Advertisement
Please wait...

Good Night / Good Bye



Estimated reading time — 3 minutes

“Do you believe in Cartesian duality?”

“Cartesian what?”

“That consciousness is not caused by physical processes but by something else — some sort of soul if you will.”

“I guess not.”

“Well, then I guess I shouldn’t-“

“You promised!”

“Ok, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. There’s a famous thought experiment that goes like this: In the future, a teleportation device has been invented. It works by creating a perfect copy of whatever is put into it at the receiving end and then destroying the original at the sending end. If you use the machine to travel to Hawaii or something, what comes out will have all your memories, behave exactly like you—it would be impossible for anyone to tell the difference. Now the question is whether this is you—in other words, would you be willing to use this machine?”

“Um…if the thing that comes out is a perfect replica of me I don’t see why not”

“Really? Doesn’t your body at the sending end get destroyed though?”

Advertisements

“Well, my body gets slowly replaced piece by piece every few years anyways. If what comes out is exactly like me for all practical purposes, then there is no reason to think it isn’t me. This is a cute example and all, but I really don’t see the point.”

“Well, Ok then, let’s try another scenario. You figure out one day that there is a perfect replica of earth in some alternate universe. Of course this other earth has a perfect replica of you, your family, your hometown—everything you care or know about. Unfortunately, someone tells you that it isn’t Ok for these two planets to be exactly the same and that to make them different, either you or your replica has to die. He then surprisingly offers you the choice. Which would you want to survive?”

“Oh, interesting, I guess my copy will probably be getting the same talk and question, but I would clearly want myself to live. Whether this actually effects the outcome is unclear. I understand the other example better now, but even so, there are never going to be two of me after I step into the teleporter.”

“I’m not sure you’re getting the point, doesn’t the example with the alternate universes show that even a perfect copy of you isn’t necessarily the same as you?”

“Hmm, I guess. There’s still no reason to think that what comes out of the receiving end isn’t me though.”

“Well, let’s go back to the point about there being two of you. Imagine if the teleporter sometimes developed problems and destroyed the sending end copy seconds to minutes after the receiving end copy was created. Now which one is you?”

“Ah, so in this situation the sending end copy is me and the machine would basically be killing me. But it seems so artificial for whether the receiving end copy is actually me to depend on the specific timing of things. Therefore I guess I would definitely never want to use such a machine.”

Advertisements

“Right.”

“Wait, the scariest part about this is that if for whatever reason I did teleport, the me that comes out the other end would have all my memories and therefore remember going through the teleportation machine safely. It would actually think that teleportation is a good idea!”

“Yeah, you can imagine some poor sucker who thinks he’s gone through thousands of safe teleportations, not realizing his experience only started at the end of the last one and that he just has a bunch of fake memories of all the previous copies of himself.”

“Wow, that’s sort of terrible.”

“Anyways, so now that we are on the same page about that—“

“Wait a second, suddenly my consciousness is tied up to the fixed physical elements of my current body. Why isn’t that silly for the reasons I was talking about before?”

“Oh, so here it helps to think of your consciousness as some instance of some complicated process run using the bits and pieces that make up your body. While the pieces may switch out over the years the specific instance of the process continues. When your body is completely destroyed by the teleporter, the instance of the process stops and you stop experiencing permanently—in other words, you die.”

“Ok, fine, I guess that makes sense. The only problem is that I know of thousands of times in my life that my instance of this process has shut off.”

Advertisements

“Ah, you seem to have hit the crux of the problem. Every time you sleep, right?”

“Yeah.“

“Are you sure this isn’t a problem with the argument but instead something that the argument is telling you about sleep?”

“Stop trying to scare me, I have personal experience of surviving sleep thank you very much.”

“Um…do you remember the sucker who thought he had been through hundreds of safe teleportations? Another instance of the process drawing on the same intact pool of memories does start when you wake up, after all.”

“…”

“Anyways, good night! I guess since there is a good chance that I won’t ever be seeing you again, I should be saying good bye too.”

Please wait...

Copyright Statement: Unless explicitly stated, all stories published on Creepypasta.com are the property of (and under copyright to) their respective authors, and may not be narrated or performed under any circumstance.

56 thoughts on “Good Night / Good Bye”

  1. All the criticizing comments! Wow. I would rate 10/10 because I’m into philosophy and English and this pasta really did creep me out. :D

  2. So why is this scary/worrisome? In both examples, it’s a discrete event terminating the original/copy – transportation or destruction.

    Sleep is neither of those things. There is nothing to suggest it even could be, even in the story. All it says is, “Consciousness is lost when dying, consciousness is also lost when sleeping, so maybe you die and are replaced by a copy every time you sleep, too!”. Quite the stretch.

    4/10

  3. This is a pretty good pasta. Feels kinda special since it was uploaded on my birthday, and as a plus, it involves psyche-type scariness. This is awesome :D

  4. This is insanely stupid for many reasons. This is the one major reason. You are defined not by your physical body, but your mind. Your memories, the way you think and process information. That is you. All that gets passed on to the copy of you, therefore, that copy now becomes you. Therefore, sleeping does not kill you. Fucking moron.

  5. Not In Your Closet

    So you die every time you sleep because consciousness is linked to your ability to survive? Nice psychological conversation but not exactly creepy unless you over think it.

  6. I can’t believe that “pastas” like this can get an 8 without ANY fear factor or ANY sort of narrative or ANYTHING, while I know some guys who spend WEEKS AND WEEKS on their submissions and they hardly get noticed. It’s so ridiculous.

  7. So… Ship of Theseus, only with people? And for some reason we’re assuming consciousness is shut off when sleeping, instead of, you know, being put to sleep?

    You know, there was a good start in this, but then it went into that “wooooo, life is scary” that reminds me of… Cracked articles. You know, the ones that use “Terrifying” on the title, but don’t quite understand the meaning of the word.

  8. Fascinating, the first time I’m on this site and the idea that this story presents is extremely fun to think about.

    It WAS however, a little confusing, I had to read it twice, and then, “OHH, DOES IT MEAN WHEN WE SLEEP WE’RE KILLED AND A NEW ME WAKES UP THINKING THATIT’STHESAMEONEWHOACTUALLYDIEDANDTELEPORTISAMETAPHORFORSLEEPAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGHHHHHH.”

    Yep. Pretty good.

  9. Not creepy but definitely got you thinking. Think about those times when you really forgot something and can never remember it. Could it be that the memories of “me” that woke up from sleep was not being replicated nicely?

  10. The whole teleportation thing reminds me of the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate factor where he puts the chocolate bar in the machine and it shows up really big or really small

  11. I think the major issue for me is that it makes it sound like these are two kids lying in bed having a talk before dozing off at a sleepover. Except that they are both speaking as if they have talked about this premise for years. No one speaks like this…and that just takes away the realism, in my opinion. I am not saying that intelligent conversation exists, but the only thing racing through my mind while I was reading this was “What in the world happened to make these two individuals get into a topic like this.” Call me crazy, but that implication was just really hard to let go. Contrary to someone else above me, I found it VERY difficult to put myself in this conversation because I would never have a thought process like the “speaker” does. It just forces too much on the reader in my opinion and instead of letting the reader come up with his/her own ideas around the subject – the author decided to describe the premise in question fully to where there is hardly any self-unveiling. It is almost as if the author does not understand the fundamentals of fear. We aren’t afraid of what we know, we are afraid of what we don’t know. By making this so scientific and linear in nature, I feel as though you are sucking the life out of this in terms of personal terror.

    There are so many ways you could have taken this. The person we was talking to could have been his replica and the catch was that the original person DOESN’T get destroyed. Or ANYTHING, but this just turned into a quaint little “Haha I tolled you with your own logic” bedtime conversation between two adults…

    I don’t know, this was just a little much for me and it really didn’t hold any merit in fear.

  12. Please don’t get me wrong. English isn’t my first language and so there is the possibilty that I didn’t get the point in this story. Is the pasta telling us that we die when we fall asleep and what wakes up the other day is just a copy of our self? Because if so then this is idiotic…

  13. Clever. I like this story very much, though it kind of got ruined because I’ve actually talked about this kind of thing with my friend before xD Yep, I’m a geek.

  14. Well, it appears that I no longer can leave the mobile version, and I’ve been confused with a different anonymous, pushing me to change my name. ANYWAY, fantastic pasta, well written, and it actually makes one think. Good!

  15. This one is more mindscrewing than the “Manual breathing mode: ACTIVATED!” prank…

    I’ll never go to sleep again… -.-

  16. There should be citations for this. This interesting thought experiment is taken from Hofstadter and Dennet “The Minds I.”

  17. Well this one is very confusing but seems logical enough…..i guess i understood idea of the story that if i undergo teleportation the me at sending end is destroyed & new me is in recieving end.Although real me is dead the new me has all of my memories upto the exact point before real me dies & the new me thinks he has safely travelled & there’s no harm in repeating it.
    BUT i didnt understood the part about sleep….can any1 explain it to mee???? o_O

    1. What it’s more or less saying here is that the process of teleportation would destroy the sender, while making a perfect copy on the receiving end. Memories and all. the philosophical part of it is, is it you? Does your consciousness transfer over, or does the proverbial “you” fade from existence, to be replaced by a copy? the theory of teleportation is that it doesn’t “destroy” you in a sense, it actually breaks you down on a molecular level, and then puts you back together on the other end. You’re still you. It’s not a copy of you. This is the scientific theory. This pasta wasn’t creepy at all, just dumb, even on a.philosophical level. You don’t become new person when you wake up the next day, no more than a computer does when you shut it down and boot back up.

  18. Wow, I absolutely loved this pasta. These kinds are my favorite, these kind of mind-blowers that really get you thinking. Fascinating and somewhat eerie all at the same time. Bravo, 10/10!

  19. Very persuasive argument! However, the nail in the coffin, so to speak, is the idea that the processes of consciousness completely stop when you are asleep. The problem is that it does not. When you sleep, brain activity may slow during certain phases, but will not stop completely. Not only do processes not stop, during REM sleep, your brain is just as active as when you are awake! Eerie idea in theory, less so in practice. 7/10

  20. I was interested, but I became more and more confused as I progressed. By the time I got to the end, you had completely lost me.

    1. It says “your comment is awaiting moderation,” on this comment… But this is the first time I’ve read the story? Either there’s been an error with the IP or server, or the story became true..? :o

  21. Weak pasta. Not creepy at all, but instead philosophical. Sounds a bit like something Wayne and Garth might think up while laying on a car hood. Incidentally, duality, with the implications that there is a soul and some kind of afterlife, is, IMHO, much less frightening than materialism, which states that all is ‘material’, and when we die, that’s it, lights out, we (as we know ourselves) cease to exist.

    But we’re not here to discuss philosophy. We’re here to get the sh!t scared out of us periodically.

  22. This was a good pasta. I found it interesting that it had no first or third person narrative, but that just made it more of a good read because I was able to kind of visualize the conversation taking place in someone’s house, or in a coffee shop. My only complaint is that it was too short! I hope to see more of your writing on this site.

  23. “I have just mind fucked you! Good night!”

    This wasn’t very creepy to me though because I personally believe consciousness extends beyond the physical form.

  24. What have we here? I do believe one of you tedious little creatures just worked it out. So, now you know the secret of sleep; what will you do?

  25. Hmm… not creepy really. Definitely some interesting philosophical ideas though. Ending was kinda….. meh. Still, the over all idea made me pause and think. I’d say a worth while read.

      1. Reality is all your perception, so yeah, it didn’t make sense if it didn’t make sense to him. Your reality is that it did make sense (same conclusion from my perception lol)

        1. I would have to disagree on the point that reality is your perception, just because you have never seen Italy doesn’t mean it isn’t real, or that it doesn’t exist until you see it. But when discussing his subjective perception and understanding of the topic at hand I see your point.

        2. If something is hilarious to one person, and the next person thinks it’s idiotic, does that mean what was said is hilarious or idiotic?
          You can only answer with your own opinion. Therefore, you could think anything of what that person said. In your reality, it was funny or stupid or mean or any of the above. To another person, it was something different since reality is all in the perception of the person perceiving it.

          That’s just the most basic and tiny example I could think of.

  26. Eh. Philosophy 101 isn’t really scary. The most it can really do is create a sense of dread or impending doom. The fact that this could be a transcript of a philosophy lecture really turns me off. There isn’t much creativity here at all. 4/10

  27. A little pointlessly complicated and hard to understand. Not very creepy, either. The whole teleporting scenario reminds me a lot of that movie “The Prestige”. 6/10

  28. Meh. Just a lot of philosophy building up to a lame “sleeping is scary” ending. The idea behind the teleportation device was interesting and the discussion was done pretty well. But that whole sleeping is scary because something vague might happen to you scare tactic is cheap. Overall it was a good buildup to a limp scare.

    7/10

    1. i think it was good. to me it was a smart story , you go to sleep and wake up a new person so the “you’ the you think you are might not actually be “you” but a copy that has your memorys so “you” are not really you.
      i think that could on some level be very creepy. to the author nice story really liked it didnt realy get the concept till the end good story though

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Scroll to Top