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Comment by patdennis | Hacker News Reader

Here's one of my favorites. Glad to see the pros are evenly split, because this one really toasts my brain too.

Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death?

Accept or lean toward: survival 337 / 931 (36.2%) Other 304 / 931 (32.7%) Accept or lean toward: death 290 / 931 (31.1%)

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I lean towards a sort of death. But perhaps we're all dying and reanimating in between each Planck time instant anyway, in which case we shouldn't worry about it too much :)

That quite defines how I think about it. The current "me" is as different from the me within a second from now as from a theoretical me at the other end of a teleportation device that delivers me there within a second. The three selves are all distinct from each other and in fact are as distinct (and as close) to each other as from any other human being, with the caveat that the 'me's a second from now inherit all the memories and physical state from the current me, whereas a different person does not.

But in terms of selves, of consciousness, they're all isolated phenonema. I think consciousness is merely an illusion, we think we have continuity because we inherit the memories and thought processes from the self from the moment before, but all that exists is a moment of awareness (the "now"), which is analogous to a clock of a computer processor.

Depending on granularity, your comment was written by a number of people approaching infinity?

Yes. And I really do think it approaches infinity, or else our wetware has a limited clocking speed and that would define a single atomic moment of awareness (seems more likely since we're highly advanced computers, but computers nonetheless.) Even as I was writing the comment several clocks might have been spent not on it, but picking up ambient sound and other stimulae. To the extent that I'm half conscious to these other things, I was actually fully conscious to them though for only a few number of clocks, whereas things on which I seem to be fully conscious are demanding the majority of my (multi)processor clocks. There's the case for whether we can truly multitask--are we multi-core? We definitely are as to the many functions done subconsciously, but what about the conscious regions of the brain? But to simplify the thought experiment, we can simply think that we can only really spend any single moment of awareness on a single atomic thing, and like a computer we juggle attention between various things so fast as to make it seem we're doing them all concurrently (like the various applications simultaneously running on a computer.)

The upside, of course, is that my philosophy frees me up for gultfree teletransportation. Bring it on!

Fun fact: there are 18.5 million billion trillion quadrillion Planck times per second. So you can think of the universe as a simulation that runs at 1.85*10^43 FPS, where each "frame" sees all light-speed particles move one Planck length in their direction of travel.

Is there any actual justification for viewing spacetime as being discrete, with unit 1 Planck length/time? As far as I'm aware, the Planck length is just a length you get when you multiply a load of constants together.

You're absolutely right. The plank time is just a time such that events that happen in sufficiently smaller time intervals probably need new physics to describe. This is comparable to how very fast moving objects needed more than Newtonian physics to describe, namely relativity, or how very small objects needed quantum mechanics. It may be that that new physics is discrete, but at this point we have no idea.

>a time such that events that happen in sufficiently smaller time intervals probably need new physics to describe //

Physically¹ events happen instantaneously we just can't tell at which precise instant they happen. This is true even with quantised time.

- - -

¹ Perhaps that should say "in the mathematical model of the physical universe we base our science on".

What if it didn't destroy the old one? Would there be any doubt at all?

The person who popped out of the other end of the teleporter would be doubtful.

Does it make a difference if it's a teleporter that destroys the original as an necessary part of its function, vs one that destroyed the original but didn't need to do so, vs one that did not destroy the original?

I don't think there's much doubt about whether a document received via fax is the original or not, regardless of whether or not the sent document is shredded immediately after.

Yes but surely that has something to do, at least in part, with the implied reduction in quality between the sent and received document?

I would hope that any working 'teletransporter' would provide a near-enough-perfect replica?

Only if you are careful to not let flies in.

It could create a replica that's exactly the same atom-for-atom, but it would still be a replica. Destroying the original at the source would make it a 'teletransporter', and not destroying the original at the source would make it a 'duplicator'.

By any external measure the replica could be functionally and physically identical to the original, but so long as new matter is used it would still be a replica.

Physically there isn't really a difference between new matter and old matter. Suppose that instead of moving an electron from A to B, you destroyed an electron at A and created one at B (through some kind of reaction between other fundamental particles). There isn't really a physical difference between the two resulting situations. Unlike conventional objects, electrons can't be marked or otherwise identified, they are really exactly identical. Electrons are just blips in the continuous fields of physics (electromagnetic field, higgs field, etc). If you could do the same with a complete person, then there may not be any physical difference between moving the person or "teleporting" the person. So if there is fundamentally no difference between those two things, then perhaps we should be agnostic to whether it is teleportation or creation-destruction. The really difficult questions are about the consciousness of such a person, and I think at this point we don't have an answer for those questions.

I rather like the related concept Feynman promoted, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe.

cf. The Prestige, one of my favourite films.

The best way to know how you lean is to really ask yourself if you'd step into the thing or not.

For me, no way in hell.

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