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Would you use a teleporter?

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thomasjack

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Teleportation & personal identity
« on: June 23, 2008, 09:14:41 PM »

Assume someone's invented a teleporter that works like this: Picard steps into the machine on Earth. The machine scans all his atoms. The machine vaporizes his body on Earth. His scanned data is sent to a machine on Mars. The machine there creates an exact replica based on the scanned data, and a Picard appears on Mars.

Would you use such a machine?

We're so used to sci-fi that this might seem perfectly OK at first. I don't think anyone watching Star Trek is yelling at the TV "NO, Jean-Luc, don't get on the transporter pad, it's gonna kiiilll you!!!". Mars Picard has all the memories of the original Picard, and appears to be totally psychologically continuous with the individual who stepped into the machine. This is a compelling way to define personal identity.

But, now suppose that the vaporizer on the machine breaks. Earth Picard steps into the teleporter machine, sits for a few minutes, and then steps out, thinking "man this was a hoax". But, he has been scanned and an exact replica has been created on Mars. In this case, we have an Earth Picard and a Mars Picard. Which is the same individual as the Picard that stepped into the machine? Certainly they can't both be the same person as the original Picard... can they? Who has to pay the original Picard's bills? Who gets to come home to the original Picard's property and sleep with the original Picard's wife?

It certainly seems like Earth Picard has a more legitimate claim than Mars Picard. He stepped into a machine, was scanned, and then stepped out. Why should some replication happening on Mars change whether this man is the same man he was a few minutes ago? It seems we must conclude that Mars Picard is NOT the same person as original Picard, but just a replica.

But why should it matter to Mars Picard's identity whether the body on Earth is vaporized or not? It seems like, if the vaporization works as intended, Picard hasn't been teleported to Mars, he's been killed, and then a copy made on Mars!

The question is, would you use a teleporter, assuming the vaporization works and your original body is destroyed?

If I ask myself "what would it be like to use the teleporter", I'm scared. It seems, intuitively, that it would feel like dying. I would go unconscious as my body is vaporized, and then someone else would wake up on Mars thinking he was me! Sure, he's got all my memories and such, but he's not me, he's a copy! I'd be dead! If you look at it this way, every episode of Star Trek is pretty tragic: every time someone teleports a person dies, and a new person is created who has no idea, and that person unwittingly kills themself by beaming up shortly thereafter.

My position is that this intuitive idea is just wrong. I think I would use the teleporter. I'd be damn scared though.
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timmysoboy

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Re: Teleportation & personal identity
« Reply #1 on: June 23, 2008, 09:20:54 PM »

I don't think you would be alive on the other end.  it would just be an exact replica of you.
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BonerJoe

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Re: Teleportation & personal identity
« Reply #2 on: June 23, 2008, 09:29:36 PM »

You'd never be able to capture the near the speed of light electrical activity of your brain.
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MacFall

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Re: Teleportation & personal identity
« Reply #3 on: June 23, 2008, 09:33:47 PM »

I don't think that the mind is the same thing as the brain. The transported you would be an atom-for-atom lump of meat. Your body would be totally vacant, and *you* would disappear into the aether.  :shock:
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mikehz

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Re: Teleportation & personal identity
« Reply #4 on: June 23, 2008, 09:34:34 PM »

You'd never be able to capture the near the speed of light electrical activity of your brain.

I'm not sure where you reached that "speed of light" data for the brain. I remember learning in biology  that nerve impulses operate at around 200 mph in a young, healthy person. And, just recently, I heard on some science podcast that it takes a tenth of a second for the brain to process incoming data from the senses.

In any case, teleportation (at least, as portrayed on "Star Trek,") is virtually impossible. I think Picard is safe.
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BonerJoe

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Re: Teleportation & personal identity
« Reply #5 on: June 23, 2008, 09:44:17 PM »

I'm not sure where you reached that "speed of light" data for the brain. I remember learning in biology  that nerve impulses operate at around 200 mph in a young, healthy person. And, just recently, I heard on some science podcast that it takes a tenth of a second for the brain to process incoming data from the senses.

Damn. I wanna upgrade to a 1333Mhz bus and a dual quad core.
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DogOn

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Re: Teleportation & personal identity
« Reply #6 on: June 23, 2008, 09:57:05 PM »

I don't think that the mind is the same thing as the brain. The transported you would be an atom-for-atom lump of meat. Your body would be totally vacant, and *you* would disappear into the aether.  :shock:

Someone needs to go back to biology class.

Your brain isn't an empty shell for some untouchable being, its a complex biological and chemical network where upon millions of electrons are flowing all the time.

If you transported atom for atom it would be "you", although you could simultaneously have thousands of versions of "you" all believing themselves to be the real "you", hence "you" becomes meaningless, its just a collections of particles which in turn form a collection of continual experiences.

The real difficulty would be assembling all the atoms together fast enough so that the body and brain could stay together in one coherent piece.

I believe a more realistic alternative would be to have "blank" genetic clones with 0 brain activity scattered across the world/galaxy, where upon a neural interface could be used to transfer the data needed to form your consciousness into your brain, although due to the structural changes that happen in your brain during thought/your life, im not sure it would be possible to mimic the same structural changes in a short amount of time in a totally untouched brain.
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rabidfurby

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Re: Teleportation & personal identity
« Reply #7 on: June 23, 2008, 10:04:43 PM »

If every atom and electron in your brain could be transported with absolute accuracy, I think it would be possible to re-assemble consciousness. However, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle means that it's impossible to even know the exact position and velocity of all those particles. So even ignoring the problem of transporting them, it's impossible.
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MacFall

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Re: Teleportation & personal identity
« Reply #8 on: June 23, 2008, 10:16:08 PM »

I suppose an experiment with transportation could/might put an end to the question once and for all. But as of today, nobody has ever proven that the mind exists as a purely biological thing, and in fact there is evidence to the contrary. It does not necessarily invoke the idea of the soul or spirit to say that the mind is something more than matter as we understand it.
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thomasjack

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Re: Teleportation & personal identity
« Reply #9 on: June 23, 2008, 10:23:41 PM »

I don't think that the mind is the same thing as the brain. The transported you would be an atom-for-atom lump of meat. Your body would be totally vacant, and *you* would disappear into the aether.  :shock:
Can you justify your dualism?

If every atom and electron in your brain could be transported with absolute accuracy, I think it would be possible to re-assemble consciousness. However, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle means that it's impossible to even know the exact position and velocity of all those particles. So even ignoring the problem of transporting them, it's impossible.
I'd say that position and velocity at the subatomic level aren't really very important to the identity of a person. I mean that I think you could create a close enough replica that it would be indistinguishable. I don't think the "soul" lies in the exact position and velocity of subatomic particles in the brain.

That said, the point is not that this might happen sometime in the future and we might actually have to make a decision. It's just a thought experiment that explores the nature of personal identity. I guess one might argue that if the thought experiment is actually impossible, the question is meaningless (in the same way that if you assume a false statement to be true in mathematics, you can prove any arbitrary statement you want). That's a whole other issue that I really haven't thought much about: conceivability and non-self-contradiction and all that crap.

I guess this is similar to Mark's recent question to Ian about utilitarianism vs. liberty. I'm saying, assume a teleporter has been invented and works. If you believe this is a logical impossibility, then whatever conclusions are reached based on this assumption are meaningless, I guess.

But to me that seems like a cop out to avoid having to make a better theory of personal identity.
« Last Edit: June 23, 2008, 10:29:12 PM by thomasjack »
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thomasjack

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Re: Teleportation & personal identity
« Reply #10 on: June 23, 2008, 10:27:05 PM »

I suppose an experiment with transportation could/might put an end to the question once and for all. But as of today, nobody has ever proven that the mind exists as a purely biological thing, and in fact there is evidence to the contrary. It does not necessarily invoke the idea of the soul or spirit to say that the mind is something more than matter as we understand it.

Please share this evidence with me. I've never even heard of it.

I think it's interesting that an actual teleportation experiment would not settle the question I'm concerned with. Sure, it'd settle whether the replica would just be a mindless meatbag, but it would not settle whether the point of view that appears on Mars is the "same" point of view as the one that was on Earth. Personally I think this question is meaningless... but if it were a meaningful question and you performed a teleporter experiment, the Picard that came out on Mars would say "yep, this is me, same old Picard", but you'd never be able to actually prove it.
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MacFall

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Re: Teleportation & personal identity
« Reply #11 on: June 23, 2008, 10:42:16 PM »

I don't think that the mind is the same thing as the brain. The transported you would be an atom-for-atom lump of meat. Your body would be totally vacant, and *you* would disappear into the aether.  :shock:
Can you justify your dualism?
Essentially, our knowledge of the material instrument of human thought has not yet explained how or why the mind exists or works. That leaves us to an explanation beyond or other than that provided by biology. Which, as I said above, does not mean I think that the mind is necessarily a "supernatural" thing.

I also have a methodological reason, which I'll let Ludwig von Mises explain for me here.
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hellbilly

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Re: Teleportation & personal identity
« Reply #12 on: June 23, 2008, 11:16:59 PM »

I cannot say whether I would make use of said machine.

I can, however, guarantee that I would reside somewhere midstream and scalp the atomic anatomy at every opportunity. Sort of like a "cell kidnapper" if you will.

And then I would use old school ransom notes to extort money from the rest of the Star Trek crew if they ever wanted to see Picard again.

..and I might even mix the atoms up with the atoms of other people for kicks.
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Zhwazi

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Re: Teleportation & personal identity
« Reply #13 on: June 23, 2008, 11:26:09 PM »

Who cares?

The two Picards almost certainly both have the same ultimate goals in mind as before, and if they meet later, chances are they'll reconcile the information from their divergent experience and decide what to do from there, both knowing they know have twice the manpower to achieve their goals. Twice as much power to pay their bills. Who gets Picard's wife? Teleport her too, problem solved. Don't like that? Have a three-way. Or best of all, don't fucking get married, fool. Anything that breaks when you push it to the extremes like that is already broken and you just haven't realized it yet. Marriage, insurance, contracts, IP, spatial property, democracy, all seemingly useful ideas in what we today consider "normal" circumstances with fundamental problems that cause them to fall apart in the wake of significant change. All that keeps them alive is ignorance and weakness, and knowledge and power will increasingly show it to be so.

Hell yes I'd use the teleporter. Especially if the vaporizer was broken. I could finally go fuck myself like people keep telling me. I could have my alts go out and specialize in something, then report back with information presented in a way that all the rest of us will have little trouble understanding, amplifying all our knowledge.

Assuming the vaporizer works, why would I care if the cut-pasted Zhwazi on Mars is me or not? Either I'm on Mars and can't tell the difference, or I'm vaporized and can't care about a damn thing.
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thomasjack

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Re: Teleportation & personal identity
« Reply #14 on: June 23, 2008, 11:42:16 PM »

Who cares?

...

Assuming the vaporizer works, why would I care if the cut-pasted Zhwazi on Mars is me or not? Either I'm on Mars and can't tell the difference, or I'm vaporized and can't care about a damn thing.

Yeah, I pretty much agree with you. Except I think we've evolved to have an illusory sense of continuity of point of view and to preserve it at all costs. Since we didn't evolve to deal rationally with teleporter thought experiments, I think the intuition is "no fuckin way, I don't wanna die", but that it's actually rational to use the teleporter (assuming you actually want to go somewhere far away..).

Though, consider this modification. The vaporizer is supposed to work, but malfunctions when you use the machine. The teleporter crew, realizing what happened a few minutes later, come in and attempt to vaporize you manually. They're coming at you with phasers and you're saying "hey what the fuck don't kill me", but then they say "oh no, it's ok, your replica arrived safely, see you can even see him on the viewscreen" and then you say "oh, ok. as long as my replica is there, go ahead and kill me." I don't think so. But why should it matter that your death happened a few minutes later rather than immediately after scanning? I mean, why would you accept death by automatic vaporization after or during scanning, but not shortly thereafter?
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