Hi, I’m a naturalistic determinist atheist. I won’t be taking a teleporter. The problem is that my body (which my continuous conscious experience resides in) will get erased if I do.
Replace “dismantled by the teleporter” with “shot in the head,” and it might make it a bit more obvious why it matters that the original you dies. I wouldn’t want to be shot in the head, even if I knew there was a perfect facsimile of me being constructed the moment the bullet entered my brain. The fact that this me would die makes intuitive sense to me.
Oh, I am very aware of it being like death. My point is that we were never alive at all. We have no consciousness because of determinism, we follow a path that cannot be changed. That’s why teleportation is not a problem from a deterministic atheist standpoint.
However I do fully acknowledge that I can not live like that. I live as if I have free will, because that is the easiest and most comfortable way to live. Beside nature / nurture arguments of course, I don’t dismiss those.
My point is that we were never alive at all. We have no consciousness because of determinism, we follow a path that cannot be changed.
This doesn’t follow. Consciousness does not necessitate free will. Just because it’s an emergent property of a complex set of deterministic chemical reactions in our brains doesn’t mean it somehow isn’t real. If you end that set of chemical reactions, your consciousness ends, even if you start an identical set of reactions going in a different brain somewhere else.
Hi, I’m a naturalistic determinist atheist. I won’t be taking a teleporter. The problem is that my body (which my continuous conscious experience resides in) will get erased if I do.
Replace “dismantled by the teleporter” with “shot in the head,” and it might make it a bit more obvious why it matters that the original you dies. I wouldn’t want to be shot in the head, even if I knew there was a perfect facsimile of me being constructed the moment the bullet entered my brain. The fact that this me would die makes intuitive sense to me.
Oh, I am very aware of it being like death. My point is that we were never alive at all. We have no consciousness because of determinism, we follow a path that cannot be changed. That’s why teleportation is not a problem from a deterministic atheist standpoint.
However I do fully acknowledge that I can not live like that. I live as if I have free will, because that is the easiest and most comfortable way to live. Beside nature / nurture arguments of course, I don’t dismiss those.
This doesn’t follow. Consciousness does not necessitate free will. Just because it’s an emergent property of a complex set of deterministic chemical reactions in our brains doesn’t mean it somehow isn’t real. If you end that set of chemical reactions, your consciousness ends, even if you start an identical set of reactions going in a different brain somewhere else.