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.
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.