Conscience Experiment

[Souper]

There are 2 rooms, and they are identical down to the atomic scale. You (yes, the reader of this very thread) suddenly wake up in one of the rooms with no recollection of how you got here. You were also copied, your "clone", identical to the atomic scale, awaking in the exact same way and position as "you".

If i am correct, the two of "you" will behave exactly the same way up until one of the endings. Therefore, you will effectively be 2 people at once.

Ending #1

You look around the empty, padded room, wondering what it is and how you got there, when, all of a sudden, one of the rooms are destroyed. According to the results of Schrodinger's Cat, "you" will always be the one who was not in the destroyed room, and thus, survived.

Ending #2

A door opens up from the rooms. The two of you walk out, notice eatchother, and due to slight variances with the outside world, begin behaving differently. The perfect syncronization is broken, and the two of you are no longer 2 people at once. If you die, it will be YOU.

[arkie87]

There are 2 rooms, and they are identical down to the atomic scale. You (yes, the reader of this very thread) suddenly wake up in one of the rooms with no recollection of how you got here. You were also copied, your "clone", identical to the atomic scale, awaking in the exact same way and position as "you".

If i am correct, the two of "you" will behave exactly the same way up until one of the endings. Therefore, you will effectively be 2 people at once.

Ending #1

You look around the empty, padded room, wondering what it is and how you got there, when, all of a sudden, one of the rooms are destroyed. According to the results of Schrodinger's Cat, "you" will always be the one who was not in the destroyed room, and thus, survived.

Ending #2

A door opens up from the rooms. The two of you walk out, notice eatchother, and due to slight variances with the outside world, begin behaving differently. The perfect syncronization is broken, and the two of you are no longer 2 people at once. If you die, it will be YOU.

Are you suggesting that the only requirement for entanglement is for two systems to be in the exact same state at the same time?

Edited May 18, 2015 by arkie87

[Fel]

*doesn't really want to get into philosophy just right now*

But let me just do this:

Let's accept (for now, to be disputed later) that the bacteria inside a human are not part of said human.

(Fictional Storytime!)

The French just sunk an American Frigate... then carefully replicated said Frigate to the very molecule and placed the "copy" in the same place.

Did the French sink the Frigate? Is the Frigate that was left behind the same Frigate? Can we retaliate against them if they did not sink the Frigate or cause any damage to said Frigate?

I know, you can't really get around the fact that they just killed everyone on board; hence my point of argument; but lets even say that it was uncharacteristically completely empty.

You're saying we are our bodies, which may or may not be true; but it is very lapacian of you

[Jonboy]

Bear in mind that the entire reason Schrödinger created his famous thought experiment was to demonstrate that the whole idea of quantum superposition was ludicrous when applied to macroscopic phenomena.

Beyond that word of caution, I'm really not sure how to respond, because I honestly have no idea what you're talking about.

Edit: thanks K^2, my understanding of quantum mechanics is very rudimentary.

Edited May 18, 2015 by Jonboy

[K^2]

Bear in mind that the entire reason Schrödinger created his famous thought experiment was to demonstrate that the whole idea of quantum superposition was ludicrous when applied to macroscopic phenomena.

Of course, we've actually demonstrated macroscopic quantum states since, so it's a hollow argument.

So yeah, back to the experiment, you can't have copies. The no-cloning theorem forbids it. What you can have is an amplified state. A perfectly entangled pair under perfectly symmetric Hammiltonian. In that case, yes, it'd be silly to argue which is which if one gets destroyed.

Of course, in reality, decoherence will take place almost instantly. It's your "opening the doors" clause. Any interaction whatsoever from the outside will be sufficient to disrupt this synchronization. So the life time of the quantum doubles will be almost infinitely short. And after decoherence, the state collapses to just a pair of classical copies, entirely distinguishable from one another.

[Aanker]

I think, if you're willing to kill people (copies or not) in your experiment, the conscience we need to discuss is not that of the test subject but the experimenting scientist.

[Jovus]

Let's forget about quantum entanglement because it's irrelevant to the argument.

The real problem is that human behaviour is not deterministic. Two people who are atomic copies of one another in precisely congruent situations will by no means be guaranteed to behave identically.

[fairytalefox]

So yeah, back to the experiment, you can't have copies. The no-cloning theorem forbids it.

Does it? I'm not a person who understands this well, but, according to Wikipedia,

We could perform an observation, which irreversibly collapses the system into some eigenstate of an observable, corrupting the information contained in the qubit(s). This is obviously not what we want.

but in this case we don't really care of the quantum state of the source being collapsed. Parts of our bodies interact with each other millions of times every second, we basically spend all our lives in near-to-collapsed state - one more collapse won't do any harm.

[K^2]

Does it?

Yes. Even though you aren't after a measurement, if you were to be able to make an exact Quantum copy, you would be able to make two sets of measurements on the same state, and that's fundamentally forbiden.

Amplification is the Quantum compromise to copying. You can have two states that are identical, but they are also entangled. Measuring one collapses both, so you can still only get a single measurement.

[cicatrix]

Let's forget about quantum entanglement because it's irrelevant to the argument.

The real problem is that human behaviour is not deterministic. Two people who are atomic copies of one another in precisely congruent situations will by no means be guaranteed to behave identically.

^^ this. The key word is 'atomic'. This is not enough if we're speaking about quantum effects here. In different rooms different quantum fluctuations may occur and thus the two copies will behave differently. And you cannot create two exact quantum copies as it's been said already.

[KerikBalm]

You look around the empty, padded room, wondering what it is and how you got there, when, all of a sudden, one of the rooms are destroyed. According to the results of Schrodinger's Cat, "you" will always be the one who was not in the destroyed room, and thus, survived.

Huh?

I don't think this conclusion is supported in any way by Schrodinger's Cat.

I think as soon as the continuity of consciousness is broken, you're dead.

Consider the following:

* You are frozen- all cell metabolism stops, neurons stop firing, your body becomes inert. (Assume you were frozen in such a way to prevent rupture of cell membranes and protein aggregation)

Case 1: All the neuronal connections are mapped out, but your body is destroyed in the process.

A clone is made with has your memories and your personality (much like the clones in the movie 6th day)

Do you wake up in the clone body?

Case 2: Your body is carefuly thawed and brought back to life.

Do you wake up in your own body.

Many sci-fi games and movies would imply that is effectively what happens in case 1 - although its often ambiguous... but from the perspective of others it makes no difference. Often the clone seems to believe it is still the original, and doesn't fear death because it can be resurected as before - particularly prevalent in the movie 6th day.

If not in case 1, then why in case 2?

Because the atoms that make up the clone are different from the original?

The atoms in the original are already different from what they were 10 years ago.

Did the you 10 years ago go to sleep one day and never wake up? is the old you just as dead as the destroyed original in case 1? Even more dead because your personality and memories are surely different?

If yes in case 1, what happens when they make 2 copies? (as in a scene in 6th day where the new clone is activated while the old clone is still dying.... the old clone realizes the new clone is a different consciousness, and when old clone dies... old clone is dead - the new clones existence is not resurection).

As far as I can figure, as soon as there is a break in consciousness, you've died (not biologically, but... philisophically).

If an identical consciousness starts afterwards... that is no matter.

Consciousnesses change over time (as people experience new things, form new memories, age, etc), but there is an unbroken chain.

The personality and memories need not be identical to prevent "death of consciousness".

So why should a newly started consciousness be relevant to the old one, just because the personality and memories are identical?

The physical material hosting the consciousness also changes over time, so it shouldn't matter if the newly started consciousness is hosted by matter that hosted the terminated consciousness or hosted by new matter.

Similar philisophical problems emerge when transfering consciousness to a machine like a computer.

If a human mind could be linked to a computer, processes run in parallel, gradually shifting over to the pure machine hardware as the parallel biological process is shut down, without ever breaking the continuity of consciousness, then I'd say you could make the shift without killing yourself.

But if its just taking date about your consciousness, starting a copy on a computer, and then shutting down the biologically hosted one... the biologically hosted one has died, vanished to never experience anything again.

Luckily, there's enough going on during sleep that I'm confident I will experience another day when I go to sleep, that the continuity is unbroken.

[cicatrix]

I'll just leave it here:

What makes you you?

[Jesrad]

This experiment has been pretty much done, many many times, on simpler creatures. It turns out that the discrepancy between the two copies will accumulate quickly or slowly depending on whether they have a specific gene (and I cannot find the link back ). In any case, the behavior WILL diverge everytime.

[BlueCosmology]

This experiment has been pretty much done, many many times, on simpler creatures. It turns out that the discrepancy between the two copies will accumulate quickly or slowly depending on whether they have a specific gene (and I cannot find the link back ). In any case, the behavior WILL diverge everytime.

There has never, ever, been a macroscopic experiment (e.g. on a creature) that is even close to atomically identical.

[Technical Ben]

The answer is in the question. To understand reality, we have to ask a question, then observe the answer. Such as that the failure is in:

"We have 2 exactly the same people in 2 rooms" makes the fallacy of presuming we have 2 exactly the same people. If we do, then we do and they are. No question or argument or philosophical discussion.

However, the better question is "can we have 2 exactly the same people in 2 locations". I would argue that due to observation we cannot. As we cannot copy perfectly (either practically or theoretically), and we cannot have "the same" of anything separated by time or space due to natural change in those systems effected by those two dimensions.

[Shpaget]

^^ this. The key word is 'atomic'. This is not enough if we're speaking about quantum effects here. In different rooms different quantum fluctuations may occur and thus the two copies will behave differently. And you cannot create two exact quantum copies as it's been said already.

If we are already stretching our imagination to the level where we can create an exact copy of an individual, could we not stretch it a bit further and say that a individual i is copied in a moment t, placed in a place p, with quantum stuff at the state q, etc... ?

Would not then every i in t, p q... behave exactly the same?

[-Velocity-]

There are 2 rooms, and they are identical down to the atomic scale. You (yes, the reader of this very thread) suddenly wake up in one of the rooms with no recollection of how you got here. You were also copied, your "clone", identical to the atomic scale, awaking in the exact same way and position as "you".

If i am correct, the two of "you" will behave exactly the same way up until one of the endings. Therefore, you will effectively be 2 people at once.

Incorrect. The brain is a complex system, and there is certainly some chaos that creeps into it. We are not some precise, 100% deterministic computer. Quantum indeterminacy has an effect on our behavior, and while it is impossible to quantify exactly how much influence, we know that it must affect us on some scale.

So, first of all, you cannot make perfect copies of anything, because that would require copying quantum information, which is impossible (see the "no cloning" theorem). Secondly, even if it WERE possible to create a copy of yourself accurate down to quantum scales, the chaotic nature of the brain would mean that even two exact quantum copies of a brain, subject to the exact same stimulus, would slowly diverge, as quantum indeterminacy is fundamental to the universe, and thus the particles that make up the brain would make different choices as to what states to be in, subtly and slowly changing the behavior of the two brains.

[Camacha]

Quantum indeterminacy has an effect on our behavior

Does it? Is there any evidence for that?

[Technical Ben]

Which leads us to only the theoretical. If we assume the information and experience of a human brain is the same as an OS running on a computer, then we solve the problems (by way of simplifying and assuming the result).

If we are the same as an OS on a computer, we continue to be "us" to the point of divergence. If 2 perfect clones are made (as I can do with my PC), then both are "me", but each individual gets to continue being themselves as much as they need to be as they experience different things (being separated by space).

A single reconstruction, continues to be "me", just as I continue day by day.

It's the question that gives the answer. The exception being, as we don't know the full complexity of the human brain yet, we cannot consider it a given that we can make a perfect copy yet.

[Souper]

Well, let's change it around. Let's make it so that the two copies of people and rooms are exactly the same down to the planck-scale, and there is no outside interference.

The whole point of this thread is to see if an exact duplicate of your destroyed-and-repaired body will be you instead of a clone, and to see if we could bring people back to life that way.

[-Velocity-]

Does it? Is there any evidence for that?

Yes of course, quantum noise is observed everywhere. Our decisions are based on very sensitive electrical potentials set up by chemical reactions. These are quantum phenomenon, if you look closely enough, there is noise in them due to quantum mechanics. Quantum indeterminacy creates noise in ANY system. Our brains are affected by this noise just like everything else, and since our "logic circuits" are rather small, and they are analog, they would be affected rather strongly as compared to more macroscopic systems. One doesn't need direct evidence specific to human brains, just as one doesn't need to fly to Alpha Centauri Bb and drop something to say that gravity makes things fall down on an Alpha Centauri Bb. The assumption that the physical laws hold everywhere in the universe is one of the cornerstones of physics. Our brains exist in the same physical universe and thus must be subject to the same physical laws- that is all the evidence that is required.

The point is, the noise creates deviations in behavior, and even if they are very tiny differences, they must exist. That is enough to make a flaw in Souper's original "thought experiment".

Edited May 18, 2015 by |Velocity|

[theend3r]

As the others said it wouldn't last any relevant timeframe. But let's go even further and say we have two identical universes which we are not part of. This experiment is run in both of them while being recorded on a camera. After the experiment ends we access both of these universes and check the results recorded on those two cameras. Would they be the same?

[K^2]

Two universes question is ill-posed. If they are identical they will evolve exactly the same way. Quantum uncertainty applies only to interactions between a system and sub-system. Not to a closed system. In contrast, if you plan to "open them up" to take a look, it all depends on how well isolated they are to begin with. If you managed perfect isolation, all of the above still applies. If not, then it collapses just as fast as two rooms case. Finally, if you really happen upon two absolutely identical universes, you can, in fact, do all of your experiments twice. However, this experiment is inherently non-reproducible. If you want to create a duplicate universe, all of my earlier comments on no cloning apply. At best, you can create two entangled copies, and there is absolutely no difference between having that and just one copy. Well, for purposes of topic discussed.

[theend3r]

Two universes question is ill-posed. If they are identical they will evolve exactly the same way. Quantum uncertainty applies only to interactions between a system and sub-system. Not to a closed system. In contrast, if you plan to "open them up" to take a look, it all depends on how well isolated they are to begin with. If you managed perfect isolation, all of the above still applies. If not, then it collapses just as fast as two rooms case. Finally, if you really happen upon two absolutely identical universes, you can, in fact, do all of your experiments twice. However, this experiment is inherently non-reproducible. If you want to create a duplicate universe, all of my earlier comments on no cloning apply. At best, you can create two entangled copies, and there is absolutely no difference between having that and just one copy. Well, for purposes of topic discussed.

Thanks. You're always there for the less trivial questions.

[baggers]

Just note that:

- Our universe not allow actually a "reverse the time": You would alway have one "original" and one "clone".

- Physically, it may or may not be any differences. But it's absolutely not the case for human justice, a tribunal, or even a philosoph ^^

- - - Updated - - -

Fun fact: If you to something stupid like, kill your mother -in-law, and just after, perfectly clone yourself and go both for judgement: What could the court do?

Jail the "original" and free the clone? ^^