He went on: suppose you kill the original — did you "transport" the person?
Star Trek creeps me out a little now.
When you step into the teleporter, there will actually be two future selves created: one will stay in the teleporter chamber, the other will go to the destination. So to decide if you should do it your not, you need to weigh the benefits to 3 people: (1) your future self if you don't go into the teleporter; (2) your future self who arrives at the destination; (3) your future self who stays back anyway, so who is very similar to (1). If (2) is much happier than (1) and (3) is not significantly less happy than (1), you should rationally do it. If (3) would be significantly less happy, there is also the option of considering having them (painlessly) killed in the process.
Either way, the person making the decision will not get to experience either (1), (2), or (3)'s experiences.
I imagine a mining colony around the asteroid belt where the CEO uses the more expensive tech that is slower to visit every so often but the workers are forced to use the tech that kills them everyday but they are just a light beam of zero and ones on their "commute"
I rather suspect that “you” are simply information. If that information is copied, there’s another you—at least for the instant before that “you” starts having its own thoughts and receives information through its own senses.
For you to die on transport and “someone else” to come out the other side, you’d have to exist in some way separate from your physical self; which might suggest you can survive death anyway.
So, when you step into the teleporter, you can perfectly equivalently think of the person that will come up at the other side as a "copy" of you, or "future you". Let's say that the teleporter doesn't affect the local copy, it just creates a remote copy. What reason do you have to care more about the local copy than the remote copy? Why are you imagining that hacking the body up into tiny pieces, sending the pieces, and reassembling them would be any different from just killing the local copy and sending the information away? You'd still die and another person would be assembled on the other side.
Now, if you do believe in a transcendent soul (I don't), things get much more interesting. In fact, teleportation in this way would amount to experimentation of this hypothesis. If humans have unique souls given to them by some god at the moment of birth, then copy teleportation should not be able to produce two copies - either one of the body copies would not be conscious at all, since one of the bodies would not have a soul, OR the two bodies would be completely different in personality, as one would have the original soul, and the other would have the new soul, which would be a completely different person. For the "move" style teleportation, the risk would be that the disassembly process kills the body and causes the soul to be separated, so that the reassembled body ends up being soul-less and doesn't function, or is inhabited by a different soul, so it must act differently.
That is a big claim considering we have no idea what causes consciousness. It is however certain that the copy is not you. Whether the original gets destroyed on teleportation or not, the original you will not feel, see, hear etc anything that the copy does.
That's not certain at all, and depends on how we define "you". And, as you say, we don't know enough about consciousness to flesh out that definition.
If consciousness depends only on the layout of neurons in the brain (for example), then a teleporter that destroys your body and makes an atomically (quantum-ly?) identical copy at the destination actually does move "you" from one place to another. But if there's more to it than just that, perhaps it doesn't.
There is no known process in physics that could give meaning to that identity. So regardless of whether consciousness is emergent or quantum or computational or whatever we will discover it to be, unless it is transcendental, there is no way to physically define this continuity or give it some special meaning, such that teleportation would be meaningfully different from the normal passage of time, or that perfectly copying an individual could be said to produce anything different than moving them.
I am arguing that we don't know enough about consciousness or about the universe to claim there is no difference between the original and the copy. So saying "there is no known process in physics" doesn't undermine my position.
Here is one possibility, perhaps a bit silly, but if we are in a simulated universe, not that I think this is likely, but if we are then each person could maybe have a unique hash. A copy then would have a different hash to the original.
Like I said I am not saying we are in a simulation. It is just an example scenario where a perfect copy would not be the same as a move.
Also note, a hash or a mind in a higher-level universe is exactly a transcendent soul: it transcends what we call physical reality (or it transcends 'the simulation' in that story). Just because it's framed in scientific concepts doesn't make it any more or less scientific than Brahman or Christian souls.
Only if our conscious experience truly stops during sleep (which as far as I know isn't actually backed up - there's a world of difference between minimally consciousness and stopped consciousness. From my understanding we simply don't know enough about consciousness) and if you believe whatever makes up experience isn't baked into the physical i.e. panpsychism, unless you want to classify that as a 'soul' (but then I'd reject your characterization of a soul as some magical thing that influences personality).
And even if 'whatever makes up experience is baked into the physical', that doesn't give a path to a time-stable identity. In fact, it makes that even less plausible, as it implies that every atom leaving your body, every cell that dies, and certainly something like losing a hand or getting a transplant, fundamentally changes your psyche at the physical level.
I'm not sure what that even means. How can an experience be an illusion? It seems to me that at point everything just breaks apart.
>Just because I remember when I started writing this comment doesn't mean I am the same thing that started writing it.
The point isn't that you remember it (false memories are a thing), but that you're experiencing continuity from moment to moment. If you think this continuity doesn't exist, how could you care about anything at all?
>From one moment to another, everything is different, or at least there are no clear boundaries
How is everything different? On the contrary, I'd say that actually most things seem to change only marginally and as time periods approach the infinitesimal, so do the changes. And I don't understand what you mean by clear boundaries. Why would there be any? Isn't lacking clear boundaries what actually makes it continuous.
>Am I the same thing as the feritilzed egg? Present-me and past-me are just as related as copy1 and copy2 with a hypothetical perfect copy machine.
If you reject continuity, sure, but otherwise the key difference is that there's continuity between the objects.
Let me ask you, why do you care about your future 'self'? That is, why do you not just maximize _your_ (current) pleasure, rather than caring about the experience of someone that you seem to think isn't actually yourself. At the very least, it seems like from your point of view there is no reason to place more importance on your future self than any other future person.
>And even if 'whatever makes up experience is baked into the physical', that doesn't give a path to a time-stable identity. In fact, it makes that even less plausible, as it implies that every atom leaving your body, every cell that dies, and certainly something like losing a hand or getting a transplant, fundamentally changes your psyche at the physical level.
'time-stable' identity doesn't mean that it must be forever frozen, but rather that it's continuous in the time dimension and happens slowly enough that the subject can experience this. You can replace parts of the 'soul material', without identity being lost as long.
This experience of continuity is built from memory, I think I am the same person I was 2 minutes ago because I can remember what it was like to be that person. If I take a roofie or drink too much or sleep walk, I will feel that the things that I did happened to another person, because I don't remember them at all. Likewise, the experience of continuity is often lost - I generally experience sleep as "falling asleep" -> "waking up", even if an EEG would show that I am not even entirely losing consciousness for this time.
> How is everything different? On the contrary, I'd say that actually most things seem to change only marginally and as time periods approach the infinitesimal, so do the changes. And I don't understand what you mean by clear boundaries. Why would there be any? Isn't lacking clear boundaries what actually makes it continuous.
Yeah, that phrase was really bad, I didn't get my point across at all. What I wanted to say is that in physics you actually look at every moment in time individually, even if functions of time are continuous; and you look at every piece of every object individually - any object can be equivalently represented as multiple objects held together by strings (or springs). There is no need or use for object identity across time.
> Let me ask you, why do you care about your future 'self'? That is, why do you not just maximize _your_ (current) pleasure, rather than caring about the experience of someone that you seem to think isn't actually yourself. At the very least, it seems like from your point of view there is no reason to place more importance on your future self than any other future person.
Because in this view, a single experience is extremely fleeting, far too little to gain any great pleasure. Also, my future "self" is the person I can empathize most with in the world, so I feel it is natural to want to help him. Not to mention, for any desire I have, he is the most likely to actually see it through.
Also, we often sacrifice our happiness for other people, often ones that we have much less reason to empathize with than our future selves. Not to mention, of course I occasionally sacrifice my future self's happiness for my current one - such as eating an extra piece of cake, or drinking another glass. But there has to be some limit, especially when I have such an intimate idea of how much the future person will suffer.
> 'time-stable' identity doesn't mean that it must be forever frozen, but rather that it's continuous in the time dimension and happens slowly enough that the subject can experience this.
Yes, I think we mean the same thing by time-stable. It doesn't have to be frozen, but it must be well defined for more than one moment of time (it's pretty trivial to define an object at time T, even the Atlantic Ocean, but it's much harder to define an object that remains itself over some interval T0-T1).
> You can replace parts of the 'soul material', without identity being lost as long.
This is the part I don't understand. In the materialistic computational theory of the mind, it's pretty clear why the mind doesn't change just because cells die and are replaced, or just because every atom in a body is replaced. But if each atom carries a part of the soul, I really don't understand how this works, or at least what it buys you in terms of identity or mind.
I think there are good reasons to believe this is not generally how the writers of Star Trek thought the transporters in their stories were supposed to work, but they weren't always perfectly consistent on the subject.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasons_and_persons#Personal_i...
I remember one episode of one of the TV shows (I forget which one), they used a transporter to transport a bomb off the ship, so it detonated in space instead. If transportation is converting matter to information, transmitting the information, then reassembling it at the other end, why would one bother doing that to a bomb? Just do the first step of converting matter to information, and then instead of transmitting it and reassembling it somewhere else, just send the information to /dev/null
(I think if someone was designing a bomb, in a situation in which such technology was known, they'd try to design it so that any attempt to dematerialise/transport it would detonate it instantly.)
Thought experiments are often not intended to be carried out empirically (Schrodinger did not poison cats, Maxwell could not summon demons, Einstein did not throw people off buildings or construct clocks made of light, and so on), but they are nevertheless useful tools that can lead to insights about the real world, or serve as inspiration for actual experiments (Bell tests [6] are perhaps a good example of this, as they derive directly from Ian Bell's careful consideration of a famous thought experiment of Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen [7]).
Quantum teleportation is also of course a real phenomenon [8], and it does have some of the same properties as the imaginary teleportation device that Parfit and other philosophers consider in their work, albeit that it has only been demonstrated at the atomic scale for now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swampman
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_brain
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_test
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_Podolsky_Rosen_Parado...
With the benefit of current scientific knowledge, most people who think carefully about personhood identify the brain as the seat of consciousness, and will tend to assume that any procedure that leaves the brain intact will leave the person intact too. If a brain (or a head in this case) can receive a 'body transplant' though, some will find it natural to wonder whether other radical interventions in the nervous system are possible; for instance whether subdivisions of the brain can be successfully transplanted, and what the effects of that might be.
That kind of speculation in turn prompts questions about the consequences that physical changes in the brain might have for conceptions of personal identity. Thought experiments about teleportation — in which all the physical matter of a brain is replaced while preserving its structure and function — offer a template for thinking about these questions by allowing their scientific and ethical consequences to be examined in the most extreme cases. The most extreme cases may or may not be realisable, but legitimate conclusions can nevertheless be arrived at by thinking about them.
Many of the most influential thought experiments in science were never conceived with the belief that they could be carried out in reality; that is often why they were thought experiments rather than laboratory exercises. The purpose of thought experiments is typically to help extend the theoretical investigation of scientific and philosophical ideas into realms beyond the reach of current empirical methods. They are a tool for considering interesting questions where attempts to test them cannot be made; sometimes this helps to inform practical experimental work, and sometimes the thought experiment itself is sufficient to reach reliable conclusions, if the reasoning is rigorous, and the underlying theory is demonstrably valid in enough areas where verification is possible for its extension to be trusted.
Star Trek: cloning takes seconds. You can have as many copies of a veteran warrior as you want. Dangerous mission? just send in the red shirts and a few highly trained veterans in the hope that nobody important dies (again).
But instead we have "pattern buffers" that "degrade" quickly, and presumably keeping around copies of the full quantum states of many humans would require too much storage.
It really takes off in the book "A Little Immortality":
https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2016-12-05
but the core ideas leading to that book go back much further in the comic's archives.
Occasionally something goes wrong and the source is not "deconstructed" properly by the equipment so the procedure is for the transporter crew to terminate the original person.
PS It was "Think Like A Dinosaur"
Edit: Made my statement more vague. There is definitely more to sleep though than turning consciousness off and on again.
Does it really matter though? It's just a different way of encoding the information. These things force one to think about the nature of what is real and what matters. Is the important thing actually hearing your Mum (whatever that means), or making the connection with her at an emotional level?
https://www.fantasticfiction.com/d/thomas-m-disch/echo-round...
The only difference with splitting later in life is that you'd share more life memories from before the split.