So some people think that star-trek style teleporters entail the destruction of their 'subjective' 'self' or...

You could preserve the conscious if you apply a extension to the brain by means implant that communicates with itself at the speed of light. The borg are incapable of truly dying.

Let's say I need your help a teleportable distance away from your current location, and this type of teleportation requires the destruction of mass at the source and the reconstruction of mass at the destination.

It is possible that your sense of self dies at the source teleporter, and merely a clone of you is created at the destination.

This is also a problem with "immortality" through brain uploadings or whatever.

It is also possible that your sense of self is transmitted through the teleportation process.

To the outside observer, me, I cannot tell the difference, and your clone will perform your duties equally as well, so I do not care :)

But in Star Trek transporters you remain conscious during the entire time you're being dematerialized. Did everyone forget the episode with Barclay when he had to get over his phobia of the transporter and saw all kinds of weird shit in the stream?

Wait?

If my consciousness died last night why is this new one here? Why is it continuing things for the last one? Does each of my new consciousnesses have a new subconsciousness or do they share the same one?

This is why naps are the best. You can kill yourself, and then take it back like "hmm nah"

That is how the simulation was designed.

>sleeping is comparable to being completely destroyed and reassembled somewhere else

The destruction and the reassembly are not linked. There is no magical process that will take your current "self" and put it into the new body

>There is no magical process that will take your current "self" and put it into the new body
Its called cortical neuroplasticity and most of the reorganization of the brain goes on during sleep.

The premise of transporters is that the inital person is destroyed, and there is a protocol in place to enure this happens. There was even a TNG episode which dealt with a dupe.

youtube.com/watch?v=pdxucpPq6Lc

have you fags really not seen this? queers.

Could you reassemble the body whilst retaining that consciousness?

It goes to the core of consciousness and our inability to understand what it actually is. You might say "ah, consciousness is strictly mechanical!" Congrats, you've ended where I'm starting.

Start to find exceptional scenarios and edge cases and you'll readily begin to have problems. eg, if you cut your brain in half (or sever the white matter tracts with gamma knife etc), which side are "you" then? Do you "become" at all, or do you simply stop existing and two new beings are formed.

But novel formation itself is a problem. Our whole undergoes macro structural changes all the time, persistence is an illusion. Whether it happens gradually, or all at once, why would becoming two distinct objects with consciousness be any different of a process? There is seemingly no room for "you", in any of these cases.

The core problem is that we experience persistent consciousness. You could look at it like a flipbook, but this doesn't work either.

What about when two people merge into one like tuvix

There is still a continuation of consciousness; no different to any other changing process such as ageing or growth. Being completely destroyed and rebuilt cannot be compared to those processes.
Imagine if instead of deconstructing someone, they were simply scanned and an exact copy was created at the desired location. This is exactly the same as teleportation except the original person is not destroyed. In this scenario, it seems logical that the original person does not experience consciousness through both their old and new body.
Teleportation is just glorified copying, and a copy is not you. You could reconstruct Micheal Jackson right now, but the consciousness that existed in the old MJ will still be dead- he would not think he had been born again.

That is why you have to sleep though, if you don't you start to go crazy because your old brain structure needs to be destroyed so all the new connections can be made.

What is the evolutionary advantage of subjective self?

What makes you think conciousness is continuous? You could get a new conciousness every few minutes and you wouldn't notice, since your memories are part of your brain and wouldn't change.

>Teleportation is just glorified copying, and a copy is not you.
But doesn't this strike you as similar to monkeys attacking their reflection in a mirror; failing to attribute the selfhood to something that is in fact them?

Assuming it's just destroying and storing an individual (would have to be very precise), then using the stored data to create a new individual. Then it is death in every sense.
Imagine that someone is copied and materialised elsewhere but the original isn't destroyed. What would you make of that?

>Then it is death in every sense.
I am not so sure that it is. Death afterall is an irreversible process after which that person is gone for good.
Teleportation seems more like being knocked out and coming to in a different location

so that you would be more motivated to make sure that you preserve yourself and by that your dna

think about it, if you don't find existing special and inherently different of not existing it wouldn't be that difficult to end your life and by that your dna

with a completely different body. What makes you think that your continuous consciousness would suddenly be in that body? You, as you perceive yourself, might just cease to exist. Like falling asleep and never waking up.

The parts that constitute the brain change in configuration as time passes. With each different configuration, there is essentially a new brain. You're pretty much dying every second of every day. The whole 'your consciousness will die if you're cloned' argument is retarded.

>with a completely different body. What makes you think that your continuous consciousness would suddenly be in that body? You, as you perceive yourself, might just cease to exist. Like falling asleep and never waking up.
The thing is, if my consciousness is entirely a product of my brain, anything which is a brain identical to mine must by definition contain my consciousness.

I've considered consciousness while driving to work on "autopilot" - i.e. I got there remembering little or nothing of what happened on the way. It is apparently well established that the brain can't "get" an external stimulus in a time shorter than about 0.5s, yet if your reaction time was that slow you could not navigate successfully in busy traffic. The answer is, of course, anticipation. One is making short-term predictions about what is going to happen in the immediate future, and they are continually being borne out. So my idea of consciousness is one of a kind of an exec loop, continually running and generating the "aha" reaction every time things pan out. If this process fails, something unexpected happens and you likely die.

Imagine a murderer trying to escape from the law. He teleports, his body is disassembled and information sent elsewhere. Is the guy on the other side still guilty of murder? Technically he never killed anyone. What if there's two copies created from the same data?

In that case, I'm going to get super fucked up tonight and let the next 'me' deal with the hangover

Don't know about sleep doing that, but anesthetic certainly does. When you wake from sleep you get a sense of time having passed, but waking from anesthetic is like picking up instantaneously from the moment you went under. At least it has been for me on the 3 - 4 occasions I have experienced it. That seems more like death to me. So I went into death without fear because I had every expectation of it being temporary. Casts a fresh light on the mentality of suicide bombers and their expectations of virgin whores and all that shit.

The people who believe teleportation won't cause death don't understand the hard problem of consciousness.

They believe that a copy of a brain would magically contain the *same* consciousness as the original.

>They believe that a copy of a brain would magically contain the *same* consciousness as the original.
The same brain 'magically' contains the same consciousness as the original.

what if the teleporter fails to kill the original person?
what if the teleporter kills the original person a second after the second person forms?

Yeah then it's pretty obvious that 'your consciousness' is not the sort of thing that can only be instantiated one place at a time.

But the clones don't share the same consciousness in the series, they're separate individuals.

separate yes, different no.

I'll believe the hard problem of consciousness exists when somebody provides an adequate solution to the P-zombie problem. Until then, I see no reason to believe in an invisible pink unicorn dwelling inside a bunch of arbitrary meat sacks.

Anesthesia genuinely scares the shit out of me. Stories of people waking up "different" as parts of their brain never wake back up or even die are horrifying.

I've had to go under a couple times in my life and as far as I know, I was the same before and after… I think. One time was when I was like 2 so who knows about that one.

If you're talking about the dual Rikers episode, the copy wasn't created by the original never being destroyed, but instead by a partially reflected transporter signal. Enough of the signal got through the planet's atmosphere that the transporter in orbit was able to materialize a Riker, but the transporter on the surface only saw the portion of signal getting bounced back and rematerialized that as a safety measure. In essence, the atmosphere turned the transporters into a copy machine for physical objects.

If you bang your head the same thing can happen. And it happens with time anyway, that's why you forget things.

source p;ls thanks

Not the same guy, but what would it be like to perceive by two consciousness? Put yourself in one of the clones perspective rather than analysing in third-person mode.

If it's possible to make a carbon copy of yourself into non violatile memory then you would never die. Everytime a fatal accident happened you could just rematerialize yourself out of storage with a deadman switch script.

Or reproduce yourself 20 times, a million times, a billion times. Or transport your brain into somebody else's body and rematerialize.

It would, you save the state of the current brain and copy it with said state just like a virtual machine snapshot.

The issue isn't with any answer, but with the question and the ideas themselves.

The concepts of absolute identity and equality doesn't really have a solid epistemic or ontological foundation. It's a case of symbolism (the Aufhebung between dynamic and static forms), wherein we have taken the dynamic concept of existence or permanence and formed a static symbol representative of it, the idea of identity. The question of whether or not the teleported person is the "same" as you is flawed in assuming that you exist in and of yourself. There is no evidence of this.

The only answer is the inelegant tautology: the being being before teleportation possessed self-awareness and the illusion of identity (ego), and the being afterward possessed the same qualities and shared all other intrinsic properties of the initial one. Trying to reduce this to an answer in terms of the symbolic representatives is impossible because we went outside of the jurisdiction of our symbolism.

t. Read the first arc of existential comics

existentialcomics.com/comic/1

You retain the memory of your previous consciousness.