According to the inventor of the transport in Star Trek: Enterprise "I had to spend years convincing people that it actually was you that came out the other side and not some weird clone."
"Some weird clone"? But I'm a weird ME right now. Doesn't that mean it made a weirder me? What if it UNweirds me? The new, less weird me might not be insulted by that like the old weird me would have been, and that's just unacceptable.
And also even with cryonics, I find it unlikely that it would still really be "you" if your body could be thawed, even if it kept all your memories and personality.
That is an actual conundrum and something you might rationally consider......unlike the guy who made this video who assumed its only natural to think walking into a teleporter and assuming it will kill and clone you instead of.....actually teleporting YOU is a weirdly paranoid soap box to stand on.
@@cralixthegameking4408 No, technically it's a sum of perceptional & behavioral rules, set by the neural network you call "brain". That's why if you mess with enough of those neurons, "you" isn't *_"you"_* anymore. (Alzheimer's, drugs, lobotomy, etc...) My point being, there's nothing "magical" to it, it's just very complicated & it looks like that in a glance. & the fact that we think of our consciousness as a static "whole" (which is far from the truth of course), only complicates things.
There's an episode of Next Generation that makes the transporter question much, much more complicated. In one episode Lt Barclay admits to never having used a transporter and being terrified of doing so, largely because of the concerns raised here, and is promptly peer-pressured into doing so by Counsellor Troy. The way this episode muddies the water it that when Barclay uses the transporter, the camera-angle 'follows' him through. We see him remain fully conscious throughout the entire experience. Later in the episode he even interacts with other entities during transportation and manages to pull something out of the beam upon rematerialising. Bizarrely, the question of death raised here doesn't work, because transporters are canonically not a break in consciousness on any level.
Hello! I have the rather rare honour of being one of Cutty Sark's three shipkeepers (basically meaning we stop it from falling to bits). Appropriately enough, before the fire, she was undergoing a major conservation project - this involved the ship being disassembled, almost all of her wooden structure taken off site, so that the iron framework within could have remedial work done to it. When the infamous fire broke out, almost all the wooden bits of ship were safely stuffed away in Chatham, and were then returned to the somewhat-melty iron skeleton months later. So interestingly enough, she was disassembled, her component bits moved to another location, then the same original bits reassembled in their prior location. Somewhat different to disassembly at a molecular level, but still philosophically interesting. One day we'll add warp engines. If I have my way.
@@The_Guit It is not a Theory but just fact that this is 'Matter-to-Energery'-Conversion. That IS what this tech is, duh. Grey should research more next time.
@@sallyl.9606 No, i dont think i can. not after all this time. I dont remember my thoughts when writing the comment anymore, just like i dont even remember this video here.
Star Trek transporters have always had some seemingly problematic aspects to them. For example, if transporters work the way supposed by this video, why not just make lots and lots of clones all day? A real device like this might be more accurately considered "the duplication machine", but in-universe, there's a clear difference between transporters and replicators which isn't fully understood.
The movie, The Prestige - directed by none other than Christopher Nolan, did a great job of a deep dive exploration of this conundrum and the dark implications.
Why's everyone freaking out? This is EXACTLY the video I've been wanting to hear! My brother and I as well as my friends have been talking about this so much lately!
You know what makes the last part even more scary? People who had near-death experiences describe the feeling of dying as very similar to falling asleep
I think that isn’t scary at all - the Transporter is way less scary then. We just fall asleep, and as we aren’t conscious about us sleeping IN our sleep, we won’t be conscious about our „death“ neither.
There was this novel where magic functioned, but it functioned in a way that was the most natural to the magician. So there was an ardent Trekkie who transported himself into various places - but splitting himself into atoms and reassembling them at the destination. Then there was a disaster, which resulted in him being haunted by all the ghosts of his previous copies. They weren't appeased by the fact that they had, in fact, committed their suicides themselves.
“Last night somebody broke into my apartment and replaced everything with exact duplicates... When I pointed it out to my roommate, he said, "Do I know you?” - Steven Wright
I few years ago there was a show on the national radio, they had as a guest a language philosopher. The final question to him by the host was "Is there a concept of linguistic philosophy that you would call wrong?" what seemed odd and unexpected, but the philosopher answered immediately and the response struck me, so I remembered it: "Yes, the word for "me", because it makes you feel like you are an object. It would be much more accurate to consider the "me" being a process". It blew my mind, because I taught of myself as a person, that gets older with time and does some stuff meanwhile. But - despite that when I was 5 years old I cried for toys, I wouldn't now consider a crying kid being myself. And this goes with the theme of the video
Exactly! This also ties nicely into the fact that THE MIND is not a THING but a PROCESS, something that the brain does. There is no such thing as a "soul" that is the real you, riding around in a meat vehicle. YOU ARE YOUR BRAIN, you do NOT get to MAGICALLY outlive the death of that brain. Dualism has been disproved LONG AGO, it's just not a lot of people know it.
@@lexprontera8325 Yes, and this leads also to some other paradoxes, not shown in the video. Was it really you who committed a crime a few years ago? Would it be just to put today's you in prison for that?
@@lexprontera8325 Almost everyone in the Western world knows it, but many refuse to believe it for obvious reasons. It's easy to cling to hope because it's impossible to disprove something that can't be measured or sensed. It can't be proven either, but the people who _believe_ in it don't need proof, that's the whole point of faith for them.
@@lexprontera8325 Except in an infinite universe with infinite time the same configuration will eventually happen. It's not dualism in that case. In the example of the OP to this comment thread, they would indeed be the crying baby, having no idea that they had lived this life before (multiple times in fact). Your memories would not survive this hypothetical (though absolutely plausible) process. The only thing recreated here is "you", not your personality or your memories.
The sleep argument just doesn't do it for me, the continuous bioelectrical system that essentially is who you are never stops functioning, dreams are a thing, and the molecules are more or less the same. A transporter fully disintegrates you and assembles you with different molecules miles away from where you were, a complete break in body and mind.
He isn't talking about a bioelectrical system. He is talking about consciousness. The conceptual idea of being aware of our existance. While this bioelectrical system may be the method of which we become aware, it isn't the awareness in itself. When we sleep the awareness goes away.
I made a transporter that in my universe, dissembles you except for your brain and keeps the atoms in your brain in the proper orientation while it's zapped away. that way you are still conscious although the experience is described by characters as "frightening"
surely, though, we are not our consciousnesses. we are not just our meaty neuron brains, we are the complex systems of signalling and generating the goop and chemical soups that helps make up the brain as well. let us take a stronger example of the loss of consciousness, a strongman, which we will defeat. say a brick hits you in the head and the trauma causes you to lose consciousness for several hours. none of the soup leaks out, the brain damage is barely detectable, and you feel and act the same as you did before, minus the sensitive bruising. Sure, some of your neurons may have died, but apparently they weren't doing much since you have no loss or change of function or feeling. From this we must conclude that this particular traumatic brain injury did not end your existence and birth a new existence later, as all the parts are the same, the system is almost entirely unchanged, all the mechanisms and systems were left intact. Obviously, if injury by neccesity does not birth a new being and kill the old one, then neither can sleep. Transporting, though? That's all author's intent, and the authors originally didn't care enough to point out how the transporter works. It certainly isn't a suicide box. You don't get to go in three decades later and declare how things work with new writers. Authors were well aware that matter = energy = matter, that is, you are not "disintegrated" or damaged by the transporter. You are converted from one form to another, and then converted back (just in a different spot). You don't "charge" a battery, you BECOME the battery. You LIVE in the battery, for a tenth of a second. Or a thousandth of a second. Depends on which episode you're in. The franchise is stuffed full of sapient beings made entirely of energy or thought or pure emotion or silicon, beings routinely convert themselves from meat into energy or from energy into silicon or from emotion into meat in a very rude attempt to take over the Enterprise, and by the end of the episode everything is back to normal like it never happened.
When he started talking about giving people the benifit of the doubt for being alive I got vibes of when I was six and thought the whole world was created for me
So you want to tell me the whole world isn't there just for me to play with? No way, you are just the random being my brain created for me to interact with.
Oh my goodness, this argument goes WAY back in time. We used to have discussions like these back in 1975 in the fourth grade. How fun to see a modern take on the subject.
it's definitely canon that the transporter turns you into energy and that pretty much all the technology on the ship uses matter/energy conversion tech. but there's also an episode where picard gets stuck in the transporter and just exists as conscious energy, even being able to control the ship, go out into some kind of energy nebula and then come back and get reassembled into a body.
Thanks a LOT for bringing back childhood fears I had mostly suppressed. I used to leave myself reminders around my room before I went to sleep at night to reassure myself the next morning I was the same person I was before I fell asleep. Haven't done this in a long time. Looks like I'm starting again.
The problem is that you can't distinguish between being the consciousness who wrote the letters and having the memories of a previous consciousness that wrote them.
+ArchAngelThomas But what does it really matter? Do you feel like a different person every morning? Let us say it is true that you do die every time you go to sleep and a "new" you wakes up. Can you tell? I just don't understand why it would matter if you can't tell.
2:28 “the philosophy majors in the room are dying to bring up the ship of Theseus now so fine” Me like 15 seconds before he said this: but- the ship of Theseus
Rule number 1 of Star Trek: The transporter is the safest form of travel, until someone mentions it's the safest form of travel. Then, you have a transporter accident episode.
+d'grassed But what if the real CGPgrey has been kidnapped and this person isn't CGPgrey! *insert illuminati music*. It would also explain why the drawings are different now! I think I'm on to something!
TNG adressed this issue and cleared it with science magic. During transport you stay conscious, you even can move and react. The matter isn't deconstructed or transformed into energy, it is "streamed".
We even get a POV from inside the stream in one episode, he stays conscious inside the stream and is able to see the cosmic horrors that attack him LMAO
_In his book The Physics of Star Trek, after explaining the difference between transporting information and transporting the actual atoms, Krauss notes that "The Star Trek writers seem never to have got it exactly clear what they want the transporter to do. Does the transporter send the atoms and the bits, or just the bits?" He notes that according to the canon definition of the transporter the former seems to be the case, but that that definition is inconsistent with a number of applications, particularly incidents, involving the transporter, which appear to involve only a transport of information, for example the way in which it splits Kirk into two versions in the episode "The Enemy Within" or the way in which Riker is similarly split in the episode "Second Chances". Krauss elaborates that: "If the transporter carries both the matter stream and the information signal, this splitting phenomenon is impossible. The number of atoms you end up with has to be the same as the number you began with. There is no possible way to replicate people in this manner. On the other hand, if only the information were beamed up, one could imagine combining it with atoms that might be stored aboard a starship and making as many copies as you wanted of an individual."_ Above quote taken from: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transporter_%28Star_Trek%29
To me the key is the existence of replicators. From this we know that there is technology to assemble new matter using just energy and information. Therefore, the transporter has no _need_ to be sending atoms of the transported person, and if it is, then it was only designed to do so for moral reasons. Which in turn would mean that someone in universe thought about it and concluded that only if the atoms are original, is this a genuine transport and not killing and replicating a new person. And the idea that the whole society would accept that reasoning is crazy to me. The way this question is never brought up in universe, even when malfunctions occur or by people who have transporter anxiety, which is a diagnosable disorder in Star Trek, makes me think that they all know that transporters kill you. And it has become such a deep, dark taboo, that no one dares to speak it. But they _all_ know.
@@themarquess honestly stuff like this is kinda why i doubt we'd use this kinda stuff in a wide scale (if it even is possible). just the dread alone of knowing that a teleportation could quite possibly mean death would really put off most of the population
Hmm, perhaps information is the key to this, to consciousness. If say a piece of matter is perfectly converted to energy will it still have that information? If so then perhaps the transporters should be fine, if not, then.... Ded
@@heliveruscalion9124 When I look back at the statistics on fatalities from air and automobile travel in the 1920's, I think transporters in the future that promise to save enormous amounts of time and money would have long lines of people ready to try their luck even while the bugs were being worked out. They like to say that the FAA regulations for the airlines were written in blood instead of ink.
The thing with sleep and induced unconsciousness is that some part of the brain (the thing responsible for consciousness), is still active, evidence by the fact we dream. Thus the stream of consciousness is not entirely broken. The transporter is suicide in that it completely cuts off the stream of consciousness.
Basically that guy is contradicting himself with two videos. In the video "You is two" he clearly states, that there are two minds inside the brain. One is silent and the other can use the mouth. Therefor if a person goes to sleep, then at least one of those minds is still active... kinda I think.
Sources? Is it not common knowledge that you can be woken up? In fact, waking up during rem is actually quite rare, and you know when you do, it's when you wake up with a vivid recollection of your dream.
Hector Woods Then I that means I am one of the few. I vividly remember when I was scaling a tower in a war only to be captured at the top and be shot in the head by the the enemy queen with her officer's pistol. I also remember several other dreams, but they are foggier. But in my memories the more emotional or single person details remain from those dreams. Like interactions.
In regards to the statement about sleep being a break in consciousness, I sometimes don't have it. Normally I go to sleep and wake up, knowing that I went to sleep because of, well, the feeling of waking up, of making new memories. But sometimes I lay in bed for what seems like an hour when suddenly my alarm goes off. I know went to sleep because I'm not tired and it certainly doesn't feel like I was laying there all night. Sometimes I don't experience this for years, and other times I have it every night for a week. I understand that this may never be read by anyone by that is interested, but I wanted to write it anyway.
I experience the same from time to time and my theory is: it's a dream. We dream about owerselves lying in bed and staring at the ceiling or whatever. Lamest dream ever.
Bro! It happened to me! I was sleeping with my body facing the bed. Next second Its day time. IDK how to do it again, but it feels amazing/cool. I want to control it. It happened when I am really really tired and the moment I hit the bed I got to sleep very very fast.
Trek even made episodes involving the copies that made it clear that the "copies" had their own streams of consciousness and made entirely divergent decisions. When i was new to it, I sort of expected them to somehow quantify the "soul" to explain why transporters weren't death machines, only to find the opposite was true.
The problem with his line of argument is that it relies on the possibility of creating two copies of a person to create doubt about the "real" person/ metaphysical nature of consciousness. But in reality that _cannot_ happen. The No Cloning Theorem prohibits that sort of shenanigans.
@@entropyzero5588 you're going to measure the quantum state of every atom in two humans to try and figure out which is the original, are you? they don't need to be identical, and in fact will not be on the quantum level, because they're made from different atoms, but they are, for all intents and purposes, identical beings, because they think, act, speak and look the same.
@@Yal_Rathol Nah, the problem comes from that fact that, at least in the brain/ central nervous system, you'd _have to_ produce the exact quantum states of the original for the copy/ transportee to be reasonably close to the original. And we can do this at most for one recipient and this necessarily means that the original gets destroyed in the process. At least until we figure out how exactly consciousness works. But as we could use that knowledge to upload our consciousness to the computer, the whole problem would become moot anyway as we could have as many bodies as we want at that point.
Reminds me of Filmcow's The Magical Realm of Horse Man. "Everytime you fall asleep you die, and someone else wakes up thinking they are you." I loved showing this to friends who were in a "psychedelic" phase.
+Tomasz Zachmost They might as well be electric signals, amnesia is real so the brain is connected to what consciousness is. And if you really think about it, what you consider memories might as well be a simple stream of images playing like an internet video. Artificial or copied memory would be the easiest thing to make or replicate compared to legitimate self awareness.
just for the record, you don't know that your "stream of consciousness" is continuous like a stream. You only ever experience the present. So you may very well be only an instantaneous entity that exists only momentarily. A consciousness is annihilated and another created in every consecutive moment. just something owrth considering i guess
@Shadow Gamer: Actually, it's not. It's experiencing an imprint stored in your brain in the present. It's like if you record a video, store it on your computer and watch it later, you aren't literally watching the past, you're watching something in the present that takes on the appearance of a past events via recording technology. Memories are even more divorced from that past because they aren't always accurate and can be changed by stuff happening in the present.
But how would you know if your consciousness isn't continuous? If your consciousness blinks out for half a millisecond then comes back online immediately after, would you be able to tell?
@@thisworldismyshonenanime7603 If you're in a completely darkened room, and your consciousness blinks out for around 8 hours, the only way you can tell is by looking outside and noting that time has passed.
+Michael Aiyedun It's pretty well established in laboratory animals that you will go insane and then die in relatively short order (weeks-months) if you don't sleep.
Sleeping may be a break in consciousness, but not in brain activity, which is clearly, obviously still in motion, just in a low power mode. Even comatose patients have brain activity. Hell, "brain dead" people are not totally inactive. So there's no break in brain existence, not like a transporter.
Crystal Kanashii I mean MAYBE, if the copy-death-paste process is swift enough. I mean I rarely dream/remember my dreams, so I can still consider my bed being a potential murder machine. Edit: I’m talking about the possibility of death from reading
Crystal Kanashii It doesn’t have to be a break in consciousness if the time it takes to kill and remake you is fast enough. I haven’t watched Star Trek, but I assume that the transporter takes close to 0 seconds. Or they could even recreate you while you’re reading, kill you, clean up the mess, and make sure that the ‘new you’ has every memory that the ‘old you’ possessed, except the one where they brutally killed you. They can make the ‘new you’ excluding the memories that may give it any hint that you may have just died. Although, you don’t necessarily die all the time, I’m just saying, you can die and be replaced without ‘new you’ noticing a thing, like what happens in a teleporter. Basically, it doesn’t have to be a break in consciousness at all.
The difference between ship of theseus and cutty sark is that the ship of theseus although gets entirely replaced in the end, its parts were never "not part of a ship" through the process. A ship isn't just its parts heaped together, to have a ship the parts must be put into a certain configuration. Throughout the existence of the ship of theseus that condition was never violated, sure it became "partly worn out ship" at times but it stayed a ship nonetheless. There was no moment when the object "ship of Theseus" (in whatever state) did not exist. Cutty sark on the other hand has at least one instance when no "ship" named cutty sark existed. At least one moment existed for every part that ever existed as a part of the cutty sark when it wasn't a part of the "ship" named cutty sark within the lifetime of the ship. That difference makes "ship of theseusing" through life a very different thing than "cutty sarking" through life.
What if you took apart a functioning ship, and reassembled it as it was before? Is it still the same ship? The parts were definitely in a state of "not part of a ship".
@@GarrickStaples Depends on whatever definition of ship you're willing to settle for. If you can allow for the ship to be the same ship before and after the destruction then yes, otherwise no. There really is no right or wrong answer for this one, at least not yet I think.
your brain doesn't get turned off every time you sleep or get put under anesthesia. I don't think it's comparable to having your body literally destroyed like happens in a transporter.
+J Nichols No, but your consciousness is. When you sleep, or put under, you have no recollection of thinking during this time outside of dreams, which have no real meaning because you can't place time or physical understanding of your body when int hat state. At any point between losing consciousness and regaining it, who knows what has changed.
Joshua Ward you might not remember it, but your brain and consciousness are both very active while you sleep, whereas they both completely die in the teleportation scenario. if this hypothesis has any merit, I think it's worthwhile to consider sleeping and complete brain destruction to be different.
Well the thing is "breaks in consciousness" are something entirely different, and not that relevant to what is discussed in the video: Namely what happens if an exact copy of you is created, and the previous you destroyed. And what happens is not a "break in consciousness" but the creation of an entirely separate and possibly coexisting stream of consciousness. Those are two very different things, especially when you consider that consciousness is inextricably linked to the physical brain.
i think this goes even deeper, what if breaks in consciousness don't matter because consciousness is just a illusion evolved to make higher intelligence possible.
Well I think the consciousness is linked to the physical brain only by the pattern and cells that make the physical brain. If you could duplicate your brain (as it seems with this machine), your consciousness would be duplicated. That's scary.
this go really deep into philosophy, because you don't remember anything in your dream, at least 99% of the time, Plus, your dream contain no new knowledge so in a sense, sleep either stop consciousness or kill it, depend on how you look as it
This question has always bugged me. I liked the idea Roddenberry posed which was that the transporter actually wormholes you to your destination rather than break you down.
+basic b!tch Probably exotic matter, which exists only in theory and possibly star trek. That or the machine creates a mini blackhole for only an instant before closing it.
***** While teleporters and portals have similar features, the fact that it is not suicide to use a Stargate (an artificial portal) makes portals preferable to teleporters.
What really gets is that starting with TNG on replicators and transporters use the same visual and sound effects. They're the same technology. Either that means the replicators are transporting that replicated food from somewhere else (doubtful with the ep of DS9 where some but not all replicators are infected), or transporters are just giant replicators that destroy you the way they do dishes after dinner and replicates a new you at the destination.
As far as I understand it, there is nothing in canon that confirms replicators and transporters are the same technology, otherwise you will have some serious problems: 1. The crews are always transporting dilithium and special medicine using transporters, despite they were shown to be non-replicable; 2. Replicated food are not as tasty as cooking through traditional methods, while transporters are supposed to create a sub-atomic-accurate copy; 3. Klingons and Ferengi go through great trouble to obtain and keep Gagh and Tube Grubs, indicating replicators cannot replicate living things at all; Star Trek is never big on consistency, but I still think it is much more plausible they are similar, but distinctive technologies.
I think the idea is that the _part_ of the transporter / replicator design that (re)assembles the molecules is what they have in common; where a transporter (I think) directly receives a stream of molecules, a replicator turns energy into matter and then passes that stream of molecules to the assembly part. Then again, it probably doesn't work that way because of the double-Kirk...
+Bloodstainer Dude I lost like half a year of sleep over this shit when I was 9-10, thought I would die after going to sleep. Surprisingly this happened after a bad surgery... huh
00000ghcbs It came to a point where, what if.. every instanced time would kill you, like every second you're out walking, you die and the "next" part of your conscious just keeps walking.
+Bloodstainer In that case the saying "I wasn't born yesterday" would be true, that you are reborn every instance, or every time you wake up from a nap.
Here I was, back in 2006, where Christopher Nolan provoke the same question: "It took courage to climb into that machine every night...not knowing... if I'd be the man in the box... or the prestige."
Here's another idea: every moment in time what you have previously experienced is a muddled recreation of what happened to you prior. Eventually memories become too diluted to be understood, and people can change personalities and viewpoints dramatically over their lifetime. What if every moment in time, you are dying and being replaced with another creature who merely knows of the blurry events of it's previous incarnations for the singular moment it exists. Every second, you die thousands of times and your memories mutate like genetics.
+ZanzaKlaus I agree. This is the viewpoint I have always held. Think about it. How long can you really vividly remember what happened? Not any longer than a fraction of a second after it happens. Try it. Try to capture an instant of time in your head and it fades immediately. You died.... But, it was a painless death. The issue with transporters is that the death may not be painless.
I think the difference is that your consciousness seems to still be present throughout those 1-second iterations of life you propose. With the transporter problem, it's possible that your consciousness ends completely and a copy of your consciousness is made at the other end. That's the scary part for me, so far there's no way of knowing if consciousness will be transported or recreated.
TNG Season 6 Episode 24 did explore this. Basically showing the duplication process. But the buffer was never flushed. That sure makes it seem like if it makes a copy, the original is eliminated. The Prestige though showed it definitively, and left the audience to ponder the "cost".
Or you can adopt the substance view of persons, which does not mean neccesarily that you believe in the soul. As per this view we are ontologically prior to our parts. If you do believe in the soul (I don't), then this could be the basis for continuing identity after death. Are you can propose that we are continuing mental substance (in a body that is not us) and will die if we loose pyschological cohesion with our past instances (primarily though memory). However, that doesn't seem to be correct, sicne I am not just my mind.
"breaks in consciousness" doesn't mean death. think of your conciseness as a program. as long as the original copy stays on the same hard disk and never gets deleted, your still alive. software can be reprogramed changed and deleted and copied. but you are the original copy, and you are still alive as long as you are not deleted (AKA brain death.) but this is hypothetical i don't claim this to be scientifically accurate (neither is the video) truth be told we don't have a goddam clue.
This is something I've thought about at length, and I find myself having an existential crisis every time because why stop at breaks in consciousness? How do you know that *you* are the same you that you were an instant ago? All your memories are stored in your brain. If your consciousness entered another brain, wouldn't it just pick up on all of that brain's memories and activate them - just like your brain's memories are constantly being activated whenever you recall something? Why does it matter which consciousness is inside your body when everything that *you* really are is stored inside your body? More importantly, why the hell does my brain feel the need to existentially terrify itself on a near-daily basis? That's the question I'd like answered :P
Spenfen Exactly. And another thing: Think about yourself, 5, 10, maybe 20 years ago. You had none of the same atoms in your body then. You think differently now than you did 10 years ago. The only thing you two share are childhood memories. What makes you two the same person? And at what point, if ever, do you become so different from a past self that you become a "new" person? Pretend that, 10 years ago, you made a different decision or took a different path in life. The "you" that would stem from there would likely become someone much different than who you are today, due to different memories and environment. The choices you make literally make you, you.
What if there is no continious consciousness at all and all we expierience is is just a row of snapshots being connected by memory. What if what you experience as "now" is just the instant that it takes your brain to process all the imput in currently gets kind of like the cpu tickrate and at any new tick the old "you" is being replaced by a new one. I mean, are we really the same people that we were 5 minutes ago? Or maybe there is no such thing as time in an existential sense and we all just...are. Man I really wish my brain would spend it's energy on usefull stuff instead of constantly contemplating the meaning of life.
Remus Lupin for that matter, if you were to lose memory. ie amnesia are you still the same person? if the only thing anchoring you is memories and they go, then what?
this was such a reassuring episode to me because I am haunted by this thought on a daily basis, and now you are too! We are existentially broken...together!!
+SmarterEveryDay You can measure if something is conscious or not. Don't believe me? Then I guess you go around wondering if rocks and dead sticks are conscious. Btw, it really sucks to be your underpants if they are conscious.
+Cloud Seeker We estimate things are or are not conscious, using rules we have defined. Doesn't mean we can be 100% sure :) Maybe we discover something in the future that proves us wrong, and we have to define new rules. Sure, a rock or dust particle probably isn't conscious, but again, _probably_.
***** The only things we have to change is our understanding of what consciousness is, we don't have to change the rules. Also what is wrong with changing the rules when we are prove the rules are not working for everything? Everything we already know have to be included in the new rules, you just add something more. In Newtonian physics it said gravity exist but was never explained what it was, and before Einstein Newtonian physics was a law you can't question. Einstein showed and proved the thing Newton failed at and Newtonian physics was replaced with the theory of relativity. However that doesn't mean Newtonian physics doesn't exist anymore and is no longer true, its just covered by the theory of relativity. Unless you can show that rocks and dust are conscious we can measure what consciousness is for the same reason you can measure how a ball will fall down without knowing what gravity actually is.
Cloud Seeker We defined those laws of physics by doing experiments, and confirming those results with real-world experience and other experiments. Over time we have realized that these are laws that are inherent to our world, and apply everywhere, so we understand them as omnipresent laws, but technically they are still only laws we have found through research and obversation. There is a possibility that in the future we'll find that there is more to them, and that we need to add restrictions, or that the behavious explained by those laws of physics rely on other underlying things we haven't discovered yet - even if they are omnipresent laws as far as we can tell, and hence we use them as basis for our explanations of other phenomenons. Similarly, we've setup rules for what is a conscious being/object based on experiments and observations. Maybe in the future we'll find out that objects we currently don't think have a consciousness do have one. (Although I think it's unlikely we'll ever find out that rocks think, although a funny thought :)) That is all I was trying to say. Generally we only add to laws of physics, but there is a (miniscule) chance we'll have to revise them in the future.
This is exactly the video that encapsulates my often insomnia and sleep terrors that I’ve been having since I started falling asleep with Star Trek playing back in 2014. It’s the reason why I sometimes wake up in absolute terror during a nap, or during the night and experience such a grief that is immeasurable. Swamp man has been a solid paranoia of mine for years now. The question is, how does one break free and stop caring? How does one sleep soundly knowing they, the you, may very well not exist the following day? Ignorance is bliss and I wish I was dumber.
Just because something can't be known with absolute certainty doesn't mean the likelihood of one thing over the other isn't vastly more likely. Both philosophy and neuroscience have considered this question and both conclude it is far more likely that our current 'self' does survive sleep and sedation. The reason is that the fundamental substrate of your consciousness (the brain) never ceases to function in these states. Consciousness doesn't really exist in the way most people think it does, it is simply a product of the brain's function and the aspect of consciousness we experience is awareness. Awareness does cease (sort of) when you sleep or are sedated, but that doesn't mean consciousness is destroyed and then recreated upon waking unlike the transporter, this is where the two situations are distinct. If we postulate that consciousness is destroyed and recreated upon sleeping and waking then there has to be a process in the brain by which this is happening that is detectable. No such process has ever been detected. Again, you can never be absolutely certain that this is true. But you can sleep soundly knowing that the neuroscientists and philosophers who are the best equipped to give a reasonable answer to this question do not worry about dying when they go to sleep.
I had the same exact panic moment. I found a "workaround" to reinsure myself. I consider we're living in a multiverse with endless possibility but with only ONE consciousness allowed to exist. What does it mean is that, everytime I should have died, my consciousness instead "jumps" into the universe where I actually survived, making that "night aneurysm" a thing I'm certain of surviving. It's not flawless but I try to tell myself it just needs peaufining, but might be close to what's really happening.
Being serious, I had heart surgery. I was unconscious on the table for some hours, with my heart stopped and my temperature brought very low. When I came around, and the long process of recovery started, I knew I was me, but I didn't FEEL like "me." I felt diminished, as if I was slightly out of body, WATCHING myself doing what I was doing. Not wholly OOB, you understand, but just a bit "zombified." Then, about two months later I woke up in the morning and suddenly I was "back!" That morning I truly felt like ME again... as if my personality had been restored. It was quite a big difference and not gradual at all. I don't know if these feelings were significant, but I understand a lot of people feel similar after deep and extended anaesthetic.
@@joaquinalvarez346 Thank you for your response, Joaquin. I am sorry I did not see it before. I am also sorry that you did not feel good for so long... but I am happy that you seem better now. Best Wishes to you, and have a good 2020, eh?
I don't think this time of experience is exclusive to losing consciousness. I definitely feel this way, over ten years on from a very traumatic experience. I feel like certain parts of me were cut away; my emotions shallower, my priorities shifted dramatically, my talents diminished, my memory absolutely destroyed. I'm okay(ish) now, but I'm not the same person I was.
You know, the idea I have that disproves only I exist (as you said, a person can only prove their own existence) is that knowledge exists. We live in a world built upon the foundations of other people's insights in science, engineering, math, etc, and is continuously being built upon, and don't forget history itself and all small facts about each person. One human mind cannot construe such things from nothing and have it all be reasonably consistent alone. Thus, the people you see but whose existences you cannot directly sense are actual people, because they know things you don't.
I was going to make a different portal 2 reference, where Cave Johnson tells you not to think about having a reaction to the repulsion jell because thinking about it triggers the reaction.
+ArcadiaCv You got that right. "The coin flip" distressed me for about 5 minutes. Then I realized, there is no coin flip. There is no either-or. Both realities are 100% guaranteed. So we better get used to the idea of multiple copies of ourselves running around, because digital brain emulation IS COMMING.
Quantum mechanics has this thing called the "no-cloning principle", which means you cannot precisely create a multitude version of any quantum system. You, molecule-filled you, are a quantum system. Note that this doesn't rule out teleportation: we can't duplicate, but we can propagate. Turning a person in a precise quantum measurement will necessarily destroy the original and turning that signal into a person can happen only once.
You don't need to know every atom to recreate a brain, you just need to know positioning, interconnections and circuittype of each neuron with their accompanying axon myleniation and glial support cells. Any phenomenon that mediates randomness in the brain such as ionizing radiation, glial responses and protein movement within neurons can be simplified into simple RNG weight based systems. There should be no difference between this simulation and you. The actual only solution to this problem is that "you" are inside 2 minds at once and each mind is liable to the laws of physics so the minds can't do telepathy or intercommunicate and as such you cannot realize that you are in 2 bodies at once.
@@tassadardaris7294 in that case we're talking deconstruction and approximation, and then there is no paradox. You just took a thousand pictures of a house, demolished it, and built an exact replica. The original has been destroyed but an outsider would be none the wiser. Also, for consciousness we simply do not know enough to assess whether statistical approximation does or does not suffice.
The scary part is not just thinking about me being the only actually conscious human, and everyone else I know a creation of my own consciousness, but that these imaginary creatures keep dropping hints that they are indeed imaginary as if they're trying to wake me up. By the way I might not exist and I'm just your brain telling you to wake up.
Your not dreaming and your not the only person who's self aware.i can assure you that I am a living thinking person who has dreams and ideas wants and needs just like you. If anything I am the dreamer and you are the dream.
+mapagatu I agree, consciousness may end but thought does not, your brain is still performing processes and possibly dreaming. Even if you can't remember these processes they are still happening and thus the greater stream is never broken. In my mind, all mental processes must be ended to break the stream not just the higher level ones.
TheWolfboy180 Well you still have a sense of continuity when you sleep. I remember moments when I was asleep better than others when I was awake that same day. So really the brain activity is still there and is not at all comparable with the interruption that would occur from the transporter method
Digitally uploading our minds and teleportaion have always left me wondering if you technically die during the process. I have raised this question on other channels that discuss such matters. A fan of yours set me here for more information and I am glad he did. You have gained a new subscriber!
I love how I got into watching a video like this thinking that it'll post the blatant, emotionally jarring theory like "transporters just copy you" but ignore the more nuanced counterpoint of sleep being an interruption of perspective too, _but then it addresses it._ This is how a video should be! It presents what we know, and isn't afraid to put equal weight on what we _don't_ know, in order to raise more inconspicuous questions and inspire the viewer to think, instead of just be told what to think.
As a side note, I'd like to add that I'm not suggesting brain activity as a product or cause (depending on your belief) of consciousness during sleep is unquantifiable. I'm pointing out that it's _good_ to think outside the box and recognize that even within the range of what we know, there are things that we don't know or have trouble proving. Recognizing an uncertain conclusion is healthy and underrated, compared to treating uncertainty as falsehood, which is just being a conspiracy nut.
it weird seeing a cgp grey with a full body as opposed to just the stick figure
Opposed*
r/boneappletea
Yeah. And also i am your 1 thousandth like
what the fuck
HE HAS FOUND FLESH
So it's like copying a save file while deleting the old one.
Better hope they have absolutely zero copying errors.
@@FFKonoko *ERROR: File Corrupted, File will be automatically deleted*
Transporters are real life cut-and-paste
Funnily enough thats how saving works, you delete stored memory and then recreate it somewhere else
@@doc_siddio yeah but the data isn't deleted at first, it just becomes inaccessible and can be written over
4:51 Imagine being that one version of you that was created when you woke up from your alarm clock and then immediately killed when you pressed snooze
Big mood temp me, Big mood.
So the urge to press snooze is me unconciously thinking "EXISTANCE IS TORMENT I JUST WANNA DIE"
To be fair... that version of me has done so to himself.
Or the one that wakes up for a moment in the night and you don't even remember it.
I know im not a clone, cuz im still alive
According to the inventor of the transport in Star Trek: Enterprise
"I had to spend years convincing people that it actually was you that came out the other side and not some weird clone."
He had to convince them.
THAT DOESN'T MEAN IT'S THE TRUTH.
"Some weird clone"? But I'm a weird ME right now. Doesn't that mean it made a weirder me? What if it UNweirds me? The new, less weird me might not be insulted by that like the old weird me would have been, and that's just unacceptable.
There’s at least one plot line (specifically in Next Gen) where the transporter does clone someone
@@MrDarkx1000 It was literally referenced in this video.
Since you become data, is actually possible to make several copies without a problem
Sleep well tonight... nice ending :-D Cheers! lol
I don't know why, but for some reason I keep seeing your comments everywhere.
+xisumavoid Now I imagine how you do grindy Minecraft stuff listening to Grey's and Brady's podcast like I do.
That wasn't the ending ;) keep watching
Xisuma!!!
+xisumavoid starting to think you're stalking me... you comment on every video I watch lately, and that's a pretty eclectic selection!
This is the same problem with any sort of "uploading your consciousness to a computer" thing.
Yeah, right? Maybe its possible, but how do I profit from a copy of myself being an immortal machine, when I myself am still mortal?
And also even with cryonics, I find it unlikely that it would still really be "you" if your body could be thawed, even if it kept all your memories and personality.
@@sevans1414 Part for part should work
That is an actual conundrum and something you might rationally consider......unlike the guy who made this video who assumed its only natural to think walking into a teleporter and assuming it will kill and clone you instead of.....actually teleporting YOU is a weirdly paranoid soap box to stand on.
@@Gojiro7 i see you are new here, welcome
Sounds just right! Yesterday I went to sleep and I woke up transported!
A bit of a late comment.
So technically the existence of consciousness is magic because it cannot be explained by science
@@cralixthegameking4408
No, technically it's a sum of perceptional & behavioral rules, set by the neural network you call "brain".
That's why if you mess with enough of those neurons, "you" isn't *_"you"_* anymore.
(Alzheimer's, drugs, lobotomy, etc...)
My point being, there's nothing "magical" to it, it's just very complicated & it looks like that in a glance.
& the fact that we think of our consciousness as a static "whole" (which is far from the truth of course), only complicates things.
Plane?
@@miyu1424 that is my exact point
There's an episode of Next Generation that makes the transporter question much, much more complicated. In one episode Lt Barclay admits to never having used a transporter and being terrified of doing so, largely because of the concerns raised here, and is promptly peer-pressured into doing so by Counsellor Troy. The way this episode muddies the water it that when Barclay uses the transporter, the camera-angle 'follows' him through. We see him remain fully conscious throughout the entire experience. Later in the episode he even interacts with other entities during transportation and manages to pull something out of the beam upon rematerialising. Bizarrely, the question of death raised here doesn't work, because transporters are canonically not a break in consciousness on any level.
I will take the "IGNORANCE IS BLISS" on this one.
wronx
lots of Romulan ale
BOB BELL for the sleep part, but conciously teleporting... no thank you!
Knowledge is Power m8
Smith: then we have a deel?
Hello! I have the rather rare honour of being one of Cutty Sark's three shipkeepers (basically meaning we stop it from falling to bits). Appropriately enough, before the fire, she was undergoing a major conservation project - this involved the ship being disassembled, almost all of her wooden structure taken off site, so that the iron framework within could have remedial work done to it. When the infamous fire broke out, almost all the wooden bits of ship were safely stuffed away in Chatham, and were then returned to the somewhat-melty iron skeleton months later. So interestingly enough, she was disassembled, her component bits moved to another location, then the same original bits reassembled in their prior location. Somewhat different to disassembly at a molecular level, but still philosophically interesting. One day we'll add warp engines. If I have my way.
Huh, so would a better analogy be the USS Constitution?
"still here? you cant stay awake for ever" played just as i closed my eyes about to pass out
IMPOSTOR!!
YOU'RE NOT NOVA THE DANCING SONG!!
Maybe imposter* so maybe ur also imposter, and maybe me, who knows?
@@The_Guit It is not a Theory
but just fact that this is 'Matter-to-Energery'-Conversion.
That IS what this tech is, duh.
Grey should research more next time.
@@loturzelrestaurant can you elaborate
@@sallyl.9606 No, i dont think i can.
not after all this time.
I dont remember my thoughts when writing the comment anymore, just like i dont even remember this video here.
Star Trek transporters have always had some seemingly problematic aspects to them. For example, if transporters work the way supposed by this video, why not just make lots and lots of clones all day? A real device like this might be more accurately considered "the duplication machine", but in-universe, there's a clear difference between transporters and replicators which isn't fully understood.
2016: The Trouble with Transporters
2020: The Trouble with Tumbleweeds
Troublingly, Transporting Tumbles would Truly, Terribly and Totally Terrify Turmoiling Travellers.
2024: The Trouble with Time Travel
1967: The Trouble with Tribbles
2024: The Troubles
The trouble with tribbles
The sweater is making me uncomfortable. Where is MY CGP GREY WITH HIS STICK BODY.
Ikr
+Liam Risk ^
+Kazoo The Kid man it's cold out let him wear a sweater
*gets knife* dont worry ;) you'll get him back
OR IS IT REALLY HIM?
+Kazoo The Kid does change scare you?
And I told myself. "Okay, last video before bed."... dammit!
Now i have to watch one more!
sujetoficticio happens every time haha
lol
That was me also after already having anxiety and insomnia.
Rip.
The movie, The Prestige - directed by none other than Christopher Nolan, did a great job of a deep dive exploration of this conundrum and the dark implications.
Well thanks Grey i totally needed an existential crisis this early in the morning....
+ohahmenuts at least it wasn't at night
Same
+ohahmenuts Seriously, I thought I was over that. NOPE.
+ohahmenuts That's what I like before I go to work.
+ohahmenuts its evneng here(18:38 ) in Latvia
Why's everyone freaking out? This is EXACTLY the video I've been wanting to hear! My brother and I as well as my friends have been talking about this so much lately!
Thank you for making this 😂
you should play SOMA. It is fucking incredible and tackles this problem handily, in an undersea base exploration horror game :D
AtomiskZabaleta I haven't played it but I've watched play throughs, and it's one of my favorite series 😄
Haha!! I was hoping someone had brought this game up - I'm experiencing it for the first time and it's AMAZING :D - I just reached the Tau Station.
Xandermorph
I was not able to play it at the time of it's release. i watched markiplier play it. If i recall tau is where [REDACTED]
You know what makes the last part even more scary? People who had near-death experiences describe the feeling of dying as very similar to falling asleep
because it is
It's the same. Only difference, usually pain. :-/
Well yes, but when you fall asleep you will wake up, and know that’s it’s you, with death it’s a dreamless sleep with no end
@@ArtemisWasHere I’d say it’s less than that, typically explained as the experience you had before birth.
I think that isn’t scary at all - the Transporter is way less scary then.
We just fall asleep, and as we aren’t conscious about us sleeping IN our sleep, we won’t be conscious about our „death“ neither.
There was this novel where magic functioned, but it functioned in a way that was the most natural to the magician. So there was an ardent Trekkie who transported himself into various places - but splitting himself into atoms and reassembling them at the destination. Then there was a disaster, which resulted in him being haunted by all the ghosts of his previous copies. They weren't appeased by the fact that they had, in fact, committed their suicides themselves.
I see CGP Grey got a bigger budget and upgraded from stickfigures. Congratulations on the upgrade!
^congrats!
+Robert Reed I like the old animation style better
Musta been that licensing program ;-)
MathHacker42 Damn what the fuck is wrong with people?
+Braden Kemmerer they're finally feeding him food and not zebras
Perhaps CGPGrey2 filed a copyright claim which prevented CGP Grey from using stick figures
Yep
That CGPgrey2 guy is a douche. I already unsubbed him.
Yes, that CGP Grey has really stopped honoring the independent spirit of youtube...
+bircan doğaroğlu
Who is this?
Probably a member of the Evil Twin Society. ;)
Don't be afraid of falling asleep. Instead, rejoice that you will be awake for the rest of your life.
A Corn Rejoice! Mercy is upon you!
And now, the weather.
Your optimism is misplaced, Asgardian
If you go to sleep you arent awake.
Dark Vulcan I think you’ve misunderstood the point of his comment
“Last night somebody broke into my apartment and replaced everything with exact duplicates... When I pointed it out to my roommate, he said, "Do I know you?” - Steven Wright
5:15
"Thanks for watching! If you enjoyed this episode's-"
You think i enjoiyed this?
DO YOU HONESTLY THINK I ENJOYED THIS?
Yes you did. All CGP grey videos are enjoyable.
@@Kaga184 whooosh
@@SketchTurnerZero Why?
Also, ' r/WOOSH' you mean?
well are you even you anymore though?
I few years ago there was a show on the national radio, they had as a guest a language philosopher. The final question to him by the host was "Is there a concept of linguistic philosophy that you would call wrong?" what seemed odd and unexpected, but the philosopher answered immediately and the response struck me, so I remembered it: "Yes, the word for "me", because it makes you feel like you are an object. It would be much more accurate to consider the "me" being a process". It blew my mind, because I taught of myself as a person, that gets older with time and does some stuff meanwhile. But - despite that when I was 5 years old I cried for toys, I wouldn't now consider a crying kid being myself. And this goes with the theme of the video
Exactly! This also ties nicely into the fact that THE MIND is not a THING but a PROCESS, something that the brain does. There is no such thing as a "soul" that is the real you, riding around in a meat vehicle. YOU ARE YOUR BRAIN, you do NOT get to MAGICALLY outlive the death of that brain.
Dualism has been disproved LONG AGO, it's just not a lot of people know it.
@@lexprontera8325 Yes, and this leads also to some other paradoxes, not shown in the video. Was it really you who committed a crime a few years ago? Would it be just to put today's you in prison for that?
@@lexprontera8325 Almost everyone in the Western world knows it, but many refuse to believe it for obvious reasons. It's easy to cling to hope because it's impossible to disprove something that can't be measured or sensed. It can't be proven either, but the people who _believe_ in it don't need proof, that's the whole point of faith for them.
@@lexprontera8325 Except in an infinite universe with infinite time the same configuration will eventually happen. It's not dualism in that case. In the example of the OP to this comment thread, they would indeed be the crying baby, having no idea that they had lived this life before (multiple times in fact). Your memories would not survive this hypothetical (though absolutely plausible) process. The only thing recreated here is "you", not your personality or your memories.
You are the process of your brain coding experience/stimulus into memory. Once that process stops, "you" stop.
The sleep argument just doesn't do it for me, the continuous bioelectrical system that essentially is who you are never stops functioning, dreams are a thing, and the molecules are more or less the same. A transporter fully disintegrates you and assembles you with different molecules miles away from where you were, a complete break in body and mind.
Good point, but I think he joked about that, tho we can't be sure. Still very good point.
He isn't talking about a bioelectrical system. He is talking about consciousness. The conceptual idea of being aware of our existance. While this bioelectrical system may be the method of which we become aware, it isn't the awareness in itself.
When we sleep the awareness goes away.
I made a transporter that in my universe, dissembles you except for your brain and keeps the atoms in your brain in the proper orientation while it's zapped away. that way you are still conscious although the experience is described by characters as "frightening"
but the mind is still conscious in the buffer, and the body still exists if only as energy
surely, though, we are not our consciousnesses. we are not just our meaty neuron brains, we are the complex systems of signalling and generating the goop and chemical soups that helps make up the brain as well. let us take a stronger example of the loss of consciousness, a strongman, which we will defeat. say a brick hits you in the head and the trauma causes you to lose consciousness for several hours. none of the soup leaks out, the brain damage is barely detectable, and you feel and act the same as you did before, minus the sensitive bruising. Sure, some of your neurons may have died, but apparently they weren't doing much since you have no loss or change of function or feeling.
From this we must conclude that this particular traumatic brain injury did not end your existence and birth a new existence later, as all the parts are the same, the system is almost entirely unchanged, all the mechanisms and systems were left intact. Obviously, if injury by neccesity does not birth a new being and kill the old one, then neither can sleep.
Transporting, though? That's all author's intent, and the authors originally didn't care enough to point out how the transporter works. It certainly isn't a suicide box. You don't get to go in three decades later and declare how things work with new writers. Authors were well aware that matter = energy = matter, that is, you are not "disintegrated" or damaged by the transporter. You are converted from one form to another, and then converted back (just in a different spot). You don't "charge" a battery, you BECOME the battery. You LIVE in the battery, for a tenth of a second. Or a thousandth of a second. Depends on which episode you're in. The franchise is stuffed full of sapient beings made entirely of energy or thought or pure emotion or silicon, beings routinely convert themselves from meat into energy or from energy into silicon or from emotion into meat in a very rude attempt to take over the Enterprise, and by the end of the episode everything is back to normal like it never happened.
When he started talking about giving people the benifit of the doubt for being alive I got vibes of when I was six and thought the whole world was created for me
So you want to tell me the whole world isn't there just for me to play with? No way, you are just the random being my brain created for me to interact with.
Kudos for pretending to be alive, guys, but I'm the only real person in the world.
Cristof ... paging Cristof ... Cristof will you please call your office.
/Truman show reference
How can you even sleep at night while giving "people" the benefits of the doubt
Ok so if beds are suicide boxes then transporters are just naps.
why is this so true?
@@dato_4527 Yeah every molecule in your body isn't taken apart when you go to sleep
No if you nap you still sleep right
you see Ivan, when think about, transporter is only spicy nap.
Anwita Gadgil but a transporter is different because you simply sleep. In a transporter it’s different
Oh my goodness, this argument goes WAY back in time. We used to have discussions like these back in 1975 in the fourth grade. How fun to see a modern take on the subject.
I like the old CGP Gray stick figures better
agreed
I second that
I third it.
+Mark Nutt Must disagree with you lads.
Mark Nutt I prefer the ones from CGP Grey. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
4:51 chances are that someone has legitimately died in their sleep after watching this.
Chances are we all did
But ik what you mean
well there's like only a hundred people that died from sleep while with no previous injuries or disease
@@pedropedrohan102 We roll a universal death save dice every Night I see
@@ธนาเดชศุภนัทนพร ok
@@pedropedrohan102 who said no previous injury or disease?
5:40 'Still here? Can't stay awake forever.'
You underestimate my power!
so, did you succeed?
@@valiverra That was a quote from Anakin in Revenge of the Sith, to which Obi-Wan replies, 'Don't try it!' So uncivilised.
:i
Eheeheheheeheh
YOU UNDERESTIMATE MY CAFFEINE!
@@drone_better7757 it's over anakin i have the high ground
it's definitely canon that the transporter turns you into energy and that pretty much all the technology on the ship uses matter/energy conversion tech.
but there's also an episode where picard gets stuck in the transporter and just exists as conscious energy, even being able to control the ship, go out into some kind of energy nebula and then come back and get reassembled into a body.
I typically use Realm of Fear to disprove the 'Death by Transporter' theory.
There was also an episode in Enterprise where Hoshi had a long dream while being transported.
Mom said no more videos before bed hehe
Edit: shoulda listened to mom
[Generic Username] bad boy
You big fat *****
Salem Grantham is that a hate comment or did I get wooosht
Yeeeeees
@@salemgrantham9081 that's only three *, so which swear word is that?
Therapist: old CGP grey doesn’t exist, he can’t hurt you
Old CGP grey:
this isn't "old cgp grey", he used this style just for this episode
Bro this isn't "old CGP Grey". Is this his only "old" video you've watched? 😂
@@NoriMori1992 it was a joke
@@jimmytheshadowleviathan7243 A joke that doesn't make any sense and is factually wrong
@@alanguvi7148 I'm predicting that someone is going to start an argument with you
gray.... who hurt you?
Grey*
me
Gary*
a white-ish shade of black
わoritoMKW Or a blackish shade of white.
Thanks a LOT for bringing back childhood fears I had mostly suppressed. I used to leave myself reminders around my room before I went to sleep at night to reassure myself the next morning I was the same person I was before I fell asleep. Haven't done this in a long time. Looks like I'm starting again.
TRIGGERED
+ArchAngelThomas But... what if you were just a new person with the memories of leaving those reminders?
Lol wtf?
The problem is that you can't distinguish between being the consciousness who wrote the letters and having the memories of a previous consciousness that wrote them.
+ArchAngelThomas But what does it really matter? Do you feel like a different person every morning? Let us say it is true that you do die every time you go to sleep and a "new" you wakes up. Can you tell? I just don't understand why it would matter if you can't tell.
“Who is you?”
“You is two”
Aaah good one!
Well done you just doubled the existential horror 🤣
Are*
@@kevinboros7427 It's quoted
@@brendarojas5613 Shit
2:28 “the philosophy majors in the room are dying to bring up the ship of Theseus now so fine”
Me like 15 seconds before he said this: but- the ship of Theseus
Hello philosophy major
Rule number 1 of Star Trek: The transporter is the safest form of travel, until someone mentions it's the safest form of travel. Then, you have a transporter accident episode.
+Michael Vaughan LOL
what..what....2 cgp grey videos so close to one another.... the universe is breaking down
another sign of apocalypse
+d'grassed But what if the real CGPgrey has been kidnapped and this person isn't CGPgrey! *insert illuminati music*. It would also explain why the drawings are different now! I think I'm on to something!
+d'grassed so lots of high quality CPG Grey videos mean the end of the universe..... I'm fine with that.
+d'grassed I ... I don't know what to think >.
Someone else did the artwork so the job was done faster!
Instructions unclear: Achieved immortality and lost the ability to sleep
TNG adressed this issue and cleared it with science magic.
During transport you stay conscious, you even can move and react. The matter isn't deconstructed or transformed into energy, it is "streamed".
We even get a POV from inside the stream in one episode, he stays conscious inside the stream and is able to see the cosmic horrors that attack him LMAO
_In his book The Physics of Star Trek, after explaining the difference between transporting information and transporting the actual atoms, Krauss notes that "The Star Trek writers seem never to have got it exactly clear what they want the transporter to do. Does the transporter send the atoms and the bits, or just the bits?" He notes that according to the canon definition of the transporter the former seems to be the case, but that that definition is inconsistent with a number of applications, particularly incidents, involving the transporter, which appear to involve only a transport of information, for example the way in which it splits Kirk into two versions in the episode "The Enemy Within" or the way in which Riker is similarly split in the episode "Second Chances". Krauss elaborates that: "If the transporter carries both the matter stream and the information signal, this splitting phenomenon is impossible. The number of atoms you end up with has to be the same as the number you began with. There is no possible way to replicate people in this manner. On the other hand, if only the information were beamed up, one could imagine combining it with atoms that might be stored aboard a starship and making as many copies as you wanted of an individual."_
Above quote taken from:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transporter_%28Star_Trek%29
I Like option #2
To me the key is the existence of replicators. From this we know that there is technology to assemble new matter using just energy and information. Therefore, the transporter has no _need_ to be sending atoms of the transported person, and if it is, then it was only designed to do so for moral reasons. Which in turn would mean that someone in universe thought about it and concluded that only if the atoms are original, is this a genuine transport and not killing and replicating a new person. And the idea that the whole society would accept that reasoning is crazy to me. The way this question is never brought up in universe, even when malfunctions occur or by people who have transporter anxiety, which is a diagnosable disorder in Star Trek, makes me think that they all know that transporters kill you. And it has become such a deep, dark taboo, that no one dares to speak it. But they _all_ know.
@@themarquess honestly stuff like this is kinda why i doubt we'd use this kinda stuff in a wide scale (if it even is possible). just the dread alone of knowing that a teleportation could quite possibly mean death would really put off most of the population
Hmm, perhaps information is the key to this, to consciousness. If say a piece of matter is perfectly converted to energy will it still have that information? If so then perhaps the transporters should be fine, if not, then....
Ded
@@heliveruscalion9124 When I look back at the statistics on fatalities from air and automobile travel in the 1920's, I think transporters in the future that promise to save enormous amounts of time and money would have long lines of people ready to try their luck even while the bugs were being worked out. They like to say that the FAA regulations for the airlines were written in blood instead of ink.
The thing with sleep and induced unconsciousness is that some part of the brain (the thing responsible for consciousness), is still active, evidence by the fact we dream. Thus the stream of consciousness is not entirely broken. The transporter is suicide in that it completely cuts off the stream of consciousness.
Basically that guy is contradicting himself with two videos. In the video "You is two" he clearly states, that there are two minds inside the brain. One is silent and the other can use the mouth. Therefor if a person goes to sleep, then at least one of those minds is still active... kinda I think.
I think it's more like both the minds going into a dream state actually, but I'm not 100% sure
Not quite no consciousness, you can still be awoken thus suggesting some base level of consciousness
Sources? Is it not common knowledge that you can be woken up? In fact, waking up during rem is actually quite rare, and you know when you do, it's when you wake up with a vivid recollection of your dream.
Hector Woods Then I that means I am one of the few. I vividly remember when I was scaling a tower in a war only to be captured at the top and be shot in the head by the the enemy queen with her officer's pistol.
I also remember several other dreams, but they are foggier. But in my memories the more emotional or single person details remain from those dreams. Like interactions.
In regards to the statement about sleep being a break in consciousness, I sometimes don't have it. Normally I go to sleep and wake up, knowing that I went to sleep because of, well, the feeling of waking up, of making new memories. But sometimes I lay in bed for what seems like an hour when suddenly my alarm goes off. I know went to sleep because I'm not tired and it certainly doesn't feel like I was laying there all night. Sometimes I don't experience this for years, and other times I have it every night for a week.
I understand that this may never be read by anyone by that is interested, but I wanted to write it anyway.
I experience the same from time to time and my theory is: it's a dream. We dream about owerselves lying in bed and staring at the ceiling or whatever. Lamest dream ever.
Bro! It happened to me! I was sleeping with my body facing the bed. Next second Its day time. IDK how to do it again, but it feels amazing/cool. I want to control it. It happened when I am really really tired and the moment I hit the bed I got to sleep very very fast.
@@lonestarr1490 Lol, that can be so true.
@@UC3rm0aNC4ysyZipDZotXnZA And that you don't dream. So immediate sleep and no dream, that are perfect circumstances.
@@craftgames1882 Oh yeau I forgot about not dreaming about anything XD
Trek even made episodes involving the copies that made it clear that the "copies" had their own streams of consciousness and made entirely divergent decisions. When i was new to it, I sort of expected them to somehow quantify the "soul" to explain why transporters weren't death machines, only to find the opposite was true.
There was also an episode with Barkley staying conscious and aware during the entire process.
@@MrFurious176 and Hoshi having a full blown dream or hallucination during her transport
Jokes on the clone, I want to die.
@SmoothRide Well save those that do, they don't have to live with anything.
Jokes on you, if that's your clone then it would've thought the same. The both of "you" will fight over who gets to be disassembled.
Hiep Jr. Solivan just go to sleep
Your clones are very Impressive, you must be very proud.
That explains why my clone tries to go to sleep so desparately every time it wakes up.
This is Dr. McCoy's worst nightmare in a video.
and Reg's
"Damn it Jim, I'm a doctor not a philosopher!"
He refuses to use transporters anyways
I think he did once or twice when it was absolutely necessary.
Nathan He uses the transporter a lot. He just really doesn’t like it.
"Well, um...
Teleportation is no longer a viable option of transportation."
-Philosophers
Does anyone know the music that starts at 0:27 ?
teleportation is totally fine.
as long as it's through a wormhole and not a transporter.
The problem with his line of argument is that it relies on the possibility of creating two copies of a person to create doubt about the "real" person/ metaphysical nature of consciousness.
But in reality that _cannot_ happen. The No Cloning Theorem prohibits that sort of shenanigans.
@@entropyzero5588 you're going to measure the quantum state of every atom in two humans to try and figure out which is the original, are you? they don't need to be identical, and in fact will not be on the quantum level, because they're made from different atoms, but they are, for all intents and purposes, identical beings, because they think, act, speak and look the same.
@@Yal_Rathol Nah, the problem comes from that fact that, at least in the brain/ central nervous system, you'd _have to_ produce the exact quantum states of the original for the copy/ transportee to be reasonably close to the original. And we can do this at most for one recipient and this necessarily means that the original gets destroyed in the process.
At least until we figure out how exactly consciousness works. But as we could use that knowledge to upload our consciousness to the computer, the whole problem would become moot anyway as we could have as many bodies as we want at that point.
Reminds me of Filmcow's The Magical Realm of Horse Man. "Everytime you fall asleep you die, and someone else wakes up thinking they are you." I loved showing this to friends who were in a "psychedelic" phase.
Sooo... Who's up for an all nighter.
Aye
+Tomasz Zachmost Memories are chemically stored so they can be reassembled just like the rest of you.
+Ahhh714 I read about this five years, sixtyfive days and seven hours ago and I still can't sleep. See 'you' tomorrow, maybe
day one of my all nighter
jk
+Tomasz Zachmost They might as well be electric signals, amnesia is real so the brain is connected to what consciousness is. And if you really think about it, what you consider memories might as well be a simple stream of images playing like an internet video. Artificial or copied memory would be the easiest thing to make or replicate compared to legitimate self awareness.
He Protec
He Attack
But most importantly
He gives us nightmares
helo u wach cgp?
Ye i wach cgp
Persian Mapper I
Persian Mapper haha, don’t worry, we won’t have to worry about it because it won’t come anytime soon
he cause existential panic attack
This brings a whole new meaning to “New day, new me”
It is not a Theory
but just fact that this is 'Matter-to-Energery'-Conversion.
That IS what this tech is, duh.
Grey should research more next time.
@@loturzelrestaurant I think you missed the entire point of the video.
@@virtuallyreal5849 I dare to say no to that.
@@loturzelrestaurant I dare say no to you daring to say no
it really took the show invincible for me to grasp consciousness in this way. “for him, nothing will have changed, but for you, everything will”
just for the record, you don't know that your "stream of consciousness" is continuous like a stream. You only ever experience the present. So you may very well be only an instantaneous entity that exists only momentarily. A consciousness is annihilated and another created in every consecutive moment. just something owrth considering i guess
That's the definition of being continuous
Not actually true. You can experience the past. It's called memory. It's not perfect but it's literally that
@Shadow Gamer: Actually, it's not. It's experiencing an imprint stored in your brain in the present. It's like if you record a video, store it on your computer and watch it later, you aren't literally watching the past, you're watching something in the present that takes on the appearance of a past events via recording technology. Memories are even more divorced from that past because they aren't always accurate and can be changed by stuff happening in the present.
But how would you know if your consciousness isn't continuous? If your consciousness blinks out for half a millisecond then comes back online immediately after, would you be able to tell?
@@thisworldismyshonenanime7603 If you're in a completely darkened room, and your consciousness blinks out for around 8 hours, the only way you can tell is by looking outside and noting that time has passed.
"can't stay awake for ever"
or can I?
No
+Michael Aiyedun You'll die before ever.
+Michael Aiyedun It's pretty well established in laboratory animals that you will go insane and then die in relatively short order (weeks-months) if you don't sleep.
+Michael Aiyedun coffee or expresso by the gallon
In that logic your awakeness is your life span, just over 12 hours
"Still here? can't stay awake forever..."
me:" I CAN AND I WILL >:'( "
That can lead to death with no copies.
madmoblin it'll be worth it
Hows that working out for you?
Larinda Brunson *XD*
SLEEP IS FOR THE WEAK!!!
Sleeping may be a break in consciousness, but not in brain activity, which is clearly, obviously still in motion, just in a low power mode. Even comatose patients have brain activity. Hell, "brain dead" people are not totally inactive. So there's no break in brain existence, not like a transporter.
The whole point is that _you_ can't know that.
@@jaideepshekhar4621 but they clearly stated that they do know that
@@Vessel767 THEY don't. The SCIENTISTS experimenting on them do. Ask someone what happened when they were asleep. See?
Why did I decide to make this the last video I watched tonight?
Because its the last video "you" will ever watch
+Legend Length you sure?
+JonatasAdoM Oh my he didn't come back!
same
"Still here?"
_"Can't stay awake forever."_
Chilling
+Kimmy Kim (Kimmy Kim) As if it wasn't scarry enough...
I can stay awake til I put a bullet through my head!
Is that long enough?
Oh, God. How am I gonna sleep tonight
But we can awake again🙌. Statistically most of us would😶, most of the time🙏
"maybe your bed is a suicide machine. ... sleep well tonight."
Well at least my want to die is satiated
Crystal Kanashii I mean MAYBE, if the copy-death-paste process is swift enough. I mean I rarely dream/remember my dreams, so I can still consider my bed being a potential murder machine.
Edit: I’m talking about the possibility of death from reading
Crystal Kanashii I don’t know, at least for me, sleep is a break in my consciousness.
Crystal Kanashii It doesn’t have to be a break in consciousness if the time it takes to kill and remake you is fast enough. I haven’t watched Star Trek, but I assume that the transporter takes close to 0 seconds. Or they could even recreate you while you’re reading, kill you, clean up the mess, and make sure that the ‘new you’ has every memory that the ‘old you’ possessed, except the one where they brutally killed you. They can make the ‘new you’ excluding the memories that may give it any hint that you may have just died.
Although, you don’t necessarily die all the time, I’m just saying, you can die and be replaced without ‘new you’ noticing a thing, like what happens in a teleporter.
Basically, it doesn’t have to be a break in consciousness at all.
While going to sleep lol
The difference between ship of theseus and cutty sark is that the ship of theseus although gets entirely replaced in the end, its parts were never "not part of a ship" through the process. A ship isn't just its parts heaped together, to have a ship the parts must be put into a certain configuration. Throughout the existence of the ship of theseus that condition was never violated, sure it became "partly worn out ship" at times but it stayed a ship nonetheless. There was no moment when the object "ship of Theseus" (in whatever state) did not exist. Cutty sark on the other hand has at least one instance when no "ship" named cutty sark existed. At least one moment existed for every part that ever existed as a part of the cutty sark when it wasn't a part of the "ship" named cutty sark within the lifetime of the ship. That difference makes "ship of theseusing" through life a very different thing than "cutty sarking" through life.
What if you took apart a functioning ship, and reassembled it as it was before? Is it still the same ship? The parts were definitely in a state of "not part of a ship".
insightful
@@GarrickStaples
Depends on whatever definition of ship you're willing to settle for. If you can allow for the ship to be the same ship before and after the destruction then yes, otherwise no. There really is no right or wrong answer for this one, at least not yet I think.
your brain doesn't get turned off every time you sleep or get put under anesthesia. I don't think it's comparable to having your body literally destroyed like happens in a transporter.
+J Nichols No, but your consciousness is. When you sleep, or put under, you have no recollection of thinking during this time outside of dreams, which have no real meaning because you can't place time or physical understanding of your body when int hat state. At any point between losing consciousness and regaining it, who knows what has changed.
Joshua Ward you might not remember it, but your brain and consciousness are both very active while you sleep, whereas they both completely die in the teleportation scenario. if this hypothesis has any merit, I think it's worthwhile to consider sleeping and complete brain destruction to be different.
Well the thing is "breaks in consciousness" are something entirely different, and not that relevant to what is discussed in the video: Namely what happens if an exact copy of you is created, and the previous you destroyed.
And what happens is not a "break in consciousness" but the creation of an entirely separate and possibly coexisting stream of consciousness. Those are two very different things, especially when you consider that consciousness is inextricably linked to the physical brain.
i think this goes even deeper, what if breaks in consciousness don't matter because consciousness is just a illusion evolved to make higher intelligence possible.
Well I think the consciousness is linked to the physical brain only by the pattern and cells that make the physical brain.
If you could duplicate your brain (as it seems with this machine), your consciousness would be duplicated. That's scary.
To put at ease those who are afraid that sleeping kills your conscious self, remember that dreaming is a thing.
John what the fuck
stop
this go really deep into philosophy, because you don't remember anything in your dream, at least 99% of the time, Plus, your dream contain no new knowledge so in a sense, sleep either stop consciousness or kill it, depend on how you look as it
John. No. Stop trying to be cool
Yeah, I actually agree. You should write it
Player Slot Available savage book huh?
This question has always bugged me. I liked the idea Roddenberry posed which was that the transporter actually wormholes you to your destination rather than break you down.
The breaking down of molecules is how transporters work on any show in the Star Trek franchise (even the ones where he had direct control).
+basic b!tch Probably exotic matter, which exists only in theory and possibly star trek. That or the machine creates a mini blackhole for only an instant before closing it.
weeeell I think the transporter broke XD
***** While teleporters and portals have similar features, the fact that it is not suicide to use a Stargate (an artificial portal) makes portals preferable to teleporters.
INDEED,, in one episode teal'c got stuck in the energy form
What really gets is that starting with TNG on replicators and transporters use the same visual and sound effects. They're the same technology. Either that means the replicators are transporting that replicated food from somewhere else (doubtful with the ep of DS9 where some but not all replicators are infected), or transporters are just giant replicators that destroy you the way they do dishes after dinner and replicates a new you at the destination.
As far as I understand it, there is nothing in canon that confirms replicators and transporters are the same technology, otherwise you will have some serious problems:
1. The crews are always transporting dilithium and special medicine using transporters, despite they were shown to be non-replicable;
2. Replicated food are not as tasty as cooking through traditional methods, while transporters are supposed to create a sub-atomic-accurate copy;
3. Klingons and Ferengi go through great trouble to obtain and keep Gagh and Tube Grubs, indicating replicators cannot replicate living things at all;
Star Trek is never big on consistency, but I still think it is much more plausible they are similar, but distinctive technologies.
I think the idea is that the _part_ of the transporter / replicator design that (re)assembles the molecules is what they have in common; where a transporter (I think) directly receives a stream of molecules, a replicator turns energy into matter and then passes that stream of molecules to the assembly part. Then again, it probably doesn't work that way because of the double-Kirk...
I've thought about this since I was 13, please, this shit ain't scaring me, I welcome death with open arms.
/r/iamverysmart
+Bloodstainer Dude I lost like half a year of sleep over this shit when I was 9-10, thought I would die after going to sleep. Surprisingly this happened after a bad surgery... huh
00000ghcbs It came to a point where, what if.. every instanced time would kill you, like every second you're out walking, you die and the "next" part of your conscious just keeps walking.
+Bloodstainer dude yes. I've had the same thought sitting in traffic. crazy shit to consider.
+Bloodstainer In that case the saying "I wasn't born yesterday" would be true, that you are reborn every instance, or every time you wake up from a nap.
Here I was, back in 2006, where Christopher Nolan provoke the same question:
"It took courage to climb into that machine every night...not knowing... if I'd be the man in the box... or the prestige."
The Prestige was such a good movie.
Niiiiiice, i was thinking about this movie too. And holy shit did that line give me chills when i first heard and just now when i read it again
Iirc he was both, since it was a copy machine
Or more recently, by the videogame Soma
@@pablorepetto2759 assuming the copying in soma is relatively perfect you, again, are both
Here's another idea: every moment in time what you have previously experienced is a muddled recreation of what happened to you prior. Eventually memories become too diluted to be understood, and people can change personalities and viewpoints dramatically over their lifetime. What if every moment in time, you are dying and being replaced with another creature who merely knows of the blurry events of it's previous incarnations for the singular moment it exists. Every second, you die thousands of times and your memories mutate like genetics.
Maybe.
WOW that could be RIGHT it makes so mutch sence now!
+ZanzaKlaus I agree. This is the viewpoint I have always held. Think about it. How long can you really vividly remember what happened? Not any longer than a fraction of a second after it happens. Try it. Try to capture an instant of time in your head and it fades immediately. You died.... But, it was a painless death. The issue with transporters is that the death may not be painless.
I think the difference is that your consciousness seems to still be present throughout those 1-second iterations of life you propose. With the transporter problem, it's possible that your consciousness ends completely and a copy of your consciousness is made at the other end. That's the scary part for me, so far there's no way of knowing if consciousness will be transported or recreated.
This is why we created integrals. Does that make you the integral of you dyou from 0 to you?
TNG Season 6 Episode 24 did explore this. Basically showing the duplication process. But the buffer was never flushed. That sure makes it seem like if it makes a copy, the original is eliminated. The Prestige though showed it definitively, and left the audience to ponder the "cost".
I am literally laying in bed about to go to sleep WHY DID YOU DO THIS TO ME
Same
Ditto. Now I'll never sleep...
Or you can adopt the substance view of persons, which does not mean neccesarily that you believe in the soul. As per this view we are ontologically prior to our parts. If you do believe in the soul (I don't), then this could be the basis for continuing identity after death. Are you can propose that we are continuing mental substance (in a body that is not us) and will die if we loose pyschological cohesion with our past instances (primarily though memory). However, that doesn't seem to be correct, sicne I am not just my mind.
"prey to God before and after you sleep", Now I understand.
"Grey to pod." (also *pray)
I don't think that sleeping is a break in consciousness, it just puts your brain on low-power mode.
"breaks in consciousness" doesn't mean death. think of your conciseness as a program. as long as the original copy stays on the same hard disk and never gets deleted, your still alive. software can be reprogramed changed and deleted and copied. but you are the original copy, and you are still alive as long as you are not deleted (AKA brain death.) but this is hypothetical i don't claim this to be scientifically accurate (neither is the video) truth be told we don't have a goddam clue.
No need to speculate, googling it shows that the brain never shuts down during sleep: web.mst.edu/~psyworld/sleep_stages.htm
MrSylfa yea, you would think that would be self explanatory.
*****
Maybe I just need to look up the exact definition of consciousness. I though that sleeping might not count because of dreaming and stuff.
Consciousness is not about remembering. One can sip too much vine or vodka and while still conscious to some extent will not remember anything.
Grey: *saying that maybe, when you will go to sleep, you'll die *
Ad: Heyyyy! Wanna some sleeping pills?
Eh, who cares
Me
R/Humm
i'd buy em up
@@_sto2972 r/foundthemobileuser
It is not a Theory
but just fact that this is 'Matter-to-Energery'-Conversion.
That IS what this tech is, duh.
Grey should research more next time.
Goal: Go to sleep at a decent hour.
Obstacle: Information and Science channels on UA-cam.
"cant stay awake forever" was just about the most ominous thing I've heard ever.
You never saw _Invasion of the Body Snatchers_ ?
CGP Grey, when did you start taking mind altering drugs?
Amsterdam
+NGinuity Philosophy =/= mind altering drugs
A joke == over your head. Don't be so serious. It was funny. Does anybody remember laughter?
NGinuity Well, guess I just don't get the joke. What was the joke?
+NGinuity There was no joke, it's sad to insinuate intelligence or creativity can only come about from drug-use.
This is something I've thought about at length, and I find myself having an existential crisis every time because why stop at breaks in consciousness? How do you know that *you* are the same you that you were an instant ago? All your memories are stored in your brain. If your consciousness entered another brain, wouldn't it just pick up on all of that brain's memories and activate them - just like your brain's memories are constantly being activated whenever you recall something? Why does it matter which consciousness is inside your body when everything that *you* really are is stored inside your body? More importantly, why the hell does my brain feel the need to existentially terrify itself on a near-daily basis? That's the question I'd like answered :P
Spenfen Exactly. And another thing: Think about yourself, 5, 10, maybe 20 years ago. You had none of the same atoms in your body then. You think differently now than you did 10 years ago. The only thing you two share are childhood memories. What makes you two the same person? And at what point, if ever, do you become so different from a past self that you become a "new" person? Pretend that, 10 years ago, you made a different decision or took a different path in life. The "you" that would stem from there would likely become someone much different than who you are today, due to different memories and environment. The choices you make literally make you, you.
What if there is no continious consciousness at all and all we expierience is is just a row of snapshots being connected by memory. What if what you experience as "now" is just the instant that it takes your brain to process all the imput in currently gets kind of like the cpu tickrate and at any new tick the old "you" is being replaced by a new one.
I mean, are we really the same people that we were 5 minutes ago? Or maybe there is no such thing as time in an existential sense and we all just...are.
Man I really wish my brain would spend it's energy on usefull stuff instead of constantly contemplating the meaning of life.
Remus Lupin for that matter, if you were to lose memory. ie amnesia are you still the same person? if the only thing anchoring you is memories and they go, then what?
Remus Lupin hmm, but brain cells don't die. And even if the did, its the pattern that all the parts of you are arranged in that matters.
So eveey time i blink i'm a different person. I will never blink again.
this was such a reassuring episode to me because I am haunted by this thought on a daily basis, and now you are too! We are existentially broken...together!!
Awesome video man. I believe some things are immeasurable. Never thought of saying it like that.
Well, I guess your not sleeping tonight...
+SmarterEveryDay You can measure if something is conscious or not. Don't believe me? Then I guess you go around wondering if rocks and dead sticks are conscious. Btw, it really sucks to be your underpants if they are conscious.
+Cloud Seeker We estimate things are or are not conscious, using rules we have defined. Doesn't mean we can be 100% sure :) Maybe we discover something in the future that proves us wrong, and we have to define new rules. Sure, a rock or dust particle probably isn't conscious, but again, _probably_.
***** The only things we have to change is our understanding of what consciousness is, we don't have to change the rules. Also what is wrong with changing the rules when we are prove the rules are not working for everything? Everything we already know have to be included in the new rules, you just add something more. In Newtonian physics it said gravity exist but was never explained what it was, and before Einstein Newtonian physics was a law you can't question. Einstein showed and proved the thing Newton failed at and Newtonian physics was replaced with the theory of relativity. However that doesn't mean Newtonian physics doesn't exist anymore and is no longer true, its just covered by the theory of relativity.
Unless you can show that rocks and dust are conscious we can measure what consciousness is for the same reason you can measure how a ball will fall down without knowing what gravity actually is.
Cloud Seeker We defined those laws of physics by doing experiments, and confirming those results with real-world experience and other experiments. Over time we have realized that these are laws that are inherent to our world, and apply everywhere, so we understand them as omnipresent laws, but technically they are still only laws we have found through research and obversation. There is a possibility that in the future we'll find that there is more to them, and that we need to add restrictions, or that the behavious explained by those laws of physics rely on other underlying things we haven't discovered yet - even if they are omnipresent laws as far as we can tell, and hence we use them as basis for our explanations of other phenomenons.
Similarly, we've setup rules for what is a conscious being/object based on experiments and observations. Maybe in the future we'll find out that objects we currently don't think have a consciousness do have one. (Although I think it's unlikely we'll ever find out that rocks think, although a funny thought :)) That is all I was trying to say. Generally we only add to laws of physics, but there is a (miniscule) chance we'll have to revise them in the future.
"Sleep well"
Good thing you uploaded this in the morning
Unless you live in Europe or Africa or farther. Then it's either getting close to night or someone just made a terrible mistake.
Was about to sleep (living in the other side of the world)
+Blueconroy It's midnight here in Japan. Good night!! ^.^
The Prestige
true dat
scrolled down to find this
hahaha yes
_The 6th Day_
This is exactly the video that encapsulates my often insomnia and sleep terrors that I’ve been having since I started falling asleep with Star Trek playing back in 2014. It’s the reason why I sometimes wake up in absolute terror during a nap, or during the night and experience such a grief that is immeasurable. Swamp man has been a solid paranoia of mine for years now.
The question is, how does one break free and stop caring? How does one sleep soundly knowing they, the you, may very well not exist the following day? Ignorance is bliss and I wish I was dumber.
Just because something can't be known with absolute certainty doesn't mean the likelihood of one thing over the other isn't vastly more likely.
Both philosophy and neuroscience have considered this question and both conclude it is far more likely that our current 'self' does survive sleep and sedation. The reason is that the fundamental substrate of your consciousness (the brain) never ceases to function in these states. Consciousness doesn't really exist in the way most people think it does, it is simply a product of the brain's function and the aspect of consciousness we experience is awareness. Awareness does cease (sort of) when you sleep or are sedated, but that doesn't mean consciousness is destroyed and then recreated upon waking unlike the transporter, this is where the two situations are distinct.
If we postulate that consciousness is destroyed and recreated upon sleeping and waking then there has to be a process in the brain by which this is happening that is detectable. No such process has ever been detected. Again, you can never be absolutely certain that this is true. But you can sleep soundly knowing that the neuroscientists and philosophers who are the best equipped to give a reasonable answer to this question do not worry about dying when they go to sleep.
I had the same exact panic moment. I found a "workaround" to reinsure myself. I consider we're living in a multiverse with endless possibility but with only ONE consciousness allowed to exist. What does it mean is that, everytime I should have died, my consciousness instead "jumps" into the universe where I actually survived, making that "night aneurysm" a thing I'm certain of surviving. It's not flawless but I try to tell myself it just needs peaufining, but might be close to what's really happening.
Being serious, I had heart surgery. I was unconscious on the table for some hours, with my heart stopped and my temperature brought very low.
When I came around, and the long process of recovery started, I knew I was me, but I didn't FEEL like "me." I felt diminished, as if I was slightly out of body, WATCHING myself doing what I was doing. Not wholly OOB, you understand, but just a bit "zombified."
Then, about two months later I woke up in the morning and suddenly I was "back!" That morning I truly felt like ME again... as if my personality had been restored. It was quite a big difference and not gradual at all.
I don't know if these feelings were significant, but I understand a lot of people feel similar after deep and extended anaesthetic.
I remember feeling this way throughout a 8 month long depression cycle.
@@joaquinalvarez346 Thank you for your response, Joaquin. I am sorry I did not see it before.
I am also sorry that you did not feel good for so long... but I am happy that you seem better now.
Best Wishes to you, and have a good 2020, eh?
I don't think this time of experience is exclusive to losing consciousness. I definitely feel this way, over ten years on from a very traumatic experience. I feel like certain parts of me were cut away; my emotions shallower, my priorities shifted dramatically, my talents diminished, my memory absolutely destroyed. I'm okay(ish) now, but I'm not the same person I was.
@@totallynameless8861 Dear Totally, Please continue to get better... and maybe do it a bit faster, eh? (Sincere wish.)
@@effyleven no one's having a good 2020 anymore, unless they're millennials.
Why I watched this video at 12:37am. xDDDD No sleep tonight...
Same
11:32 PM...
+Ben Dell 12:20
+Mario Lurbe Rookie, it's 05:49 here. And yes I refuse to use the outdated AM/PM system :)
12:55 , just why
Can u please become a stick figure again? This new CGP Grey model really creeps me out…
This.
+Jonathan Castgate I heard there was some licensing issues with stick figures on UA-cam
+Patrick Beecroft I get it #react
+Jonathan Castgate I like the new more huggable grey
+Patrick Beecroft
Really?. Fucking stick figures are trademarked now?
You know, the idea I have that disproves only I exist (as you said, a person can only prove their own existence) is that knowledge exists. We live in a world built upon the foundations of other people's insights in science, engineering, math, etc, and is continuously being built upon, and don't forget history itself and all small facts about each person. One human mind cannot construe such things from nothing and have it all be reasonably consistent alone. Thus, the people you see but whose existences you cannot directly sense are actual people, because they know things you don't.
DON'T THINK ABOUT IT
DON'T THINK ABOUT IT
DON'TTHINKABOUTIT
DON'TTHINKABOU-AGGGGHHHHHHHHHH
Damnit, existensialism.
That's what she said ....
(GLaDOS)
I was going to make a different portal 2 reference, where Cave Johnson tells you not to think about having a reaction to the repulsion jell because thinking about it triggers the reaction.
I'm so glad I watched this in the morning instead of right before bed.
Enjoy your last day of life
Im going to sleep
Dude I was literally about to turn off UA-cam and go to sleep when I thought "ah one more video won't hurt. Big mistake
agreed
SOMA. That is all.
+ArcadiaCv You got that right. "The coin flip" distressed me for about 5 minutes. Then I realized, there is no coin flip. There is no either-or. Both realities are 100% guaranteed. So we better get used to the idea of multiple copies of ourselves running around, because digital brain emulation IS COMMING.
SOMA? Ha.
Try _Rapture of the Nerds_.
+Maren “The17thsailor” Jones but what happened when Simon became the deep diving suit?
+ArcadiaCv Came to say this. Amazing game, still think about it some days,
Exactly.
Quantum mechanics has this thing called the "no-cloning principle", which means you cannot precisely create a multitude version of any quantum system. You, molecule-filled you, are a quantum system.
Note that this doesn't rule out teleportation: we can't duplicate, but we can propagate. Turning a person in a precise quantum measurement will necessarily destroy the original and turning that signal into a person can happen only once.
You don't need to know every atom to recreate a brain, you just need to know positioning, interconnections and circuittype of each neuron with their accompanying axon myleniation and glial support cells. Any phenomenon that mediates randomness in the brain such as ionizing radiation, glial responses and protein movement within neurons can be simplified into simple RNG weight based systems. There should be no difference between this simulation and you. The actual only solution to this problem is that "you" are inside 2 minds at once and each mind is liable to the laws of physics so the minds can't do telepathy or intercommunicate and as such you cannot realize that you are in 2 bodies at once.
@@tassadardaris7294 in that case we're talking deconstruction and approximation, and then there is no paradox. You just took a thousand pictures of a house, demolished it, and built an exact replica. The original has been destroyed but an outsider would be none the wiser.
Also, for consciousness we simply do not know enough to assess whether statistical approximation does or does not suffice.
The scary part is not just thinking about me being the only actually conscious human, and everyone else I know a creation of my own consciousness, but that these imaginary creatures keep dropping hints that they are indeed imaginary as if they're trying to wake me up. By the way I might not exist and I'm just your brain telling you to wake up.
Your not dreaming and your not the only person who's self aware.i can assure you that I am a living thinking person who has dreams and ideas wants and needs just like you. If anything I am the dreamer and you are the dream.
+Nikos Tsakas Jr. -- Shut up fake conciousnesses. I told you to stop breaking the 7th wall three millennia ago!
+Nikos Tsakas Jr. I think your fear is unfoundedwemissyoupleasewakeupbecause you could never dream up something as awful as this 'world.'
+Nikos Tsakas Jr. This is called "solipsism".
I saw a video on vsause on that,
I disagree that sleep and surgery is an interruption of consciousness
Elaborate.
+mapagatu what about a deep coma?
+mapagatu I agree, consciousness may end but thought does not, your brain is still performing processes and possibly dreaming. Even if you can't remember these processes they are still happening and thus the greater stream is never broken. In my mind, all mental processes must be ended to break the stream not just the higher level ones.
+TheWolfboy180 Dreams.
TheWolfboy180 Well you still have a sense of continuity when you sleep. I remember moments when I was asleep better than others when I was awake that same day. So really the brain activity is still there and is not at all comparable with the interruption that would occur from the transporter method
I have never been so glad to have already gotten my existential crisis out of the way when I was younger.
Digitally uploading our minds and teleportaion have always left me wondering if you technically die during the process. I have raised this question on other channels that discuss such matters. A fan of yours set me here for more information and I am glad he did. You have gained a new subscriber!
The scariest part of this video is cgp grey with an actual body
god fucking dammit, just take the like, subscription and comment and let me sleep
my condolences
That last line. "Still here? You can't stay awake forever."
I know, I heard that too! Terrified.
I love how I got into watching a video like this thinking that it'll post the blatant, emotionally jarring theory like "transporters just copy you" but ignore the more nuanced counterpoint of sleep being an interruption of perspective too, _but then it addresses it._ This is how a video should be! It presents what we know, and isn't afraid to put equal weight on what we _don't_ know, in order to raise more inconspicuous questions and inspire the viewer to think, instead of just be told what to think.
As a side note, I'd like to add that I'm not suggesting brain activity as a product or cause (depending on your belief) of consciousness during sleep is unquantifiable. I'm pointing out that it's _good_ to think outside the box and recognize that even within the range of what we know, there are things that we don't know or have trouble proving. Recognizing an uncertain conclusion is healthy and underrated, compared to treating uncertainty as falsehood, which is just being a conspiracy nut.