Immortal or Not?

Heh, a lot of people here have posted/reacted with how I thought when I was posed a similar question by my uni tutor for a group of us to debate. We had some spiritualistic lady on our course who was really insistent about The Soul of people, interesting no one has mentioned anything like that per se. :)

I do love the typical ocukers of the thread who have no interest... Yet post something meaningless anyway to be heard. Gotta love ocuk for that ;)

Some fascinating studies on biological immortality out there though of which I read donkeys ago. It all refreshed in my brain after seeing an ad for a new Tom Cruise film!

Cheers all! Interesting morning read :)
 
Yes, but as per my OP I wished to read others! My above post was to thank people for their contribution, so all in all I am a happy bunny!

Do you have anything worth contributing? ;)
 
almoststew1990 said:
In Mass Effect 2 when Shepherd was being brought back from the dead, they deliberately did not clone him because whilst New Shep would be identical, he wouldn't actually be Shepherd. If its in a mainstream SciFi game its got to be true!

So im going to vote no.
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Yeah but they needed the real one to fight the Collectors. Maybe you get cloned if you're not considered valuable enough to society (poor or not Shepard) and brought back if you are valuable (rich or Shepard).

That aside, the atoms that make us who we are physically are transient even while we're alive as they are all replaced throughout time, so you could argue that we're ready replicating ourselves gradually and cloning would simply be doing it all at once. Of course although the appearance and structure of the clone would be identical, the specific matter that made up the original now exists in a different form.

Kinda like moving all your saved games to the same model of HDD and same model PC.
 
It's not really immortality, as you would be gone. This new person may look and act like but it isn't, you will not be living for ever. This seems like a bit of a waste of time to me, it only benefits loved ones who would be affected by your death.
 
airrunner said:
I would say that it would make a part copy of the self, but not immortal. Only because we still don't have enough understanding of our own biology yet. If we truly understand the mechanics of consciousness, if ever then we may be able to answer this question with more substance.

But my argument in a nutshell would be that the brain is merely memory & an instrument to be used to figure out problems in reality. If you copied the memories which generated the personality of the person again, where would be that core awareness? The very thing that looks through the lense of you're eyes? We could be missing the core life force from the new entity- it's consciousness.
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Spurred on from reading your post.

My own view of consciousness is that it is simply a higher-level system that attempts to govern the various evolved problem solving capabilities you describe but within a more abstracted framework of what constitutes you, allowing it to approach and consider problems in a more flexible manner.

So for the woolly bit, replicating the brain precisely recreates the same consciousness. But in the OP's proposal, memories are seemingly transplanted possibly (not mentioned) without the neural development that occurs during the experience. The result would be the equivalent of an image of disc1 held on disc2 rahter than a recreation of disc1. How the clone interprets these memories, if it can, I would imagine to be quite different to the original. Although it may use the memories as guidance in decision making or mimicry. They would present as a quite different individual, moreso as its experiences and denovo neural development unfold and be an individual quite distinct to what the original would have become under the same experiences.
 
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I used to read a lot of science fiction and this has been explored in various ways in too many stories to list. In simple terms I suppose you could say the argument comes down to whether you think a consciousness can be cut and pasted like a file, or whether it can only be copied.

To explore the teleport question, if the entry and exit were quantum linked and you were stepping directly though a spacetime shortcut, then no copying would take place. But if you are talking about the more usual sci-fi concept of scanning someone and sending that data to another receiver to be reassembled, then what you get at the other end is only a (hopefully perfect) copy of the original.

So unless you can come up with a way of transferring rather than copying the consciousness from one body to another, personal immortality is not an option. Of course you could actually transplant the brain, in good old horror film tradition.

I could write a lot on this, but I'll spare you. Plus I need to get to the pub.
 
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