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Comment by eganist | Hacker News Reader

> We could discover teleportation tomorrow morning and it would be twenty years before teleporters were common-place. Everything takes time to be fully realized.

I can appreciate this example, though in the specific context of teleportation, there'll probably be a few decades tacked on to resolve the ethical dilemmas arising from the question of whether or not the person arriving out of the other end is in fact the same person.

(I'm of the position that it doesn't matter, but still... anyway, this entire thought was just a tangent off an example)

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You say that now, but when you step up to the machine with the knowledge that you are about to cease to exist, while somewhere else a perfect copy of you gets to go about living your life, I bet you change your mind.

Ah yes, the dilemma of whether the person on the other end having your memories means that the current you didn't cease to exist at the departing end.

I think it depends on implementation. I wake up every morning and I'm pretty sure I'm still me. I go in elevators and each time the doors open I'm still me. So, what sort of transportation experience would change that?

Admittedly, the closes to teleportation I've ever felt was my first trip on a cruise ship. I went to sleep in one city, and when I opened my eyes I was suddenly in a city hundred miles away. It was magic. I also still felt like myself.

Well, sleep and cruise ships don't destroy and copy your body. Teleportation would be equivalent to being killed the way I see it, until we get a better understanding of conscience at least.

Your body slowly replaces itself. I'm reasonably sure that when you die you have replaced almost all of its atoms at least once.

I've been using the same broom for 20 years! Never needed a new one and I'd never think of getting a new one. Of course I've replaced the handle twice and the brush four or five times.

Theseus' Meatbag?

Eventually, the constituent atoms themselves perform a complete cycle (at the slowest rates) every ~7 years. Some substances (e.g. water) cycle much faster, obviously.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1189358...

Which tells us that sentient consciousness and identity is mostly about the continuity of a signal across only some cells (nerves), and mostly rides on top of standing waves supported by those special cellular processes, at frequencies of oscillation faster than the underlying polarized/ionic chemical processes.

How do I know? I don't know what happened while on was sleeping. I fell asleep, and perpetually a few minutes later woke up, but my clock told me it was 8 hours. What happened??

You know what happens when other people sleep. It's not an issue.

Here's a great old animation on this topic

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pdxucpPq6Lc

Better quality (but with Flash requirement):

https://www.nfb.ca/film/to_be/

I can think of an experience. The kind of teleportation in which you (or your copy) is teleported too close in time and space and the original is not destroyed.

Then your copy claiming your job, your house, your wife and your children. Just as you would do.

Also if the transport process takes 20 lightyears, when do you send the ACQ? Will your original walk around for 20 years and then have an automated kill switch?

Why is it better if the original is destroyed? That's the whole issue here, the process in your example, when working as intended, just kills a person and makes an identical copy.

>Then your copy claiming your job, your house, your wife and your children. Just as you would do.

This sounds like a great scenario to me. I'm sure I would get along just fine with a duplicate of myself, and we could live together and get a lot more done. It sure would help a lot with avoiding burnout at work: we could take turns going to work, me one month and him the next month for instance. But two of us sharing one wife might be a bit much for her, so it'd be a lot better if we brought a second woman into the mix and lived as a polyamorous foursome (though this might be easier if we could create a teleportation clone of the wife too). It'd also be great having a double to help me on house projects, hobby projects, working on a side business, etc. And you mentioned kids: having an extra adult around the house to deal with them can only be a help, and since it's actually another me and not some other person, we're guaranteed to get along, have the same views on parenting, etc.

Honestly, I don't see any downside to this situation at all.

I would get a lot less [productive work] done if I had an exact duplicate of myself. My spouse would be jealous and disgusted at the same time.

But I am 90% certain that if my spouse had a duplicate, they would be yelling at each other all the time.

It would be interesting to correlate answers to the question "If you had an exact duplicate, with the same body as you, the same thoughts as you, and the same memories as you up until yesterday, how would you get along?" with various aspects of psychology.

The only problem I see here with your question is that no one really knows the answer, they can only speculate. I, for instance, think that I'd get along just great with my duplicate, and that we'd work together on getting more stuff done and enjoying more free time as a result. But I don't really know that; it's not like I've tried it before.

Why would your spouse be jealous of your clone? She'd now have two of you, so she's more likely to get attention when she wants it.

“I thought you said you could just read his brain electronically,” protested Ford.

“Oh yes,” said Frankie, “but we’d have to get it out first. It’s got to be prepared.” “Treated,” said Benjy. “Diced.”

“It could always be replaced,” said Benjy reasonably, “if you think it’s important.”

“Yes, an electronic brain,” said Frankie, “a simple one would suffice.”

“A simple one!” wailed Arthur.

“Yeah,” said Zaphod with a sudden evil grin, “you’d just have to program it to say What? and I don’t understand and Where’s the tea? Who’d know the difference?”

“I’d notice the difference,” said Arthur.

“No, you wouldn’t,” said Frankie mouse, “you’d be programmed not to.”

- Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Not actually about teleportation, but still apropos IMHO.

Think about that as you're taking also tonight. Is the person that wakes up the same person?

Why draw the line at sleep? Your consciousness, such as it is, is pretty fleeting and vague anyway. What reason do you have to think any self survives from one moment to another?

At least while awake, you may be fleeting but you exist in a near constant stream of "you", which make it feel constant. When you go to sleep your brain enters an altered state, which is only a subsection of yourself.

Who knows what will wake up from that?

Yes. You're not unconscious when you're asleep, you're just in an altered state of consciousness. Being actually unconscious is a very different experience; if you'd ever been through surgery with general anaesthesia you'd know about this.

Exactly. What if there's a bug and when your "copy" is created at destination original is not destroyed? Would you agree to be killed, should your copy agree instead? Even worse, what if there's an anomaly in transporting data, original is destroyed and copy emerges disfigured, dead or something in between? Teleportation scares the shit out of me.

As in the quite ancient https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdxucpPq6Lc

Original NFB source: https://www.nfb.ca/film/to_be/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Chances_(TNG_episode)

Did you by chance read the short story "Think Like a Dinosaur" or see the episode of The Outer Limits based off it?

It presents this exact same dilemma. Up until that point I never really considered the potential ethical ramifications of teleportation.

Take full advantage of it?

I mean, cloning things has its advantages too. Could be a good idea for some people to deliberate screw up the process and drastically cut down on their daily workload. Or perhaps as a way for the less ethical to not kill or work alongside their accidental copies, but ship 'em off to join the army or something.

Teleportation going wrong can be just as exciting as prospect as it working out fine. Cloning has a lot of useful applications as well.

Damnit Jim!

It gets more fun when you start to think about it as different consciousness being created and destroyed, each with the same memories.

At what point do we start being afraid to fall asleep?

When you go to sleep your brain doesn't stop working. Comas, now...

This is why I have no problem walking through wormholes, but will never set foot in a teleporter.

> it doesn't matter

There's a pun in there.

Teleportation will not happen soon, if only because we've invested too much in autonomous cars already.

Teleportation would violate Relativity, so the good news is that the dilemma in question is actually impossible.

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