Patent Application: Full body teleportation system (2006) | Hacker News Reader

Patent Application: Full body teleportation system (2006)

google.co.uk

34 pointsgee_totes74 comments

Teleportation is one of those technologies I would never use even if it was bullet proof.

There would be no way to determine if your consciousness persists - such that the same "you" is the same connection on both sides. Even if it looks like you, acts like you - it would shatter the foundation for what it means to be conscious.

I really don't understand why people get hung up on this (with the assumption of the impossible guarantee that it is 100% safe, or "bullet proof" as you put it). I am perfectly fine with a Prestige/Star Trek transporter, as long as it is a perfect copy, I don't really care if it is the "original" meatsack or the 100th... all I would want is to make sure the original dies quickly and painlessly (preferably after it is confirmed the copy was transported safely).

The irony, as I see it, is that immediately after the transfer, the "you" that doesn't get transported might still be aware of your surroundings and understand completely what "your" fate will soon be (killed quickly).

That would require an enormous amount of bravery and belief in the technology.

Your comment reminded me of a old Outer Limits episode, "Think Like A Dinosaur" where the teleportation "equation had to be balanced." After a delayed confirmation, the technician had to kill the original woman.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Like_a_Dinosaur_(The_Out...

That was a great show - but I haven't seen that episode. Maybe Netflix will revive it someday.

For shows like that there are usually unlicensed copies on YouTube.

Try to find it. This is probably my favorite episode and one of the best fictional explorations of the problems involved with teleportation.

I've read the short story this was based on. If memory serves it was the first time I encountered the concept of throwing someone out an airlock.

Because it shatters the meaning of what it means "to be." Am I a meatsack that houses consciousness or am I a complex stream of consciousness that controls a meatsack?

In which case, if consciousness can be streamed, can that consciousness be hijacked? Or do I stop existing the moment it's transported?

Too many uncertainties.

I definetly think the latter, and I'd ditch my body for a newer one in 30 years if I could. Would be pretty great if a transporter also did "tune up" of all of the frail biological bits as part of the copying process (without messing with the brain hopefully)

Of course, I think that this is extremely impractical so it isn't a decision that I actually have to face. In this hypothetical scenario though, I'd much rather use the "transporter" as a cloning machine... having two of me would be pretty awesome.

I've seen similar arguments to yours (against the deconstruct-reconstruct matter teleporter), and they never seem to understand the real dilemma:

It kills "you". Not the objective "you" of course, that lives on in the copy. It kills the subjective "you".

By terminating the stream of consciousness, the person going into the matter teleporter dies. There's no way for the stream of consciousness to continue after that point.

It's not ---------------X------------------

It's

-------------------XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXXXXXX---------------------------

If you're comfortable dying so that a copy of you can live the rest of your life, that's your business. But most people don't have that sort of objectivity.

Well put! This is what I am most afraid of.

You are just carefully arranged to respond that you are afraid of it.

We don't even know if there is such a thing as subjective "you". It's purely speculation. It seems humans would desperately like to think there is such a thing though.

I agree that the base notion of a subjective "you" is problematic. But I enter discussions like these with the assumption that the person on the other end is, like me, experiencing their life subjectively. "I think, therefore I am" and such.

If we reject the subjective assumption, then this whole discussion is moot (and I need to re-consider my life and become a Zen Buddhist monk off in the hills somewhere)

I tend to agree with your conclusion but I think the reasoning is still incredibly complex and not really sound. Sleep is an obvious and frequent discontinuation of consciousness.

constructing a copy, and destroying the original is not True teleportation. it is just mimicking teleporation. You are destroying the original just so you can call it teleportation? A true form of teleportation will be where the original goes from point A to B, without any copy. I am not saying it is possible, just saying that copying+destroying is not Teleportation

How do you create a test that distinguishes between the two?

There's a good science fiction story which has copying-type teleportation. Everybody recognizes it's being copied and then dying, so people are reluctant to use it. But many do, because it's required by their career.

> There's no way for the stream of consciousness to continue after that point.

How can you know that? How can you even know what that means? :)

What is a stream of consciousness? Why wouldn't it be replicated along with the physical body? If it's separate from the physical body, why doesn't it move from the original body to the new one? If you know the answers to these questions: how do you know them?

Do you die when you go to sleep? Go under anaesthesia?

But you're unconscious...

consciousness is not a "thing" it is a careful arrangement of matter and energy that is unique to you. replicating that arrangement does not move your consciousness, it creates a new one.

Your stream of consciousness is interrupted when you sleep, so with that logic you technically die every night.

> But most people don't have that sort of objectivity.

Where did you get that idea from?

> If you're comfortable dying so that a copy of you can live the rest of your life, that's your business.

You will eventually die and (hopefully) a partial copy of you(children) will continue living on and you don't even have a choice about it.

Would you feel the same way if someone cloned you as an exact copy (genes, memories, mental state) and then tried to kill you? There's no difference between that and teleporting except the order of operations.

Unless the laws of physics require the quick and painless destruction of the original in order to get the information to send to the other side, I wouldn't count on it being quick and painless.

All I'd count on is that it would be the cheapest method that does the job. If soundproofing the booth and killing you slowly and painfully saves them money over quick and painless, you are probably getting slow and painful.

Personally, my threshold question for whether or not I would consider using a transporter is: can this technology be tweaked to make a duplicator instead of a transporter?

If the answer is "yes", I'm not riding.

OK - in the spirit of a nice friendly discussion on a slow news day (LoL)...

What makes you believe that either copy of "you" would be diminished in any way? Also, which foundation of consciousness would be shattered?

Would the teleported "you" be any less "you" than the "you" that wakes up tomorrow? Or after you've replaced all your cells with new cells?

Human of Theseus?

To the outside world, it is the same person. On the inside, what if one consciousness ends and another one begins. What if you die each time and another you wakes up. Not you since you are dead. Just another person who will be you going forward. So now, the question is, does anyone even know that is what happens? New you remembers all of that and it is part of their history as a memory. Old you who actually experienced those things is unable to tell everyone that teleportation is deadly.

So I guess, to answer your question, are defined by who you are to the rest of the world or are you defined by the collection of thoughts and actions that make up your experience?

Perhaps the teleported "me" would not be any less "me" than the "me" that wakes up tomorrow.

But, surely, the non-teleported "me" would not be the "me" that got teleported, it would be the "me" that was left behind and destroyed.

I never realized Bones from the original Star Trek might be worried about the zombie problem

There's no way to determine if your consciousness persists through sleep or unconsciousness.

Really, there's no way to determine if your consciousness persists from one moment to the next. All that we know and experience is perfectly consistent with a world in which every moment in time has a different "you."

> There's no way to determine if your consciousness persists through sleep or unconsciousness.

If I remember correctly, that was actually the reason that anesthetics weren't used in operations for a time after their discovery - people believed that if you were out your soul would leave your body. Luckily, we've gotten over that particular idea.

> Luckily, we've gotten over that particular idea.

And if teleportation ever becomes a reality, human society will adjust its concept of "self" to adapt as well. The premise of a "persistent" self (essentially a soul) and the fear of death will seem like magical thinking and silliness.

Sleep doesn't involve destruction of your body, however. The kind of teleportation discussed here, does. And while you can't be sure, upon waking, whether you're the same person who fell asleep, if your body is destroyed you can be absolutely certain you won't be the person that wakes up on the other side.

I strongly disagree with the magnitude of certainty and uncertainty you assign to these various things. We really have no idea how this stuff actually works. For all we know, your consciousness was in my body until a second ago.

All we actually have to work with here is memory. Based on this, we have the illusion of continuity of consciousness. But we have no real clue if that actually happens or if it's just something we've made up.

>> We really have no idea how this stuff actually works. For all we know, your consciousness was in my body until a second ago.

Sorry but that doesn't make sense. By the same token you can start believing in supernatural creators- because, after all "we don't know how [physics] really works".

And yes, we do know some things. For instance, if something goes wrong with your brain, your conscious mind is also messed up. That's pretty solid knowledge there.

Besides you'll need to jump through some serious hoops before you can explain how my consciousness could be in your body without me knowing anything about it. Not that I'd put that beyond her, the little hussy!

Before we talk about potentially jumping bodies, let's examine a simpler question: how do you know that your consciousness is continuous at all? How do you know that the consciousness reading this comment is the same one that wrote the one I'm replying to?

Because I'm aware of having done both.

Plus, I don't remember being anyone else and I don't think anyone else remembers being me.

Edit: Btw, despite the fact I'm indulging you, I don't find that sort of discussion particularly productive. You might as well argue that parallel lines could eventually intersect. Sure. They could. But we assume they won't. Now what?

Why assume that consciousness follows memory?

I agree that we can't do much but assume that consciousness is indeed continuous like this. But my point is that it is an assumption. When you get down to the actual facts, consciousness ending due to teleportation is no more or less supported than consciousness ending due to sleep. So I find it weird to worry about one and not the other.

As discussed earlier, your body is not destroyed during sleep, while it is with destructive teleportation (by definition).

As discussed earlier, there's no evidence that this is relevant.

Seriously.

You, your memories, your brain, your character, your acting and model of thinking is nothing more than set of chemical reactions in your brain. If they can persist chemical reaction, they can persist you.

To an extent. We know of a causative or some kind of relationship, but whether consciousness is an entirely physical phenomenon, or the concept of mind, is still up for debate, at least in philosophy. To say either way as a fact would require more than the circumstantial evidence for a purely materialist viewpoint, if we are going to accept the scientific method as the arbiter of truth, even.

The question I always ask is: If it were not "scan, destruction, reconstruction" but just "scan, reconstruction" and you end up with two identical you's first, would you be fine with simply being killed then?

Inspired by an Outer Limits episode.

Can we just keep my clone around? I think we would be good friends. Great minds think alike, they say.

The Real Life Webcomic has (or had, years ago) quite a share of storylines about the advantages of that :)

The short answer is yes, I would be okay with it.

The long answer is that under no circumstance should I ever be allowed anywhere near a person-copier, whether it teleports or not, unless you would somehow enjoy being conquered and ruled by a ravening horde of me-copies.

The complete lack of political corruption would almost make up for having to be around me all the time. I think most people would probably prefer an occupying clone army/bureaucracy to at least be somewhat attractive. If you think it's bad having one "2" at a party, just imagine a hundred copies of that person that are all trying too hard to go home with you or your date (or both) rather than go back to the disappointing dogpile at the clone barracks, yet again. And now imagine that instead of that happening one time at a party, it's everywhere you go, forever.

Inspired by final chapters of The Forever War.

I remember watching this video once that really put the problem in a fun and thoughtful way

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

Instead of giving him a patent, the patent office should be referring him to a doctor given the fact he is temporarily blacking out while walking down streets:

> In the next instance, he (G) found himself down the street near the corner of the next block. Realizing that he had passed the bus stop, he turned around to see the iron grating approximately 50 meters up the street in back of him. Because there was no recollection of having jumped across the iron grating nor of having passed the bus stop's yellow marker line, he realized that he had been teleported a distance of 100 meters while moving along with the traveling wave.

Although you have to give him credit for mixing physics, geometry, with new age pseudo-science babble:

> The question is how does this amplified gravitational wave created by the rotating propellers and turbines get into hyperspace from our dimension?

> The answer comes from experiments done using the ancient Chinese form of breathing known as Chi Kung. Using this breathing technique, we have been able to levitate the human body over six feet in the air. The internal temperature of the stomach is around 200 degrees Fahrenheit. By simultaneously squeezing the diaphragm to bring hot air up through the lungs, and breathing through the nose to bring cold air down, rotating vortices are generated in the lung passages when these two air masses meet and twist around each other as depicted in the famous Yin-Yang diagram. Because the lung has variable diameter passages from the large diameter at the throat to the final small air sacs, there is a spectrum of rotating frequencies.

From which he jumps to this sentence:

> From quantum physics it is known that if there is a temperature fluctuation occurring among a group of harmonic oscillators in the environment, then Planck's reduced constant Figure US20060071122A1-20060406-P00900 is increased by the cotangent of the constant times the frequency ω of the oscillator divided by twice Boltzmann's constant k times the temperature T ℏ = ℏ ⁢ ⁢ coth ⁡ ( ℏω n 2 ⁢ kT )

But really, who needs black holes when you have breathing?

>> Instead of giving him a patent, the patent office should be referring him to a doctor given the fact he is temporarily blacking out while walking down streets:

That's probably because of all the, um, "blowing smoke into hyperspace".

This guy is perhaps the 21st Century's most important inventor, http://zapatopi.net/blog/?post=200604284330.st_clair_hyperin...

Heh, quite the record of applications.

While I suspect that the device in question does not work as advertised, I think this patent application has more merit than 99% of software patents nowadays.

What on earth would make you suspect that the device does not work as described?

I'm sure it works, just need to get the gravity wave generator working right :)

"generating a pulsed gravitational wave which propagates through a magnetic vortex wormhole generator; and generating a wormhole with the magnetic vortex generator whereby the pulsed gravitational wave traverses through the wormhole and enters into hyperspace where the wave is enormously magnified due to the lower speed of light in that dimension"

"The low-density energy fills the body which allows a human being to float upwards like a helium balloon as verified by Chi Kung breathing as well as spinning on a motorized platform known as the Chakra Vortex Accelerator. The latter device resulted in the first mechanical means to produce anti-gravity."

Seems totally legit.

"Using this generator, it was found that smoke blown through one side of the coil does not appear on the other side of cylindrical coil. The smoke flows through the wormhole and appears in a hyperspace co-dimension. It was this experiment that resulted in making first contact with the androids of the Grey aliens who told me, in a remote viewing session, that 'We saw you blowing smoke into hyperspace.'"

Well he is quite the expert:

> It took a number of days in order to understand this sequence of events. The explanation involves knowledge of a wide range of subjects such as gravitation physics, hyperspace physics, wormhole electromagnetic theory and experimentation, quantum physics, and the nature of the human energy field.

This might sound crazy, but one time, I met a shirtless homeless man in denver that purported to be John Quincy St. Clair. He had quite the ability to talk about the patents.

If you put "It was/is obvious" in a patent application, regardless if it involves hyperspace or not, the USPO should reject it outright.

A friend of my wife's worked at the USPTO for a few years as a mechanical engineer reviewing patent applications. He said they would regularly get applications for time travel machines and perpetual motion machines and they would have to spend a bunch of time writing up why it was rejected. It was a right of passage usually reserved for the new guy ;)

You teleport by breathing. Can't tell if they believe it or it's all a joke.

You levitate by breathing. You teleport by pulsed gravitational wave.

Of course, silly me. I misunderstood the genius here.

This is a pretty great comic that deals with this exact debate. http://existentialcomics.com/comic/1

Honest question: this patent application mentions "hyperspace". Does such thing exist, or is it just science fiction?

Just science fiction, as far as we know.

It's the 19th century term for spaces with dimension > 3. But... its just techno-babble now.

http://news.psu.edu/story/141406/1995/12/01/research/deflati...

2004!

Title needs to be changed. This is not a patent. This is a publication of a patent application.

Note the metadata field on the google patents page:

Publication type Application

Thank you! We've updated the title.

Right, it's an application. You can send the USPTO anything you want, if you pay the application fee.

In the USPTO's Public PAIR system, the detailed history of the application, with images of all the documents, is available. The response from the USPTO was a "non-final rejection". The rejection starts out with "An examination of this application indicates that applicant is unfamiliar with patent prosecution procedure", and then includes a FAQ the USPTO sends to the clueless.

After that, the examiner writes "The invention is not supported by a credible utility or well-established utility because the claims call for the generation of gravitational waves and and the interacting of the waves with hyperspace ... The use of hyperspace and gravitational waves in the claims therefore must be backed up with significant scientific and experimental data ... (applicant must prove) ... that the applicant has the ability to harness such interaction for a useful purpose and demonstrate it on demand."

The applicant never replied to that, so, six months later, the application was rejected for failure to reply to an office action. The applicant does not get his application fee of $770 back. Trolling the patent office is expensive.

The USPTO did exactly what they should have done. They took the application seriously, and sent the applicant a non-final rejection requiring proof that it worked. The applicant then gave up.

Nine years later, the applicant sent in a notice of assignment, reporting the sale of the (nonexistent) patent rights to someone in Bakersfield, CA, for $5. This was filed incorrectly, but the USPTO scanned it in and put it in the database.

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