I've always had a hard time understanding what's so bad about the person who arrives being a clone, never saw the downside. Yes, I 'd definitely use it. One of the biggest hurdles in my everyday life is the "going there". When I was still working, the one thing I always complained about and what ruined my every morning was having to go there and return after. If I'd had the option to instantly teleport to work, I would have loved every day because I loved my work and I wanted to be there. Now that I'm disabled, I regularly have to cancel stuff like doctor's appointments last minute because my chronic exhaustion is acting up and I physically can't move my body there.

(If teleporting isn't available, I'd settle for a ship's computer core as a PDA)

If automobiles were invented, would you use them instead of horses?

I don't buy the idea that disintegrating my molecules and reconstructing new ones is tantamount to murder or suicide.

If all I experience is being one place one moment and another place the next, then it's me. It's isn't some fucking clone, it's me. You're just being turned into some other form (energy, if we're using Star Trek rules) and then being turned back.

I'm pretty sure that at 26, I'm already a completely different person than the baby I was born as, literally. My cells have all died and been replaced. The horror. ./s

Doesn't Star Trek's transporter solution involve converting your atomic structure to Energy, beaming that energy to another place, and reconstitution your body using the same atoms? If so, that's not really dying anymore. Just re-arranging your original atoms.

Imagine it malfunctions while you dissappear and you never reappear in another location, getting stuck in the void forever until the end of time

This question all comes down to your opinion of what makes a person a person, whether that means we have something greater than the collection of our atoms, or whether we are simply the emergent outcome of the complex arrangement of atoms. If you subscribe to the former then you also need to believe that this machine is somehow capable of either transporting/transplanting that "soul" for lack of a better expression. Where if you subscribe to the latter than this is most certainly a suicide cloning machine.

I personally subscribe to the idea that consciousness is an emergent property of complexity. Given a sufficiently large enough series of inputs you can observe new and unexpected outputs that appear to be on higher orders of complexity than their inputs. This response is an example of that, from electrons flowing through transistors we end up with operating systems, hardware IO, web browsers, networking protocols, ASCII standards, font rendering, etc. All of that complexity emerges from a massive amount of on/off switches arranged in patterns over time.

Following this chain of reasoning I believe that making an exact duplicate of me down to the state of each atom is no different than that entity being me, however as a conscious being with human ethics and morals I put value in the singularity of my existence, and so a plurality of Zetaphor is something I find undesirable as it fundamentally challenges my perception of what it means to be myself.

So assuming the entity leaving the transporter is me, there's two ways to approach the way a machine like this could operate:

• It reads my state in its entirety and then destroys (or encodes for transport) that state
• Or it's creating the new instance of me bit by bit as it reads my current state

That means one of two things, either there is a brief moment of time where two identical copies of me are in the universe, or there is a period of time where zero complete copies of me exist in the universe. So either I stopped existing momentarily and then was recreated from scratch (death and clone birth), or I existed in two places at once and then died in one (cloning and suicide).

if you translocated Theseus' ship, is it still the same ship? what if you extracted the data from the transport buffer to reassemble the original in its original location?

Well, if the technology actually existed, it would solve that whole "soul" question.

We would know pretty quickly if we transported humans and they came out the other side as soulless aberrations because their original just got killed.

So yeah, I would 100% use it after it first proved once and for all that the sum of our consciousness really is all the synapses and signals and grey matter in our heads. Because if so then what does it matter if your original matter has been erased and then recreated. Your clone is just as much you as you are you at that point.

Depends on the technology employed.

Quantum entanglement? Sure. All day, every day.

That annihilation shit that Star Trek does? Hell no.

I'd also take a method that's between the two. If it could split me up and send those very same atoms across the void to other side where they're recombobulated I'd be fine with that, too. Assuming it's not painful.

Edit: My sister: "What if it's the most painful experience ever, but the machine deletes that memory?"