Was there ever such a thing as the “real Picard” to begin with? Or is the continuity of identity just a lie we tell ourselves to keep from going mad?
The Starship of Theseus?
I kept trying to find a Theseus joke, thanks.
Both are the ship. Neither are the ship.
This is the transporter dilemma, too. Disintegrating people kills them. Making a long range replicator spit out an exact duplicate with all their memories doesn’t mean they’ve moved.
My son and I talked at length about this one, and we agree with Bones. You wouldn’t get me to go through a transporter unless I was already going to die. If there’s any sort of afterlife, or soul, then that’s where the people who have been transported are, and everyone else is a facsimile of themselves.
You are now are not the same as 1 second ago. Does it mean that you-1-sec-ago died?
Oh boy, philosophers have been salivating over that question for millenia, and they’ve come up with some terrible answers lol
No because you didn’t disintegrate my brain. Being disintegrated is a catastrophic, fatal injury that destroys the body, not just an imperceptible change like naturally ageing by one second.
There is exactly the same imperceivable change for you when you appear on another side. And you-one-sec-ago do not exist anymore in both cases. What’s the difference? Just because you use the word “disintegrated”? Use the word transformed instead.
The end result is an identical entity, certainly. But in-between, your matter is broken apart, converted into energy, reconverted back into matter before it becomes the same again. Becoming a data-stream, or a jumble of particles is a very different thing than being a corporeal biological being, and that’s the state the concerns me.
At that point we might as well call him Theseus
