Transporters and the destruction of the self: What am I missing here?

In another thread about AI rights and sentience, a side conversation developed about storing people’s brains and downloading them into clones, or transporters. Now unwilling to hijack, we decided to agree to disagree about the point and let it die. However, The other poster posited that those opposed to transporter use, or biological storage and cloning do so because the new “you” really isn’t you. It was stated that this was simply something you got or didn’t and nary shall the twain meet. I’m not certain that holds up, help me out here; what am I missing?

Assume that the technology for transporters exists in the following manner: A person using one will be “saved” at one end, their atoms scattered and reassembled at the other end. This process is instantaneous. The person who emerges at the other end is biologically, physically, and mentally identical to the one who entered at the starting point. How is this person not “you”? In all senses that matter physically they are identical to the person who was destroyed in the process. No time was lost so they are the same “you” in the sense that the “you” from a minute into the future is still “you”.

This would seem to indicate that those opposed to this idea are arguing for the existence of the soul, but nearly all religions posit that the soul is separate from the physical body, surviving its destruction. This would send us down the path of a no true scotsman type argument about what truly constitutes death. Additionally, who or what then is the new person at the other end? What animates them? We don’t tell people who have died and been resuscitated that they are not the same person, so I don’t see the point being made here either.

I’m prepared to accept that this may simply be an irrational or “squicky” type experience on the part of those opposed, but I cannot accept then that the two sides have equal validity in a debate.

Perhaps the concept that some have of a ‘soul’ is what you are missing. I don’t believe in such a thing, but there are certainly a lot of folks who do, and if you were to use a transporter that took a snap shot of every molecule and atom in your body, destroyed it, then rebuilt it somewhere else that ‘soul’ might be missing at the other end.

Aside from that, some folks might be hinked out anyway by the thought of having your body destroyed and rebuilt. IIRC, McCoy was always a bit freaked by the concept and used to whine and complain about using a transporter whenever he was forced to do so.

Well, the ‘soul’ might not be destroyed, but it might become separated from the body and ascend to heaven or whatever it is that ‘souls’ do when they are separated from the body…meaning that the essential ‘you’ would be gone from your body, and the consequences might be…well, who knows? Maybe not something a person would want to experiment with, if they believe in the whole ‘soul’ concept thingy.

Seems reasonable to me, if you take as your baseline assumption that the ‘soul’ exists. YMMV of course.

-XT

I’m not really steeped in the intricacies of this particular debate, and I can’t really think of how the ‘new’ you could be anything other than you (nor do I believe in souls), but would you say the matter is complicated by a possible bug in the transporter that causes the old you to get read in by the machine, the new you to be created, but the old you not destroyed? Now there are two of you. If that happened, neither would know what had happened until told, so… when you open your eyes after the even, who (which) are you? For me, this possibility introduces a bit of a paradox that forces me into agnosticism on the issue.

This issue can be resolved with a simple experiment - though I doubt no human subject board would ever approve it.

If we assume that each of us has only one soul, the existence of the soul can be verified or falsified by either keeping the original body around or by recording the body and making two copies. If there were a singular soul one of these copies would be soulless - I don’t know what this would look like except being associated with an aversion to Motown. If the “soul” was an artifact of the body, both copies would behave identically though they would of course diverge.
Having two souls would have interesting implications for heaven or reincarnation.

That’s one of the arguments. In the split case, you’re not identical to either resulting person because both have equal claim to be you but there can only be one you. But the non-split case has a resulting person identical in every way to one of the people in the split case. So if the person in the split case isn’t you, then neither is he in the non-split case.

Another argument: If I disassemble a car, then assemble a new car using identical parts from the same factory, that doesn’t make the new car the same car as the old car. They’re different cars. And in the same way, the “you” after “transport” is a different person than the “you” who exists before “transport.”

My own reply to the first argument is to deny that neither person in the split case is me. I think they’re both me. Personal identity isn’t logical identity.

My own reply to the second is to say that the identity conditions for people (in terms of physical constitution) are different than the identity conditions for inanimate objects. For example, you can replace absolutely any single part in a car and it will still be the same car. But there are some parts of people you can’t replace and have the result still be the same person–namely, the brain.

Well we may not be able to agree on teleportation but telepathy certainly exists because I was contemplating starting a thread on this subject after the AI rights thread. And I believe I’m the poster you’re referring to. :slight_smile:

Leaving aside the teleporter issue (although its probably an adjunct of the same concept) I can never grasp why people think cloning/backing up a persons mind is a form of immortality.

For example in quite a few stories the scenario is depicted like this, a character gets his mind backed up and stored, he then goes off and has a few adventures before catching the business end of a neutron bomb few months later. No problem though because he just sits up again in the resurrection chamber no worse off than losing a couple of months worth of memories.

I simply can’t grasp how people think the resurrected person is the same person as the person who has just been killed. It can certainly be argued that they’re the same person as the person at the moment he was scanned and stored but as soon as conciousness continues they are effectively a new person.

ie: Person A goes and gets his memories backed up creating a stored and inactive copy (Person B), a couple of months later Person A is killed and Person B is booted up. It does Person A no good at all that Person B exists, Person A is as dead and gone as effectively as if he had no backup at all. Person A’s conciousness doesn’t somehow leap-back through time to appear in Person B’s body. And how long does the person have to be active before they can be considered different people? If Person A has the backup created when he’s twenty years old and is killed when he’s forty how is Person B, the backup, him?

Sorry, not making much sense, had a twenty hour workday today, I’ll come back when rested and fully up to speed.

This is part of why McCoy detested the thing and refused to use it if at all possible. There have been at least a few episodes in TNG that dealt with twinning and self-ness. Riker was “cloned” once, and Scotty spent something like a century stuck in a transporter buffer. I’m sure there are more, but I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of Star Trek. If I remember right, the new Riker was eventually decided to be a separate entity and went on to make some different choices in his career path.

We’ve been over this before. If you make an absolute duplicate of me, he may have all my memories and believe he is me, but he is mistaken.
If we make an absolute duplicate of you, can I strangle the you that exists right now without you objecting? You’ll still be alive, right?

There are two ways for a teleporter to maintain continuity of self. The first is the wormhole approach: instead of manipulating the cargo you change what parts of space are adjacent to one another so that the person can simply walk between the two. The second is to confirm the existence of an external soul that retethers itself to the copy. To prove this occurs, it is necessary to not destroy the original and to have this fact alone be enough to affect the copy. Whether that means it is “souless” until the original dies or whether the soul receives input from both bodies, it would prove that the same self is present in both the old and the new bodies.

Quantum physics has something called the no-cloning theorem, which basically prevents the creation of a perfect copy of quantum states. If mentality is a quantum phenomenon, then you couldn’t make a perfect copy of a mind.

On the other hand, if you do manage to use *quantum teleportation *to send a whole person somewhere, they cease to exist in the original location and start to exist elsewhere- presumably complete with their soul, if such a thing exists. McCoy was probably wrong to be worried about Star Trek teleportation, assuming it operated on quantum teleportation principles.

If your system of teleportation creates a copy *without *destroying the original, that can only be classical teleportation, and the copy is different from the original. The copy might be absolutely convinced it is the original, and there may be no physical way of telling them apart, but they are indeed different.

We know that McCoy was right to be worried about Star Trek teleportation - Thomas and William Riker prove that the transporter does not operate on this principle.

The transport does not work on any principle is Star trek, except the principle of “magic screenwriter’s fairydust”. No, I’m not threadshitting. But the transporter is really blatant and doesn’t work the same from one episode to the next. Sometimes its instantaneous movement. Sometimes you can be trapped in an alternate dimension. Sometimes it makes clones. Sometimes you can have conversations while being transported.

I guess you are right- they seem to use the same technology for teleportation as they do to manufacture their grub.

Being an atheist myself, the problem has nothing to do with souls. It has to do with continuity. If I walk through a stargate or something, I don’t get reassembled on the other side. I die, and a copy goes around thinking he’s me. The copy may have no issue with that, but I do, given that I don’t particularly want to die. The copy might not notice it, nor will the people it interacts with, and I guess assuming I’m dead neither will I, but it’d still bother me. Of course some people argue that we go unconscious every night and break the continuity, but sleep bothers me too. I lie awake in bed, thinking, and thinking ‘will i be the same person tomorrow’, with I be ME, as I am now? I’ve talked with others who feel the same way, and if the continuity issue is bad enough for some of us with something as natural and required as sleep, I don’t see how you’ll ever convince us that after our death and destruction of our body, that anything else could ever be us.

That’s one of the things that annoys me about Stargate. They didn’t need to make it a Star Trek-style killaporter, they’ve got a wormhole right there. Just have people walk through the thing without the demolecularisation.

As it isn’t (yet) a scientific problem, just a philosophical exercise, I think pretty much any of us, here – accomplished and experienced debate fans – should be able to argue for either side of the matter with equal facility.

It astonishes me that anyone can say, “Yes, it is the same person” or “No, the original has been destroyed” with any kind of certainty. We simply don’t know that yet.

If it worked the way it works on Star Trek – safe and dependable in far more than 99.999% of all cases – then, in practice, we’d make sure that the laws protect the property rights of people who go through it. Surely, at some point, someone would already have filed a lawsuit claiming inheritance, because “Uncle Joe is dead.” Yeah, there’s a guy out there claiming to be Joe Smith, but he’s deluded. Now declare him legally dead and give me all his property.

If, on the other hand, after a short while, people notice that no one who has been through a transporter is able to write poetry, create an abstract painting, or compose a piece of music – then that would be strong suggestive evidence that there is something soul-killing in the process.

Until we actually build one and find out, it’s barren speculation. It’s fun speculation, but barren.

A transporter which operates in the way depicted in the show, that allows for the possibility of duplicates, is something that I consider sufficiently absurd that there’s no point in contemplating it scientifically.

One that works on quantum no-cloning principles, though, sure, why not? Yes, people object to it on grounds of loss of continuity, but continuity of self is an illusion to begin with. If the teleporter inherently destroys the body at the sending location, and the body at the receiving location is indistinguishable from the original, then I have no more worry about whether the “me” at the destination is the “real me” than I do that the “me” that wakes up tomorrow morning is the “real me”. Or, for that matter, the “me” that finishes typing this sentence.

Even if you buy the existence of a soul, if the teleporter actually works that’s a strong indication it isn’t all that important or necessary. Or that the soul travels to the new copy, or that each new individual you create with a transporter/replicator immediately acquires their own soul.

Given that the main function attributed to souls appears to be making you vulnerable to eternal supernatural servitude or torture, I’d consider its elimination to be a benefit not a flaw, anyway. And at any rate if you don’t change in any way after losing your soul that seems to indicate it’s just basically just an indestructible supernatural brain-state recording device, and your transporter is basically a replacement “soul” that can run off multiple copies.

There are various problems for that. For one, we, right now are not identical to the quantum level from moment to moment; our brains aren’t even composed of the same atoms over time. If that kind of quantum-identicalness is how you want to define identity then “we” don’t last for more than an instant anyway with or without teleporters. Another problem is that there’s no reason to think that brain structure down to that level has any real relevance to our selves anyway; our minds are composed of patterns of firing neurons, not quantum states.

In order to save bandwidth, a workable teleporter might well not bother to record everything down to the atomic level anyway, but just read off the portion of our brain state that is “us”, the genetic code of our body and the general structure of that body and recreate the rest at the destination. Sort of like printing a new copy of a book in another country; the words and cover are sent, but no one bothers trying to replicate all the little details of how the paper fibers twist because they are below the level of detail that makes the book that book and not some other book.

I’d consider that a form of “semi-immortality” myself. No, the backup version isn’t “me”; but it isn’t really “someone else” the way some stranger would be, either. It’s the way I’d react to a past version of myself if I time traveled back ten years and met him - he’s not “me as I am now”, but at the same time he is me in a sense.

It is a scientific problem. Your failure to recognise it as such is why you cannot reach a meaningful conclusion.

I think the definition of ‘you’ ends when duplicates can be made. You’re taking a life that has a single identity, and forking off two lives. Each of the new lives is an individual, and they share the same part of their life up to the split. After that they are independent. A claim to originality doesn’t mean much if they are identical at the time of duplication. Now I don’t believe in the idea of a ‘soul’, so that doesn’t get involved in how I see it. If you got duplicated, I’d just see that there was one of you on one day, and two of you on the next. I wouldn’t much care which one might consider himself the original.

It’s like twins. They always know which one was born first. But nobody else cares much.