Just for people as anal as me. That works out to 4,094,475,262,959,525.0416667 days
or
11,217,740,446,464.4621689 years.
Even makes the hamsters look fast.
Why? I mean, I’ve got a (wildly grabbing a number of out his ass) few billion atoms in my body, if one of those atoms in, say, my ear disappears or finds it’s way to my ass, how am I gonna know? If you remove one grain of sand from a beach, the beach doesn’t cease to exist (well, for certain philosophers it would, but for the rest of us, it’d still be the same beach).
Well…by your line of thinking I can go and stir-up the sand on the beach and it’d be the same beach.
Now imagine I stuck a blender down your throat, turned it on and stirred you up a bit. Would you still be you? Well, in the sense that all your atoms and junk that makes you are still there then yes. However, in the sense that you are still a living. breathing and thinking entity then no as mixing you up in this fashion would certainly kill you.
Just how much can I ‘misplace’ atoms in your body before I kill you? The answer doesn’t really matter as I am more likely to get ALL of them wrong to some degree or another (I suppose a few might be correct by random chance) such that you’ll be a pile of goo at the other end (or fly apart as atoms decide to speed off in random directions…not sure which).
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In an infinite universe shouldn’t this sort of thing be happening all the time? I mean, the chances of you spotanesouly disappearing and re-appearing on Mars as Ronald Reagan are stunningly remote. Still, say the chances are 1:Googleplex and but you have a Googleplex of items in a universe (yeah yeah…only 1080 particles exist…just go with the example) then shouldn’t an object be popping around almost all the time?
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Now do you really want us to get into a discussion of different sized infinities here? Long and the short of it is: no. In an infinite universe you’d have an infinite number of weird things going on, but you’d still have porpotionately more non-weird things going on. Applying the Copernican Principle (there’s nothing special about this particular time and place) I expect to see no wierdness at all. Over the scale of the universe? Well, sure, then weirdthings are happening all the time, but then I’m observing an infinite universe and I am a sort of god (or at the very least I’m in some weird reference frame where ridiculous amount of blueshifted information bombards me without killing me in which case I’m still a sort of god).
Even if you don’t believe in a soul, there’s a big problem. Can you really reassemble a person and have it be the same consciousness as the person you took apart? My theory is that it would just be a duplicate person who had all the memories.
And this is different from “the same consciousness” how?
The soul thing doesn’t present a problem, either. Consider: This morning, I got up, prepared for my day, went downstairs and biked up to the office. Is my soul still in my bed back at the apartment? I hope not!
Well, if my soul can stay with me while I’m biking, why can’t it teleport with me, too?
What if someone came to your house, hacked you up into little bits, took you to the office and reassembled you? Would your soul have come along with you?
So a perfect colour photocopy of a document is the same as the original?
Sure, to a third party, there wouldn’t be a difference, and to the person that came out of the transporter there wouldn’t be a difference, but if you walked into that transporter, I don’t see how you’re going to walk out of it at the other end. Maybe it wouldn’t make a difference to the rest of the world, because you’ve been replaced by a duplicate, but you yourself will have discontinued having any further living experiences.
So the trick is to find a way to transfer the consciousness. If, like me, you believe that consciousness is recycled, then we’d need to find a way to direct the recycling process.
In other words, once the source body is vaporized, its consciousness is released and available for installation in a potentially conscious being. If we can force it to install in the destination body, we’ll have a successful teleport, transparent to third parties as well as to the source teleporter.
“Googol”. The one was named after the other, not vice versa. Why Is It Called “Google”?
Our bodies constantly replace themselves, more matter had joined and left again you and your body than there is of you now. Better worry that your soul could be sitting on one of your former molecules somewhere in a sewage treatment plant. Nah. Souls aren’t part of our physical universe. If you need to believe that a deity wanted to give you a soul, nothing we physically do would make whoever watches it lose track of what to assign it to. Physically moving your body on a bike, having your brain’s favorite atom converted to energy by cosmic rays, encountering a madman with an axe splitting you in half, the probability of all your atoms at once jumping one Planck length to the left or to Mars, or being teleported doesn’t make a difference in this universe.
The excitement over the ‘teleportation’ experiments was about that it is possible to transfer a quantum state from one system to another without knowing it, theoretically proving that heisenberg wouldn’t be the limiting factor for teleportation. The news, of course, immediately heard “Star Trek” and hyped.
I think it’s a fundamental principle that one elementary particle is indistinguishable from another of the same kind. So if you convert the mass of one to energy, and recreate another somewhere else in the same state the first one was in, then you principally can’t distinguish it from a particle that would have been moved there directly by manipulating its momentum. You would need to look at the whole rest of the universe (you included recursively) to be able to deduce its history.
Wait a minute, what if I placed a pile of goo on the floor, and send Ronald Reagan to Mars (and while we’re at it, perhaps some other politicians). It wouldn’t happen to me again, would it? 
The difference is personal. Assume that you are the person being teleported. You step into the teleporter, and are reduced to nothing more than a shitload of encoded data. You are now dead. Gone. Ceased to live. Your soul is up in heaven. What comes out the other end might be indistinguishable from you to everyone else, but you know the difference (or rather, you would know except that you’re dead now.)
To think of it another way: let’s say that, instead of teleporting you, we use our quantum-information-gathering gizmo to make a copy of you. You stay where you are. What comes out the other end is still indistinguishable from you, but it can’t be you because you’re still back at the copying station. You have created a duplicate of yourself, but he’s not “you.” Teleporting would be the same thing, except that you are destroyed in the process.
As for the soul/consciousness of the “other you,” I’d be inclined to say that it would have a different soul, since this is fundamentally the same as if you were to clone yourself and then copy your memories to the clone.
This is all I was trying to get to. Your first statement seemed to suggest that such things basically never happen because their probability of occuring are well past the age of the universe (even extended to its end).
Your second statement allows that this teleportation (or other) weirdness may occur on a regular basis.
The difference, that I see, is the chances of you actually witnessing some weirdness. Put that way it is indeed extremely unlikely but that doesn’t mean it is impossible and rather is likely to be happening somewhere fairly frequently.
Two bucks…and it only transports matter? I’ll give you 35 cents.
Whack-a-Mole You are making the assumption the universe is infinite in extent and time which are both unfair assumptions to what we can observe. Of course, one can make any assumption one likes and try to deduce the consequences. You made the assumption, I ran with the ball, thus the seeming contradiction in my two statements. However, the universe is NOT infinite as far as we can tell, and speculations to it being so must take into account the fact that the observed universe right now is finitely young. In effect, if the universe were truly infinite we would not witness an initiation point because it would be exceedingly unlikely (and there really shouldn’t be anything special about our observations). People are uncomfortable with this principle, in general, but I have found that it generally gives a decent to good understanding when dealing with outlandish subjects.
So do I gather that there are people here who believe that the “soul” is more than just an arrangement of atoms and related particles in our brains?
Thank you, Diceman. That’s exactly what I was trying to get at. I don’t believe in souls, but I would analyse it the same way. The teleporter has made a copy of you. In this case it has (supposedly) used the same particles that you were once made of to make the copy, but the consciousness that is created (assuming it could do so) would not be yours. It would be a new one that is very like yours, like a twin or a clone, but it wouldn’t be you.