Teletransportation Paradox

I think this kind of question is particularly important to people brought up with strong religious beliefs.

My main point is it's not as cut and dry. Yes the body is essentially a machine "executing" your consciousness. But that consciousness is self-modifying, and modified by the environment.

Tangent: this line of thinking in reflection has led me to become profoundly forgiving. Different paths could have led me to be homeless, in prison, an insufferable bastard, insane, and so on. Other paths may have made me a better person than I am now. Even worse it’s hard to tell what those paths might have been except far in retrospect.

When we judge others harshly we really are being profoundly small minded and provincial.

Of course if you instead build a transporter that uses some funky form of a wormhole, you simply move from one frame to another. In that case you are still the original.

Maybe it's not so much a paradox as a headache inducer.

Even the ancients struggled with the question “why does a soul stay connected to a particular body?” And they were playing on easy with their belief in the soul, this problem feels so much harder for the materialist.

More on-topic, how is teleportation different to losing consciousness? You "know" you're the same person that went to sleep, but how do you know? Memory. The copies will have the same memories, and thus think they are the original. (as illustrated by some big blue guys in the great and gory animated show Invincible) You don't consider going to sleep to be "dying".

Likewise, if you were to get teleported, you'd be fine, as long as the original was destroyed. As long as there's only one "me" as defined by the sum of my memories existing in a single body, then we're OK.

Very few people habitually think in the way "you went on a 12 hour flight, you are older, more radiation damaged, have different memories than before you set off, so you are a different person". Many people think "you went on a 6 month expedition, you had mind opening experiences, it made you a different person", but don't go on to conclude "therefore you no longer have rights to the original person's bank account and posessions and citizenship".

think of firefox. you start it and it "lives" in the memory of the computer. however, turned off it is gone. the process is eliminated and purged from memory. when restarted, however, it remembers your browser history, sessions and passwords. still it is a new process.

basically this is what happens each night when we sleep. every morning a new you wakes up.

so when a cloned asset of cross linked (aka relational) memories is spinned up, the resulting process does not have a distinct possibility to determine if it is being cloned. it just have it same associative pathways in its wetware as the original. yet it will believe being the original and also act accordingly. when you ask outsiders who know you, they wont be able to make out a difference, and label the clone as original. the clone (depending on the age of the information) will also believe it is original as it knows your passwords, your mental setup (and lives by that because of reasons) and it remembers whatever has happened to you, too.

this can only mean one thing: our so called consciousness is a fake conclusion. yes, cogito ergo sum, but only for the moment. new day, new me.

But assuming the new data set is consistent with previous experiences then you are probably converging to some local maxima or oscilating around some point and you change less and less every night as you get older.

In that sense decompensation or PTSD would be symptoms of some retraining with some inconsistent data and having the network diverging.

In the end, when you step into the teleporter, you'll come out from the other side. The incomprehensible, unconveyable tragedy happened to the only person that could mourn its victim. The rest of the world carries on as usual.

I enjoy thought experiments, and have thought about this myself. And have probably read some good science fiction based around the premise. My current position is that a nanomachine which replaces a neuron or glial cell and behaves the same way that cell would is essentially magical thinking.

It’s the everlasting gobstopper of consciousness. The gobstopper faces the issue of conservation of energy: how can it continue to have flavor and not get any smaller? The nanotech faces an analogous issue of “continuation of systemic process (as opposed to divergence)” that I don’t have enough clarity to describe yet. This makes my position weak, and I accept that. I think I am saying “if consciousness is a property of the body system, then introducing pre-built components that originated outside of the system will change it in unanticipated ways.”

I’ll have to give it more thought if we start to create artificial replacements for simpler organs (heart, lungs, etc.) that work better than the originals. I’d like to live in that world and be faced with the question.

However, although no one knows for sure, it seems likely that the operations of consciousness are purely “classical” in the sense that the exact quantum state is not needed (Roger Penrose’s ideas not withstanding).

As long as the copy is 'good enough', which can be far away from the uncertainty principle, it really shouldn't make a difference to the though experiment.

I would also be somewhat surprised if the most detailed scan possible under QM is even necessary for a functionally-perfect copy of consciousness: The perceptron model used in artificial neural nets is a mere toy in comparison to a real neurone, yet very effective at duplicating interesting behaviours.

After freezing, in vacuum, you could remove the atoms from known positions by shooting ions to them and then you could identify the removed atoms.

Of course this would be exceedingly difficult to do for a large body, because identifying the type and positions of all atoms would take a huge amount of time and because if the body is large it is difficult to freeze its deeper interior fast enough to prevent any damage.

Nevertheless, there is no theoretical reason for this to be impossible.

You launch it, start the process, the code faithfully creates a copy of the player character, then you suddenly see a game over screen as if your character just died.

You had a bug: you created a new character for the player, but didn't update the gameplay code to reflect the change to the copied character.

This is the paradox.

The idea behind reincarnation seems to be that something persists, and is in some way definitive, but the only available definitions of that something are metaphysical and may not even be comprehensible in human terms.

Many kids appear to show relics of a former identity up to around the age of 4. But even if you assume there are no conventional and mundane explanations for this, there are possible metaphysical explanations that don't require reincarnation.

None of this is very useful scientifically.

All of which is tangential to the original point that we don't really know what identity is. We act as if we do because we have only really have one option - which is that people's personalities tend to be associated with a body we can recognise.

In reality personalities can change drastically because of trauma and illnesses like Alzheimers. So this is just a workable approximation.

In fact we don't even know our own identities. We have a consistent self-symbol but it's not really stable, and elements change dramatically over time. (Example - I like pretty much the same music I did as a teen. I know many people don't, so something that happens to be stable for me isn't stable for countless other people.)

People regularly surprise themselves with unexpected actions. And to a greater or lesser extent everyone has unrealistic beliefs about themselves and others.

So identity usually reduces to a set of observable and consistent behaviours. It should be a set of consistent emotional and mental states. We can't know the latter - not even with test equipment - so we assume the former somehow correlates.

This isn't very useful scientifically either.