This thread was a fantastic thread. https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/immortality-is-discovered-and-is-then-promptly-ignored.282800/ But it got me thinking and I had to go watch one of my favourite movies The 5th Element. That machine they used to remake Leeloo seems like a miracle machine, in that it not only rebuilt her body from a few cells inside the glove they found in the ship wreckage, but not only that but it recreated her mind, personality, and soul for want of a better word. I'm just thinking such a machine would render death meaningless as you could just drop in a loved ones cells and "pop" you get a new copy of your loved ones completely intact. Just thinking of the implications of such a device. They don't touch on it in that movie but it just occurs to me that the implications are huge. Death no longer matters, and to think of that that is rather huge.
Um, yeah, see every debate about the ethics of using transporters on this site ever. In short, a copy is not the original.
Except that the original is not the original after some time has elapsed. We're patterns that change over time and we fool ourselves that our pattern is anything more than just that. We have memories of previous states but those memories are imperfect and mutable.
Yep... it comes down to the Illusion of the Eternal Self. There's actually no such thing, you're a slightly different person from one moment to the next. Both in the metaphysical sense of personality and in the very LITERAL sense that every cell in your body has been replaced at least once since you were a child and there isn't a single structure in your body that is actually as old as "you" claim to be. The fear comes from the fact that the discontinuity of consciousness that could occur if one version of yourself were suddenly destroyed and immediately replaced by a new one without the gradual transition in between. The fact is, this continuity is also an illusion; because you remember being awake yesterday, you assume that your memories of yesterday are part of your stream of consciousness. This could be entirely false: the "you" that is sitting here reading this message has only actually existed for about four hours, and the person whose memories you possess could have been killed in his sleep, leaving no trace of his passing. You think you're him, but maybe you're not, maybe you're just a flash-grown clone that was dropped into bed in the same clothes and last night's version of you is right now having his organs harvested by the Overlords? And maybe the "you" who is currently reading this will wake up in a strange white room with walls covered with blood and fragments of hair and teeth, and you'll remember today, and you'll realize that your whole life was actually a lie and that the only reason you exist is so that you could be horribly and painfully slaughtered for your renal tissues. Or... maybe you'll just wake up like you normally do... ... blissfully unaware.
You know, that's exactly the kind of thing a figment of my imagination would make up to try to deceive me. You're not fooling anyone, Crazy Eddie. Or should I say, me.
I forget the name... it's part of the trailer for an anime series in which the protagonist has his right hand eaten and replaced by a shapeshifting alien parasite.
Yeah but in the 5th Element it wasn't a copy of Leeloo but she was totally rebuilt. So if you shoved dead people in there or parts they would be rebuilt, unless she herself was a special case due to her very complex DNA which had extra information?
Totally rebuilt from a few cells to a full human being. Might as well be a copy. Same functional difference.