That wouldn’t be enough information for me to take the risk.
That’s your choice. Assuming they weren’t flaunting my original’s messy and painful demise at me, I’d probably go for it, if it was extremely convenient to do so (as it likely would be).
IMO the crucial issue is the survival of subjective consciousness. If the person coming out of the teleporting machine can subjectively experience all my memories then as far as I am concerned it’s me. The thing is we understand so little about subjective experience that we couldn’t possibly be sure that it survives teleportation. For all we know the process creates a p-zombie which is identical to me in every respect but has no subjective experience. That would be equivalent to death. The scary thing is that there is probably no way of telling whether subjective consciousness survives. Perhaps if teleportation is invented and the first pioneers come through seemingly unaffected, more and more people try it out and come out the other end as p-zombies. Come to think of it that sounds like a pretty interesting premise for a science fiction story.
I don’t believe in p-zombies; if something has the ability to accurately simuate sentience in every detail, that process of simulation is sentience.
I suspect that such things are possible, but would actually be harder to build/evolve than conscious creatures; the fact that we are conscious implies that it is the easier state to achieve than non-conscious creatures with our capabilities. Evolution after all has neither the reason or ability to care if we are conscious or not; the fact that we are implies that that was the simplest method of achieving human capabilities. Creating a p-zombie would probably require elaborate workarounds for imitating the functions of the conscious mind without being conscious.
And at any rate, it seems unlikely that you could create something like that by accident. If teleportation removed consciousness from you, I wouldn’t expect a p-zombie; I’d expect catatonia or automatism. We don’t have the necessary equipment to function properly without conscious thought. Teleportation would have to not only take out consciousness but put in something at least equally complex as a replacement to create a p-zombie; which I find highly implausible especially by accident.
Anything that can accurately simulate the entire behavior of consciousness is consciousness, or nothing is - because our own minds are just simulations running on the organic hardware of our brains. All complex things are composed of simple moving parts, after all.
And I maintain that there are many aspects of the behavior of a being with consciousness that could not be simulated by an being without it, becuase by definition such a being would be unconscious of the aspects of their own situation that are embodied in consciousness.
I agree that if your consciousness was separated from you by a disruption of your brain activity or a disconnect with the signals from the Zatar aliens, you would promptly become, at best, a minimally reactive vegetable. I don’t agree that you can simulate a consciousnesss with anything unconscious though, no matter how complex.
This is wrong. It does not matter to the output individual whether he’s the copy or the original. That boat has sailed, and he’s here now, regardless of whether he was here before. It does matter to the input individual whether he will be the man stepping out of the teleporter on the other end. It’s the difference between continued life and utter destruction.
If the only thing that matters to you is whether it hurts or is scary, what’s stopping you from killing yourself right now? The fact that you won’t have a copy to carry on your legacy doesn’t change the fact that you’ll be just as dead either way.
It doesn’t matter to the output individual? You say that pretty fliply, but this situation is fertile territory for an existential crisis. In fact I’d say that every person who is worried about their destruction going in is precisely the sort of person who would worry about their ‘artificial copy status’ coming out. (Not to mention the minor issue that a man died so that they could live.)
And similarly, any individual who does not worry when coming out is going to be unconcered about their ‘demise’ going in, because they will accept their percieved continuity of existence with their prior self, and thus will not see the process as involving death in any meaningful way.
You’re talking to the wrong guy - I avoid death for precisely two reasons:
- getting dead usually involves pain - and I don’t like pain.
- it would trouble my family and friends if I were to die and be gone.
I am not troubled by the notion of not existing - I’ve not-existed for considerably longer than I’ve ever existed and haven’t noticed any deleterious side effects. So, presuming the termination of the original me is not done via chainsaw or rusty spoon or something, the transporter scenario triggers neither of my concerns about death.
Well would they at least be the same molecules because that would make me feel much better.
The movie based on a Stephen King novel was about a cemetary where you could bury a pet and it would come back to life but it would be feral and somewhat evil. Then the guy’s kid gets hit by a car and he buries his kid in the pet cemetary and the kid comes back evil.
What do you mean, the person who steps in dies? If a person absolutely identical to me in every respect steps out the other end of the device, then that person is me. And if the person that is me steps into one end of the device, and the person that is me steps out the other end, then I haven’t died, I’ve just moved from one place to another. It’s no more logical to say that a teleporter kills than it is to say that an ordinary doorway kills: If I told you that the person that is “me-inside-my-office” is killed and instantaneously replaced with a new person that’s “me-in-the-hallway”, you’d say I was crazy.
But you are exchanging molecules all the time. If specific molecules are what make you, you and not someone else, then you’ve died many times over already without the need for teleportation.
That’s not the scenario. The scenario is, you stand in a room, a copy of you appears, and then you are killed. Possibly slowly and with great pain. Possibly by the copy. Who’s possibly weilding grandfather’s axe.
One thing that’s explicit in the scenario is that somebody’s dying, and the body that ends up in bits on the floor has a continuity of physical location, and of consciousness and memory, with the person who walked into the room. The copy that walks out also has a continuity of consciousness and memory with the person who walked into the room (though not of physical location), but the fact that they walked out unharmed doesn’t change the fact there’s blood on the floor.
No, because again if anything like that happens they aren’t copies anymore. As soon as the original or copy experiences anything - much less pain or seeing a copy with an ax - the two diverge and are no longer copies.
If you don’t believe that there is more to someone than the sum of his molecules, then no, teleportation doesn’t kill you. In fact, nothing kills you, because Life doesn’t exist, it’s just a state of molecules.
If you believe that humans have a soul, then teleportation kills you dead.
No, it’s the pattern of information those molecules embody.
No, since the soul is typically considered to last beyond death, there’s no reason to assume that a “soulless” person would be dead. There’s no reason to assume that it would make any noticeable difference at all since there’s no actual evidence for souls.
For that matter, as long as we are just making things up about imaginary souls we could just as easily claim that every time you remove a soul via teleportation a new one moves into the soulless body, just as a new one moves into a baby. Souls abhor a vacuum apparently. Perhaps teleporters just send a new version of the teleportee off to the afterlife every time they are used, and the teleportees will eventually come to dominate afterlife demographics due to relentless duplication.
Teleportation is imaginary.
But personally? I would not agree to teleport. I view teleportation as killing yourself so that someone else who is exactly like you but not you gets to instantly travel somewhere.
And I meant it kills YOU, not your copy.
No, more like microscopic. It’s large scale teleportation that is presently imaginary.
They’re no longer identical copies, but I never said they stayed identical. In fact, I’d say the fact one’s hacking the other up with an axe strongly argues that one of them is experiencing rapid changes to their physical structure that the other is not undergoing, fortunately for him.
Again, assume that one of you remains at the point of entry. Which one is you? Are there two yous?
I can’t conceive of any notion of identity or persona that can rely merely on the data being transferred as being sufficient proof that what comes out at the other side is you.