this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Using the star trek transporter as the example, you actually experience the teleportation process. In one episode, we see the perspective of someone being transported and they go into a white void, briefly, and then appear in the 2nd location. It takes like 8 seconds. We also know that some transporters are faster than others.
I don't believe there's anything special about my current body. Barring teleportation, I fully believe that if it were possible to disassemble a person, but them in a box, ship them across the Pacific Ocean, and then put them back together again, that they'd be the same person.
I don't see how being converted into energy and back represents death.
People experiencing the transport process is due not understanding how copies work. Damn, they don't seem to grasp the idea of a backup.
Seeing as anything that we copy or make backups of now is not self-aware, I don't see what that has to do with anything. If anything, a teleport (as conceived of and described in science fiction, not how it might "actually" work) is more like moving a file from one tree to another. The whole idea of the teleport as a plot device is to create a form of near-instant transportation. I feel like these thought exercises where "what if the teleporter cloned you and killed the original copy" miss that.
Its like, "hmm what if the train from New York to Boston actually brought you to a cloning facility in New Haven, shot you in the head and then replaced you with a lab-grown clone that went on to Boston in your stead" well then it wouldn't be what most people think of when they think of taking the train.
In order for me to be convinced that the common depiction of teleportation is a form of cloning and murder, I would need someone to prove to me that humans have souls in a metaphysical sense - that there's something about us as individuals beyond the sum of our lived experiences and the atoms that make up our bodies.
Sorry, no it's not. When you introduce technobabble related to "buffers" and "caches" where the information is stored temporarily, the working must conform to the way files are handled. Yes, you can handwave whatever you like for narrative purposes, but this discussion is not supposed to have as a valid answer "a wizard did it".
That is ridiculous. Please search the short stories "The phantom of Kansas" by John Varley and "Think like a dinosaur" by James Patrick Kelly to see the implications of this kind of transport. Neither posits the existence of a soul, and the scenario of "the original dies, a copy keeps living" is very clearly shown as the only valid explanation, and how the assumption that the person is the same after the transport (or the cloning, in the first story, but the effect are the same) is merely a legal fiction for convenience.
In any transport there's a copy, and any copy takes a non-zero time and an instant where the copied person must exist in two places at the time. Unless the spacetime is curved and poked and you transit through the hole, there is no other viable model.
The situation and plot of The Phantom of Kansas doesn't seem to have much to do with teleportation though? It doesn't look like Phantom of Kansas features a world with teleportation as a means of transportation, so I'm not sure what relevance it has to the discussion of teleporter technology since no one actually teleports in that story. Also, it makes it clear that there's a break of consciousness between one body to the next, but most people view teleportation as an instant thing that you're aware of the whole time. I accept that the premise in Kansas is similar, but people seem to use it to change their sex and appearance but keep their memory, or use it to restore backups of themselves if they can afford it, not get from point a to point b. When the question of "would you step into a transporter, like the one in Star Trek" is brought up, then it feels like moving the goal posts to bring up all these other examples of things that aren't technically teleporters, or to talk about what a "real" transporter would "have" to do.
The transporter, as shown in Star Trek, and the more generic teleporter, doesn't kill you and create a clone in your place unless something goes wrong. To believe it does says more about what one thinks of the metaphysical and spirituality than it does about science.