the essence of self and teleport

[svenof9]

Have you ever been disturbed by teleport? You get destroyed in one place and an exact replica is created elsewhere. No one else notices, but I argue that you sure do! Or, at least, you would if you were still alive

Comments

[montyy0]

That seems like a good approximation, but the brain isn't intact even in normal living let alone when you have a beer or bonk your head. There's some sort of Ship of Theseus argument that seems at odds with teleportation... maybe because identity ought to be continuous, or at least connected, in space-time. How about if your brain were faithfully duplicated? What if intelligent space-fungi removed your brain and put it in a metal cylinder? What would happen if MRI technology or something got so good that a computer could take a scan of every neuron enough that it could simulate your brain's behavior accurately? Hormones, many from body parts outside the brain, clearly influence thinking, does that mean they're not part of identity?

Another question might be how the teleportation is implemented... in Star Trek, it's more of a convenient plot movement device than one for philosophical inquiry... Is there a fidelity loss? What happens if a fly is in the transporter with you? What if there's a power surge or power failure during the process? The only way I've imagined teleportation being plausible if you were annihilated by some sort of scanning (or otherwise spatially coherent) antimatter beam or something in a way that made a hologram-like beam of photons that could interact with some symmetric scanning beam thing at the other end and reassemble you. Unless you count wormholes or something as teleportation, but that's really travel-by-shortcut so it doesn't have the continuity problem.

Anyway, the other "teleportation" variant is to scan and transmit in adequate fidelity to reproduce the person at the other end. If you can scan non-destructively, then it's really long-distance replication (people-faxing), but if the scan is destructive, it's a tron-rasterizing conversion from a real person into an information representation (which is generally assumed to be frozen in time-- which raises the question of whether only the position of atoms is important... one would think motion is important, lest you get reconstructed as exploding radially or at absolute zero.) Anyway, if there is a stage of being stored as information in a computer or something and then sent by radio/laser/ansible/whatever to the remote re-integrator (oooh, being disintegrated makes me very angry) then it would make sense to keep a copy of the data, in case the remote re-integrator/faxmachine/whatever messes up or the transmission fails or your cable company screws up your internet connection. If you can keep the data for a retransmit in case of failure, though, then you can also retransmit in case of success, thereby making a replicator. For people who believe in souls, this can be an extra hairy problem, since it's argued to be something that should be theologically forbidden because of souls are atomic or conserved or something. I found this guy's complaints about star trek transporters while failing to find the Dr. McCoy quote about believing that he lost his soul the first time he went through it, or something like that.

In summary, only weird geeks are disturbed by this. Normal, upstanding, mainstream people like Trekkies know to accept the authority of science fiction authors without question.