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Would you use teleporter technology if it existed? Why or Why not?
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Absolutely this.
Someone else can be the guinea pig, but if it's been tested and everyone came out fine? Yeah. I'll absolutely take advantage.
Even if the clone is undistinguishable from your old self, that old self has died. "you" has died. You didn't teleport to Mars, you died on Earth.
You're repeating what OP said.
Thing is, the idea that an "old you" has "died" is a modern soul conceit. If "me" is just the combination of meat, electricity, and memories - then for all intents and purposes I was simply taken apart in one place and reassembled in another. Continuity of all three is maintained when I am reassembled on Mars with my body and memories intact. There is no "old" and "new" me - because what you or OP think defines "me" isn't something that dies when the meat stops working briefly.
This isn't some radical complicating factor people just aren't thinking of - it's the same base debate as the existence of a soul. Interesting, but unprovable and utterly irrelevant to practical day-to-day life.
But we can "prove" that isn't true because what if you aren't disassembled on the first side? Just copied over. Either you have a sense and control of both bodies at once, or in a real teleport where you are disassembled, you're gone the moment you teleport and the "you" that remains is another different person with exactly your thoughts, feelings, motivations, memories, etc.
Using the star trek transporter as the example, you actually experience the teleportation process. In one episode, we see the perspective of someone being transported and they go into a white void, briefly, and then appear in the 2nd location. It takes like 8 seconds. We also know that some transporters are faster than others.
I don't believe there's anything special about my current body. Barring teleportation, I fully believe that if it were possible to disassemble a person, but them in a box, ship them across the Pacific Ocean, and then put them back together again, that they'd be the same person.
I don't see how being converted into energy and back represents death.
People experiencing the transport process is due not understanding how copies work. Damn, they don't seem to grasp the idea of a backup.
Seeing as anything that we copy or make backups of now is not self-aware, I don't see what that has to do with anything. If anything, a teleport (as conceived of and described in science fiction, not how it might "actually" work) is more like moving a file from one tree to another. The whole idea of the teleport as a plot device is to create a form of near-instant transportation. I feel like these thought exercises where "what if the teleporter cloned you and killed the original copy" miss that.
Its like, "hmm what if the train from New York to Boston actually brought you to a cloning facility in New Haven, shot you in the head and then replaced you with a lab-grown clone that went on to Boston in your stead" well then it wouldn't be what most people think of when they think of taking the train.
In order for me to be convinced that the common depiction of teleportation is a form of cloning and murder, I would need someone to prove to me that humans have souls in a metaphysical sense - that there's something about us as individuals beyond the sum of our lived experiences and the atoms that make up our bodies.
Sorry, no it's not. When you introduce technobabble related to "buffers" and "caches" where the information is stored temporarily, the working must conform to the way files are handled. Yes, you can handwave whatever you like for narrative purposes, but this discussion is not supposed to have as a valid answer "a wizard did it".
That is ridiculous. Please search the short stories "The phantom of Kansas" by John Varley and "Think like a dinosaur" by James Patrick Kelly to see the implications of this kind of transport. Neither posits the existence of a soul, and the scenario of "the original dies, a copy keeps living" is very clearly shown as the only valid explanation, and how the assumption that the person is the same after the transport (or the cloning, in the first story, but the effect are the same) is merely a legal fiction for convenience.
In any transport there's a copy, and any copy takes a non-zero time and an instant where the copied person must exist in two places at the time. Unless the spacetime is curved and poked and you transit through the hole, there is no other viable model.