To any outside observer, it would be indistinguishable from you. The copy itself would think he/she was you, and would very likely not have any perception of either the disintegration or reconstruction. But would it really BE you?

I have posed this question to a few people, and get mixed responses. Some say it IS you. They feel that identity is essentially an information structure, I suppose, together with the web of social interactions that an individual experiences. My gut level reaction is that it is not you. If I saw it done to you, I would run, shrieking in horror. To me it looks like a double crime -- murder plus identity theft.

You can think of variations on this theme. The process is well intentioned and voluntarily submitted to by the victim (think Star Trek style transporter). Or the intent is sinister. A secret invasion force is replacing humans with androids, androids so perfectly made that they fool everyone, even the androids themselves. The ultimate objective is to replace every human with an android, and even the androids themselves have no clue that anything is even happening. At heart, both of these are the same sort of phenomenon as what I described at the start of this post. So ... is it real, or is it memorex?

If there is a soul, and it was freed and the resulting copy was alive, what would be the results? Would the replacement have the personality, or just the knowledge of the original? Would the copy have feelings, remorse, guilt, or any others. Could this be where all the serial killers come from?

Of course if you are of the opinion that people are just a mass grouping of atoms then a copy would still be the same person. If you were to create two coppies then you would have two very confused people.

Even if you don't believe in the soul, there's the question of "historicity". If someone makes a PERFECT copy of the Mona Lisa, is it the original? No, it's made of different atoms, etc. So would you be if you were deconstructed and reconstructed this way. But with people, (and other living things) that may not matter as much. After all, by the time you're an adult, you may not have any atoms left of the body that you were born with. So what? In general, people will say that it's the continuity of consciousness, the SENSE of self, that really matters, and this process presumably would not affect that.

On the other hand, if the first "you" is not instantly destroyed at the moment of recording, then you instantly start to become a different "you" (in a sense) than you were before, and killing you at any time after that to make room for the reconstructed you would certainly be murder.

As for the aliens who are trying to replace all of humanity with their reconstructed doubles: Why? If they really have the same thoughts, feelings, abilities, memories, etc., then they would be no more useful or friendly to the aliens than the originals. Only if you posit some actual change in the reconstructed humans (and absence of a soul is definitely one possibility) would this scenario make any sense.

--Rick

My gut level reaction is don't do that to me! When I think about it, though, I have trouble identifying why. At some level you can argue that this is about a soul, but if there is a such thing as a soul then what makes you think it isn't in the new body?

Does anyone here ever watch Babylong 5? I love that show. In one of the first season episodes Dr. Franklin has a little boy as a patient who is dying and can easily be cured with routine surgery. His parents refuse to allow this because, in their culture, cutting open the body releases the soul.

My point is, we in our culture probably believe them to be wrong. We can't grasp their point of view. Even those of us who believe in a soul don't typically refuse to go under the knife if it will save our lives, we assume are souls are smart enough to know when we're really deaed. (I'd freak out every time I cut my finger with a knife, as I am extremely prone to do.) What's to say that this next level is any different?

Either the soul itself can be disintegrated along with the physical body, or it cannot.

If the soul can be physically disintegrated along with the physical body, then it can theoretically be reintegrated by a perfect reintegration of the entire body. In this case, as has been stated above, perfect physical reintegration would necessarily involve reintegration of the soul.

If the soul cannot be disintegrated along with the physical body, then it has not been disintegrated, and there is no a priori reason to believe that it will not return to a perfect physical copy of the original body.

I would take the precedent of near-death experiences, where a person actually suffers death, has an out of body experience, and then returns to the body. This may be unreliable evidence (as the perceptions of a person that close to--or actually beyond--death cannot be trusted), but it is the only scientific evidence (theological revelations notwithstanding) we have about what actually happens to a soul at death and what could happen if the body were returned to life.

Aside from a gut level reaction, what evidence do we have that a soul would not automatically re-enter the living body it had previously left?

More importantly, what are the implications of the idea that the soul is not sufficiently attached to the body--such that it would not re-enter a perfect physical duplicate after separation from the body?

We would have to assume that every near-death experience, including sleep, would present a possibility of the soul being exchanged for another. In this case, to what degree are we talking about a soul? Is this belief any more coherent than the fictional example presented by Christine (or the actual example of cultures that believed that a photograph would steal the soul)?

My gut reaction is that the only way to discover if there was an actual difference would be to perform an experiment where you duplicated an individual...or would even that work? After all, Card posits the idea of one "aiua" investing several bodies. Why would this not be the case with duplications of an original person? Usually, we simply assume that one soul couldn't inhabit two bodies...but why not? It inhabits two hands, two feet, two eyes, two hemispheres of the brain, and all of them together. It inhabits the 5 pound baby and the 500 pound adult (well, assuming that such people don't have extra souls--that might be an explanation for why they eat so much, but wouldn't that make going on a diet murder?).

We come back to the original dilemma. If the soul can be physically disintegrated, then it can be physically reintegrated. If not, then there is no reason to believe that the soul is harmed in any way, or that it would be unable to re-enter the body.

But realistically, if the soul is the person, and the sould spent a second or two outside the body, then most people would remember some portion of that confusion.

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But realistically, if the soul is the person, and the sould spent a second or two outside the body, then most people would remember some portion of that confusion.

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What about the example of cryogenic freezing, where the body is in a state that cannot support life, but is revived later? Let us leave aside the question of freezing post mortum. Suppose that it were possible to reliably revive a cryo-frozen human (and medical science has not established any firm reason this wouldn't be possible--so long as certain problems with ice crystals were avoided--which has already been solved in a number of fish, amphibian, and even some mammal species). Certainly, during the time that the body is frozen, notwithstanding the fact that it can later be revived, it is not alive in any conventional sense. The body displays no life activity, and if no positive action is taken (in the case of a human), it will not return to any life activity.

Sigh. Ok, I'll give it a shot.

If you freeze someone, is it really death? What if the freezing only suspends the body? Since the brain functions were slowed to a halt it is not death. From that perspective then there is no issue at all. Would the soul leave the body? If it isn't death then it should stay, if it really is death then no one would ever recover.

As far as we could tell, there would be no way for a person being cryo-frozen to tell the difference between the cryo-freeze process and fatal hypothermia prior to losing consciousness, so a cryo-patient would experience the exact same thing as a person freezing to death.

And yet, if we intervene in cases of severe hypothermia after loss of heartbeat, breathing, and consciousness but before actual brain damage can occur, the chances of revival are excellent. We already know that they have already experienced everything that they would have experienced had they actually died...there is no 'extra little sensation' of death in such cases. Even if we wait until some some brain damage has already occurred before revival, the person does not experience the brain damage itself, only the later effects ("Did you feel your brain getting damaged while you were unconscious?").

Of course, we have not developed any technology that will allow us to revive a person from a completely frozen state, so in the example I am discussing above we can point to some level of chemical and electrical activity in the brain cells, and say with confidence that life is still present...or can we? After all, it has been demonstrated that you can take out a mammalian brain (out of a cat, actually), freeze it solid, unfreeze it, and there is still some neural activity...until the brain 'dies'.

What is "life", in this context? What is "my" body and brain, as opposed to a completely identical copy? When has "death" occurred?

I will point out that many religions, and probably the vast majority of religious persons, assert that either ressurection or reincarnation are the natural fate of the "soul", whatever that is. Many, though perhaps no longer a majority, believe in "possession" of a body by an alien soul, or even "domination" of a body by a soul that already has a primary body. Other religious arguments run contrary.

Perhaps all that religion can tell us for certain is what Ezekiel said when the Lord showed him a valley full of dried bones.

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And he said unto me, Son of Man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest.

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Let us say that you simply cloned someone and tried to use hypnosis and so forth to make the clone have the same memories as the original. You might well end up with a person nearly indistinguishable from the original, but there would be substantial differences. You aren't making a perfect copy. The same could be applied to the idea of a transporter (or even a 'botched' cryo-revival). I would imagine that in some cases of severe brain injury, it might actually be possible that the original 'soul' doesn't re-enter the body (Phineas Gage, anyone?).

What interests me here is that I cannot figure out any empirical objective way to distinguish which of these is the case. Some physicists would claim that this is proof that there is no difference between the original individual and the copy. If you cannot measure or detect a difference, if in principle the difference is impossible to detect or measure, then there is no possible point in including it in our model of reality. In all practical terms, it doesn't exist.

In any case, conviction on this point seems to come down to a matter of personal philosophy or theology. And in matters of faith, it is generally pointless to try to persuade people to believe or disbelieve something by logic or rational reasoning. But I feel it is great fun to think out the arguments pro and con, and am in the middle of wrapping a story around this idea.

Ready for another one? Here is a variant of the original question in this thread. Suppose you are of the opinion that the transporter is just that -- a transporter. Stepping into it does not mean death -- just discontinuity in the physical location of one's identity. OK, if it would not bother you to use the transporter, would it bother you to step into a disintegrator mocked up to look like a transporter? You couldn't know that it was a disintegrator of course. But as a thought experiment, should a person mind? After all, your experience would be identical to that of using the transporter, up to the point of disintegration, and after that, being disintegrated, you would be in no position to mind that state, either. This is similar to Survivor's description of the hypothermia victim.

For the record, I don't think it is logical for me to object to my own demise in this fashion, at least in terms of my own experience. I would not want anyone who cared about me to suffer as a result of my disintegration, but it is not something that would cause ME any suffering. How could it? It is something that I could never experience.

There is a punch line to this topic, but I will wait to see what others think about this before I publish it.

PS to Survivor: you spelled something wrong in your earlier post. Just thought I would mention it.

Fine, I misspelled "separate"

As for someone mocking up a disintegrator as a transporter pad, of course I would mind. Not just because I would personally be disintegrated (I don't think that fear of own's own death can be justified philosophically). I would mind just as much as I would mind if it were some other poor fool getting disintegrated.

It's like asking if you would mind if someone had an organ harvesting shop disguised as a dentist's office. They give you the gas (or shot, or whatever), and your experience is exactly the same as at a normal dentist's office except you never wake up. That isn't exactly a small difference, you know?

When I go to a dentist's office, I do so in order to wake up with healthy teeth. Otherwise, I wouldn't go. When I step onto a transporter pad, I do so in order to step out at my intended location. Sure, if you cut out all my organs while I'm under or just disintegrate me, I don't physically suffer, but you've destroyed my ability to act to accomplish my goal by lying to me about what is going to happen if I go to your "dentist's" office or step onto your "transporter" pad.

In this case, it's the lie that matters.

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What interests me here is that I cannot figure out any empirical objective way to distinguish which of these is the case. Some physicists would claim that this is proof that there is no difference between the original individual and the copy.

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Most physicists I know would dispute that making a perfect copy was possible. Due to the uncertainty principle, it would be impossible to determine both exact position and momentum of each particle in your body, and in order to make an exact replica of you both would be required. The following question arises: at what point do these differences become significant enough that the result of the copy will be different enough to not be an "exact" copy? (i.e., if both copies were kept in identical environments, they would diverge from each other at some later point in some way)

The human brain is almost certainly chaotic, IMO. Chaos theory tells us that any change to the initial state, no matter how small, can result in large changes later in a chaotic system.

We've been thinking of this question from the point of view of an outside observer recently. In Star Trek it seems they look at it from the point of view of the copy, because every one of their characters has been transported (ie copied) thousands of times. I'm trying to think of it from the point of view of the person being copied and destroyed.

After the transporter accident, Deanna stopped liking Riker and he did various odd things that he wouldn't have done, including turning into a souless goon.

As for even very small changes causing whichness and whatness in a human brain, the organization of the human brain exists at the cellular rather than atomic or even molucular level. Besides which, your brain is constantly getting affected by little things like stray cosmic particles and so forth. If you are 'killed' every time a stray cosmic particle causes a tiny electro-chemical reaction in your brain...well then the concept of survival has no meaning...becaues you're constantly being killed thousands of times per second.

It claimed I was relatively in line with the theory of personal identity, that there is a soul and it is important. But it said my answer to scenario 2 was inconsistent with this theory. I decided to go ahead and have them replace parts of my brain with silicon to stay alive instead of losing my memory and personality.

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You should always base your decisions on nothing more than the desire to keep yourself in existence....

Here's the problem. There are basically three kinds of things which could be required for the continued existence of your self. One is bodily continuity, which actually may require only parts of the body to stay in existence (e.g., the brain). Another is psychological continuity, which requires, for the continued existence of the self, the continuance of your consciousness, by which is meant your thoughts, ideas, memories, plans, beliefs and so on. And the third possibility is the continued existence of some kind of immaterial part of you, which might be called the soul. It may, of course, be the case that a combination of one or more types of these continuity is required for you to survive.

Your first two choices were consistent with the view that psychological continuity is necessary for survival. In Round 1, you decided to have your body zapped and rebuilt from scratch, and in Round 2 you decided to have your brain replaced by synthetic parts. Both these choices give you psychological continuity. But your last choice sees the end to your psychological continuity, since the continued existence of the soul does not provide it. So you first ended bodily continuity and then you ended psychological continuity.

Perhaps you made these choices because all along you thought that the continuity of the soul is what counts? If so, there is still a puzzle. How could teletransportation or replacing your organic body with synthetic parts ensure that your soul continues to exist? After all, the teletransporter transmits information about body states. Why would the soul follow this information? Given the lack of reasons to suppose a soul would do this, you have been pronounced dead. (Although technically speaking you haven't so much died as lost track of where your soul has gone!) However, it is conceded that the autopsy is not absolutely conclusive!

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It may, of course, be the case that a combination of one or more types of these continuity is required for you to survive.

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I like the example portraied in the arnold flic "the sixth day"

the final question left at the end of the movie was "what happens to the origional???"

In this context, it would not be a violation of any of my rights to instantly, painlessly, and unexpectedly disintegrate me. I would never experience any suffering as a result of that. Of course, anyone who would miss me or empathize with me, or see in my demise a risk of his or her own, might well suffer if I were destroyed as described. So my life would be protected, not by my own right to live, but by the rights of others not to suffer. And in my own turn, I would find the lives of my loved ones protected by my right not to be made to suffer.

I guess it is clear where this is coming from. I maintain that sudden and unexpected destruction is not something that the victim can experience, and therefore, produces no loss that the victim can perceive. It makes me think that the right to life is somehow off base -- it is not protecting me against a loss I can experience. What I DO want to be spared is suffering. If you are going to kill me, at least do it humanely. But truly, aren't the real victims in a murder case the loved ones of the deceased? So wouldn't it be more direct to protect them against that sort of suffering? Well, that was my thought process in coming up with this imagined society.

In such a society, there would be a whole new slant on issues of current concern in our society: ie the death penalty, euthanasia, and abortion. For example, in death penalty cases, the suffering that would be felt by anyone with an emotional attachment to the convicted killer would have to be weighed against the suffering of the families of victims to know that the killer still walked the earth. And it would become a capital offense to be so antisocial that NO ONE cared to see you continue to breathe. (Telemarketers, beware!) Or consider the issue of abortion. To frame the argument in its most extreme form, who would suffer at the destruction, just moments after conception, of a fertilized fetus? Note that this is not a one-sided argument by any means. Whereas in our current culture we are constrained to argue on the basis of any rights that pertain to the fetus, in this alternate culture, those who oppose abortion, who would feel suffering at the thought of the termination of that innocent life (as they see it) would have a new standing in the argument. What you do makes me suffer, so I have a right to petition to prevent you from doing it.

So, anyone want to comment on this? I am mainly looking for discussion of whether this makes for an interesting setting for a story, as well as creative insights about aspects that might be observed about such a culture. But I know that you will all feel free to disregard my intentions.

Life is suffering, anyone that tells you differently is selling something (of course, I imagine that you want to sell a book ).

Consider for just a moment that I set up my disintegration machine and say it is a teleporter to another planet. Anyone that wants to see anyone that I've already disintegrated has only to step through the teleporter to go visit them. I cause no suffering, but I can feed an entire community through the device, no matter how much they care about each other. Thus we see that the guarantee against suffering is no protection against wanton death.

And there are those who suffer because someone else isn't suffering (a point which you gloss over with your death-penalty case). In a culture where death can't be regarded as a punishment in and of itself, the need for justice would demand that there be some kind of actual suffering inflicted. That is only the most obvious contradiction. What about those that suffer from not having more status than the people next door? Every human world is filled with these, and they tend to live next door to one other.

Ultimately, we come back to my initial statment, which is that life inherently entails suffering (just as it inherently entails death). We have a positive right to live and pursue happiness for a very good reason, because a right to not die and not suffer logically entail our utter extinction, as efficiently and quickly as may be accomplished.

Once some zealot of your rights to not suffer manages to gather up a few socio-paths that won't be bothered by the extermination of the rest of humanity, arms them with quick, painless nerve gas, or some other suitable means of extermination, and deploys them to each city of your nation, it will be impossible for any consideration to prevent the order to release the gas. To continue the allow everyone to live would necessarily entail more suffering than would be caused to the minority that were missed. Even if, by some miracle, nobody was suffering at that moment, to later find out about the extermination plot would cause great moral anguish.

In a society where the prevention of suffering was the chief aim, information that would cause suffering would be vigorously protected from dissemination. Say I'm committing adultery. The knowledge of this would cause great suffering to anyone that I would care to hide it from. So of course the proper social response would be for everyone to assist me in keeping it a secret.

But of course, the same argument can be made for any crime I might commit, revealing myself as the culprit will invariably cause more suffering than not revealing who committed the crime. Consider the case if I murder my brother, for instance. Everyone that cares about him will only be more hurt by the knowledge that I'm the murderer. The same is true for my wife, my child, my parent...anyone close to me.

How can you even investigate crime in such a society? Leave alone the question of punishment, though once we introduce that we have our difficulties magnified a thousand fold. It would be a heinous crime to reveal anyone as a criminal, particularly as a criminal that would go about causing suffering.

Consider that the most creative individuals often are driven to create by their own suffering. And also consider that the more imaginative and intelligent a person is, teh more sensitive they are likely to be to kinds of suffering that cannot be easily prevented. In a society that mandated the protection of people from suffering, all activists, visionaries, and most especially artists would have to be rounded up and lobotomized so as to reduce their suffering. We would do the same to architects, philosophers, and inventors.

And you could simply lobotomize anyone that felt distress over that, as well. I'm sure that you would want to call it something else, since lobotomize sounds rather harsh. But ultimately that is where you would be heading. Better yet, we could just disintegrate them, and send fake letters to everyone indicating that they were having such a nice restful vacation somewhere. Anyone smart enough to see through this would also be rounded up and disintegrated...I'm sure that this technique has already been pioneered somewhere or other. Okay, I sense now that I'm leading back towards extermination.

But that is the natural result. If you make protection against suffering the prime good of your system of morality, then all the conventional virtues must be cast aside, because they are at fundamental odds with the notion that you must not cause suffering. Honesty is the first to go. Virtue (of the sexual type) is also hard when it is wrong to cause another to suffer from the knowledge that you don't want to have sex with them and to cause the sheer deprivation of sexual enjoyment. Virtue of the more general type involves telling ourselves and others to strive to standards that we do no meet (and indeed cannot meet). The failures consequent to such a standard causes suffering from guilt. Fortitude is just foolishness if your prime objective is to avoid suffering.

Most importantly, charity and love of others is impossible without allowing ourselves to suffer for the suffering of others. Anyone exhorting you to care for your neighbor as yourself is telling you to suffer. Mothers and fathers would need to be restrained from teaching their children to love others, because to do so would inflict great suffering on them in the future. And of course, any religion that teaches men to love would need to be abolished as well.

Yes, a society that pursued that goal to the exclusion of everything else would be very alien to us. But, tempered with common sense, it might be very interesting.

You make a point about criminal punishment, I think that in the purest interpretation of preventing suffering you are right. But common sense allows us to make some alterations to the core concept:

1. There should be no need to prevent criminals from suffering; in fact, criminals shold probably be made to suffer in proportion to the severity of their crime.
2. If crime is not detected and punished/rehabilitatetd this will result in more crime being committed in the future. Obviously, this will result in more suffering, so the detection of crime is a necessity. It is causing some suffering to a few individuals in order to prevent wider scale suffering by society as a whole; a noble sacrifice.
3. Any suffering which is caused by revealing the identity of a criminal was caused, in the original place, by the criminal. An investigator would console himself with this knowledge; the job might feel very unpleasant (and investigators might regular have crises of confidence in this notion), but it is an essential job (as per point 2), so somebody has to do it.

I think your other points can be addressed similarly. I see no common sense reason to prevent people from making themselves suffer, although doubtlessly some people will hold the attitude that they should. Also the view that a few people suffering in order to reduce suffering by the community as a whole is acceptable would probably be held by a majority.

1. Why do you think that we don't see any successful societies based on the right to avoid suffering (and no, it isn't because nobody's ever come up with the idea before)?