Quantum theory says you cannot duplicate it “exactly”. Against laws of physics.
Suppose I choose the teleporter to not “destroy” the me on the sending end.
When the receiver side me becomes conscious I do not see out of his eyes, I still see out of the eyes on the sender side. This is where “me” is. Now shoot the sender side copy of me. My consciousness does not magically shift into the sent copy. I’m gone.
Therefore, I see this teleporter as a suicide machine.
If I were to be destroyed by the machine at the sender side during the transfer, I will be gone. He (receiver side) will resume. He’ll think nothing happened other than a shift in locale.
Preposterous to you because you are thinking like someone living in 2013. Someone reading your post in 2113 might think you’re a dope.
Just think of all the things we have now that a mere 100 years ago would have seemed ludicrous to suggest.
Well, then, when you stop laughing at yourself, change your answer to the correct one, which is, “No, it isn’t.”
Why? There is someone out there with your memories, your self-awareness, your point-of-view. He is “you.” You simply changed locations. It isn’t really any different from getting into an airplane, dozing off, and waking up in Spokane. The “old you,” from Dallas, no longer exists. He is “dead.” You can’t find him anywhere; his atoms have all gone somewhere else. Therefore, airplanes are suicide machines.
Again, why are we treating brains differently from any other object?
We don’t consider a coin to have disappeared and been reborn just because the extrinsic property of location has changed.
And, it’s irrelevant if two coins have identical properties: two coins are two coins, they are not one and the same.
The “teleported person is you” position seems to rely on us treating brains differently for at least one of these things.
WRT computer programs we use whatever metaphor makes sense for the current context, because it doesn’t matter whether a program is duplicated, moved, instanced or whatever else.
If we could make conscious programs, the distinction would matter, and we’d find ourselves with the same philosophical problem we have for humans.
Do you think wishing for the “many deaths” version of reality (as you call it) makes it more likely to be true?
Do you believe that your thoughts on what is depressing have any sway whatsoever on the laws of quantum mechanics and the nature of reality?
Do you have any evidence that the “many worlds” model of the universe and quantum mechanics is false?
Have you already made up your mind about what you want to believe, because you’re afraid of the truth?
I can’t convince you of what I believe. I’ve read long sequences of material related to quantum mechanics, consciousness, but I don’t understand it well enough to relate it myself. But what I’ve read has convinced me, and not one of the arguments boiled down to, “Wouldn’t life be awesome for humans if they weren’t dying in parallel universes on a regular basis.”
Nope; if the copy is a perfect copy, two instances of you see out of each pair of eyes independently. You have stopped being an individual; you are now a dividual.
The other you should be outraged at this act of murder and seek to avenge your death. Unless it was the other you that killed you, of course.
No, it is a machine that makes multiple instances of an individual. If some of the instances die, others may live.
Correct. His me is now the only you in existence. Apart, perhaps, for innumerable other copies in the multiverse, none of whom you will ever meet.
At least some of those copies, perhaps the vast majority of them may be Boltzmann Brains, who momentarily think they are you before they vanish in a puff of vacuum. There are worse fates than being replicated by a dodgy teleporter.
What does that even mean? Nothing physically is connecting me with any other entity. Whether that entity is 50% the same as me, 99% the same, or 100% identical to the atom, there is no sense in which I’ve been “split”.
And what is your response to the duplicate-by-chance argument, that I gave an example of in post #79?
Indeed, why?
The philosophical question is the same even without consciousness - it’s a question of identity - and I think all we’re finding is that if we can perfectly copy something, the terms ‘original’ and ‘copy’ don’t have the same meanings we have currently invested them with.
Your consciousness is magically duplicated into the copy - Something that was previously unique becomes one of an identical pair.
It’s both. It moves one instance of you and kills one instance of you.
What this probably means is that our perception of ourselves as something persistent and unique is more convention than reality. Nature hasn’t equipped us with the ability to fork our consciousness, so experience has not equipped us with the philosophical views to be able to accept or comprehend such a thing.
Three pages in, and no one’s mentioned The Prestige yet? I’m not sure if it’s necessary to put spoiler tags around a movie that’s 7 years old, but I’ll do it just to be on the safe side.
[spoiler]Christian Bale is a magician who’s famous for a trick in which he goes into a closet in one side of the room and (seemingly) emerges instantaneously from a closet on the other side of the room. Hugh Jackman is a rival magician, who can’t figure out how he does it, but wants to imitate it. He hears of a third character (played by David Bowie) who has invented an actual, working teleportation machine, so he goes to visit him. Turns out the teleportation machine doesn’t work exactly as planned. It creates a copy of the thing that is being teleported at a remote distance – however, it leaves the “original” intact. Jackman, desperate to beat Bale at his own game, decides to use it anyway – but he doesn’t want two of him walking around. So he builds a stage set in which, immediately after entering the “teleporter”, the original Jackman falls though a trap door in the floor into a chamber of water, that locks behind him, drowning him. While the “copy” emerges at the back of the theater and completes the act.
Jackman says late in the film that the only way he could go through with this was that every time he stepped into the teleporter, he had to tell himself that it was he who would emerge on the other side of the stage, not the one who would drown.
He’s right, of course, and wrong.
Anyway, whenever I ask myself if I would ever get into a teleportation machine, all I think about is the shot at the end, with the hundreds of chambers of water filled with hundreds of Hugh Jackman’s corpses. And then I think, no way, no how.[/spoiler]
[QUOTE=eburacum45]
You have stopped being an individual; you are now a dividual.
[/quote]
I doubt that we will ever find out directly - but copying and multiple instances of a single personality are likely to be a commonplace fact of ‘life’ for an artificially intelligent entity. Since they will likely exist as programs in electronic substrates they will be copiable with relative ease. Any AI of this form will have to become used to existing in several places at once. However, because of our jelly brains, it is something we probably will never get to experience.
Not split, Duplicated. And there is no communication - unless the two instances take the trouble to talk to each other. They will probably find they have a lot in common. This commonality will decrease over time, of course.
In any multiverse scenario, or Tegmarkian duplication across bazillions of light years, the process of your personality certainly continues - but that continuation is irrelevant to anyone within the lightcone of anyone who has seen you die here. The nearest exact replica of you is 10e28 metres away, give or take; that is well outside the Hubble Volume, and you will never meet them, neither will anyone you know. The same goes for instances in othertimelines.
Even though you may continue to exist in an unchanged form at that distance, your friends and/or creditors here in this volume will experience you as dead- they will have no way of communicating with that distant instance of you, so will have no way of getting that fiver back that they lent you last week.
Hmm; if we do ever manage to achieve some sort of personality copying, one wonders to what extent the copies would inherit the debts and assets of the alpha instance…
Correction - the nearest duplicate is 10e10e28 metres away, definitely well outside the visible universe.
http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/PDF/multiverse_sciam.pdf
It’s even more elemental than that.
If you can instantaneously (or nearly so) teleport any material object any arbitrary destination without the consent of the destination, you can teleport weapons of various degrees of destructiveness without your target having a meaningful response, except to respond in kind (if possible).
Imagine, instead of ICBMs and SLBMs and bombers, nukes teleported into unsuspecting enemy capitals, headquarters, command posts, warships, etc.
If a nation-state could do it, it would become a “winnable nuclear war”: you can strike first and, quite possibly, attack so rapidly and so thoroughly that there could be no response.
I think that’s the war Niven meant.
It depends what you mean by duplicate. If you want to transfer the (arbitrary) state of one system to another that is theoretically possible (i.e. quantum teleportation).
Exactly: the technology has rendered obsolete the philosophical mind-set of earlier times.
People don’t ask these questions about computer files. I save two copies of a jpeg: which one is the “real” picture? The question doesn’t have any meaning any more.
That’s right, there isn’t anything connecting you. The other “you” is a free agent. He begins by making the same decisions you make, but, as time goes by, he will digress. The moment will come when, offered water, you will say yes and he will say no. Each of those options is one that you could make. We’re arguing that you made them both. The other guy is you.
You say otherwise? Show us the difference. Point out where one of you knows something that the other doesn’t. Indicate a means by which someone who knows you very well could say, “Wait! He smells wrong” or “He didn’t twitch his eyebrow” or the like. Since one of the premises of the thought experiment is that the duplicate passes all of these physical tests, you pretty much cannot indicate such a means.
So where are you? There are now two guys with the same name, memories, emotions, will, and (worse) legal standing.
You say only one of 'em gets to vote? Okay: tell me which? Wait, wait, let me shuffle 'em around a bit, so you don’t know which one came out of which end of the duplicating machine. Okay, there: perfect twins. Tell me which is “real?”
That would surely be the war that destroyed Star Trek Earth - unless there is some technobabble reason that atomic weapons can’t be teleported.
Right.
The issue is whether you consider yourself fungible or not. In my mind the correctly working teleporter is no different than going unconscious and waking up.
I say that after duplication, there are two “yous”. Both think they’re you, and the only way to tell one from the other is to see where it’s located. Internal states are identical. We simply remove one, and go on. I would do this, and I wouldn’t regret it – that is, the copy of me that proceeds wouldn’t regret it, any more than I’d regret going to sleep last night.
When we have really good AI, good enough to convince everyone that machines have qualia and self-awareness, will it be murder to stop the program on one computer and restart it on another?
In any case, you’re free not to use the teleporter. I wouldn’t call you crazy for refusing, just missing out.
And yeah, I admit those piled up Hugh Jackman bodies would give me pause. I sure wouldn’t look forward to the joy of drowning, regarless of anything else!
IIUIC:
Quantum cloning is forbidden by the laws of quantum mechanics as shown by the no cloning theorem
Right. In theory, we could learn enough about how the brain and body work to duplicate enough to be a very close duplicate.
And like digital versus analog audio, people will argue forever that the digital duplicate just isn’t as good as the analog original. 