• AFK BRB Chocolate (CA version)@lemmy.ca
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    2 months ago

    If they made a spare of each of Thomas’s parts, replaced them one at a time, and then reassembled all his original parts, would there be two Thomases with all his thoughts and memories?

    • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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      2 months ago

      Why not just assemble all of Thomas’ spare parts immediately, without dismantling the original? Same end result, should be indistinguishable.

      • AFK BRB Chocolate (CA version)@lemmy.ca
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        2 months ago

        So with a human, if you could make all the parts and assemble them, it wouldn’t result in the result having all the memories because the brain part doesn’t work that way - it stores memories and experiences that the fresh parts wouldn’t have. We know Thomas is sentient, but as far as we’ve seen, all his parts are just train parts (maybe face notwithstanding); we have never seen that there’s a brain part.

        So I’m going to postulate that there’s some essence of Thomas that persists through the part swaps. What’s unclear is whether or not those individual pieces that are swapped out retain the essence of Thomas and would be recreated if they were reassembled.