Doesn't that solves the paradox, does it?
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.
Given: If the technology exists to create “good-enough” copies of a human, the tech to create “good-enough” copies of a habitat should also exist.
Experiment:
1) Create X copies of a controlled habitat
2) Create X copies of N humans, where N > 1
3) Place human copies into habitat copies
4) Observe
What is the expected percentage that the humans will behave identically? For how long? It’s probably best to start with one human per habitat, but I think “more than one human” is the more interesting question.
I can’t find the name of the condition right now, but sometimes people fall into loops, where they will ask the same series of questions and give the same responses each time until they recover. It happened to my grandmother once after a mini-stroke, and there’s a Radiolab episode about it which I also can’t find. So that lends credibility to the hypothesis that if the environments are “good enough,” there will be no divergence. I’m curious to know how long that could possibly last.
Anecdotally, my mother did that sometimes during the mid-to-late stages of her Alzheimer’s (before we had to send her to a care home, but after she was failing the Clock test).
My one experience of edible cannabis (in retrospect I don’t think it was just cannabis), my partner at the time said I was repeating the same sentences. Not that I know for certain: myself, I had the subjective feeling of all working memories going direct into long-term memory without touching short-term memory.
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).
So, in short the no cloning theorem does not prevent quantum teleportation.
In this sense, the follow-up in the paradox where you create 10 copies all of which are identical would not work. Quantum mechanics effectively ensures that there's ever only at most one of you.
> … (although it is possible to “teleport” the exact quantum state by transmitting its information, provided one is willing to mess up the original).
There really is no evidence for this.
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.
This also implies trying to "dig deeper" doesn't matter - there's nothing to dig up. From this follows that either 1) "the most detailed scan possible under QM" is at least sufficient to capture the entirety of consciousness, or 2) there's something beyond QM we have no clue about, that makes uncertainty not fundamental, or 3) consciousness is magic and the universe makes no sense.
I find 2) unlikely, and 3) is religion (the "separate magisterium from science" kind).