>>110760
Identity—the idea that a thing is a thing, and that it's not all just particles floating around in the void—is a human construct anyway. You're not a person; you're the idea of a person. So it's really a matter of perspective.

I think it depends on how it works. If we're just talking about a copy made of me, then there's no point. I will die and a copy of me will continue existing. This is the Star Trek transporter theory. On the other hand, if we're talking about actually transferring consciousness that's another matter. Media seems to often portray transferring consciousness as merely making a copy and then uploading that copy into something, rather than a Ship of Theseus where your consciousness is genuinely transferred over in real-time. I suppose the contention has to be whether consciousness is the electrical signals themselves or the "hardware".

For example, suppose you had a 1:1 replica of a given person's brain, and were able to wire those brains together and then switch the signals over to the replica brain. My feeling is that the person's consciousness would be able to be transferred over and the person would continue to exist without dying.

If you can do the same thing with analog and digital circuits where you can have redundant components and circuits that act as real-time failovers if a given component fails or is removed, then I see no reason why the same could not be done on the scale of human consciousness, just with much greater difficulty.

I've had this discussion quite a few times and I don't think my opinion has changed much. No, I'd prefer not to because it won't be "me". It will be a copy of me that the universe will see as identical, but it will be a different consciousness "assigned" to it.

>>110763
>If we're just talking about a copy made of me, then there's no point. I will die and a copy of me will continue existing. This is the Star Trek transporter theory.
I think I have a bit of a disagreement here. Since one thing I'm absolutely terrified of is my conscious continuity breaking and my current "self" being lost to the void forever, unable to experience being in my body anymore. There may be no point to the external observer whether you decide to replace yourself with the copy 'now' or at the end of your current life, but to yourself it may be the final moments you'll be able to experience living. That's sorta why when it comes to the Star Trek transporter problem I'm on the side of not wanting to take the transporter.

The other matter is kinda intriguing though, I don't think I've ever thought about transferring conscious over a replica brain, but if two must exist at all points in time then it makes sense that your conscious must be preserved in the process. Although in the scenario that the anime from the OP screenshot presented, it's a humanoid AI about to be formatted and restored from a backup because of a virus in the brain, so I don't think a conscious transfer would be possible.

This question is usually framed as a sort of hedonistic individual thing, in the sense that it's about you as a unique being with a quasi-soul being able to stay on Earth to have a good time for a bit longer.
That's not my take. My answer is yes because I feel things would be better if that other person who's exactly like me were able to go on. I'm a cool dude, you see, and so is he. Authenticity doesn't matter.
>>110762
This I fundamentally disagree with. The universe has recurrent, relatively stable structures that are different from one another, just like salt is different from iron and photons are different from electrons. A person is themselves no matter how they're perceived, it's like saying gravity doesn't exist either because it's just a concept. What abstract thought does is smooth out differences, it doesn't simply invent stuff out of nowhere.
>>110763
>then there's no point
The point is that functionally you will continue to exist, it's worth doing if you think the actions you would've taken had you not grown ill would be of any consequence. That is to say, if there's at least the smallest reason for you to live, then it's a yes. Not for your you-you original yourself, but for everyone else.
>>110765
>it will be a different consciousness "assigned" to it.
That's not really important, in the grand scheme of things. Would you prefer it if people lost you?

PS: the Ship of Theseus is really dumb. One is a continuous entity, the other is a newly created one that uses the gradual scraps of the first. The second is most certainly not the original, it's a new creation, but all of this is irrelevant wordplay.

>>110769
>>110770
Let me ask you this; what if, instead of doing it incrementally, we replaced 90% of the ship of theseus all at once? Or how about if we replaced half of the ship parts, and then put the parts we took out into another ship?

To be clear, I'm not coming at this from a nihilistic "nothing is real" angle. Recurrent, relatively stable structures most definitely exist. What I'm saying is the boundaries between these structures are a lot more fuzzy and subjective than people tend to believe.

>>110769
I think people themselves would prefer to lose me over having a copy of me hanging around with them being fully aware that I'm actually dead. Actually I'm dead certain about that for my family.

If I was going to do a consciousness/soul transfer I'd want it to be to a robot/android! A perfect copy of myself could just as easily die.

>>110811
What if your battery dies!

It would depend on what you mean restore and how that is actually meant to work. My own consciousness would have to be transferred to the new body somehow or else it's just another person with my body and memories and so once I die that's still the end for me personally.

But I don't know if transferring consciousness would actually be possible or if there would even be a way to find out, because, whether consciousness was legitimately transferred or not the new body would always believe it was given that it would share your memories before the transfer took place and would just think it worked.

If the person you were a week ago isn't you, then the person you will be in a week won't be you either. You are constantly dying and being reborn as a nearly-identical person. Yet your sense of self transfers between them. Handing the baton off to a week-old version is no different than passing it forward in this sense.

You could bring up continuity, that it's different because you're rolling back a week and following a different path, but all it really is is memory loss. In a month, you won't remember most of what you did this past week. In a year, you'll be lucky to remember a couple of important things. In a decade, it'll all be gone unless something really big happened. If losing that causes you to lose your continuity of self, then you're still constantly losing it.

The only reason not to restore ASAP to minimize data loss is if the restoration also restores your body, letting you put it off longer so you can then continue your life even longer into the future (or if you want to be yourself and welcome this liberating virus' blessing). Just write a memo to help yourself out later.

OP's example is a robot, though, so it was never a person to begin with.

>>110769
>gravity doesn't exist either because it's just a concept.
Gravity exists, but the concept of "Earth's gravity" as a distinct, singular thing is an artificial construct. It's useful, perhaps even necessary, to make these distinctions in order to function, but they are still things we make up.

>>110770
>all of this is irrelevant wordplay.
It has practical implications. The US Navy at one point was only approved funding for x number of ships, so they just quietly replaced the outdated parts with modern ones until it was effectively a new ship, but it bore the same name and was thus technically not going against what Congress told them to do. You also have nation-states built from the "scraps" of fallen regimes that get treated as if they are the same as the old one in terms of diplomatic agreements just because the physical parts are the same.

In the case of humans, it raises even more serious concerns. Namely, if the restored version isn't the same person, then you can't hold them accountable for the other version's actions. Spend that week killing, raping, and stealing? Can't arrest anybody, the culprit's already dead. Sign a contract, take out a loan, get married? Null and void, I didn't sign shit.

>>110782
>>110859
The ordering of this reply may come across a bit weird, but trust me, it makes sense. Shinjitekudasai. A lot of this stuff I had to look up and I'm not an expert so take it with a grain of salt.


First off, change itself. A thing has a set of attributes and as time passes some of these attributes become something else, right? There's a before and an after, that's change. But there's a fundamental issue that's really stupid and I'm not sure how to explain it properly.
Let's take the Ship, Theseus' Stupid Ship. Let's say we tear off a plank, now it has undergone change: it's the Ship of Theseus minus a plank. But in the most literal terms it's already no longer the same exact thing it was before, so now it would be a different object: Ship v2. HOWEVER, that would mean things cannot undergo change: they can only become a different object. A cinder block under the sun would become a different thing a bajillion times per day merely because of its temperature going up and down here and there, its atoms moving around. But that's incoherent, because then you would never be able to address anything since everything that exists is undone every zeptosecond, being continuously in shift down to the subatomic. Yet in the physical and the abstract, structures persist and remain identical to themselves.

In an ancient Greek work, there's a story where a creditor visits his debtor looking for repayment, who is met with the argument that:
>Since man is nothing more than a material object whose matter is constantly changing, we do not survive from one moment to the next. The debtor concludes that he is not the same person who incurred the debt, so he cannot be held responsible for the payment. The exasperated creditor then strikes the debtor, who protests the abusive treatment. The creditor expresses sympathy, but points out that he cannot be held accountable for the assault.
The ancient wisdom of talk shit, get hit. Material constitution alone cannot be the basis of identity, because then nothing makes sense. It's comedic, OBVIOUSLY both people still exist, man I hate philosophy so much.

Things get REAAAAALLY fukken complicated from there so you have to decide: either persistent objects don't exist, in which case OP's question is totally meaningless, or objects CAN persist, implying they are more than just the matter they're made out of, and more of an arrangement that transcends its minutiae.


One of the clearest examples of a working structure is that of a living body: many types of cell will be replaced multiple times throughout your lifetime, you can get all sorts of transplants and surgery, you can become a quad amputee with no eyes, but you will fundamentally continue to be who you are. In sci-fi you can be changed into mostly metal and still be you, while the parts left behind will decay into nothing. However, if a procedure kills you then you're done for, death means you've broken down too hard and are simply not there anymore. But even an organization like a sports club can persist: the Real Madrid continues to be the Real Madrid a century after all of its original members have left. If tomorrow the club were to be disbanded and a decade later a new one appeared bearing its name, it'd be a different team. Again, the whole is greater than its parts.
You can say that gravity in general is the mutual attraction of bodies, the curvature of spacetime due to mass or whatnot, and that Earth's gravity in particular is caused by the field generated by Earth's mass which gives objects an acceleration towards the planet at 9.81 m/s^2 or however that works. And that's a real thing defined without much arbitrariness, as I understand it.

About the navy, in principle I'd argue it doesn't violate the integrity of the object and is only a change of its parts. It works around Congress' intentions, and it does effectively change the composition of the ships, but it's still a continuation. They should've been more specific. As for the 90%, it would depend on how much the whole has been modified, and how much of its quality remains rather than just quantity. It sounds like it would've been completely taken apart and remade, in which case it'd be a different thing and continuing to carry the name could simply be legal fiction. But I don't know the details of ship construction so I'd appreciate a link to the particular case, I wasn't able to find it on my own.


Moving on to flippin' international law.
Honestly, this stuff's too much for me, but from trying to read the 1978/1983 UN Vienna Conventions on State Succession, a 1994 paper on how the IMF dealt with the dissolution of Yugoslavia, and the Council of Europe's 1996 draft report on the Pilot Project on State Practice regarding State Succession, the idea I got was that the matter of succession is one of continuity of parts, not of the object.
The IMF paper explains that a successor is recognized as legitimate when it "retains a substantial portion of the predecessor State's population, territory and resources." Russia was considered the successor of the Soviet Union and took over its UN seat and treaties because it "retained over 55% of the population, 77% of the territory and a significant portion of the resources" despite coming from just one of the USSR's several republics, and Rhodesia's railway debt was inherited by the parts where the material railway continued to exist. But in the Yugoslav case there was no clear successor so all of its independent states were admitted to the UN as new members, rejecting Serbia/Montenegro's claim to continuity, and Yugoslavia ceased to be a member of the UN and the IMF.
(This is without counting all the non-metaphysical concerns of politics that go into recognizing a state as legitimate, like it happens right now with Taiwan, and happened with Serbia/Montenegro.)

The object/structure that was the previous state is gone, it did break down and is now the predecessor. We should differentiate between continuity in the sense that something has carried over/been passed on from A to B, and continuity as the persistent integrity of a structure. Successor states have the former but not the latter, which is what I'm focusing on right now.


Okay, so now let's go back to OP's question.
What happens in AI no Idenshi is that a backup of a robot's mind is made, while the robot continues to exist. The difference is only that of a week of memories, which is barely noteworthy. Restoring a previous state using the backup does not break continuity, because every relevant attribute of the robot is maintained. If the robot had been formatted, and the entirety of its memories and personality had been wiped out, then it would've been a different person, at best a successor but I would argue against even that.
In the case of a "teleporter," that's simply a suicide booth that creates a copy of you somewhere else. A successor, just like a regular clone would be. But I would call it functional continuity because it's a perfect copy that will continue to act in the same way the dead person would've behaved, so there's no reason to feel sorry for the dead guy. It's routinary death without any impact, no big deal.
Of course, I doubt perfect teleporters will ever exist because it first requires scanning a person's total molecular makeup, sending that information as a message throughout space without any interference, and then reassembling it with some mumbo jumbo somehow capable of 3D printing a person atom by atom.


Finally the legal question in terms of individuals.
From what I'm reading if a defendant in criminal procedure dies the case against them is dropped because that's it, there's no justice left to serve. Now, while I still believe that the second person is separate from the first, they are also their successor, and wouldn't unconditionally get away scot-free. If a person creates a backup in preparation for a premeditated murder and then carries it out, the backup should still be punished as it was a part of the plan. Ignorance isn't an excuse (although I know I'm stretching that one). Suicide as an attempt to escape the law should be punished too, it's intentional as well. But if it's second-degree murder or manslaughter and the defendant dies unintentionally, then I think the successor should be free to go or at least given a fine, taking into account some sort of psychological test in case the person was insane or something like that. Contracts signed willingly should continue to apply, also because of it being planned and agreed to. And if there's a fine to be paid it's already the case that it can be taken from the dead man's estate, whether there's a backup or not.


You can say that this stuff is all subjective, but that'd present two issues:
1) It means objectivity doesn't exist, or is at the very least inaccessible to cognition.
2) Any attempt at an objective argument is void because there's nothing to base it on.
Keep in mind, the act itself of saying "this is subjective" is an objective statement. The structure must exist and be able to be interacted with or else it'd be impossible to perceive it in any way, much less communicate any information about it. Succession is pragmatic, continuity far less so.

As one last note, FFFFFFFFFFUCK constructivism I hate those closet solipsists the most and I like this takedown very much:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/sce.10005
>Constructivism can be defined as that philosophical position which holds that any so-called reality is, in the most immediate and concrete sense, the mental construction of those who believe they have discovered and investigated it.
Do NOT fall for their lies, reality is real and accessible.

>>110943
Nobody here is saying that everything is subjective. That'd be absurd. But the way we classify most things, when we say "this is what makes X a Y which is part of Z" is very much a product of the way human beings perceive the world, rather than anything intrinsic to reality itself.

>>110945
Well it sounds absurd, but that's what you just did.
Truth requires correct classification beyond human perception, otherwise it's subjective by definition. You're saying it's a product of the subject, and not the object.

>>110943
The issue you're having is that you're laying down two options for yourself. The point of the thought experiment is to show that the way we perceive entities and assign identities is much fuzzier than everyday life would have us think. These questions are about the abstractions of our minds and how they differ when faced with hypothetical or fringe situations. We understand that everything is always changing, but we intuitively establish thresholds of sameness in order to function.

"Earth's gravity" is an artificial idea because "what is Earth" is only defined by humans. It's just a way of describing a bunch of matter located relatively close together. When it gets swallowed up by the sun, "Earth's gravity" will cease to exist, but the gravity from all of the particles that formed it will continue on exactly as they always have because they don't care what we think they belong to.

For the botes, here's a video explaining the practice and giving some examples (as part of a broader overview of the era): https://youtu.be/z3JGnhe7L-Q?t=578
It is essentially legal fiction, but that's the whole point.

You're talking about successor states as different countries that take on the role of older ones, but there are also cases like France having five different republics, a couple dictatorships, and some monarchies and they're all just considered a continuous France or how there were so many Roman Empires historians have to make up different names for them to differentiate. Though the idea of successors does raise the question of how clones/copies/backups differ from children in regards to taking responsibility.

I think you put too much emphasis on whether one enters a "death state." A hard drive isn't lost if you can still recover and restore all the data. A teleporter doesn't kill you if it manages to rebuild you.

>>110949
Notice that I said 'most' things, not 'all'. I'm not saying that everything exists according to human perspective. Maybe it does, but I somehow doubt it.

What I am saying, is that the universe consists of a small handful of fundamental things that actually exist and have well-defined (if poorly understood) properties, like matter, energy, and time, and that everything else is a man-made abstraction atop these things.

>>110952
Sigh, I know, I know it's fuzzy, but it's worth arguing against that. Natural language is geared towards contrasts and generalizations, and so it often breaks down when things become indistinguishable. Like in the sorites paradox, which tries to find a quantitative threshold for a "heap" even though, in my opinion, the word refers to a form that inherently lacks discrete boundaries. But something like Earth is a rock, not a cloud. It does have clear boundaries, like solid planets do.
Inversely, today's Russia is definitely not the same as yesterday's USSR even if it took its place in the international stage, not unlike how the Qin weren't a continuation of the Zhou in spite of traditional Chinese historians seeing it as such, and no thinker would defend the remade ships as continuations just because they transferred a few pieces of wood from one to the other. Literal biological death too is a concept I'll continue to defend as total rupture, a completely irreversible process, while a hard drive's death is metaphorical.

But yeah, I know, it's never that simple.


>>110957
The problem with saying that elementary things are the basis for man-made abstractions is that the elementary was discovered by using abstraction. Abstractions must map onto reality, because otherwise we wouldn't have been able to find a well-defined anything. We can't retroactively derive logic from things we didn't know existed until decades ago, especially if our concepts are fanfic. Every language is going to tell you that a rock is hard, not because it's human nature to think of rocks that way, but because they really are hard. It reflects reality.