[General Battuta]

Well, that's a separate objection.  Let's say your new Neuron Two Point Ohs were going to give you elite FREDding skills instead.

[Ghostavo]

So let's replace copying with cloning, does that fit into your concept? After all, it IS you in a way.

Also, how many amoebas are there alive in your opinion?

Cloning is not at all similar, nor is the reproduction of amoebas. That's the coarse transmission of the biological specifications of the organism - like handing off the blueprints.

But that's what you are doing on a more precise scale. You are leaving blueprints for other instances. Your idea of immortality becomes no more interesting than the idea of leaving offspring.

A true 'copy' would be a full-body snapshot of everything at once, including your brain state. Ironically, this snapshot is exactly what's passed on from moment to moment in your current self, even as individual atoms enter and leave.

That's why I say we die every moment. Your snapshot from five minutes back is as irretrievably lost to you as your other copy after a fork.

I agree, we are not the same person that we were the instant before, in a way. But by forking, you and your other fork (since you dislike the word "copy") are no longer the same by your own logic! They become different persons even if they start out the same (thus my mention of twins). This is also where we begin disagree. You consider yourself to be every fork, if either one of them dies, you assume yourself to the other fork. We view ourselves as only one of the forks. Hence if that particular fork dies, game over.

Really, the only difference between your day-to-day existence and the instantaneous construction of a copy, as in the teleport, is a spatial discontinuity. Yet I cannot imagine you feel that if you were suddenly moved ten feet to the left by an act of god, you would be a new person, and the old you would be dead.

Should I explain that last paragraph further?

Not really, we all understand what you are entailing. What you seem to misunderstand is our notion of immortality is different from yours.

Oh, also - posting this as separate in case you're drafting a post - I just want to ask.

Your reasoning seems to be 'we're not cool with the teleport if it destroys the instance'. Well, my whole point was that the teleport doesn't destroy the instance. It does nothing that doesn't happen to you all the time; it just happens a lot faster.

Any copying system is also a teleport. We just assume the teleport's going to destroy the original. Yet for some reason we're cool with teleporting, but not with copying.

Perhaps there is a problem with the explanation, because I'm getting more confused by the minute.

[General Battuta]

So let's replace copying with cloning, does that fit into your concept? After all, it IS you in a way.

Also, how many amoebas are there alive in your opinion?

Cloning is not at all similar, nor is the reproduction of amoebas. That's the coarse transmission of the biological specifications of the organism - like handing off the blueprints.

But that's what you are doing on a more precise scale. You are leaving blueprints for other instances. Your idea of immortality becomes no more interesting than the idea of leaving offspring.

No no. The resolution of the blueprints is such that it's no different from the 'blueprints' passed from one second of your existence to the next. If you're satisfied with those blueprints, then you must be satisfied with your scan. They're not physically different.

Simple reproduction just creates more cookies from the same recipe. Our example here reconstructs the cookie on the precise atomic level. Crazy!

You're hitting on the idea here that objects are really only patterns of information, which is a very good idea indeed. One proton is the same as the next. If we took all the atoms in your brain and switched them for new ones, you'd still be the same person.

I agree, we are not the same person that we were the instant before, in a way. But by forking, you and your other fork (since you dislike the word "copy") are no longer the same by your own logic! They become different persons even if they start out the same (thus my mention of twins). This is also where we begin disagree. You consider yourself to be every fork, if either one of them dies, you assume yourself to the other fork. We view ourselves as only one of the forks. Hence if that particular fork dies, game over.

Absolutely true for any given fork. Did you read the post I linked you to? I've explained all this a couple times already.

I said, explicitly, plain as day, from the moment you fork, you are on your own. If you die, your copy can't do a thing.

To resolve the dilemma you're wrestling with, answer this:

Which of these two narratives is what really happens from your point of view?

I walk in to the office. I sit down in the chair. They put the helmet on my head. The scan is over in the time it takes me to blink. I get up and walk outside. A car screeches down the pavement and hits me. I fade away into nothingness.

I walk in to the office. I sit down in the chair. They put the helmet on my head. I blink. When I wake up, I am in a different room. "What happened?" I ask. "Did it work?" They tell me that it worked flawlessly, but that my other fork was killed shortly after the scan. I shrug. Like a good TrashMan, I can only be one person at a time, so I don't care what happened to the copy.

Your issue, see, is that you want to minimize deaths.

I am guessing you would prefer this strategy:

"Every time I die, I wake up in a new body."

To this strategy: "I fork every year. If one fork dies, the other one will keep going."

Yet the two strategies are identical, except in the first case, you're destroying one tine of the fork.

Now, I know what you'll say here. "THAT'S MY POINT! Your crazy immortality requires me to die every time I'm copied!"

What if you had two brains in your head, each in perfect sync. Suddenly, one of them is shot! Do you die? Of course not! You're still running fine on that other brain.

Now, imagine you pull the two brains out and put them in two separate bodies. And you're absolutely right, from the moment the link is broken, they're separate people. And if Copy A dies, Copy A is gone forever. Copy B soldiers on, a different person.

You've died. And you've lived. Copy A is as much you as Copy B was.

That's what happens in the fork. Here, we've just eliminated the tricky, biased language of 'original and copy'.

If you take one point away, take this away: think about it not as 'copy' and 'original', but as 'copy A' and 'copy B'. That will help clear up some illusions.

Not really, we all understand what you are entailing. What you seem to misunderstand is our notion of immortality is different from yours.

Not at all. It's functionally no different from your belief that you are the same person you were ten seconds ago.

Oh, also - posting this as separate in case you're drafting a post - I just want to ask.

Your reasoning seems to be 'we're not cool with the teleport if it destroys the instance'. Well, my whole point was that the teleport doesn't destroy the instance. It does nothing that doesn't happen to you all the time; it just happens a lot faster.

Any copying system is also a teleport. We just assume the teleport's going to destroy the original. Yet for some reason we're cool with teleporting, but not with copying.

Perhaps there is a problem with the explanation, because I'm getting more confused by the minute.

There is, my bad. The teleport does not destroy the instance. It moves it to a new location. It also leaves the instance behind. We just all assume it will clean up one end of the fork, but there's no reason it needs to.

This is why I don't like the term copy, see? It creates a nasty copy/original duality. Think of the teleport as forking you into two copies. Nobody has a problem with that, so long as the fork only ends up with one tine! Because that's what we're used to. We're always changing, leaving behind our previous states.

[Ghostavo]

So it's our notion of identity that's different then? 

[General Battuta]

I don't think so at all, unless you think you die every time you're knocked unconscious.

Would you be cool with a system whereby your precise brain and body state was constantly, in real time, fed to a backup brain, and if you were abruptly killed, you would just hop on over to the new brain?

The only possible objection to this is "I still die. When I close my eyes for the last time, I'm gone. That thing waking up in Backup Bay 1 is precisely identical to me, but it cannot change the fact that I died."

And the answer is, you no more died in that situation than you die every time you fall asleep or get knocked out. Your consciousness vanishes, but you persist! Why? Because you are stored in the physical lattices of your brain, and so long as those boot back up, you're still around.

I edited my previous post rather extensively, too (expansions only, no alterations). Sorry about that. 

[Ghostavo]

I wouldn't be cool with a system like that.

What if we view consciousness as life? That would explain my hate for sleep. 

[General Battuta]

I wouldn't be cool with a system like that.

****! There goes my commission!

I guess we're at an impasse if you're a sleepaphobe. We can argue about it some other time.

I'll just throw out my personal definition of immortality:

A system whereby my consciousness can continue indefinitely, without fear of permanent extinction, and without any interruption more significant than normal sleep or unconsciousness, and in which all my memories, both implicit and explicit (thereby including skills, cognitive structures) are preserved, along with my neural structure and embodied cognitive elements.

This definition stands fully aware of and embraces the issue of fork divergence, and nowhere does it forbid any of my forks from dying (which y'all seem so hung up on, you big sillies) so long as other forks continue, since each fork is fully me and can trace its full line of consciousness back to the moment of my birth.

[Scotty]

The fundamental disagreement here is that Battuta seems to be treating each copy, clone, call it what you will as merely a bottle for continued consciousness.  To be blunt, it doesn't work that way.  In a manner of speaking, your consciousness will continue, but it won't be you, as in the original consciouness in the first place.  The copy may start at the same place you left off, but it isn't you.  Say that Battuta Prime makes three copies.  Each of those copies starts at the point in Battuta's life they were made.  Then Battuta Prime dies.  Now Battuta Prime, as a conscious entity, has ceased to exist in our frame of reference.  Battuta Prime, I can guarantee you, will not give a damn about how well his copies are doing, because he will be dead.  His copies may continue on as if nothing happened, but the point is irrelevent, since it matters nothing to the original consciousness.  I rather enjoyed that example of two CPUs running the exact same process at the same time, since it illustrates nearly the same point.

(Next point)To clarify, since you seem to making a big point of all of this (ALL of you):  The difference between gradual replacement and this is that during gradual replacement, at no point does the entirety of the being cease.  Or even a tiny minority of the being.  A good example would be playing with legos.  Imagine you build a car/ship/what have you.  Now imagine that you are replacing all the pieces of the structure a piece at a time.  At no point in the process does the creation cease to be that creation.  Now completely dismantle it.  When you build it again, even if every piece is fundamentally the same, it is a different structure. 

[The E]

You really should read the thread, Scotty. All your points have been adressed several times already.

[karajorma]

I'm going to point out at this junction that I both fully understand and fully agree with Battuta.

Since I get the feeling he must be feeling like he's trying to explain how a card trick works to a dog at this point.

[Scotty]

I did read it, and its the same thing being argued back and forth between the same people, with hardly a change except for the exact wording of the replies.  It's not like I took anything away from the thread.

There are two opposing viewpoints, both based on purely hypothetical inference and/or guessing, and neither willing to admit the other might possibly be right.

I understand what he's saying too.  I just disagree.

[Flipside]

Is 'Me' a physical thing or a conceptual thing? Personally, I see it more as a concept than a physical entity, so to my mind, the recepticle for 'Me' is no more than some technology used to move my brain around, be it an organic construct or a non-organic one, the perception of 'Me' would not change as long as the mental identity has been transferred 100%.

[General Battuta]

I did read it, and its the same thing being argued back and forth between the same people, with hardly a change except for the exact wording of the replies.  It's not like I took anything away from the thread.

There are two opposing viewpoints, both based on purely hypothetical inference and/or guessing, and neither willing to admit the other might possibly be right.

I understand what he's saying too.  I just disagree.

Nope, your above objections have actually all been concretely dealt with.

I'll take them apart again if you want, though.

The fundamental disagreement here is that Battuta seems to be treating each copy, clone, call it what you will as merely a bottle for continued consciousness.  To be blunt, it doesn't work that way.

You've already taken a wrong turn here.

A copy is not a clone. If I made an instantaneous teleporter duplicate of you, you would be unable to determine which one was the original you.

You could not tell if the teleporter had generated a copy of you, or if you had been teleported, and a copy left behind.

How would you do it? How could you even begin? Answer that question.

 In a manner of speaking, your consciousness will continue, but it won't be you, as in the original consciouness in the first place.  The copy may start at the same place you left off, but it isn't you.

They will all start in the same place: at the moment of my birth. All the information that has come from that point up until the moment of copying is resident in all the copies. They are utterly indistinguishable to each other.

Say that Battuta Prime makes three copies.  Each of those copies starts at the point in Battuta's life they were made.  Then Battuta Prime dies.  Now Battuta Prime, as a conscious entity, has ceased to exist in our frame of reference.  Battuta Prime, I can guarantee you, will not give a damn about how well his copies are doing, because he will be dead.  His copies may continue on as if nothing happened, but the point is irrelevent, since it matters nothing to the original consciousness.  I rather enjoyed that example of two CPUs running the exact same process at the same time, since it illustrates nearly the same point.

There is a simple flaw in there. How did you determine which one was Battuta Prime?

They all insist, eagerly, that they are Battuta Prime, and that it is only a copy that has died.

(Next point)To clarify, since you seem to making a big point of all of this (ALL of you):  The difference between gradual replacement and this is that during gradual replacement, at no point does the entirety of the being cease.  Or even a tiny minority of the being.  A good example would be playing with legos.  Imagine you build a car/ship/what have you.  Now imagine that you are replacing all the pieces of the structure a piece at a time.  At no point in the process does the creation cease to be that creation.  Now completely dismantle it.  When you build it again, even if every piece is fundamentally the same, it is a different structure.  

Not at all. Accelerate the timescale of the gradual replacement to ten seconds. Then to one second. Continue to narrow the window of the gradual replacement towards the Planck time interval.

Tell me where it stops being gradual and starts being instantaneous.

Now, you might say, 'it occurs past that point, when the whole system is simultaneously disassembled.' To which I respond: 'why should that be any different? We could pause your brain, pull it apart, put it back together again, and you would notice not a thing so long as the atoms were restored to their proper place. In fact, we could even use new atoms and you wouldn't care, since they are as interchangeable as Lego bricks.'

And lastly, Scotty, the question nobody's even started trying to answer:

Which of these two narratives is what really happens from your point of view?

I walk in to the office. I sit down in the chair. They put the helmet on my head. The scan is over in the time it takes me to blink. I get up and walk outside. A car screeches down the pavement and hits me. I fade away into nothingness.

I walk in to the office. I sit down in the chair. They put the helmet on my head. I blink. When I wake up, I am in a different room. "What happened?" I ask. "Did it work?" They tell me that it worked flawlessly, but that my other fork was killed shortly after the scan. "Shucks!" I say. "I waste all that money and one of my copies gets himself run over?"

It does sadden me that the same questions keep coming up, because it indicates that I'm phrasing the answers too densely for people to get across.

But!

I'm going to point out at this junction that I both fully understand and fully agree with Battuta.

Since I get the feeling he must be feeling like he's trying to explain how a card trick works to a dog at this point.

Thank you, I appreciate it.

One more interesting thought experiment to ferret out the implicit dualism that is confusing people.

We all accept that we can be resuscitated after death so long as neural structures have not degenerated.

Imagine that you die and your brain rots into mush in a grave. However, someone applies an Anti-Entropic Field to your body, and you are regenerated back into perfect health.

Is this a new you, with the old you being dead? Or do you just feel as if you have been unconscious for some period of time?

If you answer the former, what is the latest point at which the Anti-Entropic Field can be applied to save 'the old you', as a resuscitation would?

Hopefully you'll see that no such firm mark can be drawn, and agree that even if the Anti-Entropic Field is used after you've been rotting for a hundred years, it is qualitatively no different from being resuscitated after an hour or after ten minutes, since in all cases you wake up with your brain more or less intact.

Now, ask yourself this: when I am reconstituted via Anti-Entropic Field, must the original matter in my body be used to remake me?

[Liberator]

Well, I'm gonna butt in here and ask the question no one seems to want to ask.

If the original is destroyed, what happens to the soul, the fundamental You?  Does it migrate to the copy?  Or is this just an elaborate suicide machine and the copy is in fact a different person that looks like, sounds like and thinks like/it is you?

[General Battuta]

That's the question everyone's been asking, really. That's why TrashMan is terrified that the 'real him' will be the one who dies and why everyone is so much more comfortable with transferring from body to body than with leaving copies even though the two processes are logically identical. If there's only one of them at a time, they can maintain the idea that their soul is just flitting from receptacle to receptacle like a beautiful bird.

And the scientific answer, at least, is that there is no soul, no fundamental You. It is all resident in the brain. There can be nothing else.

We're made of meat!

[Flipside]

In order to do that, you'd need to define the 'soul', it's one of those things that cannot be detected or proved, so, unless the technique keeps failing without explanation, there's no real evidence that a soul is a physical thing that can be 'moved' or even truly exists as a single, unified part of the human body. Personally, I don't believe that's true.

[General Battuta]

I really urge everybody who's going to jump in with the same old points about how 'when Battuta Prime dies, he is dead' to please just read this post:

Think of the products of the copying operation as two (or more) forks. There is no 'copy' and 'original'. Each fork is now a separately evolving instance, but all are direct and fully privileged descendants of the copying operation.

Whenever one dies, you can think of it as the original dying, and point out that all that's left alive is a copy - as TrashMan has. You may just as correctly say it is the copy dying and rejoice that the original is still alive, NO WORSE OFF THAN BEFORE.

The life of any given fork will proceed exactly as your ordinary everyday life does, up until their death. But, if each fork continues to fork, then you can pick one long branching tine in which the resident 'you' has never died.

You can, with complete logical validity, assume that this is the original You, because all the forks are the original You. You have lived since the moment of your birth, you have undergone several bewildering blinks between bodies, and you have left copies behind who have gone on to die - but you are the original.

And you can, with just as complete validity, say that you will inevitably die, and someone else will live. Both are correct. You are immortal. You are certain to die. And y'know what?

THIS IS YOUR LIFE. The person you are right now will be dead in five minutes. A version of you will live on - someone with a great deal of continuity, but who is nonetheless different.

We don't want to die. But this strategy for immortality, while allowing immortality, also necessitates death - in the very same way that the You who existed yesterday is dead, mercilessly overwritten by new environmental input and memory traces, forever lost and ceased to function, never again to return.

It's just that this strategy makes that kind of death much more clear. Much more real. Much more the kind of death we're used to being afraid of. That's why Kosh wants a total transfer. He wants to get scanned right on over to a new body, with no messy leftovers. When death is concomitant with transfer, it is no different from our second-to-second extinction.

Once you realize that death is not a Hard Black Line, that you could come back from the rotted grave if someone just pieced your atoms together, you will find it easier to accept this form of immortality.

Alternatively, you can take the Cylon-style live-update approach, and reduce the trauma of each 'death' to something empirically less traumatic and momentous than being punched out at a party.

EDIT: If you don't believe me.

I will now show you how to transform into a copy of yourself, just as in the copying process. All you need is access to your brain's pause button (to mimic the scan) and a Scottycorp Lego Operation Rebuilding Gun (to mimic the construction of a new brain and body.)

Get up and walk across the room. You are now at new spatial coordinates, just as the copy would be. If you insist on rigor, pause your brain and have a friend drag you across the room to the new position. (This replicates the hypothetical incredibly precise transfer of neural states and structure to the new brain in the new spatial position.)

Shoot yourself in the head (or have your friend do it) with a Scottycorp Lego Operation Rebuilding Gun. In a picosecond, magical forces will swap out every atom in your body for a brand new one. It would tingle, if it caused any nerve impulses at all!

Unpause your brain, if you elected to pause it.

You are now an utterly new (matter-wise) copy that maintains precisely the same information patterns and is in a different location. You are functionally the same as the postulated copy in the forking operation.

I bet you do not feel like any part of you has died.

[General Battuta]

HOLD THE PRESSES.

I have figured out a way into the TrashMan/Scotty/Kosh argument that makes me agree with it in part and moves my understanding of the entire idea closer to a synthesis of the two perspectives. It makes me think we've been arguing the same thing from two different directions and that some of Ghostavo and Scotty's points have actually been more valid than I thought.

I will wait until one of them posts again to see if it's necessary, though.

[Ford Prefect]

To those arguing against Battuta, I completely understand your instinctual objection-- I think I'll always have a difficult time with it on the intuitive level-- but if it helps, the mode of conceptualization that helps me the most is to call into question the assumption of some nebulous, metaphysical connection between my present self and the self I remember from, say two years ago. Who is to say that this person from two years ago is not just as dead as the theoretical "Prime" individual in the thought experiment?

I was being half facetious before, but this really is the first thing that Buddhists believe must be dispensed with. This sense of continuity of self is something we cling to so powerfully that we don't even realize there is any other way to think, and becoming liberated from this assumption is something that people spend their entire lives doing. So, while I understand your frustration, Battuta, it is important to appreciate what a mind**** your argument is.

[General Battuta]

I'm not actually that frustrated. Just mildly peeved at myself for letting myself get sucked into another crazy debate so quickly!

I totally understand, it's a real mind-screw. Even I almost managed to talk myself around to TrashMan and Scotty's position just a second ago, until I remembered stuff I'd been arguing earlier.

It's just so nonintuitive. I really do recommend the method that Ford suggests.