melmi

Maybe. We might be getting into the weeds of unknowable philosophical questions here.

My belief is that my consciousness now is more or less the same as when I was young. But then, there's no way to know that, as we only exist in the current instant. It's possible I sprung into existence when I woke up this morning.

And yet I think that the claim "there's no continuity of consciousness, the You that existed yesterday is not the same You that exists now" is just as unprovable and thus unknowable as the claim that I am the same Experiencer that I always have been. We have no understanding of what consciousness even is.

To be honest I'm not really sure what consciousness "changing" means. I'm curious what you mean by that. In my mind, either it is or it isn't the same. It's just the thing that experiences my identity, my body, qualia. It's awareness itself.

I think some of the difficulty here boils down to the impossibility of defining consciousness itself.

Tbf, I don't often talk to children about work, and I don't think most adults would want me to talk to them like a child.

Plus, talking to children doesn't come naturally to everyone. It's certainly not fair to describe it as "very easy".

Exactly. Even as a new me lives on, with the same identity, it isn't the same individual. The Me who walked into the teleporter will die, and never wake up again.

I don't care about the continuity of my identity, I care about the continuity of my consciousness. My identity changes over time, but it's always Me who experiences that identity.

I would rather have my identity radically change, but continue to be the one to experience it, than have my identity continue, but have it be a part of a different consciousness.

It only matters in that a person died. A person with their own subjective experience that they no longer get to experience. It doesn't matter that in this case I inherited their memories, and it doesn't matter when it happened other than out of curiosity. I'd mourn them the same.

And as for how I would know... If I'm the clone? Obviously I would never have any way to know, short of someone coming up to me. On the other hand if I were the original, I would "know" because I would be dead. (Or rather, I wouldn't know anything, because the dead don't experience or think)

Edit: It matters that I inherited their memories in that it might influence the way I see the world, my identity, and their death, but it wouldn't change the fact that I mourn them. I am a distinct person from other versions of me, regardless of whether I'm a clone or they're a clone, and if they die it's just as much a tragedy as any other human death.

Except the person who died is dead, and they stay dead. The person who died's final moments will be seeing their clone standing over them, and their memories will diverge.

They're clearly different meat, different consciousnesses in that moment. They won't know what the other is thinking, they will have to speak to communicate.

How are they not separate people in that moment?

Of course I wouldn't know. But the former me who got dragged off is dead. That's the whole point, the clone has no way of knowing and simply continues on life while the original dies.

And because we only exist in the present, we rely on our memories of the past to tell who we are. Our memories tell me I'm me, so I think I'm me.

Maybe it doesn't matter to you, but the reason I don't want to die is because I want to be aware. If I am never conscious again, but a copy of me is, good for them I guess, I wish them the best, but it's not what I want. I'm not conscious of waking up in the morning, even if they're me. I'm dead.

Fundamentally, no. It doesn't matter if the copy is identical in every way, it's physically separate.

The fact that one is the "original" and one is the "copy" doesn't matter. The fidelity of the copy doesn't matter. It's literally just the fact that it's different meat.

The copy will believe it's me, and will for any outside observer be identical to me, but I will still exist as a separate entity. Up until the next instant, where the clone-and-kill machine enters the next phase, kills me, and I'm gone, and there's a new copy of me out there with a new consciousness, living my life. But the version of me who was me is dead.

What happens if it doesn't kill me instantly? What happens if I get to look my transporter clone in the eyes? We won't have the same consciousness, we'll have two separate copies of the same consciousness. And then it kills me. And I watch myself die.

I don't think this is true. Even if consciousness is only a product of our physical bodies, there's still the issue of who's experiencing it.

When this body dies, I'm dead. I don't care if there are a million other perfect copies of this body or my mind out there, if this mind won't be the one to experience it.

A copy of me can be fundamentally perfect, but simply as a product of being physically separate meat our consciousnesses will be separate. If instead of teleporting, both perfect copies stayed alive and had a chance to talk to each other, this would be apparent. I will continue to experience life from the eyes of my old body, not the clone. We could then go on to live our lives separately, and we would diverge. Because we'd both be separate simply by the physical nature of our existence, we're not interchangeable, and it wouldn't make sense to kill one of us and assume that now it's "teleportation". We didn't see out of the other's eyes before, so why would we see out of the other's eyes when we're dead? No, we'd just die.

The only way I can see this not being an issue is if the awareness somehow transfers, which requires some sort of technomagic beyond our comprehension, or outright rejection of the existence of consciousness, which is a bold claim.

Google destroys their own search engine by encouraging terrible SEO nonsense and then offers the solution in the form of these AI overviews, cutting results out of the picture entirely.

You search something on the Web nowadays half the results are written by AI anyway.

I don't really care about the "human element" or whatever, but AI is such a hype train right now. It's still early days for the tech, it still hallucinates a lot, and I fundamentally can't trust it—even if I trusted the people making it, which I don't.

It definitely encrypts the traffic, the problem is that it encrypts the traffic in a recognizable way that DPI can recognize. It's easy for someone snooping on your traffic to tell that you're using Wireguard, but because it's encrypted they can't tell the content of the message.

Not familiar with the game or the publisher at all, but this definitely feels like engagement bait.

Don't see too many leftists defending military contractors...