Sorry about that ridiculous watermark.
this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
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Some wild-card ideas to think about here are this:
What we're afraid of is losing continuity of conscious experience, so a transporter brings to mind the concept of just making a copy who has your memories and thus does not share your qualia or experience of life. But we don't even know what retains that continuity to begin with. We have no idea why you seem to be the same person you were last year when most of your atoms have changed. We don't know why you're the same person when you're put under anesthesia... and in fact, you might not be. It may very well be that every time you are put under general anesthesia, a new consciousness emerges inside your brain, with the feeling like they've always lived in that brain with those memories.
Now step that back again. What about sleep? Can you prove you're the same consciousness that existed yesterday or before your last nap when consciousness was turned off and back on again?
Basically, we don't know what happens when consciousness turns off for any reason and why it comes back seeming to pick right up where it left off, but there are also a lot of people who say maybe it doesn't turn back on. And in fact, it can even be scaled up again... can you prove you're the same continuous entity that was aware of the universe a moment ago? What even IS a continual experience? Can it exist without memory?
If the brain just creates a story for our consciousness to make sense of the universe and can create and invent stories and filter things from your senses, how sure are we that there even IS a continual conscious experience? Your brain could be tricking you at every moment, there might not even BE such thing as consciousness ending, maybe when you "die" you immediately occupy the next most-probable configuration. And maybe this also can be tied to the new research that says if you could scan every particle that makes up a human body and recreate it, it would necessarily destroy the old copy, because the more you know about one property of a particle, the less you know about the other. The more you know where they are, the less you know about where they're going.
A lot of maybes here for a technology that may never exist in any capacity, but it's a great insight into how inexplicable the universe and our experience of it really is.
Good use of the Heisenberg Uncertainty principal of quantum mechanics near the end of your comment (the more we can know about speed, the less we can know about position)... And of course it's always fun to see the word qualia being used.
Personally I think we're a meat glitch. That is to say, the survival of our biology is aided by having predictive models of threats, pattern seeking and problem solving capacities (what to do about such threats), and some sense of mappable logic/reason (which solutions are best), all of which requires coordination (a story to help make choices)... But we're essentially a meat glitch.
This internal illusion of possessing consciousness may have evolved in order to aid long term survival, and perhaps to reproduce and do the other things life forms do... I think Data and Dr. Crusher discuss the definition of life at some point, detailing the requisite processes.... Having an identity isn't listed as one.
I believe it's been theorised that some species seem to act more as hives, there have even been some examples of humans being able to act in hive like ways. The technologist Kevin Kelly wrote about some of this in the 90s giving an example where a crowd could hold up a red or green sided paddle to play a game of ping pong on a big screen... One side of the room vs the other... Green paddles being a way to beckon the on-screen paddle to that location. The game was playable and seemingly coordinated just by having the feedback loop of the screen and the crowd, that was enough to create an overwhelming sense of shared willful and purposeful behaviour.
Most of us place our identity within ourselves as individuals, some learn to place it within their families. Richard Dawkins seems to believe it's actually at the level of the genes (makes that case in his book the selfish gene)... But the fact that we can to some degree place identity in different ways and locations suggests something of its unreality... Of course whose in control of that, and whether shifting it can be willful and comfortable, let alone controlled by a transporter chief is another question.
I certainly don't feel like the person from 20 years ago whose memories I hold. It seems like a completely different person lived those experiences. I know him, but I do not feel like him. Too much has changed about my personality, my body, and my life.
My hot take of the day is that sleep is not truly unconsciousness, because you're still to some extent aware of your surroundings. If you weren't, then you wouldn't react to light, or alarm clocks, or cold water on your face, or any number of other external stimuli
My second hot take of the day is that Last Thursdayism is a fun idea, but is disruptive to actual conversations about reality
I don't think Last Thursdayism is a truly valid model of reality because it's also deeply rooted in our own ideas of causality and consciousness. But it's an important tool for attacking the real question which you touch on here, which is what exactly IS consciousness, if you can be unconscious and woken up by an alarm clock, even if you're not dreaming or experiencing anything at all, how tf does that work? What parts of consciousness actually make up our sense of awareness and being alive? Is there wiggle-room? There are conjoined twins who can "travel" in each other's brains, does that mean consciousness is a distinct "thing" almost like a soul? Or is that also a trick by the brain to preserve continuity? And if so, why? Why does the brain need to simulate the experience of being a singular entity even when presented with an alternative? What happens if we start attaching upgrades and RAM chips to our brains and slowly start spending more of our conscious thought in those upgraded regions, and start Ship of Theseus'ing our brains? When can we let go of biology and would that interrupt the conscious experience if you do it very slowly?
We have far more questions than answers, and my point is that we don't know enough about our conscious experience to define what it is and how to preserve it. We might be missing something really huge about the universe that is just simply being edited out of our perceptions by a brain designed to survive animals and weather and to only present us with information to that end.