Yup. It’s incredibly convenient, I have no idea why people stopped using it. I follow a bunch of youtube channels, webcomics, podcasts, blogs, and apps in development. If there’s some way other than RSS to have all those updates show up on a single page, I don’t know it.

To flip it, aren’t they life creating machines as much as murder machines?

Yes, but having a baby doesn’t exculpate you of murder. It doesn’t cancel out.

If a person is cloned by a transporter there are two of that person

Yes, thank you! Finally! That’s what I’ve been trying to explain this entire time!

Well you can fuck yourself if it pleases.

That’s not very nice, and it makes me sad that you resort to insults rather than more sincere arguments in the face of criticism. And just when we were getting somewhere. Oh well, have a nice day.

I could dispute that

Yeah, well, in Strange New Worlds the doctor’s daughter isn’t even aware she’s being put through a transporter until he tells her, so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (also, spoiler warning)

starts up again, indistinguishable from before

It is distinguishable by its history, which is known. Understanding that two things that are identical are still two different things and not the same thing seems like a very basic cognitive ability developed pretty early in childhood, and I should probably remember what the technical term for it is, I’m sure there is one. It’s also universally understood and accepted that genuine things are more valuable than their replicas, even if the replicas are so good that their lack of documented history is the only thing that distinguishes them from their genuine models. (This is why genuine antiques with known provenance are far more expensive than even perfect fakes.) As such, I find it very difficult to believe you’re arguing in good faith here.

with every right to call itself “me”.

Oh really? Okay, another thought experiment: Let’s say someone creates a perfect clone of you. Does that clone now have rights to your property? Is it okay if he/she sleeps with your spouse?

I would love my children if they suddenly were twins.

But would you be okay with your child being taken away and replaced with a duplicate? If you’re being honest, you should be. Nothing’s changed from your point of view, it’s the same person. Right?

If I copy information from one substrate to another, and do so with no changes, I don’t have any new information.

But you have a different instance of it. If there were no distinction, copyright wouldn’t exist.

The pattern buffer serves the same function of redundancy.

No, because people are not conscious in the pattern buffer.

The pattern of synapse connections firing is what thinks it’s “you” and the transport duly preserves that pattern.

Yes, but consciousness is not a pattern, it’s an activity, and that activity gets interrupted. Saying that the consciousness continues is like saying that an aircraft that made a flight, landed, and then made another flight really only made one continuous flight. It’s the activity that we’re talking about, and the interruption divides that activity into two distinct instances, even though it’s the same object performing them.

If a loved one took a transporter trip I’d love them just the same when they got back though.

That’s not what I asked. The transporter destroys the original person, which makes it easy to pretend that the clone is that person. The point of my question is that you know that the original is still around somewhere out there. So I ask again: Would you be okay with your loved one being replaced by a perfect clone that looks and acts exactly the same, identical down to the last atom, while knowing that the original still exists elsewhere? Or would you consider that new version to be an impostor?

how does one know that the duplicate doesn’t somehow inherit the original consciousness, and some new one with the memories and personality of it doesn’t get immediately generated in the original body?

Consciousness is brain activity. New brain = new activity = new consciousness.

Yup, pretty much. It’s a shame Star Trek recognizes and points out this problem but then chickens out of it actually having any consequences.

If a consciousness thinks it’s continuous that consciousness is continuous.

No, it’s simply mistaken.

The substrate your consciousness dances on also changes all the time. Molecules arranged around the galaxy or cells dying and being replaced pose the exact same quandary, and the solution to both would seem to be “who cares”?

The difference is that molecules and cells don’t all disappear at once. Consciousness is brain activity, and the brain has redundancy that allows that activity to continue uninterrupted even while small parts are being swapped out. When you destroy the whole thing, though, the activity stops.

The arrangement of cells and neurons known as “You” goes in, the arrangement of cells and neurons known as “You” comes out.

Would you be okay with your child (or some other loved one) being forcibly taken away and replaced with a perfect clone? If what you’re saying is true, you should be, since according to you they’re not just a copy, they’re literally the same person.

Easy, build the clone without destroying the original, then test if they share perceptions and memories. Show one a playing card and ask the other what card it was or something. Proving that two people don’t have the same consciousness is pretty trivial, and I don’t know of any philosophical schools that would dispute that.

It’s unfortunate that the headline and much of the article is needlessly sensationalized. The article makes it seems as if our previous understanding had been completely wrong and was now completely overturned, and that’s simply not the case. The new finding is that aggression can be the result of self-control, but it’s pretty clear from the words of the researcher and the abstract of the paper that aggression resulting from a lack of self-control also exists (“We often fail to inhibit our worst, most aggressive impulses. But that is only one side of the story.” and “balanced perspective, which allows aggression to arise from successful and unsuccessful self-control”).

Research indicates that the brain’s prefrontal cortex, a center of self-control, shows increased activity during aggression, further debunking the association between poor self-control and aggression.

That doesn’t debunk shit. It’s obvious why the prefrontal cortex would be active in the case of premeditated aggression, but this finding makes perfect sense even in cases of spontaneous, uncontrolled aggression. In that case, the prefrontal cortex is trying to exert self-control, it’s just failing at it. But that activity would still show up.

Very interesting findings, but the reporting is pretty poor.

The US didn’t decide to start this war, but it still has to fight it or it’s going to lose it.

It’s not our war. It’s not our fight. It has nothing to do with us.

That’s where you’re wrong. America has a global empire, and Russia is one of the other powers trying to undermine and dismantle it. If America wants to keep its empire and the many benefits it brings, it has no choice but to defend it. Be thankful you’re only having to spend money while someone else is spending lives.

The Ukrainians seemed pretty grateful for the help. One would have to be pretty thoroughly brainwashed by propaganda to sincerely believe that we’re somehow doing more harm than good by providing aid to a nation fighting against an invader intending to commit genocide.

I thought they pledged not to use them around civilians or in Russia.

I don’t find many reasons to be proud of my country, but the fact that we were the first to give tanks to Ukraine absolutely is one.

a plausible argument could be made on humanitarian grounds that a negotiated settlement as quickly as possible is the best of the bad options

Absolutely not, that idea is based on a total lack of historical memory and amounts to nothing more than kicking the can down the road. Russia will not accept anything less than keeping the territories it currently occupies, and that’s not an option. This invasion happened because Russia had been getting away with this kind of stuff for two decades. It’s not Putin’s first land grab. It was Chechnya in 2000, Georgia in 2008, Crimea in 2014, the rest of Ukraine in 2022. They took a small bite at first, and when they got away with it, they took a bigger bite next. And again, and again. Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Allowing Russia to get away with this and keep the territories it took guarantees another repetition of the same pattern less than a decade later with yet more devastating results. If we had nipped this in the bud, the war could’ve been avoided entirely. The second best time is now.

If this were on Reddit, I’d have no doubt that those comments are from Russian trolls. I doubt there are many of those here yet, so I guess they’re just useful idiots who have had their brains washed.

Eh… I figure if CMs weren’t effective, they wouldn’t be using them. There’s a good reason the military heavyweights refuse to join the international treaty that bans them.

Also, the whole discussion is basically moot, since apparently Ukraine has been using old Soviet CMs all along anyway. Getting more modern American ones with a much lower percentage of duds will be nothing but an improvement.

“there are already mines so spreading more is good”?

More like “tons of mines are being placed every day, so stopping that from happening is good”.