FWIW, Douglas Hofstadter’s book, “I Am A Strange Loop” deals exclusively with this topic, including a chapter or two on this transporter dilemma.
Yeah, I can’t seem to come up with a good analogy here. A third attempt:
Imagine a vast ocean that is at first absolutely calm. Then, little fingerlets of wind whisk over the surface of the water, making little waves in all directions. The fingerlets get bigger and more nunmerous and move faster. After a while, there are no longer just waves in everÝ directioin on the surface–there’s a hurricane, with extremely fast winds and water being sucked up into the sky.
The little fingerlets of wind are units of processing ability in the human brain, and the hurricane is the human consciousness that emerges as a result if the confluence of a large amount of processing power.
But the cells on your body are constantly being worn out and replaced. The same skin on your body today isn’t made up of the same cells that were on your body 10 years ago.
In other words, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts? I’d buy that.
That’s an excellent point and one that I was thinking about last night. I once heard (from a pretty unreliable source) that in eleven years, every cell in our bodies has been replaced. If true, then I’m on version 5 of my body. And yet I’m the same person I was half my life ago.
It’s not a question of the specific matter. That’s why it doesn’t matter whether the transporter reassembles you using whatever matter is available or whether it reassembles you using the same bits of matter.
But I thought brain cells don’t regenerate.
I didn’t know so I looked it up.
A cursory search reals that they were once thought to not regenerate, but now we know that that’s not true. Looks like a pretty recent discovery.
Regarding crime prevention, my first thought was whether the judicial system is to be a punitive system, or rehabilitative.
If punitive - then the question of whether the duplicate can be held accountable is further mired in ethics. The person is made up of different bits now, but still has all the same mental processes that led the original to commit the crime. Similar to having someone locked up for life - after X number of years, all cells have been replaced - yet the person stays in jail.
So by current judicial standards, the fact that the duplicate is made of different bits would be less relevant. Therefore, the duplicate is still accountable for the originals actions.
On the other hand, if the judicial system is looked at as being more rehabilitative - once again the duplicate has the same exact mental processes and so forth that led the original to commit the crime. If the idea is to prevent crime by giving the perp a chance to rehab and turn over a new leaf, you’d have to do the same for both the original (if they hadn’t have jumped in the transporter) and the duplicate, because the mental aspect of both is the same.
So actually, I’d say that regardless of the view on the judicial system, you have to treat the duplicate exactly the same as the original.
Just to throw another wrench into the equation - say you weren’t the one who went through the transporter - say it was your significant other. When you see them again, do you see them as a different person, or the same person (since you’d have the same shared memories of events, they’d have the same sense of humor, they’d come back from their conference that they teleported too with the same reactions, etc).
I know it’s indirectly specified in the OP but a teleporter doesn’t have to be a scanner / assembler device. It could also open a portal from A to B (q.v. Stargate) and you just step through.
I’d have no problem using that sort of teleporter.
Still though, wholesale regeneration of 100% of your brain seems different than slow piecemeal regeneration of extremely small parts of it.
Just don’t go through awake. “it’s looonger than you think dad, longer than you think, long jaunt! Long jaunt!”
I’ve given this idea much thought over the years and am convinced it would kill you, and make a duplicate of you, none the wiser, and will continue where you left off, until that version teleports again and the whole process is repeated.
How do you quantize consciousness?
If it was clearly a wormhole type device, then yes, I’d do it, after extensive human trials.
Incidentally, this sort of transporter is a major plot point in the webcomic Schlock Mercenary, relatively early on. Turns out the transport rings that everybody uses to get around in fact make copies of them and their ships. Usually the original is quietly destroyed, but sometimes they’ll hold on to somebody important to interrogate them for useful information. The development of instant A->B teleporting devices that didn’t need to use the rings (or pay their hefty transit fees), as well as the discovery of what the ring-operaters were doing, led to a major interstellar war (and a series of smaller interstellar wars between different groups using the teleporting tech against each other afterwards).
A test of faith in science - would you use a teleporter?
I wouldn’t use a teleporter, unless I was suicidal. In fact, this may be the perfect Kevorkian death machine. It would most likely be a quick and painless method for shuffling off this mortal coil and there would be no hardship thrust upon your friends and family, since for all intents and purposes, you apparently never kill yourself. The only loser in this scenario would be the poor schmuck who rematerializes in the destination pod who must not only endure the misery of the life you escaped, but also feel the shame of an unsuccessful suicide attempt. Perhaps each successive “you” would go back and forth in the transporter in a long chain of suicides and re-births…at least until one of you gets laid and feels the joy of living once again. 
I don’t believe the person rematerializing in the destination pod (“Transporter You”) is “exactly” the same as “You + Time”, even if each and every sub atomic particle of your being were reassembled in the exact same configuration. Indeed, “You + Time” and “Transporter You” would both be valid versions of you, indistinguishable to virtually everyone, including “Transporter You”. The only person who would know differently would be “You + Time” after the transporter trip…but only if your consciousness survives physical destruction in heaven…or someplace warmer. :eek:
There is one difference between “You + Time” and “Transporter You”: each consciousness has its own unique line of unbroken physical contact with the complimentary brain matter from which it has emerged and supervenes, from the moment consciousness first “ignites” (in the case of “You +Time”, in the third trimester; “Transporter You”, at the time of particle reassembly) until brain death. I believe the “bucking the trend” non-regeneration of neuronal cells gives a compelling physical permanence template model upon which a unique “local event” consciousness may supervene. Even if there was complete neuronal regeneration, it would do so bit by bit over time, still giving a continuous life-long physical matrix at the cellular level, upon which a unique consciousness may reside.
Furthermore, I believe a staccato-like model of consciousness wherein each moment of awareness is a temporal series of births, deaths and rebirths— in the same vein as multiple trips through a transporter (hypothetically)—adds unneeded complexity to a system that does not require it, and therefore is less compliant with Occams Razor than a simpler (and more intuitive) wave-like continuum model.
In other words, I have a vested interest in the “me” who wakes up in my bed tomorrow that I do not share with the “me” who goes through a transporter.