If you replace every part of the real Picard with robot Picard parts is it still the real Picard?
If you replace every part of the real Picard with robot Picard parts is it still the real Picard?
The Starship of Theseus?
I kept trying to find a Theseus joke, thanks.
At the very least, he was already cybernetic, what with his heart and all.
No. At that point he would be Locutus.
This is the transporter dilemma, too. Disintegrating people kills them. Making a long range replicator spit out an exact duplicate with all their memories doesn't mean they've moved.
You are now are not the same as 1 second ago. Does it mean that you-1-sec-ago died?
Oh boy, philosophers have been salivating over that question for millenia, and they've come up with some terrible answers lol
My son and I talked at length about this one, and we agree with Bones. You wouldn't get me to go through a transporter unless I was already going to die. If there's any sort of afterlife, or soul, then that's where the people who have been transported are, and everyone else is a facsimile of themselves.
Humanity has a complicated relationship with organized religion.
Was there ever such a thing as the “real Picard” to begin with? Or is the continuity of identity just a lie we tell ourselves to keep from going mad?
As long as he still has original thought. Considering our bodies are pure mechanical, original thought is all there is distinguishing us as not artificial. At least that's what we're programmed to think.
"Neither are the true Picard. Both are the true Picard."
Both are the ship. Neither are the ship.
At that point we might as well call him Theseus