A thought experiment about the nature of self (see details)- what do you think?

People who believe in a soul might have a problem with this type of thing. Since I believe that I’m just a collection of cells in the same condition that would be accurately duplicated, yes, I think it would be me.

I believe that any 100% replication of my atomic bits will also be me. Even if the machine was a copier and not a teleporter, two of me would step out of the machine. The other person would also be me. They would start to be their own person as they start to have separate experiences.

If you believe in superstition and think there’s some ‘magic’ part of the body (i.e. soul) that cannot be duplicated, then you would probably argue that the teleported version of yourself isn’t you because the machine destroyed some divine part of you that it cannot recreate.

I honestly don’t think this is something we quite understand well enough yet. It would be very interesting to see.

as you describe it this machine would seem to be in violation of the First Law of Thermodynamics. You could not “destroy” the body any more than you could make it rematerialize out of nothing in another location. so if this machine scatters my atoms and then reassembles them somewhere else, then yes, it would be me. but if the laws of physics were somehow suspended and the body somehow dematerialized and rematerialized in a new location then i think bodyhead’s answer is a good one, it all depends on one’s spirtuality and how one views creation and the soul. or, as the great Billy Preston put it, “nothing from nothing leaves nothing, but girl you gotta have something if you wanna be with me.”

next question, if this machine existed, why not create many destination terminals and recreate yourself in many places at once? which would be the ‘real’ you?

@emt333
The premise isn’t that matter or energy would be destroyed or created in the process. The atoms in You version 2.0 wouldn’t be the very atoms from You version 1.0; those would have gone on to other destinies. The You v2.0 would be made of other atoms, but physicists generally accept that subatomic particles are indistinguishable, so we’re going on that assumption and leaving thermodynamics intact.

I’ve heard, though I’m not the biology expert, that the cells in our body today are not the same cells that were in our bodies 7 years ago. So every 7 years or so we are entirely different people. I have no belief in a soul, or even a self. Memory is the only thing that ties us to our ideas of self, and we all know the connection between memory and truth rarely coincide. No need to go as far a Star Trek.

@Harp. good call. but i don’ t think the new “you” would still be “you” as we understand it. more like replication than transportation. (how do you answer my question about multiple destination terminals?) i also think spiritualists would miss the soul.

@all
Let me introduce a twist: suppose that there’s some sloppiness in the fidelity of the reproduction on the far end of the process. Could any deviation from v1.0 be tolerated and have v2.0 still be you? How much? Which bits?

Harp, you are making my head hurt! I say that even if you came out with a different body altogether, as long as the mind was still intact and unaltered, you’d still be you. From that day forward, you’d have a different experience with life due to the body changes, but your past (memories, knowledge, personality) would not have changed. Look at it this way, if tomorrow you became paralyzed…only your body would be different. You’re still you.

It’s funny that you mention Star Trek, in the various series they do explore the ethical side of the transporter. Star Trek Spoilers: in The Next Generation (the one with Patrick Stewart), a clone of one crew member is accidentally made via using the transporter in a tricky situation, and a few subsequent episodes explore his feelings and issues surrounding this.

Personally, I don’t believe in a soul, so I would consider still being myself. I agree with augustian’s perspective that even if my brain were in a different body, so long as I retained my memories/knowledge/personality, that would be me.

Your brain isn’t immune to the affectations of the body. If your body was deformed to some aspect, it’s very likely your brain would also be deformed.

Maybe just a memory is slightly different.

It’s creepy to think about.

@augustlan
not to ramp up the headache, but Is all of the mental stuff really untouchable here? What if v2.0 remembers things a bit differently than v1.0, or is a little crankier? At what point does “different” become “other”?

Different becomes other at the first tiny mutation. It might be an acceptable risk in some situations.

i.e. I need a sandwich. (no transporter)

I need to get out of a burning building with no access and I’m going to die in 10 seconds (transporter time)

Ok, if it had any affect (effect?) on my mind, I would not be me anymore. I wouldn’t risk it except, as bodyhead suggests, to save my life.

@bodyhead
But aren’t you constantly undergoing tiny mutations in your mental constitution even without the transporter? Does that mean that you become “other” with each mutation, rather than just “different”?

Weird, I had a similar idea.

I hate to be so mechanistic about the whole thing, but yes, I absolutely believe the self would remain, and I would go so far as to say that the sense of self would remain unless we radically altered some parts of the brain. I’m thinking about this story by the neurologist Oliver Sacks, in which a man insists that his leg is not his own, and that the hospital must have put a cadaver’s leg in bed with him. It suggests to me that the sensation of the self, at least the physical self, is governed by parts of the brain that, when ablated, remove my sense that a given body part belongs to me. I guess you could say I believe there are “self” centers in the brain, and anything short of modifying those would mean you still identify your self as…yourself.

So suppose the machine gave me a slightly different nose. I might say, “this isn’t my nose”—meaning that it’s not the nose I had before the machine—but I would still recognize it as my nose, in that it would belong to me. And I am sure that I would adjust to that machine-modified nose the same way I could adjust to a nose modified by a baseball or a plastic surgeon.

As far as modifications to the brain—will it take one synapse or two or three or a hundred or a million before there’s a measurable change? I don’t know. I think that’s kind of like the pile of sand problem. Or, to quote a friend, your brain “is what it is until it isn’t.” I’m sure it’s still me, it’s just a modified me. I’m building and losing synapses (and cells!) all the time. NBD.

Similar question: There are two ports, one on the ocean, another on a lake with no outlet. There is a wooden ship “Angelina” at the sea port. An extremely talented man begins to take the ship apart, plank-by-plank, and re-builds it at the lake port. Is it the same ship? Or has it changed somehow? The ship is exactly as it was before. There is no difference from the before and after state.
If it did change…What is different, is it the same thing that changes with a human example?
If it didn’t change… what is the difference between this and a human example?

.
What if your soul follows a unique “ID” code that is in you. Then again that doesn’t really work. For example: Every car has it’s own feel/characteristics that make it different from another identical car. That is each car has it’s own personality. (stuttery start, creaks, reaction to acceleration). Each car has a VIN# .... The car personalities don’t follow the VIN#, I could swap the VIN# of two cars and they will stay the way the were, they won’t gain or loose personalties.

Harp, if you are constantly undergoing small mutations (I don’t even know if this is true but lets say it is) then you would just become different with each mutation. It wouldn’t make you an other you until there is an outside influence without which the mutation wouldn’t have occurred. (I’m calling this outside influence something that isn’t in your normal environment)

Does that make sense?

Both.

The you who stepped in the machine would be dead. It’s absolutely no different for that person than to be killed normally.

The person who stepped out of the machine is also you, but more like a perfect clone of you. It’s like asking if two different, say, Wiis (fresh out of the factory) are the same. They’re manufactured exactly the same, but they aren’t the exact same object. It functions exactly the same, and is completely interchangeable, but nothing else.

Essentially, whomever steps out will think the teleportation happened perfectly and as planned. They will have all of your memories and everything else. It’s fairly simple. Two different people, but with exactly the same quantities.

Make no mistake, you step in that teleporter, you’re dead.

I’ll play. ;)

If I was duplicated exactly, I would not exist as the same person, though my consciousness would pop up in Me 2.0. If such a recreation was possible, and there was room for error (as there always is), I would not be guaranteed to be the exact same when recreated.

What if my cells got mixed up in such a way that Me 2.0 was exactly like someone else? There is a probability, though very small, that this could happen due to the imperfection of the machine. In that case, there would be a duplicate consciousness of someone else, which is supposedly impossible. However, from that moment on, the consciousnesses diverge, becoming two separate beings. One is not the same as the other.

If there was no error, it would certainly give the illusion of a continuance of consciousness, but because of that possibility of error, there is no way that Me 2.0 would have the exact same essence as Me 1.0.

I’m coming dangerously close to the idea that there is a soul. Woe is me!

Yeah, I’m smelling a soul somewhere in there, shadling

So KitchenSink raises an interesting point: does a guarantee that a perfect copy of you will exist in the future (and let’s assume that you have complete confidence in that guarantee) make you willing to undergo complete annihilation?

Nope, not you. It’s a new thing.

I’d say yes to annihilation, Harp. One interesting thing though. If we had the technology to do what we are proposing, we’d also probably have the technology to stagger it with time.

The teleporter probably has some type of teleportation buffer on the device. This probably means that there’s nothing to prevent us from teleporting something into the future. Whether this means that we’d rematerialize him in five minutes, 5 years or 5 million years, would depend on the settings of the machine.

very interesting

First, I’d like to point out that I’d do it if I wasn’t sure. I have to die anyway… If I was satisfied with my accomplishments in life, I’d allow myself to be the guinea pig for this procedure. I’d be curious to see how it’d turn out (but, of course, I’m not sure that I’d be able to see it through to the end).

However, if I knew that I’d come out fine on the other side… that gives me pause for some reason. I’ll have to think about that some more.

It’s strange… I’m reluctant to do the procedure proper, but the experiments leading up to it seem fine by me.

Sounds a bit more like Mike TV’s transportation in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory to me.

I don’t think I would go through with it if I were one of the first to do it. I’d be too afraid of not being put back together correctly. If it was a well tested machine and tons of people had used it and been teleported okay (meaning their eyeball wasn’t suddenly replaced by a knee post-teleporting) then I might give it a shot.

But Allie, all you would be able to tell by looking at all those previous outcomes is that the person coming out over there seemed just like the person going in over here. Is that enough to convince you that it’s the same person?

Just did some digging here and discovered that I got the source of this experiment mixed up with somebody else. The “teleportation” experiment is the brainchild of Derek Parfit, who’s no amateur hack at all, but an Oxford philosopher beg your pardon Professor Parfit
The experiment appeared in his book “Reasons and Persons”. Just to set the record straight.

For the record, if I were to have complete confidence in my earlier description being accurate, I would indeed do it, in a heartbeat.

If I’m dead, my brain no longer functions, so I wouldn’t care. This also has the perk of, you know, teleportation. If I’m not afraid to do this when others are, then I might be an asset. :D

Win-win for me.

@Harp, what did Parfit think?

Wow, let me see if I can recall.

He used this experiment to downplay the importance of identity. His contention is that it’s impossible in this scenario to pinpoint a locus of personal identity, either in the body or the mind. His conclusion, as I remember it, is that identity is not what actually matters anyway; it’s continuity of relations and connections. The annihilation of v1.0 is less tragic because v2.0 carries forward the same relations and connections as v1.0, whether or not the identity remains the same. Likewise, whatever relations and connections we manage to form in our (non-fictional) lives are, in effect, carried forward by others in ways that transcend identity (and therefore death). That web of connections means that we live through others and that others live through us.

I’m sure I’ve mangled it somewhat, but I think that was the gist of it.

Interesting Q. Thanks for bringing it to Fluther.

Interesting point, Harp. By looks alone I might not be convinced, but if there were a substantial amount of testimonials from people who went through the process I might be able to gain a better insight. And of course I would want to see the positive and negative (the people who felt the same after as before versus the people who think they got f—ked up).

This is an old idea in science fiction, so I’m guessing Parfit is a science fiction reader. In any case, the mechanism is not important, especially since it’s not ever going to be possible.

The issue of identity is interesting, although I wonder if it’s really a philosophical issue, as opposed to a psychological or neuroscientific notion.

Here’s another modification. Suppose after you passed through the destruction and reconstruction sequence, you had no memory of having gone through. Or you did have a memory, but experienced no discontinuity or ill effected from passing through. From your perspective, it was the same as going through a door.

Am “I” separate from my body? I think not. Memories are stored all over the body, not just in the brain, and the physical configuration of all that makes a person up is crucial. My hypothesis is that without a body, there is no person. No identity.

I think that if that body is destroyed, the person is dead. I don’t care if it is recopied perfectly from the blueprint of the original, the clone is not the same person. It is made of different stuff, and identity, I believe, is indistinguishable from the stuff that makes the person.

Once I’m gone, I’m gone. If someone were to make a perfect copy of me, it wouldn’t be me. Who knows what the new creature would be thinking, or it could even think at all? Who knows what it’s memories would be? Even if it’s memories and thoughts were the same as mine, when I was destroyed, it wouldn’t be me.

Yes, we change from moment to moment, and our bodies change and our brains change. That change from instant to instant is very different from the total destruction and reconstruction of a copy of me. That process would, I believe, have such a profound effect on the copy, that even other people who knew me from before would know it wasn’t me.

I guess that I think that identity requires continuity. Continuity of thought, and continuity of corporeality.

I don’t know about the cases of amnesia and coma or other personality discontinuities. Something remains of mind and body in either case. An amnesiac is troubling, due to the loss of so much personality. The person can be very different, and in this case, if the interior person felt different, he or she might well be different.

Of course, I went through something like this recently. I have had my brain chemically altered in a way that I did not recognize my self when I was not being treated. When I fall into that other state of being, I am quite different. My sense is that I have a different identity. Both have many commonalities, but their outlook on the world is very different.

This is very troubling to me, because I don’t know which me is me. Harp says both are me. Sometimes I go along with that. Sometimes I am mystified. Sometimes, like now, I am certain we are not the same person.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it! ;-)

Teleportation is theoretically possible at the quantum level. At that level of detail, you wouldn’t have to worry about the copy being exact. In fact, it would be many, many orders of magnitude greater than would be necessary to reproduce your consciousness and your “self” (which is a social construct anyway). It would certainly be accurate enough to fool you into believing that you were yourself.

I think an even more interesting thought experiment would be what would happen if you didn’t destroy the first copy and ended up with a duplicate yourself. According to quantum theory, every time you make a decision, you create a new timeline branching infinitely every time you make a decision. So there are already multiple versions of you in parallel universes. Having two copies of yourself in the same time line wouldn’t be impossible so far as I know.

Chaos theory would predict that the two selves would quickly diverge from one another, creating unique individuals in their own right. If twins share a heightened sensitivity to the other’s thinking due to shared genes, imagine what nearly complete duplication would be like.

“Quantum teleportation, or entanglement-assisted teleportation, is a technique used to transfer information on a quantum level, usually from one particle (or series of particles) to another particle (or series of particles) in another location via quantum entanglement. It does not transport energy or matter, nor does it allow communication of information at superluminal (faster than light) speed. Its distinguishing feature is that it can transmit the information present in a quantum superposition, useful for quantum communication and computation.”

“The two parties are Alice (A) and Bob (B), and a qubit is, in general, a superposition of quantum state labeled |0> and |1. Equivalently, a qubit is a unit vector in two-dimensional Hilbert space.”

“Suppose Alice has a qubit in some arbitrary quantum state . Assume that this quantum state is not known to Alice and she would like to send this state to Bob. Ostensibly, Alice has the following options:”

“She can attempt to physically transport the qubit to Bob.”
“She can broadcast this (quantum) information, and Bob can obtain the information via some suitable receiver.”
“She can perhaps measure the unknown qubit in her possession. The results of this measurement would be communicated to Bob, who then prepares a qubit in his possession accordingly, to obtain the desired state. (This hypothetical process is called classical teleportation.)”
“Option 1 is highly undesirable because quantum states are fragile and any perturbation en route would corrupt the state.”

“The unavailability of option 2 is the statement of the no-broadcast theorem.”

“Similarly, it has also been shown formally that classical teleportation, aka. option 3, is impossible; this is called the no teleportation theorem. This is another way to say that quantum information cannot be measured reliably.”

“Thus, Alice seems to face an impossible problem. A solution was discovered by Bennet et al. The parts of a maximally entangled two-qubit state are distributed to Alice and Bob. The protocol then involves Alice and Bob interacting locally with the qubit(s) in their possession and Alice sending two classical bits to Bob. In the end, the qubit in Bob’s possession will be in the desired state.” citation

This question made me think about a short story by Stephen King called The Jaunt. A great and terrifying look at what teleportation might be like for the teleported.

You wouldn’t be you if you came out as Seth Brundelfly, or, in your case, Harpfly.

@daloon
I’m surprised that no one else raised this question of continuity, which is what jumps out immediately to me. Whatever identity is, it seems inextricable from continuity.

@harp, I thought of another time when time appears discontinuous: sleep. So mentally, you’ve got gaps, where we could all be being destroyed and reconstructed (except those of us who don’t sleep). Physically, however, there is and can be no continuity, no matter how perfect you say the copy is. Electrons will most certainly be in different positions in the copy, and who knows what chaotic effect that will end up having. Probably enough so it would be clear to anyone who knew you that the copy was not the same person.

@harp
“Whatever identity is, it seems inextricable from continuity.”
@dallon
“Electrons will most certainly be in different positions in the copy”

Not if the teleportation is accomplished using quantum entanglement. Every particle in the original and the copy coexist in quantum superposition, and are literally linked—i.e., “entangled”—so that what happens to the original also happens to the copy, right up to the point they part.

The chances of going into a teleporter one person and coming out another is no greater than any other decision you might make. If you decided to turn left at a stop sign instead of right, do you become a different person? In a sense you do, but not practically speaking. Turning left activates a timeline in which all possible “left you” parallel universes are called into being, while all possible “right you” parallel universes collapse. The universe you inhabit in any given moment is something like a moving average of all the universes that came immediately before.

Theoretically (as I understand it), all possible “yous” exist in the multiverse—but the universe you happen to experience in consciousness at any given moment is determined the long history of interaction between “you” and your environment. In this 99.99% of what happens at Time 1 is determined by Time 0. So absent some outside random shock, the time series exhibits what statisticians call “autocorrelation,” where each moment “before” determines the vast bulk of what comes next.

As you note, a gap in your subjective waking memory does not mean that there is a gap in the physical processes that define “you.” Your body is still there dreaming and carrying “you” forward from moment to moment. So, you are in no more danger of “jumping” identities in teleportation than you are falling asleep in the same bed with someone else and waking up as “them.” But here’s the kicker: even if you did, there is no reason to suppose that your consciousness would take all its memories with it—after all those memories belong to a specific body. You would have all the memories of your new body and no memory of having been anyone else, so you would have no reason to experience a discontinuity.

But here’s the real mind-blower: maybe there is only one basic consciousness in the multiverse, which occupies all possible timelines and all possible points of view. Maybe the distinction between “me” and “you” is an illusion created by our timelines and the limitations imposed on our respective points of view.

Not going all Buddhist on us, are you Monty?

@monty, I don’t really find the multiverse idea very compelling. Time is infinitely divisible, and in order to have instants of replication for various turns in events. This means that each infinitesimal time unit, you would spawn an infinite number of new universes. In two infinitesimal instants, you’d double the infinity of universes.

But time doesn’t come in discrete units. It’s continuous. Someone would have to explain to me where you’d get a moment of divergence before I could accept the multiverse theroy.

In any case, “I” only experience, or believe I only experience one course of situations in what I call my “life.” Even in a multiverse, the I that is me, right now, only experiences the universe as a continuous, singular event (assuming we think of alternate states of consciousness, such as in sleep, as part of the continuity). In other words, it appears to be one universe, and that’s all I or anyone can experience or ever will experience.

So it makes sense to treat experience as singular, even in a multiverse. Theoretical spawnings of new universes are irrelevant to me, or anyone.

”But here’s the kicker: even if you did, there is no reason to suppose that your consciousness would take all its memories with it—after all those memories belong to a specific body.”

Wow. Isn’t that what I said? Isn’t that where I went with my impossible reproduction argument. I’m suggesting that perfect duplication is impossible, and as a result, odd and unexpected things would happen in the copy, who would not be me.

Anyway, Monty, I would be utterly delighted to find there is one consciousness in the universe, and there is no separation of any kind. The universe is singular, and so is consciousness in this universe. The perception of separation is an illusion. Cool.

I don’t experience it that way, although I’ve had moments that seemed like that. It’s not a very compelling idea to me. Sort of like a fairy tale about god without calling it god.

I think the take-home lesson is that identity depends on continuity in both the corpus and the psyche.

@daloon,
“I don’t really find the multiverse idea very compelling.”

There are some physicists who still agree with you but they are declining in number. According to an article in Scientific American, the idea of parallel universes is a pretty safe bet, since it is predicted by the laws of probability itself. For a really good book on this and (mostly) other matters, I recommend David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes and Its Implications.

“Time is infinitely divisible…”

I don’t believe it is, at the quantum level, waves become chunks, and chunks become waves—either way, the quantum is the smallest discrete unit of anything. The Plank Constant is the lower bound limit on the divisibility of anything. I’m not sure exactly how this works with time, but if time is a fourth dimension moving away from the other three, then there are plenty of chances for time to manifest itself in discrete quantum leaps. Take electron spin, for example. Electrons don’t orbit an atom’s nucleus smoothly like planets orbiting the sun, they jump from place to place, much like they would if you observed an orbital system under a strobe light. That’s why an electron shell is expressed as a probability density function, where there is only a probability that the electron is in any given place at any given time.

“each infinitesimal time unit. . . would spawn an infinite number of new universes. In two infinitesimal instants, you’d double the infinity of universes.”

I’m not so sure. If you didn’t have discrete instants, there wouldn’t be any forward movement in time. You would be stuck in a single point in time, for the same reason that Achilles can never overtake the tortoise in Zeno’s paradox.

Think of time as a stylus on a phonograph record. The temporal qualities of the music only appear as the vinyl sails past. The stylus does not have to dig deeply into the undulations of the vinyl, it need only skip over the peaks to get the frequency of the underlying waves. So, what appears to be an analog process at the macro level is actually digitized at the Planck level, if not before.

Another reason why everything has to be discrete is that the matrix view of quantum mechanics more or less depends on there being discrete units. Also, the fractal structure of the cosmos is created by the interplay of whole numbers—which you can’t have unless you have discrete integers.

“Isn’t that what I said?”
Yes, it is. My eyes kinda glazed over a bit on your earlier post. Sorry.

“I’m suggesting that perfect duplication is impossible, and as a result, odd and unexpected things would happen in the copy, who would not be me.”

What I am suggesting is that odd unexpected things happen to you all the time, and you still have no trouble recognizing your self as you (perhaps you’re not the best example, but I think you would agree in the long run). The idea that even a few billion misplaced photons at the 10^-42 level would be enough to disqualify you as being you literally does not carry enough weight, compared to the inertia of the incomparably greater mass known as “you.”

Moreover, there is no reason to assume that these errors are going to be correlated. If they are randomly generated, they may all simply cancel one another out at the macro level. There is already a great deal of noise in your system.

“I don’t experience [the universe as a singular consciousness], although I’ve had moments that seemed like that.”

Why would you expect the ultimate nature of things to be the way you experience them with your unaided senses? I certainly wouldn’t reject it out of hand simply because it opens the door to the possibility of a god-like intelligence (which, in my view, would bear no resemblance to theistic conceptions of God).

“I think the take-home lesson is that identity depends on continuity in both the corpus and the psyche.”

The continuity of the psyche seems to be the least problematic of all, since it is the most “macro” and loosely-coupled (noise filled) constructs of all the systems we have discussed. In my view, what we call the “psyche” is a kind of mathematical space—a subset of biological fitness space—within which we work out the competing claims of our culture and our individual biology. We tend to think of our psyche’s as individual and unique to ourselves, but our “selves” are actually cultural artifacts… but that’s another way long discussion.

@Harp
“Not going all Buddhist on us, are you Monty?”

No, I enjoy this life too much to worry about the next. I’m not sure that we can escape from the matrix, so I do what I can to make it more livable.

@ Monty: let’s say that the quantum is the discrete unit of time, and that the experience of all things in the universe jolts forward one quantum at a time. Or is it one time at a quantum? Anyway….

On the other side you have the unit of choice that can be a splitting point for a new universe based on that choice. We humans, being anthropocentrice, tend to think of that unit as being a human being. That’s clearly absurd.

What are our other choices? Cells in a body? Atoms in anything? Electrons? Quarks? After all, at each quanta, each quark in the universe has options; sometimes more than one option; sometimes perhapes even infinite options.

So we may have a finite number of quanta per other unit of time (say seconds), and perhaps there are a finite number of quarks in the universe (if they are the smallest units of matter), but I don’t see how you can limit the number of options for each quark per quanta.

Even if quanta and quarks are finite in number, it still seems to me that they are effectively infinite. I don’t see how you could say that new universes split off at any other but the smallest units of time, unless, you propose the existence of a superpower that can essentially ignore the rest of the laws that apparantly govern the behavior or matter.

In any case, it’s the same problem. An infinity of new multiverses appear each quanta. Or, if you don’t go there, the number of new universes that splits off each quanta is equal to the number of the smallest units of matter in the universe.

That is so many that, given the impact of chaos, I would that think that if it were possible to step from one universe to another, the chances that it would be recognizable to you are practically nil. You’d probably die instantly as a result of not understanding the conditions in that alternate universe. Indeed, if you could step to another universe, it would, I guess, create an explosion so large that a new universe (as opposed to an alternate universe) would be created.

Anyway, I suppose it could be possible, but I find the number of infinities involved to be incomprehensible. Indeed, I suspect they’d be meaningless. What is meaningful is what we started with: identity, and the continuity necessary to perceive one’s own identity. It is what it is, no matter which of the infinite number of paths through “life” it could take. We only perceive one, because we are only in one. Our identity, or consciousness does not maintain communication with any other version of us in the multiverse after any given split.

It seems that you are proposing another idea in which our course through life is based on a kind of probability function determined based on all possible actions at any given quanta. There is, somehow, a central “you” or real you that somehow collapses all these options into an actual choice made, that is a probabilistic choice. Even though such a model would indeed be highly multicollinear, there is still room for major differences to occur in some improbably small number of cases, that would not be predicted by actions within one standard deviation of the mean. And who knows how large the variance might be? Who could even figure out a scale on which to measure actions so that we could determine the magnitude of the variance?

Now look what you’ve done, Monty!

Anyway, the more I think about it, the more ridiculous the idea of a multiverse seems. The physicists or mathematicians might be missing something hidden in their equations. Or we may be interpreting the equations in a misleading way. Or I might be missing something important here. But in my opinion, that dog don’t hunt! alteratively, that duck don’t quack ;-)

@dallon,

“I find the number of infinities involved to be incomprehensible.”

I’m afraid that whether you have one infinity or an infinite number of infinities, its all the same. Please try reading the Scientific American article cited above and see if it clarifies anything. Not only are parallel universes likely but there are four different ways they can come into being. Its not as if there is any lack of space-time in which these universes can occur.

“I would that think that if it were possible to step from one universe to another, the chances that it would be recognizable to you are practically nil.”

One way to think of the quantum level is as a matrix of all possible universes, differing in only one aspect, with each tick, tick, tick of the quantum clock, you step into a new universe. Any universe you would step into is 99.999999% (for 41 decimal places) the same as the universe you departed from. So your chances of recognizing the next tick, and the tick after that, are extraordinarily high.

My head hurts. :(

Ditto.

@Monty-

A few question stemming from your “mind-blower” idea…

Does whether or not there is a single consciousness that we all occupy affect the deterministic aspects of the multi-universe theory? This idea implies, I think, that there is a possibility for something outside of this consciousness. If there is, then do you think this consciousness’ interactions with that outside of it is determined by other “natural” laws (and if it’s not determined, does free will exist somewhere inside this multiverse to kind of direct this consciousness)?

Lastly, does it matter?

<<< Head has exploded.

I read the Scientific American article, which helped me little. There is little discussion of the divergence points, except for the Level III multiverse, which diverges once, at the initial quanta of the universe.

I suppose that since it diverges into an infinite number of alternate universes, it hardly matters how often the universe diverges subsequent to that. It won’t diverge into a universe that doesn’t already exist.

Thus with my discrete unit of time objection dealt with, I am not particularly opposed to a multiverse explanation of the universe. I suppose this infinity of universes includes universes where actions in one universe bleed through, or affect or cause actions in another universe. In such a universe where things like this happened often, it would appear as if changes were happening by magic.

I wonder about the implications of this. If every possible thing has happened in the past and every possible thing will happen in the future, then there is a universe where a large purple cartoon dinosaur has complete and ultimate power in that universe. There’s also a universe with a Christian God (assuming these things are possible).

This also makes it possible that there are universes with destructive teleportation, where identity is continuous, as well as universes with destructive teleportation where identity is non-transferable, even if the copy is perfectly like the original, except it is in a different place.

Who knows? Maybe the teleportation machine just slips us through to one of the multiverses where you are on earth one moment, and halfway across the galaxy, the next. Everything in the new universe is the same as in the old, except for the position of you.

Indeed, if everything that is possible at all times or states of the universe exists in at least one other universe, then there are universeses where teleportation exists, and magic exists, and God exists. There are universes in which we merely need to wish something, and it will be so. I.e., we are the gods.

If I had to make a guess, I’d say that wishing things true is possible to a small degree in this universe.

So, if all possible things occur somewhere in time and space, then each person navigates their own particular history, and one can argue both for free will, and for determinism. Although what that determinism means, I don’t know. Does it mean anything to say that I must do every possible thing, although the me’s that do these things all exist in separate universes and have no knowledge of each other (except where they do).

In any individual timeline, choices can matter. In the multiverse, choice doesn’t really matter, because everything will happen. I am amused to be in a universe where choice does matter.

@augustian: I’m there with you.

Oh come on people. It’s only a thought experiment. Otherwise known as mental masturbation. We only do it because we ain’t gettin’ laid! ;-)

You lost me at “multiverse.” Sorry.

@daloon-
We aren’t?
This feels pretty sexy to me.

@daloon: I dunno about you, but I definitely am.

on saturday…

@shandling21,

“Does whether or not there is a single consciousness that we all occupy affect the deterministic aspects of the multi-universe theory?”

No, I don’t think so. Think of the cosmos as a matrix of all possible universes, within which every possibility is accounted for, and everything—past, present and future—exists in an ever-present “now.” This cosmos, as seen from the outside, appears fully determined—and it is. But, once you assume a point of view, you assume a condition of incomplete. Only the past, for you, is fully determined. The future is unknown to you, and so appears undetermined and probabilistic, and that is how you are able to experience free will in a fully determined cosmos. I explain this much more thoroughly here. See post #110.

@daloon,

“If every possible thing has happened in the past and every possible thing will happen in the future, then there is a universe where a large purple cartoon dinosaur has complete and ultimate power in that universe. There’s also a universe with a Christian God (assuming these things are possible).”

Probably yes. If such a universe doesn’t occur naturally, some advanced race could build a quantum computer which simulates realities that depart from the natural laws that govern our reality. Theoretically, quantum computers are so powerful that you could simulate an entire universe down to the last photon and quark on a device that would fit on a tabletop (because the computations are distributed across multiple universes).

I don’t think it would be too hard to program a zone within it where you could have a being suspend natural laws through an act of will. And you could, no doubt, inhabit such a virtual reality, complete with angels and devils, and the whole nine yards. Why you would want to construct a reality whose natural laws were constantly being interfered with by a petulant personality bent on playing favorites among the universe’s inhabitants is beyond me, but I don’t see why it couldn’t be done.

As for the moral and theological implications of the multiverse, I have discussed those at length elsewhere.

You are correct, daloon, you could simulate a reality in which you are teleported to anywhere you could imagine. It would make space travel unnecessary. And you could achieve a kind of time travel. Indeed, quantum computing would tend to erase the distinction between virtual reality and reality, since as David Deutsch discusses, our own holographic reality is ultimately a simulacrum generated by our cellular biology. Once we are able to transfer our into such a device, we may be able to become anyone we like, anywhere or any time we like.

@all
in every thread
on Fluther
and everywhere…

It’s SHADLING! One n, in the “ing”! Get it right!
Sorry, Monty, nothing personal. Everyone calls me shandling. Is my SN that hard to read?

@shadling and tits: that’s my point, exactly. If you have all the sex you want, you probably wouldn’t spend much time thinking about this stuff. I know I wouldn’t. But I’m not getting much action, so I think about this crap, because it enfolds my mind, and sucks it in like some quantum kline bottle, and then I forget—for a moment—about my inadequacies in other areas of life.

My advice: don’t get old. There must be a damn universe where that is possible. Oh, and eternal life, too. Maybe if I had enough time, I might some day be happy enough to be dumb.

How’s that for a mix of cynicism and bloviation?

@daloon: i feel your pain in not getting any… And happy doesn’t necessarily have to be dumb…. but the sex definitely helps.