Comment on Would you want to live forever in an infinite game?
director@lemmy.world 1 day agoBut what if you started as a simulated entity? (If it’s possible to simulate reality as we know it then it’s more likely we exist within a simulation of some sort rather than the “prime” reality.)
thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
It does not matter, any copy is still not you. The exact, let’s say down to the atom (and lets ignore if consciousness is emergent from atoms), copy of yourself can be created. It would be still a copy. It’s like taking the Mona Lisa painting and recreating it to 100% identical atom structure. It’s still a copy. So when you die, you die. You do not exist in the simulation, a new entity living with your identity in a different place.
Also if you had a copy of yourself, how is it aging? Because the atoms and your genetic is programmed to age. Do you change that in the program? If you do so, the copy of yourself is no longer a copy, so it cannot age.
If you want ignore these aspects, then there is another problem. When would the copy of yourself would be made? Just before you die? Then that state is what lives forever? Do you make multiple copies of yourself? Which one is you? Can all exist at the same time?
director@lemmy.world 1 day ago
By that logic, “you” are not the person you were a nanosecond ago - you’ve physically changed over the course of time and all that exists on any possible timeline is merely a copy of the original - no?
thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
Some argue that is true, but I don’t think so. Because aging and changing is part of myself. I am not a copy, it has changed, its part of the DNA to do it. A copy is not the same as the source has changed. To stick with the Mona Lisa painting, it also ages and changes, that is part of physics.
My argument is not about changing, but about copies. The copy is artificially created and in fact nothing prevents the copies and original to exist at the same time. The fact that both can coexist shows that the original is not the same as the copy, both have different experiences (from that point of creation). Both are independent entities living in different time and space. And that is with a 100% exact atomic structure copy, we are not even talking about consciousness or the brain (as we don’t know if this can be recreated by atoms), or even a digital representation created by an algorithm and fake atoms.
In the series Star Trek, when they get “beamed” up or down, what happens there? Digital representation of their data is sent via a wireless signal and recreated at that place. The original has to die in order to function this logically, but the fact is that the original have to die and disassembled. It’s no longer the original.