• yemmly@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Was there ever such a thing as the “real Picard” to begin with? Or is the continuity of identity just a lie we tell ourselves to keep from going mad?

  • Cagi@lemmy.ca
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    7 months ago

    This is the transporter dilemma, too. Disintegrating people kills them. Making a long range replicator spit out an exact duplicate with all their memories doesn’t mean they’ve moved.

      • Bonehead@kbin.social
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        7 months ago

        Your body replaces all of your cells over the course of 7 to 10 years. So every 7 or so years, you are literally no longer the same person that you were. What’s the difference between that and expediting the process with a transporter?

        • Cagi@lemmy.ca
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          7 months ago

          This is not true. 7 years is the average, but some cells are with you for life. Others a few months. When you die, you’ve likely only replaced about 40% of the cells in your heart, the rest have been with you since birth. Same for many regions of the brain.

        • Richard@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Not true. The neurons of your central nervous system for example become fully differentiated during embryonic development, and then lose the ability to mitotically divide, which means that they stay for life. All your brain is doing after that is making synaptic connections between neurons.

      • Cagi@lemmy.ca
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        7 months ago

        No because you didn’t disintegrate my brain. Being disintegrated is a catastrophic, fatal injury that destroys the body, not just an imperceptible change like naturally ageing by one second.

        • MxM111@kbin.social
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          7 months ago

          There is exactly the same imperceivable change for you when you appear on another side. And you-one-sec-ago do not exist anymore in both cases. What’s the difference? Just because you use the word “disintegrated”? Use the word transformed instead.

          • Cagi@lemmy.ca
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            7 months ago

            The end result is an identical entity, certainly. But in-between, your matter is broken apart, converted into energy, reconverted back into matter before it becomes the same again. Becoming a data-stream, or a jumble of particles is a very different thing than being a corporeal biological being, and that’s the state the concerns me.

    • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      My son and I talked at length about this one, and we agree with Bones. You wouldn’t get me to go through a transporter unless I was already going to die. If there’s any sort of afterlife, or soul, then that’s where the people who have been transported are, and everyone else is a facsimile of themselves.

  • saltesc@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    As long as he still has original thought. Considering our bodies are pure mechanical, original thought is all there is distinguishing us as not artificial. At least that’s what we’re programmed to think.