Delta1212

There are species with variables pairs of chromosomes within the species, so having a mismatching number is not necessarily always an obstacle to reproduction.

Most people who believe this have never really lacked for basic necessities, and there is an in-built assumption in the premise that one will not be so lacking in money that they will, e.g. have to watch their child starve to death because they can't afford to buy food. I do think that there is a common attitude of "I am unhappy, but if only this one part of my life changed all of my problems would be solved" that usually doesn't bear out in practice, and that the best way to be happy is to try to be happy with things as they are rather than continuously seek that one thing that will make everything better, but let's not oversell that idea. Gaining a little bit of money won't solve all of your problems, but that doesn't mean that a lack of money cannot ever present a real obstacle to happiness in effects.

One member asked a question about how something should be classified. To some extent, all classifications are arbitrary, some are just better justified than others. I don't think there is much justification for defining either "information" or "physical entity" in such a way that the former can be categorized as the latter, but it's a perfectly legitimate philosophical question. What you did, by contrast, was make a testable claim about how things work that doesn't fit with the empirical evidence we currently have available to us. There is most certainly a difference between asking a question that doesn't have an objectively correct answer, and making a claim that is most certainly testable but does not fall in line with mainstream theory based on current evidence. The latter belongs in Speculations.

After a little digging, I did find a North By Northwest Pole.

Which way is up in the absence of a gravity field? What is north of the North Pole? What's on the other side of a Mobius strip? How many miles away is tomorrow? Why?

I think that was what he was implying.

F=ma and all the various equivalent ways of writing that simply means that the acceleration that an object undergoes is directly proportionate to the force applied to it and inversely proportionate to the mass of the object. It's a statement about proportional relationships, nothing else. If you set a=1 then "F=m" simply means that the force required to achieve that acceleration is proportionate to the mass. If the mass goes up, the force must go up by the same ratio. If the mass goes down, the force goes down.

6m + 6m + 6m + 6m + 6m is not 6m * 5m. It is 6m * 5, which is 30m. You are actually adding 5 6m by 1m rectangles, so it's (6m * 1m) + (6m * 1m) + (6m * 1m) + (6m * 1m) + (6m * 1m) or 30 square meters.

How would you know? Let's assume your position is correct and the transporter duplicate is not really you. If someone created a duplicated of you and replaced you in your sleep, the duplicate would wake up presuming he was the original and come on here and say he had always been TAR and no other entity had replaced him. If, during the course of the last 30 years, the first TAR that existed disappeared and was eventually replaced by a new entity with its own consciousness but all of the memories of the old TAR, the new entity would presumably assume that it was the original and that it was the same entity that had always existed as TAR's mind, even though the real original was long gone.

Can you give an example of an anomaly with a concrete and objective procedure that I can use to verify it myself? If you provide one that is reasonably accomplishable, I promise to do it.

Generally, time is considered the 4th dimension. Space isn't really a separate dimension. The first three dimensions are the spacial dimensions and the fourth is the temporal dimension.

One key point that distinguishes living things from a teapot is that they are constantly changing and cycling through material. Let's say you have a LEGO palace. Each day you swap out a single brick. Sometimes you put a new brick back in exactly the same place. Sometimes you put the new brick in a slightly different position. After ten years of doing this, there are only a handful of bricks out of a few thousand remaining from the original LEGO palace and it looks only vaguely similar to the original design. Is the palace that you have at the end of ten years the same palace that you started with?

There are safer, cheaper and ultimately easier ways of doing pretty much everything a jet pack does. It's like asking why we don't all take miniature Zeppelins to work. It sounds really cool, but if you actually had one I expect it would be a big expensive hassle that would quickly become a lot less exciting than just driving. Ultimately, the idea of a jet pack is much cooler than the actual implementation, because your imagination doesn't have to worry about practical considerations and engineering problems.

Ok, I have a semi-tangential but ultimately related question: If someone experiences significant brain trauma of the type that fundamentally changed their personality (up to and including, say, having a railroad spike driven through your frontal lobe) is that person still "themselves" or has their consciousness died and been replaced by a different one?

For the sake of argument, sure. You don't break up and reassemble at the other end of the wormhole. It just sends you through in one piece.

Once there are two of you, I think we all agree that they diverge and do not remain identical from that point forward. Let's flip it around just for fun. Let's say we have a worm hole. You step through it and find yourself physically transported to Mars. A weird consequence of this particular wormhole, however, is that it leaves a copy of you behind. So now the "original" you is in a new location and the copy is in the location occupied by the original. Does the copy now have a greater claim to being the real you because it's location lines up better with that of the original at the moment of copying?

I agree. You might as well argue that you are a vegetarian by defining an instantaneous boundary point between eaten and uneaten meat, so that it has either been eaten or not been eaten and at any one instant you are not technically "eating" meat.

Why? Consciousness is a process. Does a flame have continuity? The flames continue to dance in the same place, and arise from the same fuel source, but the atoms that are reacting are different, they are emitting different photons. A flame is being continuously created anew in the same place. It's like the adage about not being able to cross the same river twice. It looks about the same. It behaves about the same. But the water that flows through it isn't the same water. The mental state that makes up "you" right now is not the same mental state that will make up "you" five minutes from now. It will be similar, but not identical. If you stretch it out to a long enough time, most of the matter won't be the same either, as your body cycles through raw materials. It will be slotted into roughly the same pattern, but it won't be the same atoms. So what is it about you that has an independent continuous existence for the duration of your life if not the pattern (which can be copied)?

I think most of us are actually arguing sort of the opposite of an external seat of consciousness. At least I, and I think most of the rest debating you about this are in the same general area as me, are arguing that the continuity of consciousness you are trying to establish is an illusion. No, if you're standing on Earth, right now, is not going to be aware of the you that steps out of the transporter on Mars five minutes from now. But equally, the you on Earth right now is not going to be aware of the you that stays on Earth and I still here five minutes from now. "Right now" you is gone and has been replaced by a version of you that has all of your memories and personality + five minutes more experience. Depending on what happens in those five minutes, there can be very little difference between five-minutes-from-now you and the you that exists right now, or there may be a very significant difference indeed. But it will not be the same version of you, and the you that existed five minutes ago is not, and never will be, aware of the things that you are right now not that a new version of you will be aware of five minutes from now. So in that respect, there is very little difference between being replaced by a single version of you and being replaced by two versions of you. Both are as much "you" as you are the you from a few minutes ago. Your mind doesn't jump into the new body. The new mind that arises on Earth, and the new mind that arises on Mars are both equally successors of all the yous that came before. But none of those versions of you exist any longer except as memories in both of the present versions of yourself.

I don't think you five minutes from now is the same you from five minutes ago in any meaningful sense that isn't effectively replicated by G2. The only difference is that there's no event between five minutes ago and five minutes from now that would cause you to question whether those two entity's were the same "being" or not the way the transporter does. Edit: Let's say we have two different scenarios. Graeme steps into the transporter at 5:00 and at 5:01 you have Graeme A and Graeme B. In the other, Graeme doesn't step into the transporter at all. At 5:01 in both scenarios, 5:00 Graeme no longer exists. In the first scenario, there are now two minds that arose from 5:00 Graeme. In the latter, there is only one. But in either case, 5:00 Graeme no longer exists no matter what he chooses.

So does the new you.

Again, we're assuming as part of the premise that Spyman 1 post-transport is "more" a continuation of Spyman 1 pre-transport than Spyman 2 is. Instead, it may be the case that we have Spyman 1 step into the transporter, and Spyman 1a who steps out on Earth while Spyman 1b steps out on Mars. Spyman 1a is certainly not Spyman 1b, but neither is he Spyman 1 any more or less than Spyman 1b is.

You are, however, making an assumption that "you" already experience continuity of existence in a form other than that which would be experienced by G2. You-at-10-years-old is just as dead as G1. Your link to 10-year-old-you exists pretty much entirely in the patterns that have been preserved as memories, personality, physical characteristics, etc., all of which are also present in G2. G1 isn't made up of the same matter as G-at-10. G1 simply preserves some elements of the pattern of G-at-10. The difference, of course, is that there is a clear moment where G2 replaces G1, while the erasure of G-at-10 and emergence of G1 seems more gradual, but the end result is ultimately the same. There is a different you that retains the memories of the old you, but is demonstrably not the same you.

Let's put it this way. If I declare brunettes and blondes to be separate races, and then sample genes associated with hair color, I will be able to group the population genetically into blonde and brunette clusters. Does this mean that blondes and brunettes as a racial classification are proven to have a genetic basis? No. Just because you can cluster people by genetic similarities doesn't mean races have a genetic basis. Because people are more likely to have children with people who live close by, there are some genetic markers that you can cluster geographically, but where exactly you draw the lines between "races" based on this is just as arbitrary as basing it on hair color. Are the English a different race from Italians? Do northern Italian and southern Italian populations represent two different races? Are Native Americans the same race as East Asians? You can go very broad and very narrow and still find ways to cluster people genetically. That doesn't make any of the clusters particularly more meaningful than any of the others, and which clusters we choose to define as racially significant and which not are arbitrary. Where finding a genetic basis for race is even attempted, it usually falls into the category of "I think these two populations represent different races. Let's see if I can find any genetic differences between them" which, yes, you probably can.

I think the fairest criteria is that if there are bullets in his gun, you are in imminent danger, and if there aren't, then you are merely afraid and not in real danger.