all sitting on the floor together listening. I was accidentally compressing my carotid artery with my finger, and I passed out and fell over. Must have been very brief though, as no one seemed to notice. Maybe they thought I dozed off for a few seconds.

I think it's difficult to speculate. For me we would have to answer three questions, what is consciousness, what constitutes "you", and what is death. Saying that it is just an identical copy of you and isn't you to me implies that what defines us and our consciousness is more than just a mere configuration.

The next problem is, if it is just mere configuration, if I was to be copied/cloned and survive, does that mean I would see through two pairs of eyes? Very unlikely, which means although the copy has everything i have and is everything I am, it is not me.

With no discernible way to actually know what has happened, I'm with you op, I wouldn't try it. I believe that we are more than just a conguration though, consciousness goes beyond simple matter for me.

>>3667308
>I believe that we are more than just a conguration though, consciousness goes beyond simple matter for me.
You're a dualist, then.

But the very (hypohetical) fact that a functionally identical copy can be made poses a serious problem. If you're more than your atoms, then where did your copy's "extra something besides atoms" come from?

Even worse, what about a simulation of a scan of your brain, which is only simulating atoms? If that works, doesn't it prove that you're just the interactions?

>>3667300
Hmm, I quess I'll let it wait a bit. Maybe I'll find some anesthesiologist or at least someone who has acces to anesthesia and knows what they're doing. I'd rather not cause some permanent damage to myself with that.

>>3667159
You know the power of brainwashing through religion, or propaganda.
You can't persuade religious people with the best arguments.
So now our entire society gives us names right from year 1, tells us we're Paul and Jack, and we experience the universe through little holes where people stare right into, and our knowledge comes right with us behind these holes, and all of it moves as a whole. It's the ultimate biasing experience. You can't be more stuck into a belief than that.
But when you think about it.
The fact that all of our being comes into a little human box. It doesn't mean shit.
There is the brain computing power, the ability to produce a consciousness, reminiscence.
All of these abilities could be separated, industrialized.
Inside us are universal mechanisms at work. It's physics.
We're not, fundamentally, little human boxes with names. We just happen to be shaped so by evolution.
Consciousness, the "feeling alive" thing, is an universal product. It's not a mystical 'Bob' soul. It's a product.
We believe we're 'one person' because we're superficially separated. But it's a social construct.
We're surrounded with stars, rocks and lava. We're atoms. We're machines producing consciousness stuff.
We're pack of atoms which happen to move freely one another. There's no such thing as a human being, fundamentally.
If you realize you're everyone at the same time it solves the cloning paradox, the teleporting paradox, the "what are the odds of being alive" perplex, "why am I human and not a bird", ect... It solves everything.
You all agree that feeling alive is a product of the brain, yet you think it stops at your personal death. It's contradictory.
If human knowledge and memories were neurally shared you wouldn't have such a concept as personal death.
Your cortex processing power would die and then you would "know" that your life goes on. Tyranny of knowledge.

>>3667346
I generally agree with what you're saying, but want to make sure it stays pragmatically grounded.

I'm not interested in preserving non-useful illusions about self. But "I" am a pattern to which I attribute value, as I do to all similar patterns (intelligences).

Are you suggesting that we should stop valuing intelligence, or that we should just stop caring so much about individual and artificially constructed concepts of identity?

>>3667341
You could look into nitrous oxide. I'm not sure if it fits what you're looking for as far as effects go, but it's probably among the easier things to get and shouldn't be especially dangerous. Maybe have someone monitor you and tape the experience.

>>3666783
If I can't tell the difference, why should I care? If I can't tell the difference, is it even meaningful to say there IS a difference?

You know the funny thing about this debate? No matter how you define personal identity, there will come a time when there are no people who have OP's concern, because all such people will die (including information loss) and not have their mental patterns perpetuated.

You see, mind uploading, format shifting, brain renewal - all of these techs for keeping "you" alive long after your body's expiration date would fall under what the OP considers getting killed. And all such people will end up ceasing to exist, and only the people who are fine with it will continue.

>>3667436
And nothing of value was lost.

>>3667436
Where did OP say he was against any form of perpetuating himself *if he were going to die anyway*? His question was straightforward: Would this act kill me?

>>3667135

Never before has this image been more appropriate.

Juts...wow.

I wouldn't rely on the copy made by such a transporter being the same person as the original. I don't equate the discontinuity of sleep, coma, or learning to the differences created from teleporting because sleep does not cause me to split into two, but let's disregard that for a moment. To me, breaking down the original would be a waste of a good body, If mind uploading isn't to the point of there being no sense in making a new body on the other end. It seems better to just keep one of me around in each area I'd need to teleport between.

>>3668258
>It seems better to just keep one of me around in each area I'd need to teleport between.
What? We're talking about minds, not just bodies. If you upload your mind nondestructively, or copy yourself, there is no going "back". There's a person already there.

>>3668114
Glad you enjoyed it. It's a fantastic story.

>>3668029
He later went on to assert that it WOULD kill him and that he wouldn't use it.

>>3668298

Yes, if I copy myself, there's no going back, and I'd just have two of me. No going back with that, I agree. The two minds would go off and do different things, and drift apart from having different experiences. This could supposedly negate the benefit I would get form teleporting back and forth, but getting a secure channel to share thoughts with my duplicates and keep us in sync seems reasonable enough.

>>3668377
IMO keeping you in sync would require some very unusual procedures, and probably uploaded minds. Unless you just mean keeping in touch like friends.

Anyway, yes, you'd be different people unless there is some sort of recombination process afterwards. As for teleportation, that generally implies destructive copying, which is fine, IMO. There is a net zero change in the value of the prior and latter situations as far as life and intelligence go, and you get the benefit of teleporting.

>>3668309
Right, he said he wouldn't use a transporter.

That's entirely different from saying "Once I'm 100 years old and near death anyway, I don't want my brain downloaded into someone/something else."