Since these machines are hypothetical /magical they can behave however you want them to behave.
Ultimately most armchair experts seem to say the transporter is simply a duplicator and a death chamber in one handy combo-package. The new you in the new location *thinks *he’s just jumped from here to there, meanwhile the old you is promptly blasted into oblivion once the machine is sure the new one was created working OK.
The whole debate is: How much is the new “you” really the same as the old “you”? Completely? Almost? Not at all?
Why should the degree of similarity of the new “you” to the old “you” matter to the old “you” in any meaningful way? Does something magical happen if the new “you” phases from 1%, or 10%, or 50%, or 90%, or 99.9% identical (to the old “you”) to 100% identical? Do you suddenly have a future in the 100% duplicate, whereas you had *none *in the 99.9% duplicate?
There is no physical connection (hard-wire, or wireless) between the mind of the pre and post transported “you.” There is a hard-wire connection between younger “you” and older “you”, however. Original “you” has a real future in the later case, but not the former, IMHO. Unless physicists discover some WIFI networking going on between separated brains, I don’t see how this point can be logically refuted.
If my brain was hardwired to that of a chimpanzee, I’d say I have more of a future in the chimp than any Star Trek-type transported “me.”
That’s certainly one school of thought. And one with plenty of adherents.
The opposing view, held by myself as well as a few folks in the previous pages, is the opposite. IMO …
The other you is a different instance of the same person. And that’s a distinction but not in any way that matters. Your consciousness will believe that it jumped from here to there. Even if it’s ultimately mistaken in that belief in some absolute external sense, as long as it genuinely believes that it’ll be a totally realistic feeling of transportation from it’s POV. And that’s good enough IMO to declare the “new” “you” to be “you”.
Until we build one and send somebody through we’ll never know for sure. And as I said upthread a time or two, it’s real easy to talk past one another because of our unstated assumptions about what words like “you” even mean in an environment where these machines are not only possible, but really exist and really seem to work.
A is you just before you go to sleep at midnight and B is you when you wake up at 7am.
A’ is you at midnight as you get into a Star Trek transporter and **B’ **is you at 7am after your subatomic particles have been torn apart and later reassembled (it was a rough night, lot’s of booze involved).
The debate really hinges on whether there is any qualitative difference between #1 and #2 with regard to A and A’s future.
I say there is a difference. I believe A went to bed believing he would wake up happy as a lark in the mind of B…and he did. I believe A’ walked into the transporter believing he would emerge in the mind of B’…and he didn’t. A’ inadvertently committed suicide. No one else perceives any difference, they are all the same to all outside observers. A and B and B’…and everyone else in the universe are happy with the way things turned out, except for A’; he got royally screwed. That is, of course, just my opinion.
Really, beyond whether the original is still around or not, you have all kinds of interesting social implications. What if Original Woman is only replicated 98%, but she is a bit more good-looking and no longer has bipolar disorder? What if it were discovered that the slight changes caused by teleportation were beneficial? “Jump it till you make it.” Or what if it were the opposite: replication was about 99.5% accurate but a noticeable degeneration in intelligence occurred each time?
The questions are endless…
Really, no industrial process is 100% successful. In airplane carriage today, sometimes crashes occur, though we keep doing air travel because that rate is very low. If teleportation were a matter of replication, why would we expect it someone to magically relay our data 100% of the time?
I wouldn’t use the teleporter. I participated in the last thread and couldn’t convince any of the “I don’t mind being copied and replaced” people, and I still have trouble understanding their mindset.
We got down to a point where we had a hypothetical machine that only copied, and once it confirmed the new you was 100% successfully copied, then the old you was shot in the head with a gun and chucked into the incinerator. Most of the pro-teleporter people were A-OK with that.
I think a few pro-teleporter people had problems with the scenario, because there was a split-second divergence, but I don’t know why that matters? No matter what happens on the other side of the teleporter, no matter the timing, you are getting killed on this end.
I think it boils down to the core of how I see myself, and for me that is not a certain combination of matter, energy, and chemistry, but rather a stream of conciousness. That stream of conciousness goes through various states if I sleep, or am put under anesthesia, or suffer through a coma, but in all those situations, there is a thread of something that connects my current waking reality to all those memories floating around in my head.
If you copy me and send my copy to Disneyland, does that mean I got to experience Disneyland?
And whether or not the Star Trek transporter does what you say is…the very thing that is disputed. So…nice of you to affirm the consequent, but do you have anything to offer to suggest your interpretation is correct?
I can’t figure out how this makes any sense, except that you are denying the original question’s merit. Are you denying that the current version of you is destroyed? If you “beam” to Disneyland but a copy of you is also left behind to sit at home, and now it is the next day, and your memories include sitting at home but nothing about Disneyland, did you experience Disneyland?
It should be impossible to answer no to this situation and yes to the first one. In both situations, current-you’s memories have nothing about Disneyland. In the original scenario. current-you’s memories stopped in the transporter. No Disneyland.
The one who has all your life memories up to the transporting event, and all the memories of the Disneyland visit, and none of the memories of sitting at home the last couple days. “He” is just as real as “you” are.
IMO that Disneyland “you” is no more or less privileged a position than the so-called “original” stay-at-home you. In fact I’d argue that the instant the “copy” is brought into being the concept of “original” and “copy” are philosophically and practically meaningless. There are now two utterly identical and utterly equal instances of you. Both of whom totally believe they have this so-called continuity of consciousness back to pre-birth that some folks seem to think is important.
What happens next is where it gets interesting. We can kill, or not, Mr. Stay-at-home. We can kill, or not, Mr. Disneyland. Neither need ever know the fate of the other. Though the survivor certainly could be told or presented with evidence of the death or ongoing life of the other.
How do we think about this ongoing dual existence? If we created the “dupe” in an identical room as the “original” was/is in, and then lost track of who was who, how could we, even in principal, later determine which was the real one and which was the imposter? The answer is simple: the concept of real and imposter or original and duplicate are meaningless terms in this context. We now have two identical originals who each are, e.g., 40 years old.
Not just biologically 40, but ontologically 40. In no meaningful sense can you argue that they both weren’t really in existence 40 years ago as infants; their shared history means they both trace their existence in an unbroken line back to then.
I’m saying that some versions of the transporter concept do not “destroy” anything.
As soon as the copy has an experience that the original does not, they cease being “the same person.”
I don’t think anyone is claiming that the guy who stayed home “experiences” Disneyland in any sense. It is in the nature of a straw-man argument, because no one says this.
Even in a “disassemble/reassemble” transporter, the question is debatable as to whether the guy arriving is a “duplicate.” Some of us say he’s “the same person” even if he was scanned to atoms and re-built again. So long as there is no possible scientific test to differentiate the guy who left from the guy who arrived, it is a “difference that makes no difference.” It is only a philosophical difference, with no actual physical meaning.
I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that this does not include the Stargate: SG-1 wormhole, because no one is exactly certain what happens to you as you pass through the watery surface layer. It might be disassembling you, atom by atom, and reconstructing you at the destination.
But…what about a spaceship? You get in, it goes very fast, and your body is compressed to microscopic thinness by Relativity. You’re squished flat as paper. Does the fact that you, personally, don’t perceive this grotesque bodily distortion make it acceptable to you?
Since the last few posts have essentially just repeated the arguments from the previous pages (and previous threads), I’ll ask again:
Can I transport to another universe? That is, a universe physically completely separate to our own; even information can never pass between our universes.
If the only requirement is same brain configuration, then the answer, in principle, is yes.
??? If information can’t pass between the two universes, then travel there would be impossible. Any form of transportation between them would also carry information.