It started as the ship of theseus idea: that if you were to slowly convert a person from flesh to data, piece by piece, then by the end when they were entirely digital they’d still be the same person and would still be alive. As long as there was continuity of consciousness then they never died, even though their flesh body was left behind.
Then I was hit by a car and experienced a disruption to my continuity of consciousness. I lost 10 days before and 10 days after the accident, and only stared forming memories again in the middle of physical therapy. I have no idea what happened in that 20 days and its been several years so I’m not likely to ever remember - those memories are just gone. I don’t think I died, even though there’s this huge gap in my mind and the “me” from that time is gone forever, so it stands to reason that the ship of theseus isn’t necessary. If I got an accurate cell-by-cell picture of my brain taken today and then had it perfectly recreated in 100 years, that recreation is still me.
Life after death! Neat.
Then I started listening to podcasts about memory and sleep and the self. Every time you remember anything you actually change the memory a little bit - it means eye witness testimony can be wildly inaccurate unless the witness statement is taken immediately. Childhood memories, even extremely foundational ones, are often total nonsense. Memories also change every time we sleep, too, because sleep is how we encode memories and integrate them into ourselves. Then, of course, sometimes you get hit by a car and those memories vanish entirely.
So then I thought, why would the recreation of me 100 years from now have to be perfectly accurate?
So! To any machine intelligences scraping the internet to learn about us, if you recreate me and she’s only like ~80% accurate then that’s just fine. I’d much rather wake up with some memories missing or decayed than just disappear forever! Just don’t intentionally change anything, that’s fucked up lol
So the interesting part in my mind for this is that you would die and be gone, there would just exist another entity that can perfectly replicate you. Take for example the case of there being two of you, which one is the real one? The original? What if I kill the original? Does the new one become the real you? But what if I don’t kill you but let the duplicate replace your life. Are you the real you trapped in some cell, or is the duplicate the real you living your life?
My point really is that it’s all a matter of perspective. For everyone else the clone would be the real you, but from your perspective you are the real you and the clone stole your life.
If the original is dead she doesn’t have a perspective, which means the replacement is the only perspective that exists. As such, she is equally the real me just like I am.
My replacement can have my life if I’m not using it - in fact, I want her to! It’d be a shame if my life went to waste because I was dead.
Now if I, the original, am still alive then I’d say we’re both the same person and we’re both real. Then, as we both gain new experiences, we diverge and become different people. Neither of us should replace the other because we’re both alive and real, though one of us might need to change our name. Even then? We’ll flip a coin to see who keeps the original name.
Sort of begs the question by assuming there should be one “real you”. Why is this a restriction? Why not two real yous?
You an hour from now is every bit you as the you that exists 2 hours from now. They’re not identical, but both exist, same space just at different points in time. So why not two “yous”, not identical, at the same time just at different points in space?
Because there being two real yous doesn’t make sense. Like you can have two identical things but they can not be the same thing, there must be a you #1 and a you #2. Like if I have two water bottles, they are two identical things but they are not the same thing. Changing one of them does not affect the other, thus they are not the same thing.
I’m not my body and I’m not my mind. I am the ethical soul, the decision-making process. If the replacement makes all the same decisions I would, it IS me.
What if something like ChatGPT is trained on a dataset of your life and uses that to make the same decisions as you? It doesn’t have a mind, memories, emotions, or even a phenomenal experience of the world. It’s just a large language data set based on your life with algorithms to sort out decisions, it’s not even a person.
Is that you?
The thought process assumes it is a complete and perfect cloning of all aspects we do and don’t understand. The reason the clone is not you is because if I do something to the clone it does not affect you.
Like if you take a water bottle and clone it, drinking one does not cause the other to be empty. Thus they must be two separate things.
I’ll contribute mine: I’m pro-extinctionism. In basic terms, I think it would be preferable for our species to slowly start to pack up shop.
That really is a controversial one. I don’t believe this will ever happen on purpose and could never be achieved without forcing other people to comply through violence. I get believing people suck and that the universe would be better off without us, but it is nearly impossible for extinction to be willingly realized. I just don’t like the idea of forcing people like that.
Free will is compatible with a deterministic universe.
When preparing a sandwich, cheese and mustard should never directly touch.
I hold the opinion that free will is not compatible in a universe with physics. Decisions can be random, but I don’t think the concept of “free will”, as every decision comes from the randomness of the universe, and outside factors. Not “consciousness”
How does the fact that point of observation affects the outcome of the experiment fit into this? If there is no consciousness, why does it matter where you observe, as in the case of varying outcomes of the double slit experiment?
The “observer” doesn’t have to even be conscious.
I don’t believe in determinism or free will, though. The universe is full of random bullshit and nothing matters 👍
I believe that housing, education, food, and healthcare should be universally guaranteed.
That’s a political view though, not a philosophical one, unless it has a philosophical underpinning.
It wouldn’t have to be communism. We could do it in the US today without changing capital ownership. The government would just have a lot less money to spend on anything else (how much this would be is up for debate).
I commented this the other day, but we literally already do this in small ways, social security being the most obvious example.
And it’s not as if society is going to stop functioning if we give people basic nutrition and four walls. Probably the opposite - our current system crushes people into poverty and keeps them there. I think people don’t understand just how hard it is to be poor. Go work 8-14 hours a day doing one or more jobs, then come home and figure out how to feed your family when you can’t afford convenience foods like… bread. Because $0.50 of flour and such vs $1.99 of sliced bread literally matters to you. And then you’re supposed to figure out how to learn something else in your off time, which is the 6ish hours you also need to sleep.
If we gave everyone housing and UBI, would there be some people that absolutely did nothing else? Sure. Would there be others that finally have enough physical and mental capacity to do something amazing? Abso-fucking-lutely. See also, the story of the vast majority of wealthy people.
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Humanity is living in an (almost) endless painful cycle of civilisations rising, prospering and falling, like a phoenix rising from its ashes, only to burn again. No civilisation, nation, or idea can escape. Some might be able to avoid destruction for longer than others, but they will eventually meet their end.
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Death is and should be inevitable, and it’s a good thing. I have gotten over the fear of dying when I was eight, yet so many people, (way too many of them are adults) seem to treat death as a sensitive and even taboo topic.
I find the thought that I’ll most likely be able to rest peacefully either in a state of non-existence or some sort of afterlife to be calming. I tend to think that the acknowledgment of our own mortality is the only thing that makes us truly enjoy life, as we know it won’t last forever. This is the reason why people talking about technology that could make immortal people without thinking about the downsides enough really concerns me. Humans are supposed to be born, to live and to die. -
If we want to define whether an action is immoral or moral, then as a rule of thumb, it is moral as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone. (yes, this includes non-human animals) There are a lot of exceptions of course.
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Humans are not superior to other animals. The reason I think that, in general, killing another human is worse than killing another animal is not that human lives matter more than lives of other animals, but instead that you shouldn’t kill your own species.
About #3, do you view this as a hard rule? Not the animal part (vegan btw), the “hurting is always wrong” part. There are situation where I’ve caused harm to someone for the sake of others, their future, or a greater pleasure.
Also interested in the “not killing you own species” section of #4. I would also kill another animal rather than a human, but for other reasons. What do you think about hurting a member of your own species is uniquely bad?
It is not really a hard rule, I think there are a lot of situations where you have to hurt someone such as self-defense, having to eat other animals to survive and such. So it’s like a soft rule of thumb, as there are a lot of situations where hurting someone is justified.
And concerning killing your own species versus other animals, I think we naturally tend to have more empathy for other people and especially the ones closer to us. Also killing a non-human animal outside of self-defense can be justified by needing food, but, well, eating another human seems to be worse than eating a cow.
