• Lurker123 [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        8·
        1 year ago

        The “magic law” is just the consequence of what it means to be the “same” person. To be the same person, you have to, among other similarities, take up the same spatial-temporal space. This is why if we ask “is Bruce Wayne the same person as Batman” one of the first thoughts is “you know, I’ve never seen them in the same room before.”

        Maybe what you’re getting hung up on here is the split. Let’s imagine there is one river (river A) which goes for a bit before it forks and becomes river b and river c. In some sense, we could say that both river b and river c are river a. But if you’re river b, then river c is not the same as you, and vice versa.

        • flying_sheep@lemmy.mlEnglish
          3·
          1 year ago

          In the moment of copying, they’re the same, after that, they’re diverging through different experience. The difference in atoms/location is irrelevant from the perspective of that person’s consciousness. They both are the original in any sense that counts for them or others.

          • USSBurritoTruck@startrek.websiteMEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            The same is true for two Rikers. That’s the entire point of the episode; that despite them diverging at the point of the cloning into two different people, they are still the same person and need to live with that.

            I don’t think that as the point of the episode. As their lives diverged their interests and desires did so as well. They were similar, yes, but still different people. Will was promoted after successfully evacuating the people of Nervala IV and he became focused on his career. Thomas was stuck on Nervala IV thinking of the woman he left behind, and when he’s rescued he wants to rekindle that relationship whereas Will let it fizzle.

            To say nothing of Thomas eventually choosing to join the Maquis. That is not something we’d ever see from Will.

            Will: Good luck, Will.
            Thomas: I actually thought I might go with the name Thomas.
            Troi: Your middle name.
            Will: I guess we really are different. I never really cared for that name.
            Thomas: Well, I sort of like it. I guess I’d better get going.

    • Trashbones@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      There’s actually a book series I enjoy, the Bobiverse series, that does an interesting take on it. In it a human, the eponymous Bob, gets digitized and becomes the AI of a Von Neumann probe. He’s given the mission to make copies of himself, explore the galaxy, and build colonies for humanity.

      Later on in the series...

      As he makes more copies of himself, it’s found that the personality of the copies diverge more and more the farther from the original that they descend, and they eventually devise a statistical way to measure this divergence. No two extant Bobs are ever the same person, even though they’re identical copies.

      However, it’s also discovered that if a Bob makes copy of himself, shuts down his original AI matrix, and only then the copy is turned on, that Bob will have no measurable divergence from the one he was cloned from. It’s measurably the exact same individual, and it implies that in-universe there’s some fundamental, tranferable property of identy. Arguably some kind of “soul”.

      Not only that, if the original AI matrix is turned back on then that one starts displaying the divergence that was expected of the copy. This is used in one case to transmit the data of a Bob to a waiting, empty AI matrix around another star to avoid physical travel and side step the teleporter problem.

      There’s a lot of sci-fi hand waving in it, but I thought it was a fun way to approach the question.