Bay 12 Games Forum

BUT. That means that you are not the same person that you were a second ago. There is no 'me'.

he is the same person, his personality and behavior changed slightly due to the addition of new memories and experience. This is where your logic fails, and mines seems more rational.

Mind: Set of memories.

if this is the case, then you can already immortalize yourself by creating a computer program that responds to outside stimulus using your existing experiences. So go ahead and do that then kill yourself and give the computer 10 bucks, good luck.

Why would you believe that the world does not exist outside your cognitive capabilities? If you are already going to believe in a personally unverifiable assumption, then why not believe in what the evidence tells you, namely that the world has existed for some billion years already? Now you'll probably want to change your statement to:

ahh but you see my friend, the world has existed, the universe has existed, for immemorial. It is all meaningless. It may have well not existed because for all that time, all those trillions of years we were unborn and in darkness. There is nothing the world can give us. It may have well not been there until we were born.

Here's a further question: Assume you were disassembled and subsequently rebuilt with all the same particles in the exact same configuration. Would "you" still be "you"?

no, i believe you permanently died when the cells in your brain cannot function. Disassembling at the molecular level destroys the brain. Re-assembly creates a entirely new one.

Okay, you aren't making much sense to me, Catsup. If two things are physically identical, then for a single instant they may as well be each other. You haven't explained this 'individual ability to become conscious'. This may sound rude and unfair, but from what I'm hearing from you I get the impression that being a distinct individual is very important to you and it sounds like you're grasping at straws to protect that idea.

no, im just very bad at conversations in general, a few pages back in the thread i was arguing that everyone had their own individual consciousness, and that they die when they lose this consciousness permanently; only to figure out that different ppl had different meanings to what consciousness meant.

i think i will use another poster's post as an example for you, many ppl voted "no" for the poll because they want to live and could care less about what their clone could do for the world as "them":

As to my limited understanding, we're basically electrically charged flesh behind a bone structure, if you copy that charge into three identically pieces of flesh, and then removes the charge from the first, you've killed an instance that was cabable of experiencing the world beyond what it already had.

Even if a copy of me lives a good life and no one else ever knows, my charge is still gone if I'm dead and I won't know it. I'll not accept to die before I am forced, because I want to know the world. I don't care if you copy me a million times and each of them experience amazing things, the original charge has been put out and won't even know it. I'll be dead and it'll matter nothing to me.

I don't understand how you can have such a hard time understanding that.

here the poster refers to my definition of "ability to become conscious" as "charge"

I'm pretty sure the divergence here is that you see a mind as something abstract to be preserved, whereas I don't. I don't care about my memories and personality either surviving or being consigned to oblivion*, what I care about is the conscious self that is staring out of my eyeballs right now being able to continue doing so. If I'm dead, having a 100% identical copy with all my hopes and dreams and memories will never, ever achieve that.

Sort of? I mean, I could make a conscious decision now to do a handstand after the cloning happens. Then both mes will (at least try to) do a handstand after the procedure.

yes, you'll know from past memory that this is what you planned to do (do a handstand). Theres always the possibility for one of you to change their mind.

my point is, you cannot control the clone in real-time as you can with your own body, and neither can you sense sensory input that is experienced from their body. And therefore because of this, they are a separate being than you.

Heck, it could even be said that "You" die whenever you lose your train of thought, or go to sleep. If you had something that slowly and progressively replaces the behaviour of the brain, something so progressive the sense of "You" never changes, then a brain transfer to another medium wouldn't be death of the self, death of the you.

what you lose when you go to sleep is consciousness. Behavior and personality that define your person is determined by memory and experience, those are constantly being added and your personality is constantly changing and this ability to change is what makes a person human. You are considered dead when you fail to be able to take in physical stimulus permanently, with the brain that is in your head right now.

Dude, you still didn't define "you". Either you mean your body, or you mean your mind.

why dont you start defining what "mind" is? you know exactly what i mean, your brain is the physical reality that represents "you". Duplicating it perfectly creates a copy that is a copy, that are their own, and which experience the world as a separate being than "you".

"You" die when your original brain dies, period. I dont get why thats so hard to understand, we arent discussing sci-fi fantasy here.

The second statement is true (we'll leave brain transplants out of the scenario for now). But the first statement is false, since that body has the same memories (therefore the same mind) as the original body.
Here's another question. Let's say you are abducted while sleeping and replaced with a duplicate of yourself. Nobody would notice, and your copy would be perfectly okay with that, since he doesn't know he is a copy.
Now let's say the same thing happens, except you are awake during the duplication process, and the copy remembers that. What would the copy feel?

it doesnt matter what memories the body has, it doesnt matter what appearance they have, it doesnt matter if the world is unchanged since your clone is your exact double. It doesnt change the fact that he is a separate being than your original self, whose body cannot be controlled by your original brain.

the other 2 questions are kind of pointless, what exactly are you trying to prove?

Is it wrong that I laugh when I read stuff like this? I think that basically a clone with my exact particles and memories is me. At the moment of it's creation there is no longer a singular 'me'. There is now two units of 'me'. Once any amount of time has passed we are no longer identical, but neither has a greater claim on being 'me'. No more than the 'me' that existed yesterday still exists. Basically I think that mind and body are one and the same.

no one will know its not you, but it isnt you because you arent the one in control of the body, you arent the one looking through its eyes.

what is created here is a piece of flesh that just happens to have the exact same brain structure and organization as you (and thus the same mind) as your original self, but is a entirely separate entity with it's own thought process (even if those may be identical to you).

EDIT: after rereading, mind and body are not exactly the same for humans because we do not have a decentralized nervous system. Just transferring our brain is enough to transfer our mind and our present "ability to become conscious", into another body so we can wake up in that body.

Okay, so, I've listened and tried to understand, and the only problem remaining is - if if I believe those who talk about consciousness being something that can't be transferred (somehow, for some reason that isn't really clear and seems rather arbitrary), that still leaves a vitally important question. Why does it matter?
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This is exactly what I mean. So what? That is how things are ALWAYS going to end. I'm not a nihilist, though. I actually believe the world exists, unlike you. And this particular instance isn't particularly important to me, especially since it's fate (i.e. death) is set in stone anyway.

you are wrong my friend, the world exists, but only when your alive to see it. And death is NOT set in stone, many organisms have natural biological immortality or at least longevity due to how their bodies are built. Humans are apparently naturally selected for senescence because earlier humans in evolution often died from other causes before old age kills them (and passed on their offspring already) so there was no real natural selection against senescence.

Is it just me, or does this sound like a rather odd military design?

i believe its called turtling

theres a few signs of being a vampire regardless of age. They are always historical figures, so they tend to have un-regular experience levels and skill distribution compared to generated migrants. They may be missing certain body parts from fights in world generation. They are usually a witness or suspect in the murder (they may "discover the body" themselves, after killing a dwarf). They will have "not had a drink" in their description where slothen mentioned. And they may own accessories made from the bodyparts of intelligent creatures (ie dwarve hair crown).

first look through the witnesses, and if ANY dwarves have dabbling in most skills (and is a recent immigrant) with uneven experience distributions (look through therapist) and does not have any recent drink thoughts/not had a drink for some time, you might consider isolating these dwarves alone using burrows and locked doors until they get hungry (proving their not a vampire) or exposing them to walled-off but visible undead (non-vampires run away in fear).