Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Are you a pile of stuff?

The following is something I developed during the course of a series of conversations I've had over the last six years on the nature of human consciousness. Apparently, some obscure philosopher came up with something similar a while ago, and anybody who has spent far too much time thinking about Star Trek might have had a similar idea.

Imagine that I were to offer you a great reward - let's say $1 Billion, substitute whatever you desire the most - in exchange for your participation in the following procedure.

You will be put to sleep on an operating table and your body will be instantly cooled to 0K - absolute zero - and in a state of complete stasis. It will experience absolutely no changes, and is frozen in space down to the atomic level. Over the table upon which you lie, a piano of an astronomical weight is suspended from the ceiling.

Using your body as a template, a copy will be produced from pure elements on a similar table on the other side of the room. The copy is also in a similar state of stasis, and, when completed, is absolutely identical in every way to the original, down to the relative positions of the atoms.

Now both bodies are instantly pulled out of stasis, and woken up, but at the precise moment that they wake up, a lever is pulled, the piano falls, and the original body is crushed. This is done with such precision that the copy gains full consciousness at the exact moment that the piano completely obliterates the original.

The copy will awaken with all of the behavioural traits of the original - an observer who knows you would find him or her to be completely indistinguishable from you, and the copy can now claim the $1 Billion reward for participating in the experiment.

Assuming that everything transpires exactly as described above, and assuming that you are interested in your own survival, would you agree to participate?

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5 comments:

Unknown said...

If I understand your question correctly I think that there is quite a debate going on between philosophers and scientists on this topic. The issue is known as the hard problem as coined by the philosopher David Chambers http://consc.net/papers/facing.html
From my reading on the subject I am inclined to think the Collin McGinn comes closest to expressing my current my opinion.
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/
philo/courses/consciousness97/
papers/ConsciousnessSpace.html
There are some questions that our brains are just not constituted to come to grips with.
Cicero is quoted as saying
"Nature herself has imprinted on the minds of all the idea of God."
I think he is referring to this very question in that humans experience life in the first person as part of a material universe and are therefore easily convinced that just as there appears to be more to themselves than meets the eye there must also be something more to the universe.
I don't believe that the ego doug newton will survive the death of my body but I am agnostic enough to think that there may be more to me than my ego and that God would operate in the realm of what would appear me as the paradoxical.
To answer your specific question I think I would try the experiment.
If I regained consciousness as the copy and notice no difference then that will go a long way to answering this question for me. i.e. whatever it is to be doug newton is a function of my physical constitution. If I do not regain consciousness then I will have gone on to whatever awaits us after death a few years earlier than I will anyway.
A more interesting twist to the experiment would be to keep both the original and the copy.

doug newton

The Proud Islamist said...

Actually, examination of the alternative scenario, where the piano doesn't fall, supports the conclusion that you shouldn't participate.

Let's first imagine that no copy was made, and the piano didn't fall. What would happen? Undoubtedly, you would wake up exactly where you were before.

Now let's say that the copy is made, and no piano falls. What would happen? Well, there's no reason for you to wake up across the room - the mere existence of the copy is irrelevant to the continuation of your consciousness in your body. There is no mechanism by which you would somehow be transported across the room and begin experiencing the world from there, when physically you didn't go anywhere. Consequently, you would wake up where you were before.

Now if the copy is made AND the piano falls, why should things be any different? Again, there is no mechanism by which you would be transported across the room, just because that's where a copy of you happens to be waiting.

The more reasonable assumption is that you will die when the piano hits, and someone else, indistinguishable from you, will be walking around living your life. You will not benefit from the reward, as you are no longer living in this world.

As far as the rest of the world is concerned, you are still alive, in the shape of the copy, because by every material measure, he is you.

You are, however, more than just a pile of stuff.

doug newton said...

You are assuming that there is more to you than meets the eye. That consciousness and the apparent uniqueness of your first person experience won't be explained by science as the functioning of your material being.
You wrote,
"There is no mechanism by which you would somehow be transported across the room and begin experiencing the world from there, when physically you didn't go anywhere."
You described the mechanism in your original post.
It is entirely possible that we are no more than a pile of stuff. If this is true then in the instance when the piano did fall I would wake up and wonder momentarily about the mess on the other side of the room. In the instance where the piano doesn't fall two of me would wake up. We would diverge from that instant starting with the realization of which of the two us was the original from our relative positions on awakening.
Some people I know would object to the existence of two of me but heh.

doug newton

The Proud Islamist said...

Well, when you say that two of you would wake up, you are using the word "me" in a different sense that that which I am talking about. It is true that, from the perspective of an observer, two of you would wake up, given that where there was originally one person with all of your characteristics, there are now two.

The other sense of the word relates to your stream of consciousness and experience. Of this, there can only be one. You can't simultaneously experience the world from two different perspectives, when there are two completely separate bodies. So you must wake up in one place - you cannot wake up in two, so again, knowing that you would have woken up where you went to sleep had no experiment been carried out, the most logically consistent conclusion is that the same thing would happen regardless of whether or not the copy existed, and that crushing the body under the piano killed "you," in the second sense of the word.

Emily Gusba said...

Okay. First off, I'm a dualist - I can't reconcile my "me" being simply neurons and electrical impulses.

TPI - It seems to me, though, that there is nothing necessary about your argument that "you" can't be in two places at once. We're talking about some kind of spirit/ essence/ soul (that is able to interact with the physical body, which is a whole other sphere of argument in the Mind/Body philosophical discourse) - but why can't "you" (or "I") experience life from two places (read: bodies) if, in fact, my "me" comes in spirit form?

Your argument works in your favour, but not in the way you intended it to (as I read it, anyways). Your argument works because if the "me" is purely physical, then necessarily if you copy it, there is something separate-but-equal in the copy. As soon as the copy wakes up, its subjective experience is different from the original's - meaning that even if the copy was the same as the original for a split second, they diverge fairly quickly, ultimately producing two different individuals (one of whom gets dead PDQ, for the purposes of your thought experiment), since they're both alive at the same time. The new "me" on the other table might be the-same-but-equal-to the one who gets squished by the piano, but it is different nonetheless. If my "me" comes from the physical, reproducing the physical makes the copy different. necessarily. Oui?

So let's talk about the spirit in your argument. As it stands, we get one body, and our spirit interacts with it to make it walk, talk, and ride rollercoasters. Is that a physical constraint, or one of the "me"? I'd be willing to bet it is a physical one - a reality of the way our brains work, and our physical experience of the world because of our bodily reality - not a spiritual one. It is actually totally plausible that the spirit is capable of experiencing the physical reality of two interfaces, right? So you MIGHT wake up, and you MIGHT be the same person in two bodies if the "me" is the spirit - but definitely not if the "me" is the body.
Non?