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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?

#51

Post by keiferski »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #36
keiferski wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Power in practice does adhere to borders, just not 100% of the time.

Reality isn’t a computer program. The fact that some rules are broken occasionally doesn’t mean that they aren’t rules.

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

#52

Post by keiferski »

The fact that this is uncontroversial to a lot of people mostly just shows how intellect-focused our society has become. Plenty of other value systems treat the Self as the entire body, not merely the head. Perhaps if we did too, we might not have so many issues with obesity and drug abuse. Dualism has consequences.

I once read someone describe academics as “floating heads with bodies attached.” I think that could apply to society at large.

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

#53

Post by skissane »

JProthero wrote: post #18
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.

There is a long tradition in academic philosophy of using this model of teleportation as a device for investigating questions of personal identity. Derek Parfit's 'Reasons and Persons' is probably the best-known treatment [1]. I think there are good reasons to believe this is not generally how the writers of Star Trek thought the transporters in their stories were supposed to work, but they weren't always perfectly c…

> I think there are good reasons to believe this is not generally how the writers of Star Trek thought the transporters in their stories were supposed to work, but they weren't always perfectly consistent on the subject.

I remember one episode of one of the TV shows (I forget which one), they used a transporter to transport a bomb off the ship, so it detonated in space instead. If transportation is converting matter to information, transmitting the information, then reassembling it at the other end, why would one bother doing that to a bomb? Just do the first step of converting matter to information, and then instead of transmitting it and reassembling it somewhere else, just send the information to /dev/null

(I think if someone was designing a bomb, in a situation in which such technology was known, they'd try to design it so that any attempt to dematerialise/transport it would detonate it instantly.)

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

#54

Post by tsimionescu »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #8
Blikkentrekker wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Are you implying identies don't exist? Because that either has to be sophistry (i.e. trolling) or insanity.

The notion of an object, in the human sense, doesn't have any solid relationship with the physical world. I hope we are agreed on this much. For some objects, there is a stronger correlation between the human concept and the physical world (i.e. you could find a formal definition that matches to some extent what I mean by a particular spoon), but for other objects in our minds there is nothing in the physical world that truly matches our understanding (the Atlantic Ocean, as an object separate from the Pacific Ocean, is not a physical object, it is just a human abstraction).

In particular, our notion of the identity of an object has no relationship with the physical world, as the Ship of Theseus shows. Our idea that objects "shatter" and "transform", so that if I break a glass the pieces are a different object than the glass; or if I mix of bowl of flower with water and roll it into a dough, the dough is a different object than the bowl of flour and the water - these are not physically definable notions.

When it comes to human identity, the identity perceived by myself, the same logic MUST apply, unless you believe in a soul. The fact that I can think of myself as the same identity as myself 2 seconds ago, or myself when I was a handful of cells in my mother's womb, is obviously an artifice of the human mind. There is no such continuity in the physical world.

And this has all been said from the perspective of classical physics. If you go into QM, where any notion of identity of particles would contradict the theory and observations of it, things really break down.

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

#55

Post by michaelmrose »

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 science fiction book explored the idea that this destruction was imperfect leaving behind an echo that could only interact with other echos. I was called "Echo Round his Bones"

https://www.fantasticfiction.com/d/thomas-m-disch/echo-round...

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

#56

Post by BorisTheBrave »

keiferski wrote: post #52

The fact that this is uncontroversial to a lot of people mostly just shows how intellect-focused our society has become. Plenty of other value systems treat the Self as the entire body, not merely the head. Perhaps if we did too, we might not have so many issues with obesity and drug abuse. Dualism has consequences. I once read someone describe academics as “floating heads with bodies attached.” I think that could ap…

Or, people have already seen transplants and prosthetics, and it's easy to observe that the pros outweigh the cons.

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

#57

Post by Blikkentrekker »

keiferski wrote: post #51
Blikkentrekker wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Power in practice does adhere to borders, just not 100% of the time. Reality isn’t a computer program. The fact that some rules are broken occasionally doesn’t mean that they aren’t rules.

That's very much what a law of physics is.

If the law is observed broken once, that is a falsification of the entire theory.

And I assume you live in a rather peaceful area if you think powers adheres to borders. In many parts of the world governments have a harm time enforcing their law upon fringe areas where effective anarchy is quite common. — the picture is certainly not as simple as you paint it.

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

#58

Post by marshmallow_12 »

JProthero wrote: post #18
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.

There is a long tradition in academic philosophy of using this model of teleportation as a device for investigating questions of personal identity. Derek Parfit's 'Reasons and Persons' is probably the best-known treatment [1]. I think there are good reasons to believe this is not generally how the writers of Star Trek thought the transporters in their stories were supposed to work, but they weren't always perfectly c…

i fail to see how this is an important philosophic subject, being based on absolutely no scientific data.

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

#59

Post by keiferski »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #57
keiferski wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power in practice does adhere to borders, just not 100% of the time. Reality isn’t a computer program. The fact that some rules are broken occasionally doesn’t mean that they aren’t rules.

That's very much what a law of physics is. If the law is observed broken once, that is a falsification of the entire theory. And I assume you live in a rather peaceful area if you think powers adheres to borders. In many parts of the world governments have a harm time enforcing their law upon fringe areas where effective anarchy is quite common. — the picture is certainly not as simple as you paint it.

Physics isn’t politics.

Most countries follow borders most of the time.

This really isn’t that complicated.

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

#60

Post by femto »

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.

Something similar happens in telephony today. When you talk to your Mum over a phone that uses a predictive vocoder, you're not really talking to your Mum. You're talking to a voice synthesiser that is being instructed to talk like your Mum.

Does it really matter though? It's just a different way of encoding the information. These things force one to think about the nature of what is real and what matters. Is the important thing actually hearing your Mum (whatever that means), or making the connection with her at an emotional level?

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