Actually, it is.
The current laws of physics don't have the notion of identity. So swapping two identical particles not only doesn't have any effect, it doesn't even make physical sense. Like the rest of physics, this principle stays valid at the macroscopic scale.
Teletransportation is a genuine form of transportation. It doesn't kill you, and the result is not a mere copy. It was traditionally a philosophical question, but thankfully, physics has the answer.
Identical particles have different identities because they have a different location in space-time. The location in space-time creates the identity.
There's also a problem with the math of your claim. They can't "be the same particle" if you can have two of them. 1 != 2
How is that not exactly what that means?
[1] Well, presuming it actually does exist as something other than confusion, which I'm not currently arguing, though I'm sympathetic to the notion.
Fun is an extremely vague notion, I'm not sure what it means or if it even has a consistent set of synaptic patterns (or whatever), but I think that's probably because people don't use the term consistently (or are confused, etc., as you say).
Spiciness is absolutely purely chemical.
> Just because physics doesn't have a notion of identity
I inferred that the intended meaning was "Just because the field of physics has no notion of identity". Obviously in philosophical and sociological circles there is absolutely a concept of identity.
Now I did made some language abuse.
First, there is no such things as a particle at the basic level. I mean, there are particles, but in the same sense that there are houses: particles are not the fundamental stuff, they are made up of the fundamental stuff, just like houses are made up of bricks.
Second, It is possible to test whether two situations are the same, or not. And I don't mean "nearly the same", I mean exactly the same. The difference is rather drastic: in one case you end up with |x|²+|y|² (where x and y are two complex numbers), and in the other case, you end up with |x+y|².
Third, there are no labels attached to particles. The universe is not like "photon A here, photon B there". It is more like "photon here, photon there". We know that because of my second point: there is just no difference between "photon A here, photon B there" and "photon B here, photon A there", it is the same configuration.
Now, when you move a particle from point A to point B, those are certainly different configuration. (So you do have a point). On the other hand, the way you move the particles doesn't matter in the slightest, as long as the end result is the same: having the particle at point B.
Well, the same goes for a human. Flying from London to New-York doesn't destroy your identity. The only thing that matters it that you end up in New-york. So, whether you took the plane, or have been wired across the internet just doesn't matter. You end up in New York.
Now, sure there is some difference: locally, you are the same. But the world around you is different. So this is a different configuration[4]. The plane didn't fly, computers did some more work, bandwidth got consumed… But that doesn't sound like the kind of difference that destroys your identity, even intuitively. I mean, by writing this text, I have a much greater influence over your than the motion of a plane could ever have (unless you're in it, or watching it). And I don't destroy your identity.
Now that's about it. Those who hunger for more should really read the whole Quantum Physics Sequence.
[1]: http://lesswrong.com/lw/kg/expecting_short_inferential_dista...
[2]: http://lesswrong.com/lw/pi/classical_configuration_spaces/
Life is short.Just read Volume III of Feynman Lectures here
However, I do not think it means you are the same person. Currently, quantum teleportation destroys the original copy. For the sake of philosophical argument, suppose it did not. Then that new person would be conscious independent of you. Clearly, you are not that person.
Now imagine your particles becoming destroyed. You are dead. He is alive. He is not you, even though it would be impossible to tell that he was not you.
Let's take the teleportation example: my rebuilt self is just as much "me" as the original was (or still is, should the device keep it intact) -- all atoms are in exactly the same place, and what's crucial, the memories and mental characteristics are preserved. It's not my clone (where only the DNA is the same), it's the exact replica. Doesn't matter that it's built from freshly assembled atoms, since our bodies continuously assimilate new atoms and shed old ones anyway. In that we're more resembling a wave on the ocean than a Luke Skywalker's lightsaber prop, where it actually counts that it's the exact set of atoms that Mark Hamill wielded on set. If you care about memorabilia anyway.
The two existing duplicates of me are obviously not "the same me", but nobody should expect them to be. They both are a continuation of myself. Like the aforementioned wave, I'm not my atoms and their configuration, I'm the continuity of their ever-changing state.
.......
When a cell divides, does it cease to exist? If so, at which point exactly? Are the two newly created cells the same cell as the one that was there before? Are they a half-cell each, even though they both are full cells now? Is one of them the original cell that gave half of its matter to create an offspring? Would everything be back to normal if one of them ate the other one and we could say that the original cell just performed a crazy transformation, but it's still the same cell (the same atoms, chromosomes and all)?
These questions might seem reasonable, but I think they stem from our mistaken desire to qualify and label things. Still, the reality isn't limited to our understanding of it.
The best scenario would be if there were no concept of choice at all. Not even before the copy were made. Not even the awareness that as part of the cloning either the clone or the original would die is good enough, because you are still asking me to make a choice.
The ideal case would be I am awake today, go to sleep and tomorrow either me or my copy would wake up.
I would add a third motivation to the list that was best articulated by Ernest Becker:
“For man, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it by watching others fed to it as he survives transfixed with rapture.”
I highly recommend the work of Ernest Becker to anyone interested in this topic. It is amazing how well the theory of Generative Death Anxiety explains human behavior.
I'm surprised people still believe this. There are no souls. Nothing about the atoms in your brain are special. If I replaced them all right now with "different" atoms (if the universe even does have a unique identity assigned to every particle) you would be the same person.
One explanation for who we are is that experience is a binary relation. In order for identity or anything else to be experienced by someone, they have to be operating.
There is an episode in Star Trek where a transporter accident didn't destroy the original copy. Obviously a copy of someone isn't that someone because identity is a transitive relation, and the two copies aren't each other!
So by simple logic, a copy of someone isn't that someone because you can have multiple copies. Of course the real issue is the question of someone's identity in the first place.
Because identity is a TRANSITIVE relation (meaning if A is related to B and B to C then A is related to C). And two copies of the same thing aren't each other.
Actually identity is an example of what's called an EQUIVALENCE RELATION which means it is reflexive (A is related to A), SYMMETRIC (If A related to B then B related to A) and transitive. Those 3 properties are necessary and sufficien for a relation to be an equivalence relation. An equivalence relation partitions a set into subsets called "equivalence classes" where all members are equivalent.
So the big question is, what is the relation here that would form equivalence classes between copies of a person? Perhaps it is that two people are the same if, in some sense, they arose as a natural continuous change from some previous biological thing.
That way we can acknowledge the vast complexity of what it's like to be human and alive, and still make a meaningful definition.
It just so happens that this definition is along the lines of hinduism - I've been listening to some Alan Watts lecture recently.
The fact that the software copy of me is in my present time frame and yet is obviously separate from me seems to force the conclusion that I am not it, generally, in all time frames. This does not fill me with confidence that I will live on in any sense in this software copy once my present conscious experience is snuffed out.
What is the physical nature of sentience? What are its mechanics? Does it consist of atoms?
There is a study showing that caloric restriction increases life span in monkeys [1], but apparently there were issues with that study. According to a NYT article [2]:
>Its authors had disregarded about half of the deaths among the monkeys they studied, saying they were not related to aging. If they had included all of the deaths, there was no extension of life span in the Wisconsin study.
Another study on caloric restriction in monkeys showed no increase in average lifespans [3]. Also the NYT article mentions that other studies on rats have also shown no increase in lifespan using caloric restriction. So there's not really a great consensus out on the effectiveness of this yet.
[1] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/325/5937/201.short
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/30/science/low-calorie-diet-d...
[3] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v489/n7415/full/nature1...
Maybe you meant 20 years? There is no way this stat is right - he's 77. Making it to 87 isn't unusual
We live in an age in which access to specific types of medicine is very flat. If you have $30,000 and medical insurance, there is nothing that a billionaire can conveniently buy that you cannot also go out and get if you do the legwork and phone calls yourself. Medical tourism, clinical trials, etc, etc. The billionaire can buy a fleet of doctors but he cannot buy a form of medical technology that isn't yet available to other people.
He can of course, create new medical technologies by funding their development, but then it is still available to everyone at the end of the day.
Remaining life span for the old is strongly dependent on progress in medical science, however: the transition of the next few decades from medicine that is only a matter of crudely patching over the symptoms of aging to medicine that addresses the causes of aging. An example of the former is alteration of gene expression through drugs, or introduction of reprogrammed stems to enact repair. In neither case does that address the reasons why gene expression changed, or why native stem cells are not doing their jobs. An example of the latter is breaking down the build up of metabolic waste products like lipofuscin constituents [3] that harm cellular operations and housekeeping machinery, and are increasing prevalent with age.
The future of medicine must be something that evolves from the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) [4], a way to repair the underlying cellular and molecular causes of aging to reverse its course. Everything else that fails to deal with underlying causes is just patching over holes in the dam, or trying to keep an old engine running without replacing any parts: the whole thing fails catastrophically no matter how much expense you go to, and the expense keeps mounting regardless. That is present day end of life medicine in a nutshell, and it must change to preventation and repair of known causes.
Even with far more funding than is presently the case, SENS implementation in laboratory animals is 10 to 20 years away.
If you are in late life then your only practical option for anything other than death and oblivion is cryonics [5], the low-temperature vitrification of the fine structure of the brain in which the mind is stored, done against the possibility that future medicine can restore a vitrified brain to life. (Or, depending on your viewpoint, that it can be scanned and run in software, but that doesn't seem like a very helpful end result to me. A copy of you isn't you).
So as I said at the top, this fellow has a health hobby, but he really isn't doing anything material other than having a good time, and perhaps deluding himself as to how well he is impacting his life span. The only material things worth a damn are (a) 80/20 good health practices like regular moderate exercise and calorie restriction, (b) funding the right rejuvenation-focused medical research, things like SENS that may pay off greatly in the next few decades, and (c) cryonics. Everything else is wishful thinking.
1: http://www.forbes.com/sites/nextavenue/2013/06/07/90-year-ol...
2: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/npp/national-population-projec...
3: http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research/intra...
4: http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research
5: http://www.evidencebasedcryonics.org/scientists-open-letter-...