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Ask Slashdot: Is Beaming Down In Star Trek a Death Sentence?
Artem Tashkinov writes: Some time ago, Ars Technica ran a monumental article on beaming of consciousness in Star Trek and its implications, and more importantly, whether it's plausible to achieve that without killing a person in the process.
It seems possible in the Star Trek universe. However, currently physicists find the idea absurd and unreal because there's no way you can transport matter and its quantum state without first destroying it and then recreating it perfectly, due to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. The biggest conundrum of all is the fact that pretty much everyone understands that consciousness is a physical state of the brain, which features continuity as its primary principle; yet it surely seems like copying the said state produces a new person altogether, which brings up the problem of consciousness becoming local to one's skull and inseparable from gray matter. This idea sounds a bit unscientific because it introduces the notion that there's something about our brain which cannot be described in terms of physics, almost like soul.
This also brings another very difficult question: how do we know if we are the same person when we wake up in the morning or after we were put under during general anesthesia? What are your thoughts on the topic?
It seems possible in the Star Trek universe. However, currently physicists find the idea absurd and unreal because there's no way you can transport matter and its quantum state without first destroying it and then recreating it perfectly, due to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. The biggest conundrum of all is the fact that pretty much everyone understands that consciousness is a physical state of the brain, which features continuity as its primary principle; yet it surely seems like copying the said state produces a new person altogether, which brings up the problem of consciousness becoming local to one's skull and inseparable from gray matter. This idea sounds a bit unscientific because it introduces the notion that there's something about our brain which cannot be described in terms of physics, almost like soul.
This also brings another very difficult question: how do we know if we are the same person when we wake up in the morning or after we were put under during general anesthesia? What are your thoughts on the topic?
There's a great animated short by John Weldon that explores this topic. It's called To Be and can be found at this URL: http://www.nfb.ca/film/to_be/
Is the transporter killing people by ripping them apart atom by atom, and then creating a new person?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
. . . beaming down while wearing a red shirt does NOT seem to be a good idea.
Folks dressed like that never seem to last too long.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
"... which brings up the problem of consciousness becoming local to one's skull and inseparable from gray matter. This idea sounds a bit unscientific because it introduces the notion that there's something about our brain which cannot be described in terms of physics, almost like soul."
No, all it says is that a copy of a brain is not the original brain.
If you make a perfect copy of an orange, all the way down to the subatomic level, then that copy is still not the original orange. It's the copy.
If you make a perfect copy of me, down to the sub-atomic level and that copy walks into my room, then I will not suddenly confuse that copy with myself.
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I never knew why they didn't just use the transporter memory to restore all the red shirts...
... physicists find the idea absurd and unreal because there's no way you can transport matter and its quantum state without first destroying it and then recreating it perfectly, due to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.
It's been established that ST transporters have Heisenberg compensators, so checkmate actual physicists.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I raised this very question (Star Trek, transporter experiment) to my daughter when she was a teenager. Her response was, what's the difference? Our atoms have already largely completely changed over many times by now anyway. I recall reading years ago, I think it was a Time Life book or perhaps an educational movie, that we're all breathing, and thus by implication incorporating, some fraction of the actual atoms that Leonardo da Vinci breathed; a matter of statistics. Of course, that still leaves the question of whether your consciousness this very instant is already a different "thing" that it was a second ago, and only your current state of your memory leads you to believe that it is the same.
Hasn't "BeauHD" ever heard of Heisenberg Compensators?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
No sig today...
The universe is entirely static, a four dimensional object where everything that has or will happen exists simultaneously in an eternally unchanging state.
Our perception of it dynamically changing over time is an illusion of senses only perceiving a single "slice" of that object.
Furthermore, our consciousness is not continuous, but rather a disconnected multitude, each trapped forever in a specific moment of our lives. Each convinced it has a history because of the illusion of memory. Each convinced it has free will because of the illusion of action.
Since we are talking Star Trek, this has all ready been directly answered. Riker beams up, but leaves a copy. Years later, he is rediscovered by the enterprise crew. Dr. Crusher and Jordi agree they are identical and equally "Riker" so it must be true. Eventually the duplicate wanders off to lead a life of his own. Glad I could wrap that up for everyone scientifically, once and for all.
"shared out-of-body experience" is also a new-age farce.
Conversations like this are being had all over the Internet by amateurs who don't know nearly enough about the relevant subjects to speak intelligently on them, and of course consider themselves experts nonetheless.
"Soul" is a religious concept, zero actual evidence of the existence of any such thing, and it is not a concept that should be included in such discussions.
"Consciousness" is only meaningful when people don't abuse it by using it as a modern synonym for "soul." Consciousness is NOT a magical floaty part of yourself that is really you but isn't made out of matter. It's a high-level abstraction of everything necessary for a complex nervous system to be responsive. The word loses all usefulness when it is polluted with superstitious tripe!
The philosophical problem of personal identity is important and relevant, but it is also technical, has a long history, and there is a lot more to know about it than what you can infer from its name and common sense! If you are not educated you cannot participate in the debate!
"Identity" is an abstract concept, not a concrete thing, and the brain arrives it by a very fuzzy cognitive process. All of our "oh its is so mysterious" responses just come from a simple, and ignorant, expectation that this abstract concept should behave more like a physical object. It is why people try to bend your brain with questions like:
if you chop a person's arm of, and attach a different arm, is it still the same person? What if you pull three neurons out of that person's brain, and replace them with three new neurons? What if you pull 300 nerouns out and replace them? 3 million? What if you just swap the whole brain out with a totally different brain that has the same memories? Where is the specific line at which it becomes a different person?
These questions don't point out a problem of reality, nor do they point out a problem of "the mystery of consciousness" or anything stupid like that. They demonstrate that the concept of self that we are using is not clearly defined. That's ALL they demonstrate!
I realize I am ranting. So I will stop. Have fun remaining blind while being led by the blind, on this one.
The Outer Limits did an interesting episode on this topic: s07 e08 Think Like a Dinosaur.
That's sleep paralysis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It's very common and nothing to worry about.
That's what the Heisenberg compensator are for: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/...
Try it! Library of Babel
A scientific view of consciousness would state that if you could find a way to duplicate a physical body, then you could build a transporter as our consciousness is just the chemical and atomic state of our brain.
If we really have a metaphysical "soul", then just how would that re-attach to the physical form you transport elsewhere?
I liked how Dark Matter handled this better, where they created a clone at the destination while you were cryogenically stored at the origin, then if the clone made it back to the transmitter without dying you would get all of the memories of what happened.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The you would have no problem collecting that 1 Million USD from James Randi?
The Star Trek Transporter is a device invented to facilitate telling a story. There was 50 minutes. Obviously they could get in their space shuttle and land on the planet, get from the clear place they chose to the town, and then start the story. Or they could beam in.
There is also the fact that the way the communicators work is elided in the story. Obviously the channel can't be open until you say the name of the person you're calling, and even with some speeding up of the original audio it's going to take a second or two for them to catch up and respond. But nobody waits for the phone to ring on Star Trek.
And of course the data transfer method of the future is to give someone your tablet :-)
These are story devices. We can speculate about matter transmission being applied to conscious entities and copying people, but we should be clear that the reason these are used in Star Trek is not because they think that is how things will be in the future. It's because they made telling the story in the present easier to do.
Bruce Perens.
It's a death sentence, but also a rebirth, so it cancels out.
The biggest conundrum of all is the fact that pretty much everyone understands that consciousness is a physical state of the brain, which features continuity as its primary principle; yet it surely seems like copying the said state produces a new person altogether, which brings up the problem of consciousness becoming local to one's skull and inseparable from gray matter. This idea sounds a bit unscientific because it introduces the notion that there's something about our brain which cannot be described in terms of physics, almost like soul.
Consciousness is a physical state of the brain. It is a section of the brain which is 'reading' what's happening in other areas of the brain (more like the 2nd informational hub of the brain, similar to a large rest stop on a superhighway.) You can damage/turn off those other areas without losing consciousness. Continuity is not a primary principle. There are many ways to break continuity. Your unconscious mind don't break continuity during most of those instances. You can watch that on brain scanners.
Sleeping doesn't break continuity. It blocks short-term memory storage of the events happening during sleep. You can slowly train your brain to not do that. When you do so you become a lucid dreamer.
Exactly copying something means you have a second copy. So the second brain has its own consciousness exactly identical to the first until they start experiencing different inputs. In what way does any of that imply a soul? It doesn't, You just made up that statement because you've confused yourself. The summary makes an invalid argument so this shouldn't have been approved to Slashdot.
My thoughts on this topic are meaningless and so are yours. God is a human invention. You can see it time and time again by studying history, how humans react, and the areas of your brain which turn off during meditation/prayer (the section which lets you know where all yours parts are when you're not looking at them, so turning it off gives you an out-of-body experience). It doesn't matter if you're a new person when you have a gap in memory or not. Since it's trivial to demonstrate you don't go under any abnormal physical changes during such periods, the answer to such a question is meaningless no matter the answer.
Maybe this is the wrong question to ask...
Obviously, given the transporter doesn't exist yet, this is all hypothetical. However, assuming that a transporter had been developer for inanimate objects and your question preceded a decision to use it to attempt to transfer a living organism, then a different question becomes relevant:-
What is the mechanism by which the human brain achieves consciousness?
Because, I would argue, you can only answer the second question ("Is Beaming Down In Star Trek a Death Sentence?") when you know (1) How the Beaming Down process works; and (2) How the brain acts as the "container" for the mind [assuming it does].
Digging a little bit deeper... If it can be shown that consciousness is achieved merely from the result of a truly massive scale of parallel chemical processes that are taking place in the cells of the brain, then well, it might be possible. It would require technology that could scan the body not to a cellular resolution, but to an *atomic*, or possibly even sub-atomic resolution, instantaneously... then transmit that information to a remote location and reconstitute all that organic matter, with all those chemical "transactions", all synchronised to exactly the same point in time...
On the other hand, if consciousness exists through other means [I'm making this up, but, say quantum super-positioning] then the act of scanning the subject at the point of origin might in fact destroy the "data" before it could be "beamed" anywhere.
This is why my answer is that the OP asks the wrong question. It's not the beaming you need to consider first, it's to understand how consciousness functions at a materials science level. Only then can you start to understand the functional design requirements of the transporter.
because Star Trek and Star Trek transporters are fantasy. Something that fewer and fewer people seem to be able to distinguish from reality.
The research supporting your assertion that consciousness is local is pretty thin, and common phenomenon like corroborated veridical OBEs (out of body experiences) suggests that consciousness may be a lot more complex than you pretend. You might want to look at the work of Dr Kenneth Ring, Professor Emeritus of psychology at the University of Connecticut. His two major studies (and publications) on the matter raise a lot of questions about the local consciousness hypothesis.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It's a high-level abstraction of everything necessary for a complex nervous system to be responsive.
Please describe an objective repeatable test that a "conscious" entity would pass, but an entity without "consciousness" would fail.
"I know it when I see it" is not an objective test.
The word loses all usefulness when it is polluted with superstitious tripe!
"Consciousness" is superstitious tripe.
It would mean eternal life.
Since it would first record the data of the person to beam, it would analyze it and obviously NOT beam any cancer cells and pathogens down, but delete those from the data first.
Second, it could be used to send the body of a 25 year old in perfect health but with the conscience of the real person, no matter the age.
In case of a fatal accident, the last backup from the last beam could be used to recreate the dead person.
Obviously all esthetic surgeons would go jobless as well.
Astral travel is nothing more than a lucid dream with self imposed limits on the experience. You see yourself as travelling around on the astral plane because that's what you want to see. You can also have sex with a supermodel or captain a star ship if that's what you want. It's all in your head. There is just as much evidence of shared OOBEs as there is of telekinesis and telepathy...that is: none.
But why is the copy in the Mirror Universe ALWAYS Evil and has a Beard?
Come again?
Don't mind if I do.
The other day somebody stole everything in my apartment and replaced it with an exact replica... When my roommate came home I said, "Roommate, someone stole everything in our apartment and replaced it with an exact replica." He looked at me and said, "Do I know you?"
- Steven Wright
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Experiments performed on subjects who had the corpus callosum (the connection between hemispheres of the brain) severed, sometimes to treat chronic epilepsy, suggest that once the human brain is effectively divided in two, consciousness is also divided between the left & right hemispheres. The result is two distinct perspectives and sets of understanding observable within one body, each controlling their respective side of the body, the two sides sometimes disagreeing or fighting each other. This challenges the idea that consciousness exists as an indivisible 'soul', a supernatural phenomenon existing outside of and independent from the matter that makes up the brain. https://www.psychologytoday.co...
You can also have sex with a supermodel or captain a star ship
In my dreams I am a supermodel starship captain.
"The materialist argument is that a copy of you is also "you," you've basically just been "forked.""
On some level, yes. On another, no. The copies are very similar and share a common history, but from the moment they "forked" they actually are different people because they are different human brains.
If you bring two copies of a person together and tell them they must choose one of them to die because by law only one "you" is allowed to exist, then there will be some serious consternation, stress, and conflict between them most likely.
"The sticky problem is that even with a materialist explanation, it still doesn't explain what conscious awareness actually IS, just that it's an aspect of certain arrangements of matter. The problem of qualia is not solved, in fact it's a total mystery."
My bet is that what we call our consciousness is the amalgamation of the brain's higher functions. It's how the brain perceives itself, basically. How that works and why we experience it the way we do may eventually be figured out in detail.
The core issue is that we don't know exactly what consciousness is. A sense of "self" resulting from a skillful architecture of atoms? What even is life? What is the minimum requirement that separates a non-living replicator (is there such a thing - prions maybe?) from a living replicator?
Until we can define these things explicitly, questions such as those posed in the summary can only be speculated upon.
Why Star Trek transporters won't work in real life has nothing to do with Heisenberg. A living being cannot survive the process of having all their atoms ripped apart, due to the large among to energy required.
I just ripped some atoms off my body and survived... if I could save a map of where they all belong and reassemble them somehow, I could probably rip them all off. I didn't rip apart the atoms themselves, but presumably I can do that after they've been moved away from my body.
I’d suggest that you’re destroyed and recreated by transporting. The transporters use Heisenberg uncertainty compensators for one, implying a need to compensate for the destruction and re-creation. Transporters also have pattern buffers where they have been used to recreate adults from children and reform aged / damaged adults into their stored patterns. The information used during transport is very redundant. In one incident Riker was transported and the beam split. The result was two Rikers. So, pretty conclusively not transporting your atoms across a distance but rather transmitting a very accurate description of the being reduced to a corpse. Then recreated if no issues crop up.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Specifically there are three "places" you are simultaneously; or maybe two and two. In ST you have a thing called the buffer which is not a computer simulation. It's more a pocket universe. The beaming process involves duplicating you such that you identically exist in two places at once. You more than quantum entangled (you get misreads with quantum entanglement) but rather totally entangled. Almost like a mathematical transformation. You continue to exist alive somewhat constricted by a force field. You exist in real universe and the buffer universe simultaneously while particles in each are synchronized. There is one you in two places then possibly three once once you start to beam to your destination. The magic part is this is happening without measurement but rather magical entanglement on a three dimensional scale. You are one person (information down to the quantum level) existing in multiple places at once to varying degrees in the process in a quasi time.
Can this be done? Probably not. Let us not forget it was a plot device to speed up the stories rather than spending so much time in shuttles. What can definitely be done is in the relatively new sci-fi drama "Dark Matter". Where your consciousness and memories can be transferred to another body over distance; either a clone of you or possibly a generic body. Then your prime body goes into a deep coma. When the trip is done the new memories are copied back. Now this is really more of the metaphysical conundrum than Star Trek is. One could download to other bodies quite easily which could be a form of immortality as well as take backup of our minds. Traveling to other planets we could download to bodies developed for the environment (like avatar but actually downloaded rather than piloting). At what point could we become so comfortable having multiple bodies that we have no issues destroying the original rather than bear the cost of storage considering we could re-clone if we wanted our original forms?
I know you are joking, but there are 4 different paths to enlightenment:
* The Fakir
* The Monk
* The Yogi
* Spiritual Marriage / Gnosis
You _don't_ need me as a sensei, you already have everything within you to learn. Practice any hobby that helps you to connect to the Divine. Music, Painting, Dancing, Gardening, Sports, etc. You'll know what works for you when your sense of time is slowed down -- what athletes call "Being in the Zone."
Lastly, stay away from drugs -- they are a mental crutch.
I became a mystic when I dwelt in the presence of my Soul a couple decades back.
I guess if you're not dwelling in the presence of your soul.. you're dead.
I don't have much time for mystics who throw out lines like "dwelt in the presence of". What does that mean? You shared an apartment with it? Did it ever stiff you on the rent? Did it ever float into the room and casually announce "... Akashic shitter's clogged"?
I think it's safe, in fact, I'm thinking of doing some trials using myself in the test.
Just need to put on a clean shirt.... ah, my lucky red one! That means it's going to work.
See, I didn't think so either, until I checked the scientific literature. There most certainly are examples of corroborated out of body experience. It's most often found in studies of near-death experience cases, especially of blind subjects.
Let me remind you that skeptics base their opinions on evidence, not on what some TV magician tells them is true.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Not only are Energy and Matter interchangeable but aso Information. Imagine a brain region prosthetic were placed onto the brain to replace a region expected to die from alzheimer's. Interconnected to the same brain regions as that which it replaces, it learns to imitation the same output patterns as per the same input patterns to that when the replaced region dies, the prosthetic takes over (such things are under development today). Now let's suppose the disease spreads and you eventually replace every part of your brain, one region at a time. At what point did you become no longer you?
So the Soul is: one's sense of unique and continued existence.
They say every cell in the body is replaced every seven years. To my knowledge this is true with the exception of neurons. However, would it matter if it included neurons? So long as you copy one's personality and one's memories, I think most of us would consider that to be pretty much what defines us. Perhaps some would include also one's innate drives or perhaps emotional/chemical balance, if not considering those part of the personality already.
If a person walks through a quantum replicator (assume such a thing existed) and two of him or her walked out the other side. They would be the same person until that moment from which time they would start being separate Souls. The reason being, uniqueness split at that point.
It is the information that defines us, not the matter.. The concept "1+1=2" works the same no matter where you write it. It exists outside of the world of matter and energy but it does exist because it remains the same. The matter and energy in which information is implemented brings it into the world the same regardless so long as the information is the same. The same with a person.
Also, is it not accurate to say that we are a slightly different person with each moment that passes? And over time, we come to be more different. Are you the same person at 45 as you were at 25, or at 15, or at 5 years old? The Soul is a concept inclusive of one's life's narrative. It is your story.
In my dreams I am a supermodel starship captain.
Well then. I'll see you tonight ...
Said the guy who just consciously posted a comment.
Bots can post comments. That doesn't make them "conscious".
How does "consciousness" differ from mere intelligence?
Why don't you just admit that there is no evidence you would believe, and that until Penn & Teller tell you it's OK, there is no amount of peer-reviewed research you will ever accept? It would save us a lot of time with me providing citations and you not looking at them and deciding they're BS.
https://bioethics.georgetown.e...
http://www.resuscitationjourna...
There's lots more where that came from. I just picked this off the top.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Nobody knows shit about consciousness, and no physical model has ever explained it, despite some 150-200 years of scientific work on the problem – years which yielded countless discoveries in dozens of other fields, many presumably directly related.
How matter produces "awareness" is a question, not understood any better now, than in the time of Aristotle, or the dark ages.
Nor shall it ever be, I expect. Not as long as assumptions about the physical nature of the universe continue to remain as they have, from those ancient days, through the era of quantum mechanics. I'd wager consciousness is still a problem, unresolved, 150 years hence.
I do think that the work by Dr Donald Hoffman at UC Irvine is very interesting, at least in explaining how we are fundamentally wrong about consciousness and perception, because a real understanding of our environment can be demonstrated as evolutionary unfitness.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Its amazing how Random Capitalization of Words almost always indicates a crank or conspiracy theorist. Suddenly Everything That Matters becomes worthy of Capitalization for Emphasis. A friend of mine who's gone of the deep end started doing this, and now I know she's Truly Lost.
A Near Death Experience (NDE) is fundamentally different from an Actual Death Experience (ADE). There are no reliable accounts of people returning from an ADE.
There is an alternative to the problem matter producing awareness: awareness might be an inherent property of matter. I don't imagine an atom or electron has a particularly sophisticated awareness, but if it has even the smallest fleck of "I am!" to build upon, then it fundamantally changes the nature of the questions we should be asking.
In that case the awareness of an organism need not be a is not a fundamentally new feature, but an emergent structure from the interactions of more primitive consciousnesses. Much as the life of an organism emerges from the structured functioning of the life of its cells. Or the wisdom of crowds (and insanity of mobs) emerges from the interaction of large groups of people.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Or maybe it's entirely contained in the intensely personal network of interconnection between our neurons, and possibly to some extent in the internal state of the neurons themselves (RNA, etc). Certainly we have managed to revive people whose brains have been almost totally inert.
The mechanism underlying awareness is still completely unresolved.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
You know its a terrible idea, but all your friends are doing it, because they don't understand how it works. And then your mom starts doing it, and then she lays a huge guilt trip on you because you never visit.
Why don't you just admit that there is no evidence you would believe, and that until Penn & Teller tell you it's OK, there is no amount of peer-reviewed research you will ever accept? It would save us a lot of time with me providing citations and you not looking at them and deciding they're BS.
https://bioethics.georgetown.e...
http://www.resuscitationjourna...
There's lots more where that came from. I just picked this off the top.
Did you read your own link? Because neither link support the idea of OBE or consciousness existing outside the brain.
Let me summarize them for you since you took the assertion that I wouldn’t read it: there’s evidence of consciousness after clinical death. The brain does things we don’t fully understand yet. But it’s a huge leap to say that our consciousness exist outside your brain. Here’s a movie analogy, you believe consciousness is like “Dr. Strange” while existing evidence says it’s more like “Jacob’s Ladder.”
Good, you're making progress. Now that you accept the existence of NDEs, let's look at how they relate to OBEs:
https://link.springer.com/arti...
https://link.springer.com/jour...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You are welcome on my lawn.
That was very insulting of me to be so quick to be dismissive. My aura needs cleansing and my chankra isn’t aligned.
There are seven different vaginas that lead to enlightenment. You must find these 7 evil vaginas, and fight them.
-a guy who has just as much evidence as the OP
From the perspective of the rest of the universe ? No it does not matter. From the perspective of the teleported person ? It sure do. You die. Point. You do not continue. A clone of you with your memory do continue. If you don't care to die and let a clone continue, you take the perspective of the rest of the universe, fine for you. But I take the perspective of me, myself and I, and I would certainly care not to die. As for your ship of theseus explanation : yes we sleep , we replace part of ourselves. But it is a process which do not replace whole neuron (neuron in brain stop reproducing at what , 12 ?) or touch the network that much. Yes there is not a continuity of consciousness, and yes the "persona" itself change , grow or degenerate, but it still continue to be the same identical individual. It does not die and have a clone replace it. That is why your comparison fail.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Did some just take a beginners' philosophy class ?
Physics as we know it says this type of transfer isn't even possible. Whilst the OP mentioned Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle it seemed to miss that it means you fundamentally can't do this. You canNOT measure perfectly (enough even) the position *and* momentum (energy) of anything at sufficient level to re-create it elsewhere (even assuming you could). Star Trek techno-babbled "Heisenberg Compensators" to address this, but that's completely fiction.
If it *was* possible, well, then you given it's fantasy you can argue as to if the scanning/reading in *would* be destructive or not (Quantum Mechanics says the measurement will also change the state, but we're in fantasy land here...). If it's not then you have what's been covered by some SF stories, e.g. something goes wrong during transmission, and as you're not sure if a new copy is active at the destination you don't yet destroy the original. If communication issues persist then you may later find the new copy is perfectly fine. Now what do you do to the original ? If the original is destroyed in the process then you'd better hope the copying process works else you've just committed definite murder.
As for waking after sleep... are we even the same person we were before our last conscious thought process? Unconscious one ? Anyone who's ever had their mind changed about something,or experienced anything new has this happen whilst awake.
It's not currently testable, but considering it's damn near impossible to test whether a fellow human is actually aware of anything that's not surprising. It's not a symptom of magical thinking, but rather of trying to find the source of something we have no reliable method of detecting in the first place. We're putting the cart miles in front of the horse.
And it's not at all a meaningless concept - it's a completely objective and deeply relevant one: either fundamental particles are conscious, or they're not. If they are, then that changes they way we should look for the source of our awareness - not for a mechanism that creates it, but for a path that allows it to emerge from lower levels. (presumably in a more sophisticated form)
Heck, you don't even need to assume it originates from fundamental particles for that to be a useful perspective - anyone who has watched an amoeba hunt will get the impression that it has some spark of awareness in it's single-celled body, and it's no great leap to assume our individual cells may possess such awareness as well. So how is it that the awareness of your neurons combines to form the gestalt awareness of "you"? It should be clear that starting from that assumption suggests an entire realm of research avenues that are overlooked by the assumption that awareness is something somehow produced by mechanistic "bio-transistors"
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I've heard the experiences are comparable.
What I'm doing is nothing new nor unique. When you listen to Terence McKenna, Allan Watts, Ram Dass, and other modern mystics and distill their teachings down to the raw essentials you find everyone teaches pretty much the same basic spiritual principles: Unconditional Love and Forgiveness for All. Based on my personal experiences I agree with that 100%.
What made my experience memorable for me is that a friend of my brother gave me one of Raymond's Moody's book Life after Life. That got me to curious to try meditation. One my very first try I met my Soul. That was proof enough: "OK, maybe there just is something to this whole meditation thing after all." Over the years, both solo meditation, and meditation with the wife, you quickly find out "We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto." We're mapping whole new territory.
These experiences are the reason I say "Mind, not space, is the final frontier -- because there is nothing, or no thing, but Mind." The _real_ interesting question becomes: Whose mind? :-) It dovetails with the quintessential questions: Who am I? Who was I? Who will I become?
It's great to see other people reach the same conclusions about Consciousness: The Primacy of Consciousness - Peter Russell
There are a couple of other important points I've learnt along the way:
* It never ceases to amaze me how an armchair critic is now magically "an expert" on an experience they have never even had.
* Religion is about taking one man's Spiritual experience and adding all sorts of bullshit dogma and tradition around the "correct way."
But I digress ...
What is really cool is that we have just barely scratched the surface with the entire "Mind over Matter" thing as a species.
Modern science is stuck in a myopic reductionist POV: "If it isn't physical then it does't exist." -- which is the epitome of ignorance because Time and Numbers themselves are non-physical. *facepalm*
Princeton for 28 years has evidence that (human) consciousness CAN effect a random number generator -- but important clues like this, sadly, are marginalized or ignored.
http://www.princeton.edu/~pear...
Thankfully First Contact ~2024 - 2034 will (help) put an end to our primitive thinking and widen our perspective to the next level of understanding.
Great ready for an interesting ride these next few decades. We're about to learn some really cool stuff about reality.
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Atheist: A blind man arguing with those that can see that color doesn't exist.
And your evidence for this is?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
It's not currently testable, but considering it's damn near impossible to test whether a fellow human is actually aware of anything that's not surprising.
It's entirely testable. I assume you're referring to the old "how do we know if he's aware or just emulating awareness" conundrum, which is another bit of meaningless handwaving. If an entity demonstrates perception of it's environment, the ability to process that information, and the ability to store and recall that information, then it is aware. Whether this is "true awareness" or "emulation of awareness" is a meaningless question. You might classify different entities as having different levels of awareness, much like we can classify them by other abilities, but to deny that it is aware in the first place is absurd.
It's not a symptom of magical thinking, but rather of trying to find the source of something we have no reliable method of detecting in the first place. We're putting the cart miles in front of the horse.
If you assume that you can't detect it, then yes, you certainly are doing that. Which makes me wonder why you're doing it. If you truly believe that awareness cannot even be tested for, it seems absurd to start looking for a source.
And it's not at all a meaningless concept - it's a completely objective and deeply relevant one: either fundamental particles are conscious, or they're not.
It's not the concept that's meaningless; it's the word "conciseness" itself which becomes meaningless if you redefine it in such a way that quantum particles and atoms could actually possess it. Particles cannot perceive. They cannot process. They cannot store, or retrieve. All they can do is interact with each other. In order for you to give them "consciousness" you have to either redefine the word in such a way that it becomes meaningless, or you have to invoke magic. And even if you do invoke magic, so that particles can now magically perceive, process, store, and recall information, you're then left with a near infinite number of entities which have consciousness yet do absolutely nothing with it.
If they are, then that changes they way we should look for the source of our awareness - not for a mechanism that creates it, but for a path that allows it to emerge from lower levels. (presumably in a more sophisticated form)
Which lower levels? You've already invoked magic to give it to the lowest levels. There's nowhere "lower" for it to emerge from.
Heck, you don't even need to assume it originates from fundamental particles for that to be a useful perspective - anyone who has watched an amoeba hunt will get the impression that it has some spark of awareness in it's single-celled body, and it's no great leap to assume our individual cells may possess such awareness as well. So how is it that the awareness of your neurons combines to form the gestalt awareness of "you"?
Whatever level of "awareness" you want to assign to a neuron is probably not much different than the level of awareness you could assign to a silicon logic gate. You may as well be asking "how does the awareness of logic gates combine to form the gestalt awareness of an AI". Well, I could explain to you how it works, but I suspect you already know the answer, so what is it you're really looking for? Some magical "something more" which somehow makes the higher level consciousness more than the sum of it's parts?
It should be clear that starting from that assumption suggests an entire realm of research avenues that are overlooked by the assumption that awareness is something somehow produced by mechanistic "bio-transistors"
I don't see how. Other than the fact that, if you insist on invoking magic, it pretty much puts an end to any serious inquiry. If we leave out magic and just start assigning limited awareness at the level of multicellular organisms, then you're back to the same "realm of research avenues" as the rest of us; figuring out how exactly many simple parts can organize to form a more capable whole.