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Comment by patdennis | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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?

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.

Only if you are careful to not let flies in.

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