2G54:Scientific predictions regarding man-machine interfaces

Posted: Wed Aug 03, 2005 12:41 pm Post subject:

I'm not too surprised. Saw the trailer... Felt like the whole movie was in there.
Why go and pay to watch a two hours movie when it can be compressed losslessly into a two minutes video clip?

Posted: Wed Aug 03, 2005 4:00 pm Post subject:

Lossy media!

I'm sucha nerd. Sad

_________________
Yuka offers you tea and biscuits teatime

Posted: Wed Aug 03, 2005 10:44 pm Post subject:

Posted: Thu Aug 18, 2005 2:01 am Post subject:

As far as teleportation, I don't understand why you wouldn't consider the person at the destination the same as the person at the start point. Like you basically conveyed, the 'you' last year most likely is composed of little to none of the same particles that comprises you now, but you still consider yourself (pretty much) the same, no? I really don't see that much of a difference whether this 'swapout' of constituent particles slowly happens over years or all at once. Also just because the materials that comprise the person at the start point aren't the exact same ones at the destination has little significance, since that proton in that atom in that molecule that is a part of his liver is for all intensive purposes (chemically, structurally, what have you) the same as that proton at the destination. All the interactions between molecules, the firing of synapses, the electrochemical signals, etc. are the same. I guess if you are into the supernatural or something, and believe in souls and whatnot, yeah they'd be different, but ignoring that unsubstantiated aspect of the discussion, I'd say they're the same.

On a slight tangent, I guess by the time you're an adult, all/most of the atoms and comprise you comes from the food you eat. So I could say that fattie over there is made of pork, and be telling the truth.
_________________
"When a man steals your wife there is no better revenge than to let him keep her."
Sacha Guitry
"Women''s intuition is the result of millions of years of not thinking."
Rupert Hughes

Posted: Fri Aug 19, 2005 9:21 pm Post subject:

Discontinuity, that's the big difference, IMO.
Continuity means the change we undergo when "moving" from point A to point B (be it in time or space coordinates) are smaller as A and B are closer, up to a point that with A and B close enough, you can see no difference.
And continuity is what allow us to retain a sense of self, even though our bodies slowly change with time. It's also what allows an outside observer to say : yep, I'm positive this is still the same person, and not just another person that looks more or less the same.
However, the so-called "teleportation" method that consist in making a copy of the data that define a person, destroying the original, and creating a copy of the original with the data previously obtained, introduces a huge discontinuity in the process. A discontinuity called death.
The same process, only slightly altered, by not destroying the original, would result in having two persons that look the same and remember the same things. If an outside observer was to witness the event, which one should he consider to be the "real one"? If you want to pick up only one of the two, it will be logically be the one who remained at the same place during the whole process (space/time continuity, conservation of matter and energy... it's objective data), not the one that was synthetized out of some random molecules floating elsewhere.
So now let's says we destroy the original. Will is identity magically transfer to the closest looking individual, that is the copy? To me, makes about as much sense as saying, when a twin dies, that "no, no, he is not dead, look at here, he's still alive!", while pointing at the surviving twin.
Of course no sensible person will say that, if they know the dead guy had a twin brother, if they saw the two twins along which each other before, for instance. The same way that if you see both the copy and the original in the same room, you know they can't be exactly the same person, since they exist at two different places. And the person closest to the original is the one that didn't move, while the other erupted out of nowhere.
The trick in that false "teleportation" process, is to establish a new, fake sense of continuity by having the original disappear at the same time the copy appears elsewhere. It really is like a conjurer trick (like when they move their hand in a way that makes you believe the object they had in their left hand a second before, is the same than the one that is now in their right hand, while they actually picked a new object out of their sleeve, and hid the first object somewhere else, but you couldn't see it coz it was too fast and partly hidden by their arms). If you were to shift (even slightly) the time at which the destroy or create event occurs, the illusion wouldn't work quite as well. Especially if the destruction is a bit late.

However, teleportation that uses "worm-holes" (like in Star Gate?) are somewhat different, I think, because they seem maintain a continuity of some sort, by making up additional dimensions, and saying our 3D space is bent in such a way in the n-dimensional space, that two points that look far away to us, are actually very close if you use a short cut trough the n-th dimension (like, if you take a string = 1D space, and bend it to have two points of the string - which are far away if you follow that string - touch each other in our 3D space)