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Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?

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Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?

#31

Post by raducu »

klipt wrote: post #26
JKCalhoun wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A colleague went on once about Star Trek transporters: what if they worked by "scanning" a person, sent that data over the airwaves, then, made a perfect copy of somewhere else (sourcing new molecules from wherever) — would this copy believe they were the original? He went on: suppose you kill the original — did you "transport" the person? Star Trek creeps me out a little now.

This already happens with identical twins, who split from a single embryo at some point in their development. The only difference with splitting later in life is that you'd share more life memories from before the split.

Transplantin a twins brain would still render the person a complete legume, not even the cranial nerve connections would be the same(sight, smell, hearing, touch of the face), let alone the spine nerves. All the nerve wiring would be wrong. DNA does not contain all the intricate nerve connections, just a meta-summary on how to build them.

Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?

#33

Post by anoncow »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #7
userbinator wrote: post #2

Ethical and moral considerations aside, this also has some interesting philsophical implications: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

A colleague went on once about Star Trek transporters: what if they worked by "scanning" a person, sent that data over the airwaves, then, made a perfect copy of somewhere else (sourcing new molecules from wherever) — would this copy believe they were the original? He went on: suppose you kill the original — did you "transport" the person? Star Trek creeps me out a little now.

A rule could be made that memories can only be moved and not copied. Copying memories could be made illegal punishable by mandatory formatting.

Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?

#34

Post by mynegation »

anoncow wrote: post #32

Instead of transplanting brains, if we could format/update the brain OTA, we could prevent a lot of morbidity and recovery time associated with surgeries. All we will need is bodies to act as hosts for these memories/brain updates.

So, Altered Carbon?

Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?

#35

Post by pontifier »

Larrikin wrote: post #17
JKCalhoun wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A colleague went on once about Star Trek transporters: what if they worked by "scanning" a person, sent that data over the airwaves, then, made a perfect copy of somewhere else (sourcing new molecules from wherever) — would this copy believe they were the original? He went on: suppose you kill the original — did you "transport" the person? Star Trek creeps me out a little now.

I always imagine this will be the divide between rich and poor in the future. The more expensive technology will break the person down and send their atoms to the destination to be reconstructed, it will be slower but it will be the same person. The less expensive technology will scan the person send that data and they will be printed out from a a futuristic atomic printer in a process that kills the original. I imag…

If you're gonna go that route, why even bother with an organic body... much easier to just throw the poor into a generic robot or something.

Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?

#36

Post by Blikkentrekker »

keiferski wrote: post #14
Blikkentrekker wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“exist"? I would hardly use such words in this frame of reference. I'm saying that “identities” are a fuzzy human “ You know it when you see it, and different men see it differently. ” category that is bereft of any definition that can be objectively measured and reasoned about, and that what I just said is a trivial and obvious conclusion. They “exist” in the same way that borders between different oceans exist, arb…

The fact that borders exist doesn’t imply that there are different centers of power. In fact, for most of history borders were notoriously ill-defined.

But power in practice does not adhere to how different parties arbitrarily define where borders lie.

Most of nations of the world officially define Crimea to be within the Ukrainian border, but it is the Russian government who wields the actual, practical power there.

It took a rather long time for many countries to stop defining mainland China as falling within the power of the R.O.C. government, despite the R.O.C. wielding no practical power there any more, and the R.O.C. still defines mainland China as falling within it's power.

If “borders” of nations were defined descriptively based on sovereign entities having control over them, then they would certainly be more useful, but, this would also assume a simplified world where it is easy to decide what powerbase is sovereign, and what powerbase binarily has control over what surface of the planet; it is often not so simple and often multiple parties vie for control over a single area, and whether a powerbase be sovereign is not so easy to simply answer.

Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?

#37

Post by pontifier »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #3
userbinator wrote: post #2

Ethical and moral considerations aside, this also has some interesting philsophical implications: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

I find there to be nothing interesting about it. This, like so many other “philosophical quæstions” is a futile quibble of semantics that answers nothing. The simple answer to this problem, and many other problems, is that the exercise of giving clouds of atoms in vicinity to one another “identities” is not one based in salient thought. — there is no such thing. All Theseus' Ship shows is that, indeed, this theory is…

I tend to agree. It's difficult to draw a good shell around what I call myself. Yes, there is the body, the brain, some part there somewhere that is "Me", but I also have children, and ideas that are part of my identity.

I tend to draw the border of self a little looser than most. I'm a human, a living being, and a piece of me extends both forward and backward in time far beyond the start and end of this meat bag at a keyboard.

Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?

#38

Post by Blikkentrekker »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #16
Blikkentrekker wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“exist"? I would hardly use such words in this frame of reference. I'm saying that “identities” are a fuzzy human “ You know it when you see it, and different men see it differently. ” category that is bereft of any definition that can be objectively measured and reasoned about, and that what I just said is a trivial and obvious conclusion. They “exist” in the same way that borders between different oceans exist, arb…

> I'm saying that “identities” are a fuzzy human “You know it when you see it, and different men see it differently.” I.e., you claim that identities don't (really) exist. Do triangles exist? Is the definition of triangle "bereft of any definition that can be objectively measured"? Is the Ship of Theseus fundamentally different than a triangle, or is it merely a difference of degree? Ask any random human to define so…

> Do triangles exist? Is the definition of triangle "bereft of any definition that can be objectively measured"?

Certainly not, the definition of a triangle is quite a rigorously defined mathematical construct.

> Is the Ship of Theseus fundamentally different than a triangle, or is it merely a difference of degree?

It is not a difference of quantity but quality. A triangle is an objectively defined, mathematical concept; identities are as I said “You know it when you see it, and different men see it differently.”. — you will not find many mathematicians disagreeing on what is, and is not a triangle.

Another fundamental difference is that a triangle is an abstract reasoning tool, not an empirical one, and no mathematician would suggest that real life objects are, or are not, triangles.

> Ask any random human to define some extremely complex mathematical entity, and you'll get various fuzzy answers.

A lay human being with no mathematical understanding perhaps, but all of these entities have been defined rigorously in mathematical terms.

> Does that mean complex math doesn't really exist?

You were the one who speaks in such terms as “existence”. I will not have you put words in my mouth.

All I said is that one has an objective, rigorous definition such that you will find that every single educated man in the field agrees on what is, and what is not a triangle, such that a machine proof assistant can be fed this definition, and verify machine-level proofs that reason about them, and that the other lacks this such that you find that nigh any man, expert or not, has a different definition of what constitutes the identity of a physical object, and where a new object starts.

Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?

#39

Post by est31 »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #7
userbinator wrote: post #2

Ethical and moral considerations aside, this also has some interesting philsophical implications: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

A colleague went on once about Star Trek transporters: what if they worked by "scanning" a person, sent that data over the airwaves, then, made a perfect copy of somewhere else (sourcing new molecules from wherever) — would this copy believe they were the original? He went on: suppose you kill the original — did you "transport" the person? Star Trek creeps me out a little now.

There is a CGP grey video about this subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQHBAdShgYI

Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?

#40

Post by developer92 »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #7
userbinator wrote: post #2

Ethical and moral considerations aside, this also has some interesting philsophical implications: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

A colleague went on once about Star Trek transporters: what if they worked by "scanning" a person, sent that data over the airwaves, then, made a perfect copy of somewhere else (sourcing new molecules from wherever) — would this copy believe they were the original? He went on: suppose you kill the original — did you "transport" the person? Star Trek creeps me out a little now.

I'm off the opinion that transporting is pointless from a selfish point of view: your duplicate will get to Jupiter or wherever, and think they're you, but your consciousness will stop so you will never get to experience it. I don't know what experiment you could do to prove this either way.
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