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I would say shooting someone takes away their life, the dead body is still a dead human body :P

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Using a computer as an example again. Your brain is like the hardware, but your consciousness is like a running program. If you end that program that person (to me) dies even if you were to start up another copy of that program some place else. There is no connection between the first person and the second persons consciousness. However, if you where able to link the persons brain to the computer brain and some how MOVE that consciousness along the connection so that it moved from the human to the computer then I would consider doing it if I were on my death bed :P Secondly I would want that computer to be housed inside of a robot with really strong armor around the new computer brain (ala Ghost in the shell)

For the teleporter I would want to make sure that when my body is broken down that somehow my active program, my consciousness , whatever it IS would be sent along with my energy to the new location and placed inside the new body so that my consciousness is never broken or replicated only the phyiscal form. It would be hard, like you say, for anyone to REALLY know if that was transfered as the new clone would assume it worked even if it had not (How would they know?) The only person that would really know would be the dead guy :P And he wouldn’t REALLY know because he’d be destroyed.

This gets even more complicated if you believe in a soul. Can you xfer your soul to the computer or the new cloned body ? Will it just float away and if so what does that mean?

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Anyway in my example I’d like to think the mad scientist would rig up suitable I/O systems to allow the newly simulated brain a nice existence. If he didn’t there’s no way I’m letting him anywhere near my brain!

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There are definitely some ethical worries for teleporters regarding this type of thing. After all if both survive then clearly they won’t be each other and the one who wasn’t transported definitely looks like they’ve got the best case for being the same person as the original but if the original was supposed to be destroyed like in Star Trek then I suppose the copy could argue that they were what they intended and the original only exists because an error prevented their destruction and so they are more in line with the wishes of the original. I think they’d both have pretty much equally good claims.

I think that if next week an exact copy was made of me then in the instant of creation (if such a thing makes sense) I would exist in two places at once, then would be different people but both me. Basically I guess I don’t think personal identity obeys the logic of an identity relation because I don’t think it’s transitive, I don’t think that just because person A is person B and person B is person C that person A is person C.

I think it’s a really good question if you create an exact copy of yourself but in the process kill the original did you do anything wrong? I don’t think so but if you say teleported yourself to another location and then once you arrived sent a signal back to say you’d arrived and the original could be destroyed and if your original had be conscious during the delay then even if it was only a few seconds I think that’s probably be wrong (I’m hesitant to label it murder because I don’t think it’s very wrong) because by that point you’re slightly different people but if the copy sent a message back to the original saying they’d arrived safely and the original, if they trusted the technology, may not mind committing suicide too much at that point since only the most recent few seconds would be lost (just like quick loading right after quick saving). Imagine a scenario in which you could walk into a booth and us it to create a copy of yourself in another special booth anywhere but permanent duplication was illegal (and I think that would actually be necessary because otherwise there would be an urge to hedge your bets with important life choices and do both) so you’d walk into the booth and send a copy but then you’d both be locked in and the original would have to choose which one would be allowed to live and until one was dead neither would be allowed to leave. Would such a system catch on as a method of travel? Would anyone walk into a booth, see a copy of themselves appear and then press the button to accept the transfer and painlessly destroy themselves. I think in the end it would because I think the fact that the copies would be, with good reason, convinced they were the same person as the originals and they’d be happy to do it again and they’d win most people round so I think in the end it would become accepted that this is how you travel.

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So I didn’t read through everything you guys where going on about with regards to humanity and it being taken away or not, but I did see something about simulating a human brain in a computer in a way to create a human-like consciousness. The problem I see with this is that one’s self is more than just a conscious state or consciousness.
I’ll analogize a human and a desktop PC. So the human brain has a state of being that is directly dependent on all the sensory inputs coming in from the various senses of the host body. So if you could take that brain and make it live in a jar, it would only have any sense of reality through whatever senses it had available. This also goes for the computer simulation of a brain.
Now if not only the brain but also the sensory inputs that make up the brain’s perceptions of reality where also simulated, you might have some form of virtual humanity inside the simulation.
The point being, a consciousness without a way to perceive reality is like booting your PC without a monitor or keyboard or mouse or video card or hard drive plugged in. It will turn on and such, but it’s not going to be able to really do anything without something being loaded into it to process. Without some sort of I/O for a consciousness, how does it perceive anything or itself.

Carry on.

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If the computer program allowed the brain data to work just like it would (Or better than it would) in a human brain then yes I think that brain would be a person in its own right. I’m not sure if that brain would be ME but it would be just like me. That is one of things that has always worried me about Star Trek type transporters. Is that person that shows up on the other side really YOU or is it just a copy and paste of you the moment before you were murdered by the transporter that turned you into pure energy on the other side ? :P When you copy and paste text is the new text the same as the old text? It is, but at the same time it is in a diffrent place and time and was created at that moment, not connected in any way to the origonal text other than by the fact it is the same physically.

I concede I am wrong. I would have to agree with you that being a human only depends upon your DNA. What I was getting at indeed was a figure of speech and not technically correct.

Now here is an interesting question. If an alien had the same morals and codes and mental abilities as a human but had totally diffrent form they’d obviously not physically be human, but would they have “humanity” In that sense if they shared our basic morals towards one another?

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