this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2025
879 points (97.4% liked)
memes
15345 readers
4910 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
Sister communities
- !tenforward@lemmy.world : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world : Linux themed memes
- !comicstrips@lemmy.world : for those who love comic stories.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
No you can't. Only through the logic of knowing that the transported one must be the copy. Both will feel like you do. If you eliminate that location part (e.g. like in “The Prestige”), nobody will know or care who is “copy” or “original” (if concepts like that even apply in whatever fictional mechanism that movie uses)
I don't know what you mean by the talk of “chemical process” and how it's supposedly meaningful if one ends or not. I'm a brain believing it's alive. If one recreates or simulates that brain’s functionality sufficiently well and puts it into roughly similar simulated or real body, that person is me.
I'm saying that you're essentially believing in souls. That the ego in your head that believes it's an entity because it has access to your memory and philosophy is just an illusion. No less real, but not in any form required to be continuous.
I will. Or rather, if my original body gets disintegrated, I won't. Because I'm dead.
Nope. I'm explicitly denying the existence of a soul. My experience is bound to my physical body, and nothing else. If my physical body is disintegrated, then my existence ends, even if someone constructs a perfect copy of my body somewhere else. That will not be my physical body.
A you died. A you remains. Nothing is lost, so calling it a “death” is like calling sleep “a small death”: purely philosophical and with no relevance to your ability to live your life after.
It's a trick of perspective. If you acknowledge that “you” is just a electrochemical reaction, you're just like a computer program: only defined by what's happening, not which CPU is running it.
This is equivocation. Under one definition, a me died. Under a much more meaningful and relevant definition, the only me died. Someone else that looks and acts and sounds like me is alive, but I am not experiencing life through his senses. He's a different guy, even if no other person can tell the difference between us. I already explained this.
I said that consciousness is a chemical reaction, and also that my experience of life is bound to my physical body. If you destroy my physical body, my experience of life ends. I do not care if an identical program is running on a different CPU right now, I am running on this one.
I want you to imagine for a moment that I'm about to shoot you in the head, but I explained that "it's fine, because I just scanned your body and at some point I will make a perfect reconstruction of it. Nobody will ever know the difference between the you that I shoot in the head and the you that I reconstruct later." You don't want me to shoot you in the head. I know that for a fact. You know there's a difference between the you that's experiencing life right now, and the you that I will reconstruct elsewhere.
It doesn't matter whether I reconstruct you later, or I've already done so, or if I do so at the exact moment the bullet enters your brain. I know that you know that when you get shot in the head, you die, regardless of how perfectly I can recreate you elsewhere. Does this analogy help you to understand why I think that a transporter that disintegrates your body kills you?
Believe me, I've been there. I've thought what you think for decades, but at some point it clicked and I knew.
My point is that there is no part that makes the one that died “the only you”. Your “point of view” is an illusion. Your belief in your ego being a unique continuous thing is product of how our brains functions, not a fact.
Think about the freeze example some more. Think about what would happen to “you” if you ship-of-theseus’d your brain while frozen by dividing all molecules randomly into two piles, adding copies of the respective other pile, and reassembling everything: what molecule holds the “you” particle?