Lets say you deigned a nanomachine that basically recycles your own cells and transforms them in to much superior immortal synthetic cells. These cells also work perfectly whit existing regular cells so they cause no issues and if you lets say replaced your arms or legs using this you would feel no difference. But you would have potentially perfect legs that never have muscle atrophy atrophy and maybe even let you preform feats impossible by a normal human. Now lets say these cells can essentially replace all the cells in your body giving you near immortality and immunity to diseases and serious permanent injury.
Now here comes the complicated part. Lets say the nanomachines can replace your biological brain. They do it slowly once cell at a time. Each time it replaces a cell you may forget something for a single moment but then remember it the next as the machines work. You can stay awake thru the entire process.
The question is. Is your mind still your own or is it a perfect copy of your old mind. Lets say each time the machine deletes a cell in your brain you forget something g but once it is reformed in to a immortal biosinthetick cell you now remember it as if you never forgot it in the first place. Also keep in mind this is not a sudden copy paste process. Like you dont cease to exist in one moment and then a new you emerges who may or may not be you [Based on the coin flip principle] At no moment did 2 exact copies of your entire mind exist.
Are you now dead and this thing is just a perfect copy of you. Or is this new creature/thing still you and not a copy.
ship of theseus. you are the original human with replaced parts. if you assembled the original pieces then you get a different copy of you made of the original parts.
as long as maintains its processes while getting replacement parts, its the same thing.
faggot
Charles Garcia
This is just the Ship of Theseus problem.
What's funny is that this already happens to you with living cells. Every single cell in your body is replaced with a different one every 7 years or so, so you're not even the same person you were 7 years ago.
You're saying that with some authority but that's just your opinion. This is a philosophy question with no correct answer, just feelings and justifications of your feelings.
Samuel Gutierrez
you are why people hate philosophers.
my argument for the ship of theseus was that the ship is preserved in terms of identity, but not physically
David Ortiz
this is essentially the same argument as the Star Trek transportation. the question is what is "you" and what constitutes the real "you". for now the answer is totally subjective and up to speculation, but I think the answer will probably be same as the one to "what is consciousness?"
Levi Ramirez
If you replace the pages of a book page by a page, is it the same story or is it a copy of the same story? Does it fucking matter? A copy of a computer program is the same computer program, there is no practical difference. Same with humans. Btw, the process of replacing parts you mentioned is already happening, all the time, just your new ones are same or slightly worse than the old ones.
Nathan Watson
This really. The big question is if an old book has rotted, is an identical replica of that book in its viable state any different? One is rejuvenation and the other is necromancy but doe a monist functionalist, it should be possible.
Joshua Ross
Basically this And these You are the process not the parts. This is a problem that can be examined in the real world so you can't claim some sort of pure metaphysical playing field.
Caleb Myers
That's pop Sci, retard. You keep most of your neurons for your whole life.
Ethan Perez
This is true, though your brain still changes structure as you grow and age, so his argument still holds.
Leo Robinson
Yeah I quoted that as a part of my argument and realized I was being hasty after as well. Still, though, it's not as if one of those neurons is the "you" neuron and if you let it die everything reboots. The brain is an adaptable system.
Jeremiah Peterson
>You are the process not the parts
That's just an opinion, not a fact. It could be more rationally argued that you are the parts, and the "process" is just a hypothetical concept which you arbitrarily assign to to a blob of atoms. You could just as easily call the entire universe a single process, or call the interaction between two atoms a process. There's no reason to think the "process" of a human life has any special significance. It's a simple thing to select an area of atoms and say that these atoms all constitute a human known as "OP", but trying to define something as ephemeral as the "process" that constitutes OP over time, with parts constantly trading out and all the outside systems effected is much more arbitrary
Elijah Davis
>It could be more rationally argued that you are the parts, and the "process" is just a hypothetical concept which you arbitrarily assign to to a blob of atoms. The setup for your argument is its own undoing here. Matter is constantly flowing in and out of and rearranging within that system. None of the atoms within it in the structure that they exist are necessary for the continuation of the process.
Retaining my identity has nothing to do with retaining the same precious, exact carbon atoms that I had X years ago.
>You could just as easily call the entire universe a single process, or call the interaction between two atoms a process. There's no reason to think the "process" of a human life has any special significance. Because it isn't special. The only person in this discussion who needs special metaphysics is you. To me, if I can ask the Ship of Theseus at any point whether it feels that its identity and continued consciousness is that of the Ship of Theseus and it has an answer for me, that settles the question. No different than the standard I hold any other conscious identity to. You demand a special layer of metaphysics that cannot be broached, making the entire problem arbitrary and meaningless.
Julian Nguyen
>The setup for your argument is its own undoing here.
Not so. I would argue that identity of an object can only be accurately defined in any meaningful way within a single instant of time. After an instant has passed, or an instant before, it was not the same object but only a very similar one which you choose to consider the same for the sake of convenience.
I think it's important here to point out also that considering any collection of the smallest parts (at this time considered to be perhaps Strings, although there could be yet smaller parts not yet known) as a single "object" is just a flight of fancy of a person and not something that is inherent to the universe.
To go back to the basis of my argument, I am saying that there is no real meaning to the concept of the continuation of a process other than just whatever random thing you decide to make up on the spot, so there is no correct answer to the question the OP posed. There are just opinions; and in a way, any opinion is correct because any nonsense somebody makes up would be equally reasonable.
Juan Evans
w/rt to objects you're almost there. True no valid or invalid label for an object exists. In the original, unconscious conception of the Ship of Theseus problem, all answers are equally arbitrary.
The way introducing consciousness breaks the problem is that the job of the observer is no longer to give the Ship of Theseus its nonexistent perfect label. It is simply to determine the contiguous nature of an ongoing process. Just like I can't define the Ship of Theseus as an object but I can define each process on board: the replacement of her boards, the swabbing of her decks, the furling and unfurling of her sails.
Zachary Bell
>ship of theseus this, Indeed.
Your body naturally replaces every cell in your body every couple of years. It makes no difference if they're synthetic replacements or organic replacements. You're still different. Every day you wake up you're a different person than you were yesterday. Some people think this is horrifying, that the past you is gone and virtually dies, but it's a blessing. It means we're all have the capacity for change, weather we want it or not we are always changing. Which means if you make a minuscule effort every day to improve yourself the effects of that minuscule effort are cumulative. Eventually you'll be a greater person than you ever were.
Connor Cruz
Brain cells do not, In fact its the only cell in our body that doesn't divide for most of our life. In fact our inability to generate new brain cells might be the reason why immortality may be impossible even if we stop aging.
Evan Hall
>Or is this new creature/thing still you and not a copy. You'd have to do it to have any possibility of an answer; maybe not even then.
Jordan Gomez
>braincells don't regrow this is a belief based on an old research paper which has been dis-proven.
Brain cells do get replaced over time, but obviously at a lower rate than skin or stomach cells It's the reason why memory changes with age.
Kevin Jones
you are the configuration of sinapsis transmissions at a given time during your life. if you kill one neuron and replace it with another, and the same sinapsis go through, its still you. not a copy of you, but actual, real you. if there is a single sinaps in that neuron in that exact time it gets killed, then yes, you lose 0.0001% of who you are, which gets easily replaced with the fraction of a second. its like you forgot the name of someone and simply asking again and bam, sinaps back to your brain networking.
Carson Morris
TLDR
William Anderson
The book "Prey" is a bit like that.
If the synthetic can exactly replicate you then yes. Even if it copies you and it is exact, then you are both you. You need to remember, you said "perfect" copy. That means this entity will be biological not mechanical. It will just be you right down to your memories and everything. Otherwise, it isn't "perfect".
