Day 95

Last class was today! That's it for undergraduate classes, though 5 essays have yet to be written. All in good time, it shall be over.

*Warning* Spoiler alert ahead for the movie "The Prestige."

This evening's philosophical topic will be... transporting devices! There are many kinds, and I will muse over a particular kind, to be found in the aforementioned movie, as well as an old episode of Star Trek TNG, in which Riker gets copied during a transport through a plasma cloud and... well, suffice to say, I'm a huge nerd.

Bacially the "Prestige" transporter works like this: in a single instant, it copies your entire body molecule-for-molecule, such that one copy remains in the same spot and a second copy appears some distance away, about 20 yards.

So if I enter the machine: after the copy, there will be two "I's" both of whom think they're the 'original'. The one who is in the same spot will think he's not been moved, and the one who appears in the new spot will think he has been moved.

Persumably, one of them is the 'original,' while the other is new. Does the machine make a copy, and transport the original over to the new spot? Or, does it make a copy, transport the copy, and leave the original where it started? Is the difference relevent?

It seems to be. In the movie, the character only wants one person to live each time he uses the machine. So he's set it up that when it's done its thing, whoever is left in the original spot drops through a trap door in the floor into a tank of water, to drown moments later. The other person, who appears in the new spot, lives.

The question is this: would you be more or less weary of going into the machine depending on how it functioned? I want to say yes. For example, if the machine only made and transported a copy, dumping the original (me) into the drowning tank, I'd never go in! Because, the person who survives may think he's me, but he's not me! Just, a copy of me with all the same memories up to that moment. I will die.

But if the machine tranported the original, while creating a copy to occupy the original's spot above the trap door, I might not fear death. Because, I get transported, and the copy, who only thinks he's me, gets drowned.

Presumably your intuition is similar.

Now, you must understand the above in order to follow what I'm going to hypothesize, so digest for a moment if necessary.

The intuition is, in a way paradoxical, because no matter how the machine functions, both people think they're the original! Enjoy the following illustrations, courtesy of my marginal ms paint skills:





and the other:


And there you have it. The machines operate very differently, but the interesting part is that, since both people think they're the original, one person is always surprized at the result. In the first case, the survivor thinks it's gone wrong, and that he should have died (despite that it worked the way it was supposed to). And in the second, the person drowning thinks it has gone wrong, when in fact he's just where he is supposed to be.

What I find most fascinating, is that in the first machine case, no matter how many originals die (say it was performed 100 times, each time in which the person entering the machine drowns and the copy is transported), the remaining survivor (copy) would still believe he was the original all along; that he'd simply been transported every time over and over. It would be impossible to believe otherwise.

And this is where the really deep question gets uncovered. We want to say that this person has been deceived, he only thinks he's survived every time, when in fact he's the 100th copy, and every original, including the original orignal, have perished. But hold on, if the fellow has everything that constitutes a continuous life, namely all pre-and co-requisite memories, how could we meaningfully say he's wrong? It doesn't seem that we can, because the "really" breaks down into nothing when faced with the actuality of his stream of consciousness.

Or think of it this way: imagine you were that person. Anyone who claimed you were a 'copy' would sound like an idiot to you, because you remember being transported every single time. "No, you're wrong, the copy was the one who died! Here I am, the original!"

That is a thinker.

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