Bear Ribs
Well-known member
Well that was a specific example but hardly the only such case. F'rex on humans we use the brain. You can lose all four limbs, get a heart, kidney, liver, and gallbladder transplant, and there's no question that you're the same person. Replace the brain and you are a different person.No more than a clone, even with the same memories as the original, would be. It's trickier to say with AI, as it's harder to define exactly what it is, but one of them had the experiences, and the copies only have the memories of them.
I guess I didn't get any of that from what you said. Going back to the gun example, honestly, pointing to a specific part is just what the ATF does, and there often is very little logical basis in anything the ATF does or how it categories firearms. The amount of an old gun that has been replaced is actually part of what makes it more or less valuable, specifically for the reason that once you start replacing parts, it is no longer the same rifle, it is only mostly the same rifle, except for those parts that have been replaced, and I would even count the receiver among them. As it applies to ships, the closest anyone has come to saying that a specific part represents the entire ship is the ship's bell, and it would be pretty absurd to say that a ship which has had everything but the bell replaced is the same ship, just because it has the same bell.
In technical writing terms this is called a synecdoche. We use it all the time to identify are single part of something, the heart of the matter that is to say.
Yeah, the Bugs Bunny bit, I think you weren't looking at the actual point I was trying to make. It's not about versions of the same character, it's about identity and changing material.The other aspect of your argument I didn't get was over the Bugs Bunny stuff, because as I pointed out, people do make arguments like that, and I even gave a couple of my own. I could point to things like writing when it comes to dismissing nuTrek as not being "real" Star Trek, for example, and it would be a matter of whether people agreed with it or not, but the point remains that it is an argument that can be made and does get made.
Let's narrow it to one short of one Bugs Bunny cartoon to remove the confusion. There's, let's presume, 24 frames per second. The short is four minutes long, that's 240 seconds, so there are 5760 individual pictures of Bugs Bunny that go into making the cartoon.
Here's the point: Nobody will say that the still picture at the end is the same still picture as the beginning one. But everybody will identify that Bugs is the same Bunny throughout all 5760 pictures, even the one where Bugs is a small pile of ash with ears. This is simply a variant on the Ship of Theseus writ large but helps highlight the main point, it's about how you perceive the world and how your perceptions are perhaps affecting your view of the world. When the images are still, you perceive them as thousands of individual pictures but when they are flashed at 24 frames per second, you see a single animated bunny for four minutes. We would look very strangely at both a person who claims that the four minute short contains 5760 Bugs Bunnies and a person who looked at a pile of 5760 pictures of Bugs on a table and said there was only one there. Yet in practice there is no material difference.
Yoda: "No, no different. Only different in your mind."