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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1636 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 2, 2025

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You been playing soma recently?

SOMA is one of those Muggle Plots that immediately gets solved once you accept the pattern theory of identity.

Literally just put the original in dreamless sleep before making the copy (shouldn't be hard since the original is already an upload; just pause the hardware!), make the copy, and then destroy the original without waking it up.

Before the process, there was one of you in the old body. After the process, there is one of you in the new substrate, which is what we wanted. No one had to experience being left behind. No need for an existential crisis; it is now no different than the Star Trek transporter disassembling your atoms, beaming the information over, and re-assembling you out of new atoms at the target location.

EDIT: Original post defining the term.

This is raised in-game. That's why there's a suicide cult who kill themselves as soon as they're uploaded and why you have to choose if you're going to mercy-kill your unconscious original before you go down into the abyss. It's mostly played for tragedy because the original is a perfectly healthy human being who kills themselves or gets murdered, and is essentially thrown away like garbage. The existence of a happy, healthy copy doesn't magically turn scanning someone's brain into a transfer of consciousness rather than the creation of one life and destruction of another.

In terms of the game, you're stuck playing through the memories of abyss-Simon. You get to play through the experiences of car-crash Simon and woke-up-under-the-sea Simon because those got copied over and now form part of abyss-Simon's memories. The appearance of transferring between them is pure illusion - you possess their memories but you were never either of them. There's no process on earth that can transfer you into the mind of ark-Simon because there's no process that can transfer you into anyone's mind.

I scrolled 1 screen down in your first link and the concept as proposed by EY already looks retarded. According to him, an unliving database entry is the same as a human (complete with deleting it being murder) because it's a "unique store of knowledge and experience".

No need for an existential crisis; it is now no different than the Star Trek transporter disassembling your atoms, beaming the information over, and re-assembling you out of new atoms at the target location.

This is exactly what the existential crisis is about. If Star Trek fans didn't mind it back in the day, I can only guess it was because they weren't very philosophical about the setting.

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