Teleportation would destroy the world.

Great Debates
81

First, you have it backwards: deflation is an increase in the value of the currency. Second, there is no difference between “an increase in the value of the currency” and “all prices drop by some give proportion”.

There are two different definitions of inflation/deflation, though. One is an increase or decrease in the monetary supply (and according to many, without a corresponding increase or decrease in the size of the economy). The other is simple a decrease or increase, respectively, in the value of money, which is equivalent to an increase or decrease, respectively, in the cost of goods.

The two definitions are equivalent but only if we retain the parenthetical part. Folks who believe we need a fixed money supply leave out that parenthetical bit, but IMHO they’re crazy wing nuts.

Based on what criteria?

Thanks! That title rings a bell; I bet that’s it, and I may have glommed in some other stories. I’ve certainly read a lot of Azimov.

Yup. Assuming all other technical problems are solved, there will still be significant latency, for which there is no solution barring the repeal of the light speed limit.

That’s my theory – or better yet, there’s no difference between my dying and waking up a new consciousness, and it being the “same consciousness”. Identity doesn’t signify unless there’s an observable difference (and even then, well, see below.)

Based on this logic, I better not get any more colonoscopies! Because the result is a “me” that is devoid of some of the later experiences of the “me” that underwent – but does not recall – the colonoscopy.

If I died of an accident, I’d really prefer to have a backup. Too bad that service isn’t available.

Right.

Clever.

The bottom line is that the concept of identity gets murky when we talk about consciousness. Mijin is right that a lot of philosophers differ on the matter, but the ones that disagree with me tend to be the ones that take the same wrong turns (IMHO) regarding artificial intelligence and classic problems such as the knowledge argument.

Admittedly, as soon as a consciousness is duplicated and the two have different experiences, we now have two individuals. (Before that, there’s a philosophical argment, and it’s indeed debatable, as Mijin says.) Once we have two individuals, the loss of one represents the loss of one – the loss of that one’s experiences and its consciousness. We’ve lost everything new since the duplication.

That seems to contradict what I said earlier, but only if you feel there is a specific “identity” to a consciousness, other than what it remembers and thinks and experiences. I had to abandon that belief, to be consistent with what I believe (er, suspect) about consciousness being an emergent property of a mechanical substrate.

82

The graped part is the problem. What happens is not that I(as the person I am now) will wake up tomorrow (or on stepping out of the teleporter) - what happens is that the person who wakes up remembers being me, and therefore is.

If we could make exact duplicates of ourselves, two people would wake up and both separately and indeoendently experience equally valid senses of being ‘me’ - just like I did this morning.

The ‘me’ of now doesn’t have a forward connection with the ‘me’ of tomorrow, other than by laying down memories and other patterns of mind - the ‘me’ of tomorrow has a backward connection with the ‘me’ of now, by means of those patterns. As it happens, nature has not equipped us for whole person fission, so we have not developed the skills to intuitively understand what it would be like.

83

Technological unemployment, just like any other kind of unemployment, is bad for society, not only for the unemployed. The question is whether the benefits of the technology causing it outweigh the costs. Usually, they do.

84

Oh, *someone *is getting killed, I think we can all agree on that. The question is, would it be possible to kill someone in this way and maintain the illusion (assuming it is an illusion) of a continuous self? This is what will determine whether people will use their car when they go to work in the morning, or just commit suicide and use the transporter, to avoid the traffic and get 15 extra minutes of sleep.

85

They are not both you in the sense we are talking about. There could be a you from forty years in the future walking around right now, and you’d be none the wiser. Unless you can see through their eyes and move their body as if it was your own, and access their forty years of new memories, they might as well be an entirely different person.

86

Travel tends to homogenise culture - so cheap, easy, fast international travel would do that quicker.

On the other hand, there would be no need to try to build McDonalds restaurants in, say, Iceland, if the people there can just teleport somewhere else to get a Happy Meal. In fact, maybe we would see some of the mega-chain organisations start to centralise into larger outlets where economies of scale start to kick in - with demand smoothed out by customers arriving from 24 timezones, there might not be quiet and busy times - which could lead to greater efficiency.

87

I don’t understand your question. Please elaborate.

Well, that’s something that’s disputed.

I think it’s pretty clear at least in the million light years away example, that when I die, I just die. From a God’s eye view, the universe had 2 Mijins and now has 1. But from my POV, and that’s the only one I care about, it’s over.

So note that I am not defining “me” as any entity with the same memories as me, not even one with a common origin or with an equal (or better) claim to be the “real” Mijin. I am defining “me” as this instance of consciousness right here.

I would find the term “technological unemployment” misleading. It’s temporary if anything. People have this idea of a finite number of jobs and each time an expert in crocking woggles gets made redundant by a woggle crocker machine, that count goes down by 1.

In reality there are always jobs while humans have needs or wants. The long term, net effect of automation on jobs, is probably mildly positive; it helps to grow the economy and may make some ventures (that would employ some people) feasible that otherwise would not be.

88

Told you I wasn’t an economist. Would a drop in the production costs of a vast array of goods, with a corresponding drop in prices, have a negative economic effect? It doesn’t seem so to me, but I’m no economist.

But in the aggregate, the society is better off with the new technology.

When has it not?

89

This is my complaint as well (only in my case it would be a 24-year old smoking hot Swedish lesbian with mad guitar skillz).

90

Hogwash. Both duplicates are “the real me.” There simply happen now to be two of them. They would gradually diverge in experiences – just as real people gradually change over time. (Was Ronald Reagan no longer “really him” when he changed from being liberal to conservative?)

You aren’t even presenting a meaningful linguistic argument. You’re just declaring, “It isn’t really me any more.” But since the teleportation is defined (for purposes of argument) to be perfect – or so close to perfect that no meaningful test can discern the difference – you don’t have an atom to stand on.

Why? You say so – loudly – but what evidence? If Capt. Kirk passes every possible test for self-hood – he remembers the same childhood memories, and his best friends can’t tell the difference – then what, exactly, is the difference? You say, “He isn’t real.” Okay, how? What’s missing? What test does he fail?

When you concede he passes the tests, you concede the matter which the tests measure: identity.

Once it has been as well established in practice as the Star Trek transporter, then, yes. I’d happily use a ST transporter to go to Lisbon for a weekend. I would happily let my wife go. I would not have any doubts at all as to identity, any more than Kirk and Spock do.

You think it’s murder. You haven’t given jack as far as evidence for this.

91

Oh give me a clone, of my own flesh and bone
with the Y chromosome changed to X
and when we’re alone, me and my clone
we will think about nothing but sex.

(Isaac Asimov)

92

Let me ask you the converse: your wife dies, and someone comes up to you and says, “We can bring her back, exactly as she was, with all her memories and personality perfectly intact.”

Do you say no?

93

That is not the converse; here saying no does not leave her alive and well, it is only a question of whether I want a replacement goldfish or nothing. It is possible that I would say yes, but it would be because my judgement would be clouded by grief. It would be disrespectful to my wife to so easily replace her, yet it would be cruel to this woman to create her and then immediately spurn her.

94

Why do you say you will either live or die? What criteria do you have for saying you live or die? You’re assuming the consciousness that was you yesterday is the same consciousness that is you today. I don’t make that assumption, and frankly, I can’t make any sense out of that assumption, so I had to discard it.

Perhaps that happens every time you lose consciousness. The “me” that you call “me” isn’t there. It’s gone. Poof. Someone wakes up with all your memories, and calls itself Mijin. That’s the new “me” you call “me”. The only connection with the yesterday you is the memories.

(I’m not saying this is unquestionably true, it’s just the most sane interpretation I can put on things, given that I assume that consciousness is an emergent property of a brain that is a data processing machine in a body.)

Any unexpected dramatic change in an economy will have some negative effects.

Inflation is bad for savers because their savings are worth less. It’s good for borrowers because they can pay back their debts with money that’s worth less than the money they borrowed. Conversely, it’s bad for lenders.

Deflation is the opposite. It’s great for those with savings! It’s great for lenders. It’s bad for people who owe money.

Note that with deflation, wages and salaries go down as well as prices, but with a bit of a lag. The lag causes economic displacement, which is good for people earning wages and salaries, but bad for people paying them.

However, in general, increased productivity (which would be a “good” cause of deflation), increases wealth in general, and more importantly, increases purchasing power. I think that’s the main thing going on here, so it would be more of a good thing than a bad thing. (A good example of this is energy cost. Our economy is very sensitive to energy prices, and does way better with low energy costs. When the price of energy goes down, it’s good for most sectors of the economy – pretty much everyone except those who’ve hedged against higher energy prices.)

Of course, the teleporter’s disruption of the economy overall could be very severe, as lots of people lose their jobs and haven’t yet found an alternative. Slow predictable changes are generally a lot better than fast unpredictable ones.

95

I have made no such assumption either, and what you’ve done here is not logical.

You’re saying I should submit to a procedure that I think will kill me because maybe Mijin dies all the time, who knows?

Perhaps. But we don’t know this. Contrary to popular belief the brain does not shut down when you sleep, not even consciousness does (if you wake someone up in deep, non-REM sleep, they can often recall odd, scattered thoughts).

Looking at things purely philosophically, the hypothesis that there is never continuity of the self, is probably the most solid position right now, I would agree with that.

Given the seriousness of what that would entail though, I will wait until we have more reason to have confidence in that hypothesis than “It’s the only description we’ve thought of that doesn’t have a refuting thought experiment against it”.

96

One of the best examples is the motorcar, probably the one invention most
responsible for American prosperity since 1920. The motorcar gave us a
cascade of industries providing millions of jobs. You don’t need macadam and
concrete roads for horses. However, about 2000 people die every year
in Texas because of automobiles.

Teleportation is an impossibility like time travel. The idea that a terminal can
transmit every molecule in a human body and reassemble them perfectly at a
distant receiving platform is preposterous. Unless a machine is capable of
achieving perfect replication of organic material, there will surely be an
accumulation of errors from each teleport of the original. Beaming “Scotty”
from the Enterprise to the surface of a planet without being DOA requires
the equivalent of perfection in an artificial device or process. The downside
of teleporting is an unacceptable death rate or morbidity rate.

97

The past doesn’t exist any more, so the only connection we can possibly have with it is via memories and patterns previously laid down - when we say “I was there”, all we can ever mean is “I remember being there”.

98

That’s true for regular sleep, but what about the PHCA/DHCA procedure I mentioned in post #68? That stops all brain activity for up to an hour. Does it kill the original patient and create a new one? And how would we find out whether it does? The patient feels that they are still the same person and it seems to others that it is the same person. If that is enough to justify using this procedure, why would it not be enough for the hypotehtical teleporter?

99

What happens if you don’t have the procedure? If your only options are “die from a brain aneurysm” and “die from DHCA”, you’re not losing much even if it does end your existence. It’s only comparable to teleporting people if you consider teleporting people a last ditch effort to save the dying, and not just a way to pop down to the supermarket before it closes.

100

“Did I just hear that the animal turned inside out…and then it EXPLODED?”
-Jason Nesmith
I think part of the conservative mind is to take a mental snapshot of the world the way it is now and view anything that potentially alters it as “destroying the world”. The wheel, horse, steam engine and internet didn’t destroy the world. They changed it. One could argue that they solved some problems while introducing others. But the world typically doesn’t collapse because someone introduces a disruptive technology.

Also, it’s pretty dumb for any of us to argue about the dangers of teleporting technology. Any information about teleportation comes from theoretical physics, movies and television. But from that we do know there is a high risk of having your molecules scrambles, materializing in a wall or floor, not materializing at all, turning inside out and exploding, genetically grafting with something or someone else, accidently creating a duplicate or simply going insane because it’s like forever in there.
-Do you carry a remote device (or phone app) that will dial you from any place to any other place?
-Would it work more like a door or a Stargate? Where you can only travel between doors like nodes on a network?
-What scale would it operate? Would every home have one or do I still need to take a taxi to the LaGuardia Teleport Terminal because it’s only suitable for large-scale, long distance use?