If you can teleport things, you don’t even need weapons, because you can dematerialise matter - this makes several forms of attack possible, including:
[ul]
[li]Teleport your enemies into the middle of the Pacific Ocean[/li][li](Or just teleport your enemies away and be careless about putting them back together properly)[/li][li]Just teleport away your enemy’s aorta[/li][li]Teleport a brick into your enemy’s skull[/li][li]Decompose a coin in your enemy’s pocket into energy - convert this to local heat[/li][li]Teleport a solid object inside another solid object in close proximity to your enemy - this should cause a pretty violent explosion.[/li][/ul]
Vernor Vinge, in “The Peace War,” had something vaguely akin to that: you could project “bobbles” or bubbles of isolation and stasis. If I wanted to get rid of you, I would simply enclose you in a bobble. To the world, a silvery sphere would appear around you, and would remain absolutely inert for the next ten thousand years. To you, no time at all would pass: you would simply emerge from the collapsing bobble – in the year 12013. An interesting way of getting rid of unwanted competition!
I asked Vinge at a convention, what about projecting smaller bobbles, such as one to enclose someone’s heart and lungs, or maybe even a whole swarm of them, like the foam in beer, through the middle of someone’s body?
He said – politely – that this wasn’t the kind of book he wanted to write.
But, yes, definitely, remotely targeted teleportation would be one hades of a nasty weapon! One might imagine that locations might be screenable from being targeted. Warships and headquarters buildings, for instance, might be enclosed within teleportation-proof fields or grids.
(What are the overall energic limits? I’ll just teleport a small asteroid to appear somewhere in one of your major cities.)
Yes, but (unacheivable) the goal of quantum cloning is to end up with two systems with the same arbitrary seperable state, this isn’t the same as the goal of teleportation which is to transfer the arbitrary seperable state of one system to another, which can be done using a quantum teleportation-like scheme.
A machine that can transport people goods and yes services instaintainously from one place to another might require a hefty power source and would very likely not exist in your own home or place of business. I can see them being operated right along side conventional forms of transportation at existing airports and mass transit terminals.
Cities would not necessarily go broke and fall to ruin because people may opt to live in Tokyo and work in Hill valley.
Think of all the tourist dollars such a transportation system might generate. XXX XXX. A nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.
Earth may one day become a planet inhabited by a population of day vacationers. We might even return to our old nomatic ways of life in order to take advantage of the increased diversity of employment opportunities not to mention a truly global menu.
( I’ll just teleport a small asteroid tuo appear somewhere in one of your major cities.)
What would happen to the kinetic energy of said asteroid? What happens to our angular velocity as we drive from Miami to say Alaska?
In orbital terms, the kinetic energy isn’t as important as the huge change in gravitational potential energy. Larry Niven covered that in his JumpShift booths, noting that, without compensators, if you teleport downward, you have to increase in temperature to conserve energy. (He later introduced compensators.)
(Obviously, the Star Trek transporters have k.e. compensators. Someone in orbit, moving five miles a second, beams down to a planet’s surface…and doesn’t go blasting off eastward at five miles a second! That would certainly make issues of individuality seem moot!)
So, the kinetic energy isn’t changed. The asteroid continues on exactly the same course-vector, just from a different position. Meanwhile, it gets a hell of a lot hotter…
The other guy is Mijin, but he’s not me.
If I have 2 pencils is there any sense in which I can talk of them being one and the same? No. It wouldn’t matter if they were identical to the atom; I have two pencils and there is no sense in which we can say that this pencil is that pencil.
For some reason, some posters here wish to make new rules for brains and personal identity.
That’s right it’s a premise of the whole thought experiment. I wish people would stop repeating it. Yes, the other Mijin has all the same intrinsic qualities as me (but a different extrinsic property; location), and of course believes that he is me and has survived the transporter jump. So what?
That’s right; two guys, both of which are Mijin but only one of which is me.
What is your response to my argument in Post #79?
(I’m about to explain why eburacum45’s response doesn’t work).
Exactly, and I am within that light cone.
So while my personality may continue elsewhere (or at least, a being that happens to have an identical personality), I do not.
Agreed.
But you now have two pencils.
You are better off in pencils to the tune of one.
If and when we manage to make AI entities, these will probably be easily clonable, and a single successful instance could become two, or a hundred, if necessary. Given certain frankly unlikely advances in science, human personalities might become copiable too. Then you could have as many of yourself as pencils in a box.
This might not, in fact, be a desirable outcome, because of the reduction in diversity that results.
That’s the crux of it - assuming we’re talking about Star Trek style teleportation, decomposing matter into energy will require, then release a vast amount of energy.
That’s the most likely reason we will never be able to do it - the energy cost, and the complexity of manipulating vast energies without harming and easily-cooked human.
Unless there’s some metaphysical soul-like element, each of them (separately) is just as “you” as the other.
Both of them experience continuity of personality - if the copying process really is complete and perfect, and there’s no metaphysical soul, then the physical continuity of your body in the transmitting location is a trivial detail.
Twins
Are twins not an example of reproduction by fission in a sense? Identical twins are just that until they begin to be shaped by their individual environments. A pair of twins sitting in a room together are both sharing that environment and experiencing it differently at the same time.
A copy of you would be physically the same perhaps for a brief instance even mentally the same . Experiences are just memories and memories are are just physical patterns expressed by chemical combinations locked in the matrix of nerves that make up the structure out our brains -
A few seconds after the copying process the copy would both be you and a unique individual just as twins are following birth. You might even consider that the twins became two distinct individuals while still in the womb at the moment each became self aware. They each would then begin to draw their own conclusions from their uniquely experienced perspectives.
There may be some benefit to society in making copies of gifted individuals.
The real threat is the possibility of filtering people in transit. Desease could be eliminated, limbs mirrored and replaced when lost and a pattern of your younger fitter self could be preserved and used to retro age you on demand. One need ever stay dead again. But we could also filter in or out those thoughts and behaviors most desired - but who gets to decide?
No.
None of the three standard positions* on the transporter hypothetical requires or posits the existence of souls.
It’s getting pretty frustrating hearing people on both sides of this debate basically reason as “Either there are souls, or my position. Therefore, my position”.
- I can’t remember the formal names for these positions but they broadly are:
- The transporter moves you
- The transporter duplicates you
- There is no persistent entity in the first place – “you” cannot be moved, duplicated or even sustained for a second
Those three things are more or less the same, if our selves are a property of our physical existence.
If you perfectly copy the physical substance of a person (including every detail of the state of each little part), then you duplicate the self.
From the point of view of the original, a copy was made. From the point of view of the copy, he moved.
And if you shuffle the two, then present them to a panel of observers, scientists, technicians, and engineers…they cannot produce a test by which the copy is to be discovered. That means that the question is scientifically meaningless.
Our correspondent asserts, “I’m the original.” But he provides no means by which that claim can be verified.
In my opinion, the “originalist” philosophy showed its bankruptcy when it would take a perfectly functioning, working, intelligent, aware human being and deny them their humanity. “I’m sorry, Mr. Kirk – no, you lost your Captaincy when you died – you are a dead man. Dead men have no rights.”
That is a strawman of your own creation. Kirk’s doppelganger is still a human being, he just isn’t that human being.
My confusion with regard to the “transporter won’t kill” thesis versus the “transporter will kill” thesis is that I can not tell exactly where the conflict of opinion exists. It would be very helpful if we can determine that point, because, otherwise, we just keep talking past one another. So, let me briefly describe my position and then I’d appreciate some of you pointing out the points of my position that you don’t agree with and answering some follow up questions.
I believe the following: transporters will kill you; you and any copy of you are each valid people, completely indistinguishable to any outside observer, but with separate personal identities (PI); “you + time” are the same person with the same PI (i.e. the feeling of continuity is real, not imagined).
“You + Time”: Some of you mention that when you go to bed, you wake up as a different person. Others say you die a few times every day, or perhaps when you turn to the left. But, what do you really mean by that? I assume you mean that the current version of a person only imagines continuity of existence because they “stole” the memories of the prior version, and they from the version before, ad infinitum. Is that correct? If you believe that is correct, let’s continue on that track with a few questions: If the person who wakes up in your bed tomorrow is a new person with your memories, then the current you really doesn’t have a future in that person in any real sense of the word, correct? Assuming you are a person who wants the best for world, would you accept an offer from a reliable source to wake up tomorrow with your particles rearranged into a person with completely different memories, but who is destined to do better things for mankind than the person with your your memories intact? If not, why not? You have a future in neither, so why not pick the better one? Sentimentality?
Let’s also explore the frequency of rebirths in this thesis. I believe it has relevance. Do you die every night when you go to bed? When you nap? Once a minute? Once every Planck second? Does everyone die on the same schedule? Is the periodicity completely arbitrary? If so, then isn’t it possible, and perhaps likely, that the frequency is exactly as it seems to be—that you die once per mortal lifetime? Why not?
If you believe that you die frequently, say once a day, then isn’t the argument about transporters completely moot? If I’m not the same person who wakes up tomorrow in my bed, then it doesn’t really matter to me whether that person travels by transporter or not, I have no future in him either, right? If that’s what you believe, we can stop here because we at least understand each other. But, if you believe that you do have a future in the person emerging from the arrival pod of the transporter, let’s continue on.
Slurry Transporter: all of your particles are torn apart in the departure pod, they travel in space, then they are reconstructed in the arrival pod and you walk out with a PI and all your memories intact (let me know if any of that is incorrect). Do you believe this person has the same PI as the guy in the departure pod, or a similar but different one? I believe it is a different one. I believe PI’s are born (emerge) when particles combine into a living sentient (perhaps only sapient) brain, and they cannot survive having their substrate torn apart.
The reason I believe a PI cannot survive being torn apart and reconstructed is because there would be no difference between that (one brain, torn apart, reconstructed) and having many identical brains constructed from scratch from new particles, and I strongly believe it is an unresolvable paradox having a PI split into multiple copies (as others have mentioned, you can’t see through multiple sets of eyes separated in space, even briefly at the point of or before divergence). There is nothing more special about two exact copies of you, than you and a duck. To say there is, is to invoke magic. (IMHO).
BUT, there is a difference between “you + time” compared to “transported you”, or “multiple replicated you”. The difference is “you + time” has never, since birth, had your brain particles torn apart. So, the feeling of continuity everyone feels does not have to be an illusion, it can be the reality, because there really is continuity of PI throughout the life of a brain. And, it does not require a soul, or magic, it is just based on a real difference that exists between a brain left intact for a lifetime and one that has not.
But, going deeper into the rabbit hole, the story doesn’t end there. You are, most likely, champing at the bit to say, “yes, but the transported you and the replicated you’s believe exactly the same thing as you do”. That’s correct, and as mentioned above, they have a valid reason to believe that they are you and to all outside observers, they are you. You are all valid people who have a valid claim to be you. But, you know that you’re not them, and they know that they’re not you. What’s the difference? You share the exact same memories from the point of divergence…but, you never shared the same PI. (IMHO).
Breaking it down further, let’s compare 1) “you today vs. you tomorrow” to 2) pre-replicated you vs. post-replicated you”: 1) ask today you if you have a future in tomorrow you and you’ll probably say yes. Ask tomorrow you if yesterday you was correct and he’ll say yes. Ask post-replicated you if pre-replicated you was correct in saying he had a future in him and he’ll say yes. But, you can’t ask pre-replicated you to answer that question, or any question, because he did not exist then—his particles were scattered in the wind before replication. Replicated you’s memories are only an illusion, his memories trick him into believing he was alive since birth, yet he was only born today. (Indeed, this paragraph is even hard for me to follow, so do the best you can with it). My point is, the memory part of consciousness is very illusive and it’s easy to get lost in thinking memories alone are what make you you.
I believe you are more than just your memories. I believe your consciousness is the sum of your memories plus your PI (self awareness supervenes on lower order consciousness). Memories are past tense and non-local (to steal and bastardize a physics term); PI’s are present tense and local.
Imagine if you can two exact copies of a sentient being who share the same memories, but have no PI (they live only in the past). I agree that those two beings are exactly the same person, in every respect. You can’t ask either one of them if they believe they are the same as the other, because they have no sense of the present, so the question has no meaning to them.
Now imagine two exact copies of a sentient being with only PI’s, but no memories (they live only in the present). I believe those two people are, and have always been, two beings with separate identities, and if you ask them, they will both agree (just assume they understand language with no capacity for memory ;)). Do you agree?
I’m not very clear on what you’re saying a personal identity actually is - and what the terms ‘same’ and ‘different’ mean with respect to it.
I think what I’m confused about is where the difference arises - we’ve got a machine that’s performing a function whereby every effect is preceded by a logical cause - and every cause is followed by an appropriate effect.
Then we suspend that process, capturing all of the causes that haven’t yet had effect, rebuild the machine somewhere else, restoring the state of all those pending causes and the machine starts running as if nothing had ever happened - the chain of cause and effect logically unbroken.
How, in that scenario, would the function of the rebuilt machine not be a continuation of the function before the move?
I think though Terr made the point has been made though that quantum mechanics forbids there from being a process for making exact copies of anything (though of course you may ask how exact a copy of a person needs to be for it to be considered the same person). I added though it doesn’t stop though from existing a process from transferring the exact quantum state of one system to another (though another question that may be asked is what the ontological status of quantum states is), or, in more hand-waving terms, you can make a ‘copy’ if the original is destroyed.
So, if we have two objects that we cannot tell apart, we have to conclude that there is one object? Why can’t we use the fact they do not share a location to distinguish them?
This is how we’d do it with most objects. If I covet your tricycle, and use my magic copying machine to make an identical copy, that is exactly how we’d describe the process: your tricycle hasn’t changed or “split” in any way, simply a copy has been made.
This is another tangent that often comes up in this topic.
I don’t care if I’m the original or not. Say you clone Mijin 40 times, and I’m clone #17. Well, then, I am clone #17. It doesn’t matter to me one jot that if I die other clones exist, even if they have the same memories up to my moment of death. When I die, I’m dead, and that’s that.
And Mijin Zero (the original) can say the same thing.
Again, no-one has said this. Of course the copy is identical to you, and is a normal human being, that’s part of the premise.