Star Trek teleportation paradox

Teleport a teleporter within a teleporter...
(>'-')>

>consciousness resides in our brain cells
Inter-species differences are mostly defined by quantity and organization of neurons, not by differences in the individual neurons themselves. You can find the same basic sorts of neurons in a human brain in the brains of otherwise radically different creatures like squid.

And of course it doesn't even stop there because at an even lower level it wouldn't make much sense to say there's anything special about the individual carbon atoms used. One carbon atom is going to be pretty well interchangeable with any other carbon atom in the universe.

I imagine it would feel like a nap: consciousness off, disintegration and reconstruction, consciousness on exactly where it left off. But other than that, yes.

If nanomachines were to slowly replace all your brain cells, and you perceive no change. Would you still be you ?

>Would you still be you ?
There is no real "you" thing. The concept is just a convenient way of abstracting / blurring together all the actual things a given "self" has in common including memories, habits, skills, aptitude, association with a particular body, etc. Changing one or more of those actual things simply changes one or more of those actual things. Speaking about what it would do for the "self" isn't a coherent thing to do because that concept never had a real existence of its own.
Questions like this are like asking if you replaced all the green US dollar bill with red US dollar bills would the unit of currency they represent still exist or would it "just be a copy." The answer is there is no answer because the question is premised on the false belief that a concept has some sort of literal existence.

Google neurogenesis

If nanomachines slowly killed neurons of your brains one by one, would you be dead by the end of the process? Obviously yes. So the fact that the change is done gradually does not guarantee that every property of the brain is preserved (such as consciousness).

What you are describing is a philosophical zombie. I.e. An entity that behaves and 'thinks' like a self-conscious being but in reality is a non-conscious organic robot

That isn't me. I sense myself. It's not about thought or emotion or sensory input. I am aware of myself. It is ridiculous and self-evident to me that my consciousness is real and distinct

>What you are describing is a philosophical zombie.
How do you know?

... not real and distinct, I meant

Science has demolished religion, spirituality and morality, but it's not content, it's now targeting the very notion of oneself

>It is ridiculous and self-evident to me that my consciousness is real and distinct
That's exactly what false beliefs are like. They seem very clear and simple and obvious. It's just that they're not true. Look into studies on psychology / perception, lots of interesting findings about how what we believe we're seeing / thinking / doing is way off from what's really going on when these processes are pinned down in controlled / independently observed settings
>Science has demolished religion, spirituality and morality, but it's not content, it's now targeting the very notion of oneself
Replace "science" with "knowledge" and realize your complaint is inane. If knowledge of a "thing" destroys it, it's because that "thing" never existed in the first place and what was destroyed was your mistaken idea. If I tell you how a stage magic trick is done, I'm not destroying magic, I'm just disabusing you of your mistaken idea about a guy cutting a woman in half and putting her back together by explaining the details of what really happened.

Doesn't this paradox relie on the conservation of an object's identity through duplication ?
One example of this is my car : it isn't the same as the one it used to be, because I changed the wheels, battery etc. but it's still my car because it shares common characteristics that are precise enough to fully states it's identity ( it has it's own color, shape, license plate ...) with the one it was before

The simpler solution is to simply accept the fact that your identity is as amorphous as your physical self.

Just as you've replaced nearly every cell in your body between the age of six and thirty-six, so too have you replaced yourself. The only entanglement between the two objects is temporarily. They share a stream of cause and effect in that one lead to another, both incidentally and physically, as new substances were brought into become new components in the ever-evolving pattern that is "you".

It's too much to say that you are not the same being from moment to moment, as there is a cognizant evolution of pattern involved, at the same time, it is too much to say that yourself of the distant past and of the present are the same being, save by the subjective identification of others. Certainly, traumatic events, such as drugs or electrocution, may alter your personality irrecoverably and reduce that strand of consistent identity to an invisible thread of ephemeral silk, and over time, the remaining consistency between your selves may even be less than that of the weight shared by those few cells you do not replace, but the journey and the path you made in the sands of time will always remain.

Such an amorphous and ever-changing identity and consciousness, in the end, isn't about consistency of form, but ties of history. The teleport conundrum in the title, when it makes a copy and destroys the original, severs that identity, as two separate objects are indeed separate objects, regardless of how identical they may be. At the same time, two identities of consciousness can be tied to one another, regardless of how much change the identity in question has gone through.

(And similarly, if it's instead a matter-energy transfer beam, yer good to go.)

>most people
no

Apologies -- I meant most people that know a thing or two about brains. Not the general public.

2000 years later, and we are still asking the same questions.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

If you were to be teleported via having every atom in your body f=recreated at a different location, you would be dead and the person at the new location would simply be a clone with your memories

Great answer

This is the thing though, that's not how star trek transporters work.
You're converted into energy and most importantly your signature down to the neural patterns in your brain are stored in the buffer then reassembled at the destination. A definitive answer isn't possible until we understand what consciousness is.
My theory is that we all have a repeating neural signature that keeps each consciousness rooted in an individual mind, and recreating that in another mind elsewhere would either transfer or duplicate that consciousness depending on the state of the original. If however there's nothing to consciousness other than our physical brain then regardless of the method the guy that goes in ceases to exist and the guy that comes out is as you say just an exact clone with all the memories. Indistinguishable to everyone else and even to himself, but not to the guy that went in and ceased to exist.

you are remembering memories not the actual memory itself but the memory of a memory of a memory and so forth. this way it never really dies

>Yet over this same period of time, despite the near total replacement of one's physical body, there is a self perceived continuity of consciousness (of memory and sense of self)

You just explained it with your previous sentence you fucking mongoloid.

Isotopes :^)

So what if the teleporter copied Kirk, but left the original. Would it not have been the same process as deconstructing and reconstructing him?

I don't feel previous posters have properly accounted for the problem of the philosophical zombie

Some people claim consciousness is an illusion inflicted on the mind by a continuity of qualia and memory.

But wouldn't a philosophical zombie (an organic entity driven by the same biology and chemistry as we are despite having zero consciousness or true sense of self) be driven by the same impulses?

What, if anything, separates us from the philosophical zombie? Surely this is the font of the soul

For example, one could conceivably deprive any one of us of cognitive function, memory, emotional and sensory reception etc ... there would be nothing left except an iota of consciousness. What remains is a speck of awareness, infinitely small yet greater than nothing.

I believe it is this iota that separates us from the zombie. I think it is this residual pinprick (whatever it is in a physical or biological sense) that is the true seat of consciousness.

I found that eel sign much more interesting than the content of your post.

4. consciousness is an illusion created by the brain in its near infinite complexity. replace and/or change any number of parts and the illusion is still constructed

>What, if anything, separates us from the philosophical zombie?
Nothing, "hard problem" is a bad meme. We shouldn't ask "what causes qualia," we should ask what causes us to report that we "experience qualia." Reportability is a real and explicable concept. We shouldn't overrate the literal validity of what we believe happens when we report "experience."
>For example, one could conceivably deprive any one of us of cognitive function, memory, emotional and sensory reception etc ... there would be nothing left except an iota of consciousness.
No, there would just be nothing left. Awareness is a cognitive function too.

This. It's really unintuitive so I think people become emotionally charged at this answer, because it upheaves their whole sense of self.

Humans might build a robot. The robot may be so sophisticated that its mind functions in a way that seems to an observer to be very similar to that of a human. The robot would have a memory, would respond to sensory stimuli, and may even be configured to express and respond to emotional impulses

Given a sufficient level of sophistication, the robot may even express an opinion that is possesses consciousness.

Yet despite appearances the robot is obviously not conscious. It's 'thoughts' (electrical signals providing it with stimuli, processing capabilities, and executive functions) don't establish self-awareness
respond to emotions

This paradox is trivial because in the case that you replicated yourself but didn't destroy the original, do you suddenly have two consciousnesses you can view the world with? Maybe, or maybe consciousness doesn't reside in the brain at all and is not physical. The on and off switch may be in the brain, but the present experience is probably not.

>I think I am
It's cogito ergo sum
>I think therefore I am

Think about it, the you that is living now knows knothing about the you that lives now, so maybe your consciousness dies every instant. The future you however remembers everything the past you has done, since the past you gives the future you the short-term memories as an attempt to survive. If you teleport, you will die and another you will be created as it gets done every moment. Will you still be alive? Well, no. I think you die every instant, so the one that is reading this word is different from the one who read the first word. However, he has an illusion of being the same one. Your whole life may even be your last you remembering everything before dying, AFAIK. Anyway, the you created at the other end will still feel as if he's you, he will remember the past while the previous you will feel nothing, thus you don't need to care about him. If you get cloned, you get two consciousnesses, and they'll act normally until they get to see each other. They cannot accept the fact they'll never remember what has happened to them, and it may drive them crazy. It's my opinion tho, you don't know until you die, and even then you may actually stop doing anything and never know. If what I said is true then you may get stuck remembering all af your life until the moment you remember all af your life and then remember that moment, leaving you in an inception that may degrade or continue for eternity, all in an instant. In fact, since consciousness means feeling things, when you stop feeling things may never happen, and your consciousness may freeze before entering death as if you look at someone falling in a black hole.

I think the idea of continous self is assumed without proper evidence.

Consider this, let's say that our "self" (that is to say "awareness") doesn't actually turn off in the moment when we go to sleep, but actually dies. When you dream, your brain creates a new consciousness, a new awareness, and the same goes for when you wake tomorrow. This new awareness operates with the same memories stored in the brain from the experiences of the previous awareness, creating an illusion of continued existance.

Nothing about this is impossible, which is why we shouldn't just assume continued existance. It could just be an illusion.

4. An individual's consciousness is the result of connections, of atoms, and consequently/eventually connections of molecules/nerve cells these make up, which obviously relates to their configuration, not the identity of the atoms.

In other words, put more simple:

>You're you because some Hydrogen atom is connected to another Oxygen atom. Which oxygen and hydrogen molecule you use is irrelevant as long as all the connections are the same.
>If you replace all the parts in a chair, it's a _different_ chair, but it's still the same _type_ of chair, performs the same, reacts the same, etc etc.
>If you build a car according to a plan, and then another from identical parts ("same type of atoms") it still the same car.

What you refer to as consciousness is the emergent property of a combination of atoms, emphasis on combination, not on the atoms.

WRONG

Even braincells die and are replaced.

However much like a memory storage system being transferred to another memory card everytime it "knows" it is about to go faulty, the brain will pass info to the newer cells giving the old info and energy a new place of residence within you.

Only someone that has gone through cryogenesis and been brought back could tell you this. It really is like being dead.

I thought that the matter -> energy -> matter was the general concept of a teleporter anyway.

>If however there's nothing to consciousness other than our physical brain then regardless of the method the guy that goes in ceases to exist and the guy that comes out is as you say just an exact clone with all the memories

I think that the underlying question here is this: When matter is converted to energy, then subsequently changed into matter after traveling a distance, is it the original collection of matter at the end point? Or is it an identical collection of matter assembled according to what the computer remembers about the molecular structure of the object?

>Yet despite appearances the robot is obviously not conscious. It's 'thoughts' (electrical signals providing it with stimuli, processing capabilities, and executive functions) don't establish self-awareness
>respond to emotions
So... Like just humans then? Nothing really separating man from bot under that functionality.

Emotions are about the easiest thing to simulate as it is, being one of the few human-like aspects we've been able to simulate well.

Much harder is the ability to reason out a problem with no point of reference. We've yet to invent a universal problem solving machine, only very sophisticated specialized database divers.

But if you manage to simulate a human brain, there's nothing about it being a software simulation that should make it any less conscious vs. the bioelectric construct. Then again, we have no idea what consciousness really is, or how to empirically define it, beyond the medical definition.

Generally, when someone brings up the teleporter conundrum, they are speaking of the variety of teleporter that makes a copy of you and deletes the original - but yes, that thought experiment is specifically why Gene Roddenberry introduced the energy-matter transfer beam. (Even if both he and his writers sometimes fudge that premise for the sake of plot development.)

Again, with the Roddenberry method, it's just an extreme state change, matter to energy and back again, but the conundrum usually revolves around a device that instead kills and perfectly duplicates you.

>Only someone that has gone through cryogenesis and been brought back could tell you this. It really is like being dead.
Ever been under full anesthesia?

It's not like sleeping. Your consciousness is literally interrupted, and there is no sense of a passage of time (for most, it indeed fsks up their sense of time for at least a few days). It's a brief moment of non-existence. If you want something that's like being dead, that's probably as close as you're really going to get - barring the usual "all that time before you were born" meme.

Arguing that teleportation destroys conciousness is pointless when you can't prove conciousness is normally continuous.

Its the pineal gland man!
Seriously.

>Hurr durr youre not the same person you were five seconds ago
That is like a /pol level of smug copout and oversimplification. There is something significant about our feeling that we will continue. I don't feel like I am going to die when I sleep or blink and that shouldnt be ignored and just giving up on the problem because a possibility might be that we are constantly dying and copying doesnt inspire any further explanation, although investigating the copying process might be useful for downloading consciousness.

Was more thorough and actually useful. But only described drugs as negative. They can also "expand" consciousness and remove filters that we take for granted.

And these guys brought up a question that I have as well. What happens to copies? Does consciousness split or does it produce two unique branches? We wont know till we copy someone.

And just because you didnt dream doesnt mean others have the same experience. Every heard of a near death experience?

Have any of you guys had ego death with psychedelics? Ever done DMT? IMO those are essential experiences if you want to understand consciousness and all the different possibilities. Huxley and the like though of the brain as a filter which defines your consciousness out of subtractive synthesis, the same way you can say that math theorems already exist and are discovered. Psychedelics can allow perception of this and also a feeling like your are everything at once.

You guys are underestimating the importance of subconsciousness. There are hereditary features that are passed down that genetics cannot explain in a field called epigenetics and the most interesting are how subconscious traits are passed.. Gene expression is not adquate IMO. Your subconscious is pieced from all your ancestors. In essence your subconscious lives on.
youtube.com/watch?v=ZklRSn92ek4

>But only described drugs as negative
Actually didn't describe drugs as a negative, just indicated they can permanently change the fundamental nature of your identity and perception. Though, so long as ya brought up the subject, I'll clarify that, and say, yes, generally speaking, drugs are bad. I worked intake a mental hospital for a few years, and have seen enough drug addled folks come in eating their own shit, among other things, to give light to that, as well have known enough functional drug users to know that, even in optimal cases, the effects are at least as negative as positive.

Severe electrocution isn't much better, sometimes permanently altering your personality and perception in fundamental ways, should you survive it, but at least its effects are more random. Obviously there's more dysfunctional electro-chemical configurations than functional ones, but at least it isn't something likely to lead to addiction, and the dysfunctional configurations drugs can lead to are much more common as well as self-reinforcing.

>Does consciousness split or does it produce two unique branches? We wont know till we copy someone.
Presumably, they'd each carry on with their own consciousness from that point on, as do identical twins. No reason I can think of for it to be otherwise.

>And just because you didnt dream doesnt mean others have the same experience. Every heard of a near death experience?
No one dreams under most forms of full anesthesia, as the consciousness is completely disconnected. I suppose one might blame a sudden DMT release, creating a rapid onset of vivid dream in near death experiences, but if you look into it, turns out the near-death/DMT release thing is largely fictitious. Not that I wouldn't expect a brain in its death throws to demonstrate all sorts of haywire activity of similar sort, but so far I know, no one has verified any level of consciousness without a brain to support it.

(I'd say - but we kinda started there.)

>There is something significant about our feeling that we will continue.

No there isn't, that significant feeling is just a feeling, it shouldn't carry any weight in a scientific discussion.

>even in optimal cases, the effects are at least as negative as positive
If someone takes mushrooms one time and their headaches or depression is cured then how is there any negative effects? If they have an awesome trip and no side effects how is that any negative effect? I'll give you that there is always a negative risk, that is for sure, and I do not advocate anyone trying drugs without being willing to sacrifice their mental capacities, at least temporarily. But some people are willing to risk that, especially when it comes to things like DMT which are deeply alluring to people for reasons.. . I also feel like I have to point out some people's brains are already fucked beyond repair and for them it's impossible to feel normal without drugs and the positives of taking pills everyday may greatly outweighs the negatives for them, but you sound like you understand that sort of thing.

>Severe electrocution isn't much better
Oh common now you are just being silly! Millions of people do drugs everyday without consequence, especially benign ones like psychedelics or weed. And heavy drugs are beneficial to some people who have no other choice, and contrary to /pol's beliefs brain chemistry is a physical thing that not even the best will power can change in certain circumstances, although I'm not saying a strong will is bad for trying to change your brain chemistry either.

>but at least it isn't something likely to lead to addiction
Yeah with certain drugs but almost everyone does them, such as caffine, alcohol, and nicotine and Cannabis is surely less addictive than all of those. And for people that do become addicted there are very effective medication regimes that can basically make them feel normal. The only real downside for them is the vulnerability taking medications that have been demonized by society includes. And psychedelics will NOT lead to addiction unless you are literally batshit crazy to start with.

No one has permanently cured depression with a single dose of shrooms, or any other drug, legal or otherwise, though I suppose a few have become permanently schizoaffective from such. You can't really address depression without addressing the underlying causes, and even if you could, that in itself would be a negative effect, as it would prevent you from bothering to improve your situation.

As for the rest, there's no convincing a drug addicts that drugs are bad until they've hit rock bottom, so I'm not going to bother - not particularly to topic in anycase.

Have you ever considered that it's structural and that's why the biological tissues/cell/whatever that compose the brain can change/replace themselves to new ones but the structure and the components are practically the same so nothing really changes and the only significant changes are to the structure itself that's why when people grow their consciousness and awareness also changes with them.

>Presumably, they'd each carry on with their own consciousness from that point on, as do identical twins. No reason I can think of for it to be otherwise.
What if the universe collapses in a big crunch then bangs and forms a person exactly like you? Will that be you? Will you experience living your life again or have any subconscious link to your past self?

>No one dreams under most forms of full anesthesia, as the consciousness is completely disconnected
No, it's just severe intoxication... I could understand if brainwaves correspond to brain inactivity but being unconscious from drugs will still carry you through REM sleep cycles sometimes.

>turns out the near-death/DMT release thing is largely fictitious
How do you know? It's just a theory. How can they actually measure what chemicals are released in near death experiences? Is there some tiny probe that measure neurotransmitters between axioms. DMT is just the best candidate for near death experiences because it qualitatively matches "trip" and is known to exist in Human and animal brains. Just because no one has found DMT in a recently deceased brain that does not mean it's not there. I am guessing that the techniques used to figure out what chemicals are in a brain at any one moment are crude and use downstream techniques to measure other affected variables. Here is a web page that outlines the tests that support the DMT theories and they are all indirect measurements so I agree there isn't much proof either but there is people's experiences which seem to align:

>q4lt.com/measuring-dmt-formation-in-humans

>no one has verified any level of consciousness without a brain to support it
True but I dont think NDE should be completely ignored either.

Anyway I am not saying anyone should try DMT but it seems very safe and brief. And the experience of reality totally dissolving while conscious is indescribably unique and it's impossible not to reference when thinking about the nature of reality.

It's not the same continuity of consciousness from the "old" instance but it is from the "new" instance.

WRONG. With regards to depression coming from terminal illness:
thesun.co.uk/living/2303067/single-dose-of-psychedelic-drug-in-magic-mushrooms-treats-anxiety-and-depression/

>most interesting and remarkable finding is that a single dose of psilocybin, which lasts four to six hours, produced enduring decreases in depression
>Roland Griffiths Johns Hopkins University School Of Medicine

>can't really address depression without addressing the underlying causes.. that in itself would be a negative effect, as it would prevent you from bothering to improve
What if the cause of depression is existential? There's an afterglow period which makes people feel enlightened and positive the day after, some times longer, sometimes months. People get nasty "funks" and psychedelics are a tool that allows people to get a radically different perspective on their lives and reality itself so there's no reason to discredit people who say they had an acid trip and it helped their depression for months afterwards. Thats retarded to think they would mask the "underlying cause" because psychedelics are DEEPLY introspective and allow people to gain substantially insight into what is bothering them, if not just a brain chemistry issue. Again Psychedelics help that because they have an afterglow affect.

Thousands of reports:
>erowid.org/experiences/subs/exp_LSD_Glowing_Experiences.shtml

>no convincing a drug addicts that drugs are bad til they hit rock bottom, so I'm not going to bother - not particularly to topic in anycase.
WTF! Is your ego really so overblown that you assume anyone who does drugs is an addicts?! What about people who were addicts when they were young and their opiate receptors are permenently damaged? Some of them experience anhedonia. anxiety, and depression for years after they quit because their brain wont go back to normal. This is called Post Acute Withdrawals or PAWS and for those people they are actually better off taking opiates.

>No there isn't, that significant feeling is just a feeling, it shouldn't carry any weight in a scientific discussion.
Okay good luck learning about a subjective experience if you discount all subjectivities.

>No, it's just severe intoxication... I could understand if brainwaves correspond to brain inactivity but being unconscious from drugs will still carry you through REM sleep cycles sometimes.
No, REM activity under full anesthesia via desflurane, isofluran, sevoflurane, propofol, or etomidate, is impossible, as is conscious brain wave activity in general. The process effectively breaks the neural communication that makes consciousness possible, and places the brain in a "standby" mode, no dreams, no passage of time, no nuttin. This is a comatose function that happens to exist conveniently, perhaps evolved for severe injuries liken to a state of shock - though there seems to be a lot of debate as to why that state exists at all, as it does not happen naturally.

spooky

Not playing link wars with a drug addict. Not considering you a drug addict because you use, but because you are blindly defending their use without pointing out any of the, much more common, negative consequences, which is classic addict behavior.

Roddenberry's transporters work via mater-energy transfer beam, so the energy that made up Kirk is the same energy that makes up body at the destination, thus one could argue this is the same object undergoing a severe state change and relocation, and it is no more a loss of identity than a brief interruption of consciousness through other means (such as temporary clinical death and an ambulance).

But the conundrum is usually in reference to teleporters that deconstruct to gather data, and then reconstruct a perfect duplicate at a new location, and those two would be fundamentally separate objects, however identical. One could only assume that this would be a new instance of the same consciousness, and had you not deconstructed the original, you would indeed have two fully functional and aware Kirks.

Not that Roddenberry didn't violate this premise for his own storylines from time to time.

>Not that Roddenberry didn't violate this premise for his own storylines from time to time.
Well, in the episode, Second Chances, they did explain that somehow the odd atmosphere of this planet "reflected and duplicated" the energy-matter transfer beam, so they didn't completely violate Roddenberry's rule. I suppose one could technically state that Thomas is not William, as he's made up of energy reflected from that atmosphere, rather than energy from William's original body.

But yeah, same effect - two alien lady killers for the price of one.

>Not playing link wars with a drug addict. Not considering you a drug addict because you use, but because you are blindly defending their use without pointing out any of the, much more common, negative consequences, which is classic addict behavior.

>Hurr durr youre not saying the bad things when arguing against me even though im saying all the bad things and it makes sense to take a different position in a thing called an argument.

Nice dogma faggot. Im sure it serves your ego somehow and you must rely on it for positive self esteem and you seem very very ADDICTED to your dogmatic position. Considering all possibilities rationally is soooo mainstream! Spock and Data would be disspointed you fucking stupid dogma addict bias queen. Also you should stop drinking water and breathing because all addictions are objectively harmful hue hue hue!

first post best post

>Kirk and Spock

Yes, you'd be dead, and the experience for you would be somewhat like a degenerative nerve disease, like Alzheimer's. However to everybody else you would appear to function normally, if not even better than before, with apparent advance cognition and memory. They would have no idea they were talking to a dead guy. If it becomes a product it will be popular given the superficial results and those claiming it causes brain death will be considered luddites and lunatics and ultimately eliminated by the new power elites.

>Problem is provably unsolvable within the current model
>But any proposed models are rejected just because they aren't the current model
That really makes me think.

>My own personal opinion of what my brain makes me believe is so overrated that I literally think it transcends physics
Or maybe it's so ostensibly immediate and pure and beyond explanation exactly because what's really going on is nothing more than the reporting and behavior you engage in reference to the phantom "experience."
You don't need magic to make people believe they watched you saw a lady in half and then put her back together. You just need to make people believe you did that. And your brain doesn't need magic to make you believe you're "seeing red" or "hearing a song." It just needs to make you believe and behave around the notion of abstract concepts representing sensory data having a literal presence you can refer to and talk about.
I have a hard time understanding why anyone would think we need to appeal to some new quantum physics based consciousness theory or mind-body dualism or that random 11 dimensional brain theory some user posted the other day when the only reason you could have for believing ordinary physics isn't good enough to explain consciousness is the bizarre conviction that because your brain made you believe you literally "experienced" something that this means you literally "experienced" something. If you could only just entertain the possibility that maybe your brain is making you believe something that isn't true, then the mind / body problem becomes a non-issue and what you're left with is 100% physically explicable reporting behavior.

>in the case that you replicated yourself but didn't destroy the original, do you suddenly have two consciousnesses you can view the world with?
At no point along a given person's timeline do any of the momentary instances of brain activity have access to any of the other momentary instances of brain activity, so that's not a reasonable thing to expect in the first place.
What each momentary instance of brain activity has access to is memory, and the replication would in fact have that same access to memory. The fact the brain activity of the source person won't teleport into the brain activity of the replicated person says nothing about the replicated person being any more or less legitimate as "you."
It's like if I had music on a disc and made a copy of that disc and you said the song on the copied disc wasn't really the song because the song from the source disc is still there and didn't teleport into the copied disc. The whole expectation of there being transportation of the information instead of just generation of the information is wrongheaded because isn't some thing that can travel to and from different locations to begin with. Information is just a pattern, and you don't transport a pattern, you participate in it.

And through what magical process does this take place? Where one can continue to function, think, and react normally, yet somehow be experiencing all the effects of a degenerative brain disease?

Archer and T'pol?

>Empirical data indicates that there can only be one consciousness
>People jump through hopes to try and explain how there could be more than one
A wrong turn was taken at some point.

Where did you find empirical data on consciousness? (Let alone, "how do twins work?")

It's called the Theseus's Paradox, revisionist.

By observing anything.

That's not empirical. That cannot be measured nor confirmed by another. Ergo cogito sum only applies to yourself, or we wouldn't be having so many questions about philosophical zombies in this silly thread.

I know for damn sure I'm not a philosophical zombie (can't say the same for you guys though). that a spark of consciousness exists within my own mind is irrefutable and self-evident to myself, regardless of all theorising and sophistry to the contrary. And it's more than just a cognitive function or memory (which a philosophical zombie would also have), which are necessary but not sufficient conditions of awareness

If all consciousness is reported as having the same qualities, what reason is there to believe that they are different ones?

Consciousness is no more some magical property outside the body than MS Paint is some magical property outside of your PC. Your brain is a computer, consciousness is the result of complex computations.

>I know for damn sure I'm not a philosophical zombie
You believe you know that for sure. And it's not like false beliefs are very difficult for the brain to manufacture or else we wouldn't all go along unquestioningly with absurd dream scenarios almost every single night of our lives. Which is why you probably shouldn't trust your own personal intuition more than objective, cross-validated physical reality.

That's nice, but the point is you can't prove it, or prove anyone else is or isn't such a zombie. There's nothing to distinguish between a functional human being that is or is not having an conscious experience. You cannot, in short, prove the existence of the "soul".

That would rather depend on how you defined "consciousness". The state of perception and qualia seems to be, at least, not only individual, but to vary radically in the same individual with time and circumstance.

Your claim (that I am not real) is patently absurd and ridiculous, whereas my own existence is self evident to myself and attested to by several centuries of enlightenment philosophic theory. For these reasons, the onus is on you (and all other edgy nihilist hipsters) to prove your claim with evidence

>you can't prove it
We don't "prove" things in Veeky Forumsence, you philosotard.

Well, first off, it's a philosophical concept, but scientifically speaking, you can't give any evidence for or against the possibility.

You can't have a thread about consciousness on Veeky Forums because all these brainlet faggots come out of the woodwork parroting "HURR DURR CONSCIOUS ISN'T REAL" in an attempt to sound intelligent.

The fact people overrate what "consciousness" is seems like a much more reasonable explanation than "HURR WE NEED A NEW 11 DIMENSIONAL QUANTUM GODEL BUZZWORD SUPER PHYSICS TO EXPLAIN WHY I BELIEVE MY OWN BRAIN ACTIVITY IS SO SPECIAL."

>Your claim (that I am not real)
Nobody claimed you're not real. Let's be specific here: qualia. It's about qualia.
You believe you're having these "experiences" that are literal, scientifically inexplicable phenomena in need of some deeper explanation than what modern physics can account for.
I believe what's really going on is primarily just a behavioral thing (I say primarily and not exclusively because there's some physiology involved too e.g. when you're in pain your blood pressure will probably increase). The question of why we report "having experiences" then becomes the new, 100% reasonable and physically explicable phenomenon to explore in place of the question "why do we have experiences," with the latter leaping to an assumption that we should take our reporting behavior at face value and the former simply sticking to what we can verify is actually happening (someone is reporting something).
There was an article someone posted the other day in one of these threads that had a pretty good analogous real life example for why this approach makes more sense. The doctor had a patient who claimed he had a squirrel inside his skull, and the article pointed out that you don't try to figure out why there's a squirrel in that patient's head or what color its fur is or whether the squirrel is an emergent physical phenomenon or a non-physical Platonic form. The real problem you deal with is the fact the patient is *reporting* having a squirrel in their head.

Denial of consciousness is more attention seeking fedorism from the edgy athiest undergrad brigade

To brush of consciousness as an illusion perpetuated on human awareness by its own cognition ignores the fact that it is consciousness itself that is allegedly

... allegedly the very thing being deceived. It's a middling of cause and effect

>To brush of consciousness as an illusion perpetuated on human awareness by its own cognition ignores the fact that it is consciousness itself that is allegedly the very thing being deceived.
That's only the case if you choose to use a definition for "illusion" that assumes "experiences" are literal, existing things in the first place. There is no requirement that you use "illusion" in that particular way. Appealing to the fact that word can have connotations of "experiences" as literal, existing things isn't an argument any more than appealing to the fact the word "sunrise" has connotations of geocentrism being true would be an argument in favor of geocentrism.
That said, even if you believe we really do have literal "experiences" in need of explanation, you can still recognize it's completely possible for someone / something other than ourselves to behave in the same way we do but without having literal "experiences." David Chalmers is the poster boy for the "qualia need to be explained and doing so is the hard problem that science has no handle on" position (in fact he's the guy responsible for coining "The Hard Problem of Consciousness"), and his famous thought experiment on "philosophical zombies" does exactly that: Philosophical zombies behave exactly like we do in every way and have no "qualia" actually "appearing" to them despite reporting that they do. So it's not at all a contradiction to suppose of a situation like that. You don't need to have qualia to say "your shirt looks blue" or "ow, I stubbed my toe!" And you don't need qualia to have physiological responses like raised blood pressure in response to stimuli like toe stubbing. And you don't need qualia to have the ability to store information about stimuli so you can later exhibit behavior in response to that information too e.g. saying "Gas prices got very high, I remember back when they were still just $X."

>Over a single decade every cell in the human body will die and (generally) be replaced.
isnt this straight up wrong lmao

We know of several species who are self-aware, or at least passed the mirror test, namely great apes, dolphins, elephants, orcas, and Eurasian magpies. And there are probably others. The point being that it is we who have yet to to be intelligent enough to determine whether or not these and other species have those self aware, self conscious thoughts.

It's entirely plausible that a small group of philosophical zombies could be sitting around in a campus cafe somewhere having this exact same conversation. Conceivably, they could even be expressing similar points and counter-points (although none would truly believe anything in particular as their opinions and refutations are merely the product of a mechanical neurological process and involve no actual expression of conscious will)

The first sentence of your post betrays your reaction as being primarily based on emotion. You are in denial and railing against reality.

> being addicted to shrooms

Somebody was scared by the DARE program as a child.

In addition to the consciousness issue, there is also a Ship of Theseus situation.

If a teleporter machine scanned your body, communicated the information across the universe to another machine that built you another body, and then your original body gets liquidated. If the liquidated parts of your body are used to build the body of someone else that is "teleported," do they have your body or their own?