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"the people who use the transporter don't feel like they're longer themselves. They just feel like they've moved."

Well, the people going in the transporter would be killed, so they wouldn't be feeling anything after that. The people coming out of the transporter might feel like they just appeared in a new place, but that is immaterial to the people who were killed by the transporter.

Similarly, a mother could have grounds for rejecting a teleported child, for the one who came out of the teleporter was not physically the one she gave birth to.

Incidentally, the philosophical concept that episode explores goes back long, long before Star Trek, to the Ship of Theseus[1] thought experiment from Ancient Greece (and I wouldn't be surprised if this was considered even before then in ancient India or China).

The Ship of Theseus problem asks: if a ship's parts are progressively replaced with new parts, until all the parts have been replaced, is it still the same ship?

The cells in our bodies are being progressively replaced. A materialist, naturalist, or physicalist would have trouble explaining how someone could retain their original identity if nothing of them was left after this process.

The brain upload, teleporter, and transporter questions are variations on these.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

It's not immaterial at all. It's basically the same thing as going to sleep at night and waking up or seeing your friend after a 1 minute break. It can feel like the person who was gone had continuity.

To the observers, but not to the person being transported.

Do you have a reason to believe that the consciousness would stay in one place and be destroyed rather than be in both places, and then just one place again?

I don't think that consciousness has momentum.

Why would the consciousness of one person migrate to the other?

You're really talking about (at best) a new instantiation of the identical consciousness in a new body. That's not the original consciousness moving, that's a new (identical) consciousness coming to life.

I am unconvinced a consciousness can migrate out of the body that it's in. Copies are not enough.

This is made more obvious if you consider the case that the original is not destroyed. Then the clone that comes out of the end of the transporter would be having experiences that the original can not experience. If they were really one consciousness they would have one experience from that point on, but they don't. They're two different people.

So in the first case one person dies and another person with the same body and memories is born, and in the second case the first person does not die and another person with the same body and memories is born. In both cases they are two separate people.

>You're really talking about (at best) a new instantiation of the identical consciousness in a new body. That's not the original consciousness moving, that's a new (identical) consciousness coming to life.

This is making a lot of assumptions about how consciousness works. If I make a copy of a book the story doesn't move, but it is now in two places. If I destroy the original book the story isn't lost. I think experience might be more like that. Multiple copies of the same information system will all only have one subjective experience.

Yes if you run two versions they will diverge and the question is much more complicated. But if there is one moment of copy/destruction or you're scanning and then simulating/rebuilding a frozen brain, then there's no point in time where a consciousness doesn't have a future version.

You need to consider it from the point of view of each entity. Each entity may not like to be destroyed irrespective of whether there is a copy.

An entity might have a reaction to the destruction of their original body, but if the transport is done as a single step there is only 1 conscious entity, and they survive.

That is a very bold assumption.

Why is it more bold than the other way around?

But a book is not a person. A book does not have experiences. A book does not think or live.

There's a mechanistic, reductionist point of view that runs throughout many of the HN comments here that I find really disturbing.

A lot of people seem to think that we are just machines. If we are, then sure, replacing one machine with another that works the same and has the same "data" might be unproblematic, but I don't share such a bleak and narrow view of humanity. To think and feel is not just to run a program on a computer.

I'm starting to lean more towards a consciousness-first idealism.

I don't think it's less mechanistic to say that the second copy creates a second entity.

Why do you think that the thinking and feeling is tied to the original body?

Religious people pine for any proof of consciousness being something other than a mechanical thing in our body but all availableinformation points to there being no magic.

> The cells in our bodies are being progressively replaced. A materialist, naturalist, or physicalist would have trouble explaining how someone could retain their original identity if nothing of them was left after this process.

Suppose I transfer a virtual machine from one physical server to another using some live migration tool. Of course it migrates the state of all running programs. But beyond that, for all practical purposes, the new VM assumes the identity of the old VM: its IP address, its pending requests, its role in a cluster, et cetera.

Someone might argue that the new VM is not really the same entity as the old VM; after all, it's stored on a different physical storage medium and processed by a different physical CPU.

I'd respond: who cares about the physical storage medium? That's the wrong layer of abstraction to be looking at. A VM does not exist on the plane of matter but on the plane of information. It is not made of hard disks and CPUs, but bits. The hardware is just a way to instantiate it in the physical world; it's not part of its identity.

So it is with people, even if we currently lack a way to transfer the bits representing them to different storage media.

Except that a VM hasn't lived through any events in its life (since it's not alive and doesn't experience anything anyway), and no one would care if it had or hadn't. Also, there are no ethical issues with destroying a VM.

The same is not the case with people.

It would matter to a lot of people if their loved ones were the ones they knew and had intimate contact with, not some clone of theirs that simply shares their appearance and memories.

The person to whom it would arguably matter most is the person getting destroyed or killed. What comfort is it to them that some clone of their lives on?

> Except that a VM hasn't lived through any events in its life (since it's not alive and doesn't experience anything anyway),

It has certainly processed events during its lifetime and accumulated data about them (~= experience that a person might get from living through events). There wouldn't be ethical issues with destroying it, but there would be the downside of losing that data; however, migrating it doesn't have that problem.

> The person to whom it would arguably matter most is the person getting destroyed or killed. What comfort is it to them that some clone of their lives on?

Personally I would have no problem with myself or anybody I know going through such a process. Partly because I would consider the result the same person, but partly because I think more broadly that the difference between "I live on" and "a clone of me lives on" is unimportant.

For example, suppose I went through a teleporter but due to some mishap the body at the sending end were not destroyed, so there were two copies of me. If this happened and were detected immediately, both copies of me would freely volunteer to kill themselves in favor of keeping the other one. From my perspective (as either of the copies), the only thing lost would be the memories I made since teleporting, but losing a few minutes' worth of memories is not a big deal and something that happens all the time. Beyond that, the other copy is still "me", so there's nothing to offend my desire for self-preservation. If on the other hand the situation lasted much longer before being detected, so I gained more unique memories, or if it was only a few minutes but I just happened to have some kind of eureka moment in that time, I might be more ambivalent.

Ideally there would be some way to merge the memories of the two copies into one person. In that case, I would be interested in intentionally making short-term forks of myself on a regular basis, to be merged later (say, after a few hours), so that I could effectively do multiple things at the same time.

Partly because I would consider the result the same person

Do you consider identical twins the same person? Do you consider Abby and Brittany Hensel[1] the same person - they share the same body so they must have shared the same life experiences?

> I think more broadly that the difference between "I live on" and "a clone of me lives on" is unimportant.

Do you think the difference between "I live on" and "my child lives on" is unimportant? What about the difference between "I live on" and "someone else lives on"? The clone is a different body in a different place, it's the same situation as "I live on" vs "any other human lives on", except for what you believe about the other person.

> If this happened and were detected immediately, both copies of me would freely volunteer to kill themselves in favor of keeping the other one.

Then why don't you suicide right now, if continuity of experience is that casually irrelevant to you and all you need is a belief that some other body in the universe shares the same ideas you do? There are a lot of people on the planet right now, are you not convinced that someone, somewhere, shares enough of the important ideas with you already? Why not? Is your memory of a dentist's visit in third grade, or your particular grandmother's generic apple pie really that special?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKrvtq5vDmk

I should have been more clear about the role I believe experiences play. What matters to me is not just a person's concrete memories of experiences, but their unique personality that has been built up by a combination of those experiences, genetics, and a hefty dose of randomness.

In the "accidental clone" scenario, I wouldn't just be losing memories of a few minutes of experiences; I'd also be losing whatever delta to my personality the discarded clone went through in those minutes. However, in most cases I wouldn't care because that delta would be miniscule. As I mentioned, a potential problematic case is if I suddenly had a eureka moment in those few minutes that single-handedly changed my personality, but that's pretty unlikely.

With Abby and Brittany Hensel, on the other hand, they've had three decades to build up unique personalities, so despite sharing many of the same experiences they're definitely different people. (Plus, there are various sources of divergence between their experiences. For example, each of them will remember a different subset of their experiences, and in any argument between the two of them, each of them would experience being on a different side of the argument.)

Similarly, "I live on" and "my child live on" are very different things; a parent and child don't even share most of the same experiences, let alone personality.

> Then why don't you suicide right now, if continuity of experience is that casually irrelevant to you and all you need is a belief that some other body in the universe shares the same ideas you do? There are a lot of people on the planet right now, are you not convinced that someone, somewhere, shares enough of the important ideas with you already? Why not? Is your memory of a dentist's visit in third grade, or your particular grandmother's generic apple pie really that special?

I'm a special snowflake… just like everybody else. [ed:] I'm not important, but I'm unique; nobody is exactly like me.

Do I make the world much better with my existence? Not really. Hopefully I make it a little better; hopefully I don't make it worse; but I'm only one person and not a particularly famous one.

But I still want to live, and I want other people who are alive to keep living. Not as a means to some end, but as an ingrained human desire.

Yet I choose to interpret "I" as "my special-snowflakeness", as opposed to tying it to some physical object [ed: or continuity or linearity of experience, which I think are largely violated already when I fall asleep or lose memories]. An exact copy of me is the same special snowflake, at least at first, progressively diverging as the two copies start to have different experiences.

"In the "accidental clone" scenario, I wouldn't just be losing memories of a few minutes of experiences; I'd also be losing whatever delta to my personality the discarded clone went through in those minutes. However, in most cases I wouldn't care because that delta would be miniscule."

It just seems weird to me that someone would think "I don't matter if there's a backup of my data somewhere and they could bring back a copy of me if they wanted." or "There's already a copy of me out there right now, so that makes my own death ok."

To me it wouldn't matter in the slightest if there was a clone out there of me. As long as I want to go on living, it's me having future experiences that matters to me, not whether some clone of me has these experiences.

Something else that hasn't been discussed yet is whether the clone really does have all your experiences and really is identical to you. How would you really know? Would you trust some scientist's or some machine's evaluation? I don't think you could ever really know.

Of course, for me it would make no difference as I wouldn't want to die so some clone may life, but it might matter to those of you who are willing to sacrifice yourself for a clone. In that case think: how would you really know they were a clone?

Sure, you could quiz them regarding some memories that only you had, but you couldn't ask them about everything. As important, you can't know if their experience of the world matches yours, nor what their true beliefs are.

Some people are surprised to find their life partners aren't who they thought they were, after decades of living together.. but you probably won't have decades to get to know your clone before you voluntarily suicide. In fact, in the "teleporter" example and in the mind upload example I'm hearing people eager to suicide even before their clone even exists. So no verification at all is even possible.

That kind of attitude just boggles my mind.

Once you say that you would die if someone else carries on, and that the other person doesn't have to be exactly you but can have for example a few minutes delta, then we get into the discussion of just what it is that makes your belief that they are "similar enough" that you can happily suicide.

> "I'm not important, but I'm unique; nobody is exactly like me."; "I still want to live"

I submit that if you were in the accidental clone scenario, you wouldn't be willing to die as you claim, but would instead feel "I still want to live" very strongly, and your belief that the clone is "exactly like you" would give way to "they just came out of a nano-assembler and they know it, they're only an approximation of me who knows how many things are subtly different inside, I deserve to live more strongly" or on the other side "I just stepped out of a nano-assembler, I'm new and fresh and they've been ageing for decades and they intended to die in that scanner, I deserve to live more strongly", or possibly "I'm willing to share everything I have and compromise, there's no need for any death here".

> [ed: or continuity or linearity of experience, which I think are largely violated already when I fall asleep or lose memories]

I'm not happy with the casual idea that continuity of experience is violated by sleep. If that were true, waking up somewhere "unexpected" would be impossible, instead it's very disorienting and scary and a trope of horror stories. We expect to wake up where we went to sleep, we expect any times of waking up in the night to be in the right places in the sleep timeline, and we expect to feel an amount of refreshed/relaxed/over-tired/too hot/aching/with a numb arm from lying on it/etc. depending on how long we slept for and how well we slept (which is something we are aware of and can report on), and we can experience waking up with answers or decisions to things we were thinking about the night before. Sleep is not 8 hours of non-event.

It'll be solved anyway. By folks who want to do it. They'll just do it. Leave the morality to the philosophers.

If my body is failing, I'd be happy to make a copy, even let it run before I die. Not sure I'd want to if it was a destructive copy (it killed me). But some would I suppose.

If my body was failing and I could make younger copy with same knowledge, as an old body I would want to be killed so as not to suffer.

If you only live to work and take care of things, then sure, having a clone to take on your work would free you up to die and end your otherwise miserable existence, especially if you're suffering.

However, if your life has meaning beyond just work and responsibility, then I don't think it matters if there's a clone, as your experiences would presumably matter to you, and it wouldn't matter if some clone was having them instead.

You are a process rather than a snapshot of material. The material is what the process runs on.

> practically speaking, the people who use the transporter don't feel like they're longer themselves. They just feel like they've moved.

That's begging the question, isn't it? If the destroy-and-copy view is right, then the people who use the transporter are dead, and replaced by the transporter with people who have the memory of having safely used the transporter.

I agree, though, that after a while society would just adapt and no one would care whether they'll survive the transport.

'balance the equation' so to speak https://theouterlimits.fandom.com/wiki/Think_like_a_Dinosaur

There's a Star Trek episode where Riker discovers a transporter copy of himself on an abandoned outpost. He'd transported out years earlier, but the 'Riker' who stayed thought the transport had failed. Lived on by the skin of his teeth for a decade.

They kind of glossed over the morality - a wasted episode really. Didn't say much about which was the 'real' Riker. Didn't seem to care.

That was the right answer.

There were then two people with common memories up to a point. There could be legal complications, probably already thoroughly explored. Does Starfleet have two flag officers now, with two service records? Yes. If he were married, does his wife now have two husbands? Probably. Kids? Two dads, now. Property? Held in common, until they negotiate. Etc.

A decent non-fiction book, Teleportation: The Impossible Leap, by David Darling, that I read some years ago, tackled these sort of ethical/philosophical questions neatly.

I think you'd find a whole lot of people unwilling to use a Teleporter, even over multiple generations.