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I don't believe continuity of consciousness is actually required to maintain the identity of consciousness, is the thing. I think that, if you died, and then were brought back some how, you wouldn't have some "new" consciousness that merely think it's the first one, but literally would have the first one again, to the degree that such a thing can be called the same from moment to moment even under normal circumstances anyway.
so if i copy myself perfectly while still alive, my consciousness would span both bodies like The Multiple Man?
This is where this idea breaks down for me personally.
No, because you also change with time. You from today are slightly different than what you are yesterday, and you from a second from now will be slightly different from you from right now, because your thinking requires the patterns in your brain to change, just a little. If you copy yourself, both of you will experience different things, and dont have a means to sync those different inputs between you, and so you immediately diverge into two separate if similar entities. Youre both equally a progression of the original and so both are that original person in the same way that you as an adult and you as a kid are the same person, but once diverged youre no longer the same person as eachother. If the teleporter destroys the original while scanning them and then recreates them, theres only ever one of you at once. You only get an issue if you make the copy before destroying the original, because then there are experiences formed after the scanning process, and that new version of the identity is lost.
A bit like how theres a notion you sometimes get in sci-fi or some hypothesis about quantum stuff, that any event where more than one outcome is possible creates a different branching universe for each of the outcomes, and if you could somehow travel to one of those places, you'd find someone that was you up to the point of that event, but now has been shaped by different experiences since.
Would you just have two yous if there were two existing copies?
Youd get two people who are both "you" from before the copying, in the same sense that you are the same you that existed in your past, but arent the same as eachother anymore because they both get different inputs and experiences and develop along different paths.
But if you say that a perfect copy of you is literally you, why would it matter if the "original" is destroyed or not? The result should still be the same (as in a copy that is a separate conciousness) no?
What "you" are changes with time (consider that you're quite different now from when you were, say, 5). The implication of this is that once a copy is made, new experiences are formed by both copies and their patterns change in divergent ways. If you destroy one after a copy is made, the changes undergone by the destroyed one after the copying aren't transferred to or recreated again, and so are lost. Or in other words, if you make a perfect copy, they're identical at the moment of creation, but virtually immediately afterwards won't be. If you destroy the original before making the copy, then the copy is identical to the original at the moment it is destroyed, ideally, and so the same state last experienced is re-achieved and can develop further.
I'm struggling to think of the proper words to explain my thoughts on this subject, so I'm sure my responses about it are somewhat confusing, and my attempts to elaborate make them fairly long, I'm sorry about that.
Something that I think might be a source of some of that confusion is that I get the impression that many think of consciousness as a distinct nonphysical "thing" that is somehow tethered to the brain, such that the destruction of the brain results in the severing of that connection in a way that means it can't be caught and pulled back again by any physical process, similar to how people that believe in souls posit them to behave.
I do not believe consciousness works this way. I think that it literally is a specific form of information, or perhaps an emergent effect of certain kinds of information processing, and thus, is a part of the physical universe in the same sort of way that a digital image is (the image itself isn't "made" of any substance and can be encoded into any form of matter that can be organized into a sufficiently complex arrangement, but that organization physically exists, changing it changes the image, or produces a new but similar one depending on how you define it, and it cannot exist if no matter exists in an arrangement that can encode it), and as a result of that, getting it back just requires getting some matter into an arrangement that encodes it again. The tricky bit is that unlike a digital image, it isn't a static sort of information but a changing one. So, to take the analogy further, replace the image with a computer program that takes inputs from the world around it, and then rewrites it's own code in response to those inputs. If you take this algorithm, pause it, copy it's state and destroy the original machine while rewriting that state into a new machine in a new location, and unpause the program on the new machine, you'd get the same results as if you had just paused it, moved the original machine to the new location and unpaused it at the same time you would have unpaused the copied program. There's no basis to say that you have a different program, because they have the same code and are behaving the same. But if you unpaused the original machine, its instance of the program will change itself, and then if you destroy it now, the copy won't reach the state that that last version of the original would have reached had you brought it to the new location too. In this analogy, killing a person is equivalent to one of these programs reaching a state that is no longer continued, so if you continue it later, somewhere else, even on new hardware, that's fine, and if you create a branch and keep both running, that's also fine, but if you create a branch, and then destroy one without recording it's state to recreate it later, or just never actually run it again on a new machine, that branch has reached an end state that doesn't continue changing itself, and so you've had "someone" die.
Another way to look at it is from a purely spiritual level. As in the soul being an inherited property of life. Every "living thing" from single cells to macro organisms like us has had at least some physical connection to it's predecessors. We were once a physical part of our mothers body. For every living being a line can theoreticaly be drawn through a "family tree" from now till the moment of random prehistoric carbon chain molecules forming the first cells. So it would be just as valid to assume that a "soul" that emerged sometime in the distant past as a product of complexity is passed down (or rather split off) form our mothers to us. But this begs the question, would a fully artifical "motherless" being have a soul then? It could be just as likely that a perfect reconstruction of yourself would end up being a lifless sack of flesh even though physically there should be no reason for it to be so. It's like you make a perfect copy of a running car but you measurement was static, therefore your copy wouldn't be running at the moment of creation. You'd need to also consider the fuel, air, inertia of components and heat as part of the car, but they're really not. The car can exist in a cold vacuum and with an empty tank and would still be the same car.
It could as well be that you also have to measure a complex electormagnetic signature representing all physical and chemical processes in your body and apply it to your copy for it to function. But since you can ever only get partial electromagnetic information (position or velocity) there is essentially no way to perfectly capture and recreate a 9person and essentially copy a soul. Therefore it can only be passed down continuously.
I think I get what you're saying, and I completely agree with the first parts. What I don't quite understand is how the conciousness would differentiate between the two clones in all scenarios.
If we create a copy and pause at the exact moment of creation, where both copies are exactly the same, how would the conciousness "choose bodies"?
If we kill the person first, doesn't that necessitate that the clone has been killed as well in that case?
why does it need to choose bodies?
I'm assuming this is a transporter as exists in Star Trek, and not some kind of wormhole.
Imagine if it didn't deconstruct your original body, and only made the perfect copy at the exit. Would there be two "yous?" Under your definition, yes, but they are very clearly two separate entities. There is a "you" that walked into the entrance, and there is a "someone else" who walked out of the exit. I think a continuous consciousness is not only relevant, but crucial to a meaningful definition of "you."
And nobody post that "you die when you fall asleep" comic. It equivocates different definitions ofbghese words in a confusing and misleading way.
I don't see an issue with having two yous that are nonetheless separate people from eachother, that's actually exactly what I think would happen in such an instance. Asking which is "you" would be like watching a cell undergo mitosis and then asking which one is the original cell. Continuity mattering seems like a problem to me because it feels like it should require involving something outside the material universe to make it make sense. I'm not sure how best to explain this, but it seems to me that:
If that thing, whatever it is, is part of the material universe, then the perfect copy must have it too by definition, it wouldn't be a perfect copy if there was something materially different about it, and then it would have to be you, because it has whatever that thing is that makes it "you". If that thing exists but is not present in a physically identical copy, then wherever it exists must be outside the physical universe, yet capable of some kind of interaction with it (since presumably you cease if killed materially). That isn't logically impossible, but requires adding an entire layer to reality to make it make sense, which seems premature when other interpretations don't require this (and we could end up in the same boat anyway, if I made a thought experiment that suggests some really advanced technology has found a way to manipulate this other layer too, and copies you there as well) Continuity (for anything, not just humans) by itself isn't really a "thing". It isn't made of anything, and doesn't seem to interact with the physical world in any measurable way. As far as I can tell, it requires making fewer unproven assumptions about how the universe works to assume that continuity is merely a concept we made up due to the manner in which we perceive time, without any actual physical validity to it.
Apologies for the point-by-point reply. I have many responses to many things, which don't necessarily fit into a cohesive structure of paragraphs.
Disagree. In mitosis, both child cells contain parts of the original. This is akin to Farscape Season 3's "twinning—" a method of cloning in which neither result has any claim over being the "original."
This is different from a Star Trek/The Prestige style transporter—you can keep track of which one is the original: it's the one who went into the entrance. No part of their physical body is present in the transporter clone.
Yes. A continuous conscious experience. Notably different from an experience of continued consciousness. We must avoid equivocation here. "You" has multiple definitions, some of which are more useful and relevant than others.
There is something materially different about the you that steps out of the transporter. They're made of different atoms and subatomic particles. This isn't even a Ship of Theseus situation—like, if you replace every single part of your car over the course of a year until every single part is different, there's some ambiguity about whether it's the same car as it was the year before. But the car that came off the production line right after it may be made using the same materials in the same pattern, but it is unambiguously a different car.
You could say it's the "same" car, in that it's the same color, make and model using the same materials, but if someone crashes it, you would not say they crashed your car, no matter how arbitrarily similar they were at the time of the crash.
Continuity isn't a physical object, but it definitely exists. For one example, the lithium in my phone's battery is the same lithium that was in it when it was made. The phone would work just fine if the lithium atoms were constantly being replaced, but they don't seem to be. Continuity is a real phenomenon.
The bit about things being made of different subatomic particles is interesting, because its actually, to my knowledge, difficult to truly prove that, because fundamental enough particles dont seem to have a lot of the differences seen between similar objects of larger scale. There are even ideas (not proven ones mind, just food for thought) that some of them might actually be the same, for example, theres an idea that there might be just one electron in the universe that bounces around in time and space such as to look like there are more of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe
My point there though, is if "different" fundamental particles are so similar as for it to not even be clear that they are necessarily different, what would the underlying mechanism be for a notable difference to using different ones?
Im not really convinced by your final bit about continuity, but I think its more down to my difficulty in explaining what I mean exactly by calling it not real. I dont mean to say that we cant define a label for an idea like "no atoms entered or left this battery pack", but rather that theres no particular indication that the universe "cares" (cares really isnt the right word but I simply cant think of the right one and I guess cares is as close as I can think of, just strip the part out that implies conscious intent or thinking) about that label once we've defined it.
If we return to your analogy of cars, "cars" also arent really real, not in the sense that the concept applies only to things that are completely fictional the way, say "vampires" does, but in a sense like, there is a fundamental, non-arbitrary difference between, say, an electron and a photon, such that they interact with the physical laws of the universe in a distinct way. A car meanwhile, is just a collection of these fundamental particles, which does not have any distinct rules for itself among the physical laws of the universe, and rather has behavior that is merely emergent from its constituent parts following the behavior of those particles. The universe has no distinct concept that a given mass is a "car", but does seem to for an electron (again, "concept" isnt really the right word because it implies thinking and intent, which Im not trying to ascribe to the universe here, but again I struggle to find a word that better fits the idea that Im trying to communicate).
If, suddenly, every electron, proton etc (fundamental particles that is) in your phone's battery were suddenly swapped with others of the same type of particle from elsewhere in the universe, there would be absolutely no way to detect it. Presumably, this would break the continuity of that battery, but if we took a snapshot of the universe right before the swap, and one immediately after such that no time has passed between them, the only way there could be any difference at all between them would be if there was some kind of unique "label" for each particle fundamental particle to make them distinct from one another, something that, as far as I am aware, there isnt any evidence to suggest is the case. Without that added layer of complexity added to the universe, the swap would be like swapping one pixel of an image with another pixel elsewhere in the image that has the exact same color value- the result there wouldnt be a new image, because no information has been changed, it would just be the exact same image again. That is to say, the particle swap wouldnt be physically meaningful at all, unless you assume the universe has that specific unproven property added to make fundamental particles non-interchangeable, which occams razor would suggest I discount until proven otherwise, because a universe with non-unique fundamental particles is simpler than one with extra information to distinguish each. And if that swap isnt physically meaningful, then the universe before and after the swap dont have any change in information to them that could represent the break in continuity in the first place, which drives me to the conclusion that either continuity somehow exists outside the universe, which again adds another unneeded bit of complexity to reality that I can discount as less likely with occam's razor, or else that the concept of continuity is just one of the many made-up concepts that we use to help make the universe easier to think about, like labeling some arrangements of matter "cars" based on their general emergent properties, that dont have any true basis in the physical laws that actually describe the behavior of the universe.