Source Page. Credit is to SMBC-Comics and even more credit to @[email protected] who noticed it was missing and found the credit in this comment. Sorry about that and thanks, you're awesome aperson <3
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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If you stepped through a time-travel portal, your conscience would effectively not exist between the original time and the time the portal leads to, yet no one would call you dead. If you could somehow install your mind into a new body, let's say you download it into a flashdrive and plug it into someone else's brain while your original body lays without a mind, people may call our body dead but not you. So when there is a continuity of self between the person who steps inot the teleporter and the person who steps out, I will never call that a death, that's silly.
Downloading to a flash drive - I don't think this is actually transferring consciousness. Flash drives are just copies.
To survive the process, you would have to initially be plugged into something that is capable of acting as a full extension of your brain. You would then become simultaneously "one" with the device, as well as your current brain. Then somehow, your current brain functions would need to cease working, and you would be fully reliant on the new "brain."
From there, that process in reverse would bring you to a new body.
In the time travel instance, there is still two of a person if they happen to visit the same place at the same time. They have different perspectives and experiences at that point and are different people even if they are from the same origins. They don't share a consciousness; there are now two consciousnesses.
Same deal with the transporter struggle session if it just so happens that matter was replicated (like in the comic) but the person that was to be disintegrated simply wasn't disintegrated.
I was specifically talking about forwards time travel to distinguish between someone's mind existing in the world and them being alive as two separate states. In teh backwards timetravel example, what makes them different people? I would say legally they are the same person, and the same ethics and morals apply to them, and many people who know the version of them in the past would probably recognize them as the person they know albeit a bit different. Are you not the same person you were yesterday? Or a minute ago?
I suppose that's the issue: it's externally observed rather than internally experienced. The difference may matter for the one experiencing it rather than just being observed.
at teh end of the day we don't have a definition of consciousness, so issues that would come down to it can't be decided.
Perhaps not, but the first and only thing we as individuals are aware of (when we are aware) is that we are aware. The perceptions of external observers may not share that experience, but they can certainly try to invalidate it.