Scientist proposes new plan to "resurrect" the dead with a Dyson Sphere, kind of

[SheiffFatman]

@Elmer

There’s an interesting cultural analog to this in e.g. Japan, where castles that have burned and been rebuilt multiple times are still held to be the same castle as the one that existed hundreds of years ago. The question of identity in this case is more about form than it is about actual physical stuff.

I read a similar thing about Japanese temples in (I think) Hokkaido Highway Blues (a.k.a. Hitching Rides with Buddha), in which the perplexed author has a conversation about this phenomenon with an equally perplexed Shinto priest, neither able to grasp the point of view of the other.

[barneyrubble]

Another thought experiment I came up with a while back, to prod at the nature of continuous subjective identity:

You’re you. We’ll call you person A. Imagine you’re being experimented on by scientists with magical sci-fi powers. First, they freeze time. Then, they create a perfect duplicate clone of you and your brain state at this exact point in time, which we’ll call person B. Both versions of you are then cut in half, right down the middle, split into two. There are now two halves of body A, and two halves of B. The left half of body A is then magically sewn up / fused with the right half of body B, and the right half of A is likewise sewn up with the left half of B. Good as new. Each body contains half of your original brain, fused to half a clone brain. Finally, time is unfrozen. Which of these mashups is the “original you,” aka the one that will continue your uninterrupted subjective experience, already in progress before time was frozen?

Good luck answering that if you believe in a concrete continuous subjective identity. (And here’s a variation of the above that perhaps makes the idea clearer: instead of being cut into two, the bodies and brains of A and B are chopped up into 1mm cubes, which are then shuffled and magically fused back together into two bodies, so that each body contains 50% of A and B, like two identical puzzles put together using shuffled pieces from both.)

[jtiii]

@AnthonyC

So which part of the structure/pattern that constitutes your body and brain is what makes you “you”? And why do you believe it can never be reproduced in another substrate?

I believe it’s theoretically possible for “me” to be reproduced in another substrate, but even if I’m duplicated atom for atom the “me” that I experience will remain in this decaying body. Not saying there couldn’t be an exact copy, just that it would in no way grant me immortality.

[jtiii]

Oh for sure, even as an early teen I realized that those dudes on Star Trek were just dying and getting photocopied.

[AnthonyC]

I would say instead that it is a deterministic fact about that world that current-you will experience both outcomes, separately, as the-thing-you-now-call-you diverges along more than one trajectory.

[mofolotopo]

Or the musical…