Roko’s Basilisk is just pascal’s wager but with AI.

why does it need to choose bodies?

The bit about things being made of different subatomic particles is interesting, because its actually, to my knowledge, difficult to truly prove that, because fundamental enough particles dont seem to have a lot of the differences seen between similar objects of larger scale. There are even ideas (not proven ones mind, just food for thought) that some of them might actually be the same, for example, theres an idea that there might be just one electron in the universe that bounces around in time and space such as to look like there are more of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe

My point there though, is if “different” fundamental particles are so similar as for it to not even be clear that they are necessarily different, what would the underlying mechanism be for a notable difference to using different ones?

Im not really convinced by your final bit about continuity, but I think its more down to my difficulty in explaining what I mean exactly by calling it not real. I dont mean to say that we cant define a label for an idea like “no atoms entered or left this battery pack”, but rather that theres no particular indication that the universe “cares” (cares really isnt the right word but I simply cant think of the right one and I guess cares is as close as I can think of, just strip the part out that implies conscious intent or thinking) about that label once we’ve defined it.

If we return to your analogy of cars, “cars” also arent really real, not in the sense that the concept applies only to things that are completely fictional the way, say “vampires” does, but in a sense like, there is a fundamental, non-arbitrary difference between, say, an electron and a photon, such that they interact with the physical laws of the universe in a distinct way. A car meanwhile, is just a collection of these fundamental particles, which does not have any distinct rules for itself among the physical laws of the universe, and rather has behavior that is merely emergent from its constituent parts following the behavior of those particles. The universe has no distinct concept that a given mass is a “car”, but does seem to for an electron (again, “concept” isnt really the right word because it implies thinking and intent, which Im not trying to ascribe to the universe here, but again I struggle to find a word that better fits the idea that Im trying to communicate).

If, suddenly, every electron, proton etc (fundamental particles that is) in your phone’s battery were suddenly swapped with others of the same type of particle from elsewhere in the universe, there would be absolutely no way to detect it. Presumably, this would break the continuity of that battery, but if we took a snapshot of the universe right before the swap, and one immediately after such that no time has passed between them, the only way there could be any difference at all between them would be if there was some kind of unique “label” for each particle fundamental particle to make them distinct from one another, something that, as far as I am aware, there isnt any evidence to suggest is the case. Without that added layer of complexity added to the universe, the swap would be like swapping one pixel of an image with another pixel elsewhere in the image that has the exact same color value- the result there wouldnt be a new image, because no information has been changed, it would just be the exact same image again. That is to say, the particle swap wouldnt be physically meaningful at all, unless you assume the universe has that specific unproven property added to make fundamental particles non-interchangeable, which occams razor would suggest I discount until proven otherwise, because a universe with non-unique fundamental particles is simpler than one with extra information to distinguish each. And if that swap isnt physically meaningful, then the universe before and after the swap dont have any change in information to them that could represent the break in continuity in the first place, which drives me to the conclusion that either continuity somehow exists outside the universe, which again adds another unneeded bit of complexity to reality that I can discount as less likely with occam’s razor, or else that the concept of continuity is just one of the many made-up concepts that we use to help make the universe easier to think about, like labeling some arrangements of matter “cars” based on their general emergent properties, that dont have any true basis in the physical laws that actually describe the behavior of the universe.

I don’t see an issue with having two yous that are nonetheless separate people from eachother, that’s actually exactly what I think would happen in such an instance. Asking which is “you” would be like watching a cell undergo mitosis and then asking which one is the original cell. Continuity mattering seems like a problem to me because it feels like it should require involving something outside the material universe to make it make sense. I’m not sure how best to explain this, but it seems to me that:

1. you exist, for obvious reasons, since you perceive yourself
2. you aren’t everyone and everything
3. the previous two things should mean that there is something about what you are that makes it, you, and not someone else, nor some unconscious zombie

If that thing, whatever it is, is part of the material universe, then the perfect copy must have it too by definition, it wouldn’t be a perfect copy if there was something materially different about it, and then it would have to be you, because it has whatever that thing is that makes it “you”. If that thing exists but is not present in a physically identical copy, then wherever it exists must be outside the physical universe, yet capable of some kind of interaction with it (since presumably you cease if killed materially). That isn’t logically impossible, but requires adding an entire layer to reality to make it make sense, which seems premature when other interpretations don’t require this (and we could end up in the same boat anyway, if I made a thought experiment that suggests some really advanced technology has found a way to manipulate this other layer too, and copies you there as well) Continuity (for anything, not just humans) by itself isn’t really a “thing”. It isn’t made of anything, and doesn’t seem to interact with the physical world in any measurable way. As far as I can tell, it requires making fewer unproven assumptions about how the universe works to assume that continuity is merely a concept we made up due to the manner in which we perceive time, without any actual physical validity to it.

I think the first of those approximates my view, just with the added caveat that your consciousness is “something”, since we use the word to describe some aspect of our experience even if we don’t fully understand it, and if there’s no physical basis for anything to have been lost in this process because the copy is the same, that implies to me that your consciousness must have been preserved or recreated as well.

What “you” are changes with time (consider that you’re quite different now from when you were, say, 5). The implication of this is that once a copy is made, new experiences are formed by both copies and their patterns change in divergent ways. If you destroy one after a copy is made, the changes undergone by the destroyed one after the copying aren’t transferred to or recreated again, and so are lost. Or in other words, if you make a perfect copy, they’re identical at the moment of creation, but virtually immediately afterwards won’t be. If you destroy the original before making the copy, then the copy is identical to the original at the moment it is destroyed, ideally, and so the same state last experienced is re-achieved and can develop further.

I’m struggling to think of the proper words to explain my thoughts on this subject, so I’m sure my responses about it are somewhat confusing, and my attempts to elaborate make them fairly long, I’m sorry about that.

Something that I think might be a source of some of that confusion is that I get the impression that many think of consciousness as a distinct nonphysical “thing” that is somehow tethered to the brain, such that the destruction of the brain results in the severing of that connection in a way that means it can’t be caught and pulled back again by any physical process, similar to how people that believe in souls posit them to behave.

I do not believe consciousness works this way. I think that it literally is a specific form of information, or perhaps an emergent effect of certain kinds of information processing, and thus, is a part of the physical universe in the same sort of way that a digital image is (the image itself isn’t “made” of any substance and can be encoded into any form of matter that can be organized into a sufficiently complex arrangement, but that organization physically exists, changing it changes the image, or produces a new but similar one depending on how you define it, and it cannot exist if no matter exists in an arrangement that can encode it), and as a result of that, getting it back just requires getting some matter into an arrangement that encodes it again. The tricky bit is that unlike a digital image, it isn’t a static sort of information but a changing one. So, to take the analogy further, replace the image with a computer program that takes inputs from the world around it, and then rewrites it’s own code in response to those inputs. If you take this algorithm, pause it, copy it’s state and destroy the original machine while rewriting that state into a new machine in a new location, and unpause the program on the new machine, you’d get the same results as if you had just paused it, moved the original machine to the new location and unpaused it at the same time you would have unpaused the copied program. There’s no basis to say that you have a different program, because they have the same code and are behaving the same. But if you unpaused the original machine, its instance of the program will change itself, and then if you destroy it now, the copy won’t reach the state that that last version of the original would have reached had you brought it to the new location too. In this analogy, killing a person is equivalent to one of these programs reaching a state that is no longer continued, so if you continue it later, somewhere else, even on new hardware, that’s fine, and if you create a branch and keep both running, that’s also fine, but if you create a branch, and then destroy one without recording it’s state to recreate it later, or just never actually run it again on a new machine, that branch has reached an end state that doesn’t continue changing itself, and so you’ve had “someone” die.

Youd get two people who are both “you” from before the copying, in the same sense that you are the same you that existed in your past, but arent the same as eachother anymore because they both get different inputs and experiences and develop along different paths.

No, because you also change with time. You from today are slightly different than what you are yesterday, and you from a second from now will be slightly different from you from right now, because your thinking requires the patterns in your brain to change, just a little. If you copy yourself, both of you will experience different things, and dont have a means to sync those different inputs between you, and so you immediately diverge into two separate if similar entities. Youre both equally a progression of the original and so both are that original person in the same way that you as an adult and you as a kid are the same person, but once diverged youre no longer the same person as eachother. If the teleporter destroys the original while scanning them and then recreates them, theres only ever one of you at once. You only get an issue if you make the copy before destroying the original, because then there are experiences formed after the scanning process, and that new version of the identity is lost.

A bit like how theres a notion you sometimes get in sci-fi or some hypothesis about quantum stuff, that any event where more than one outcome is possible creates a different branching universe for each of the outcomes, and if you could somehow travel to one of those places, you’d find someone that was you up to the point of that event, but now has been shaped by different experiences since.

I don’t believe continuity of consciousness is actually required to maintain the identity of consciousness, is the thing. I think that, if you died, and then were brought back some how, you wouldn’t have some “new” consciousness that merely think it’s the first one, but literally would have the first one again, to the degree that such a thing can be called the same from moment to moment even under normal circumstances anyway.

I tend to think what “you” are is the pattern formed by the various electrical and chemical signals in your brain and whatever other parts of your body are involved in cognition, and since patterns are ultimately information, and a completely identical copy of some information is the same information with nothing to distinguish it, that a sufficiently perfect copy of you literally is you, and as such, if the teleporter works the way fictional teleporters are generally described as working, then yes, it is you.

I do find it somewhat interesting that there is a sense with some that a hydrogen airship could never be safe enough to carry crew, or even exist unmanned, but at the same time, we can make rockets containing massive tanks of liquid hydrogen, right next to huge tanks of liquid oxygen, propelled by a massive continuous explosion, safe enough to put people in. Obviously the accepted risk for rockets is a bit higher, but still, its not like we dont know how hydrogen works, and what conditions it does and doesnt explode under.

honestly, I bet we could probably make a hydrogen one reasonably safe, if we really wanted to. Sure, its flammable and all, but so is jet fuel, and we can throw giant tanks of that stuff into the air safely with enough engineering put into it.

Hard to say that theyre really safer, when the primary safety incident everyone thinks of, occurred during the 1930s, a time whose airplanes certainly wouldnt have been as safe as modern ones either

That watch salesman really ripped you off then.

I swear every time I play that game, half my army ends up being pawns, the weakest piece.

Tbh I dont think that this is actually incompatible with determinism, since the mechanism by which the future is predetermined doesnt necessarily have to be that all causes only have one possible effect associated with them. I mostly suspect the universe is deterministic because I suspect (though this is only a suspicion that I cannot prove) that the universe has block time and therefore that, even if random events with no clear “this must lead to that” chain exist, the future is predetermined merely by “already” existing along some time axis. Sort of like how if you had a character in a flipbook roll a die, and nothing earlier in the flipbook forces the die to have to land on one particular number to keep the plot self-consistent, the outcome of the die will still always be the same, because the pages where its result is shown already have been drawn.

Fight what exactly? Determinism either is or isnt how the universe works, it isnt like some sort of external force of finite capacity that can be resisted by some application of effort. If it is true, then you have no choice but to act the way something like you would act, and the way humans are wired to think is in terms of choices and the possible outcomes of those choices, even if the choice you make and the thinking that leads you to it is inevitable. If it is not true, then the possibility of making different choices exists, but it doesnt look any different to you because you only get to perceive the result of following one set of them.

The thing about determinism is that while it may be an interesting philosophical exercise, beyond being difficult to maybe impossible to prove or disprove, it isnt really relevant to much. A deterministic universe looks, feels, and acts to us exactly like a nondeterministic one would.