Because you do not understand. If the soul exists and it does not transfer this does not mean you carry on your life, unburdened by the threat of heaven or hell. It means you go straight to whatever afterlife or lack thereof is waiting for you, while some doppelganger walks around with your memories. It does not save you from eternal supernatural servitude or torture, it just sends you there a few decades faster.
Science would be able to tell you if the structure of your brain is roughly identical before and after teleportation. Science will be able to tell you if your personality, as measured by various tests, is roughly identical, If you don’t define “soul” this way science can’t say much about it. In fact unless someone gives a testable definition of soul, there is not much to say.
And Matheson’s early script had Kirk split into a good and bad side, which is really far away from any other transporter characteristic seen thereafter.
No. Leaving aside the religious “soul” aspects, which is as silly as most of religious belief, the problem is just a lexigraphical one. The problem is that people are defining the word “you” in different ways, nothing more.
If memory, sentience, and sense of self pass through the process, any person(s) resulting from the copy are “real people” and functionally equivalent to a replacement for “you.” Whether you choose to grant them “you-ness” is a matter of whether your willing to stretch the definition of a word to cover a new case that hasn’t existed until now, but doesn’t change the result one iota. Certainly the copy(s) will think they’re “you,” but you can choose to agree or disagree with them as you like.
I assumed it was the doppelganger that was free of the threat of the afterlife.
In some literary transporter systems, it isn’t atoms that are sent, it’s the information on the arrangement of the atoms. The atoms just have to be taken apart in order for the pattern to be completely read.
A receiver on the other end uses available matter there to re-create the pattern. If the pattern of the brain holds the thoughts and memories, then they go forward. But the pattern is being maintained by new matter.
Would most of you agree that this sort of transporter is ending one person and starting another even though the second person maintains continuity of thought and intention?
Thinking about it, it occurs to me that if one goes with the scenario that each teleportation creates a new person with a new soul, this results in the afterlife being flooded with huge numbers of different versions of the same person if teleporting is common enough.
No; at most it means that one “me” goes off to an afterlife while another version of me is free of it. You are operating under the erroneous assumption that if a soul exists it and only it is me. If a transporter works to produce fully functioning people at the destination, then at most the “soul” is just a supernatural alternate version of me, not the only one.
No; it’s the same person in my view. After all, that’s pretty much what normal living is like just a bit faster; the atoms that make up my body are constantly being discarded and replaced. I’m a moving pattern of information, not a chunk of matter.
Douglas Hofstadter talks about this in his book “I Am A Strange Loop”. He gives the following thought experiment:
The first transporter invented scans the original body, down to the position of every last atom and transmits that information to, say, Mars, where the terminal on the other end recreates the original down to every last atom. The scanning process destroys the original body, so it works just like the Star Trek transporter. You close your eyes on earth, and an indistinguishably identical you opens your eyes on Mars. Most people would probably say that the Mars “you” is the same person as the Earth “you”.
Now, let’s say that someone improves on this design, and develops a scanner that is able to read the information needed without immediately destroying the original body. Let’s say that the original is able to survive for, say, a few hours. Suddenly, this wonderful magical technology takes on the aspect of a horror story, as the original body slowly dies, watching via instantaneous tele-screen technology as a new copy of himself arrives on Mars and begins living his life, leaving the original behind. Hofstadter argues that in this scenario, most people would not consider the two bodies to be the same person - that the copy is in some way just that: a copy.
And what if the scanning process becomes even better, so that the original is able to live just fine? Well, now you’re just cloning yourself, and obviously each clone is a separate individual, right?
I’ve been thinking about this, and I think in the long run that the prevailing opinion will be that such duplicates are you. Mainly because people who believe that will be the ones most likely to use such technology, and will therefore be the ones to colonize the galaxy - sending information between stars is a lot easier than sending mass. I foresee the most likely method of colonizing the galaxy being sending small robotic probes that can upon arrival replicate & build industrial, habitat & communication facilities, and only then will people (human or otherwise) arrive by transmission.
[QUOTE=Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See, p. 149]
I remembered once, in Japan, having been to see the Gold Pavilion Temple in Kyoto and being mildly surprised at quite how well it had weathered the passage of time since it was first built in the fourteenth century. I was told it hadn’t weathered well at all, and had in fact been burnt to the ground twice in this century. “So it isn’t the original building?” I had asked my Japanese guide.
“But yes, of course it is,” he insisted, rather surprised at my question.
“But it’s burnt down?”
“Yes.”
“Twice.”
“Many times.”
“And rebuilt.”
“Of course. It is an important and historic building.”
“With completely new materials.”
“But of course. It was burnt down.”
“So how can it be the same building?”
“It is always the same building.”
I had to admit to myself that this was in fact a perfectly rational point of view, it merely started from an unexpected premise. The idea of the building, the intention of it, its design, are all immutable and are the essence of the building. The intention of the original builders is what survives. The wood of which the design is constructed decays and is replaced when necessary. To be overly concerned with the original materials, which are merely sentimental souvenirs of the past, is to fail to see the living building itself.
[/QUOTE]
Pretty much sums up my opinion of the subject. Sure, I’d be destroyed. Dead. But soon enough I’d be brought right back, and never notice the difference.
In the case where I go through the teleporter, and me #2 is created, but me #1 is not destroyed, well, I suppose there are just two me’s then, neither having a valid claim to being more ‘me’ than the other, and now, due to our different experiences, are two separate individuals, yet still both ‘me’.
Its rather like identical twins. Say your wife(or you, if you’re so equipped), have a pair of bright eyed bouncing twin boys. We’ll name them Jack and John. One day, after about a month, you’re changing them, and… Wait.. Which one is Jack? Which is John? Oh shit.. the wife is going to rage when she finds out…
Unless you just don’t tell her. Because, for all intents and purposes, it makes no difference which is which. And frankly, she may have already mixed them up and not told you, fearing your own reaction.
Ultimately, getting their names right is pointless until they are old enough to actually have different personalities. They are clearly not the same person when placed side by side, due to there being two of them, but the distinction is irrelevant, and they are entirely interchangeable.
You’re resorting to the argumentum ad populum now?
Other people might not notice the difference, because a teleporter is very good at hiding the evidence of your death. You will never notice the difference, because you will be dead.
Part of that is do you believe in a soul? Something that is not detectable in our 3d ‘universe’ but is part of every living thing.
My take is the transporter would work as your soul would just be using the matter/energy in this 3d state no-matter what the form. Though the physical life form (the body) needs to be biologically intact enough to preform it’s function to continue to live. In the OP the transport is instantaneous and perfect, so it would work.
In the example of using a transported to create a clone, a perfect duplicate, it gets fuzzier, but since the laws of physics don’t work outside the universe there is nothing to stop the cloned soul from becoming duplicated without any loss. The example of this would be creation of a child from the parents, a new soul comes into being. The one being would become 2 separate beings with a common past but different present and future.
No, I’m simply talking about what most people will likely believe regardless of the truth (assuming that there is a “truth” here).
Yup! But also not dead. I’d be a regular heisneburgs cat, I tell ya, neither alive nor dead. Nor zombie. It’d be a trip for sure the first time. 
As Mr. Adams said, the idea, intention, design.. All live on. Thats the important bits. Not the flesh(which is replaced many times throughout your life anyway), or maintaining a string of unbroken consciousness(which you don’t do).
An interesting question in these debates is if you would use the teleporter if you faced certain death if you didn’t. Say you’re on a shipwreck in some far flung planet, no hope of rescue. But you’ve got the Acme Atomizer 3000, which is guaranteed to filigree you up into a fine pink mist so that something thats technically not you but indistinguishable anyway can wake up at home. Do you use it?
I think this kind of ‘classical teleportation’ is the most plausible form of teleportation, and may be the only one that will ever be practical. Quantum teleportation would require technology that achieves far too many simultaneous miracles to be plausible.
However I do think of classical teleportation as a kind of copying, rather than true teleportation. If enough people did it there would be copies of people all over the universe, all starting off similar then gradually diverging. Widespread use of copying would reduce the mental diversity in a population, which might be seen as a bad thing, and so on.
How do I go about performing independent, repeatable experiments? Where is the actual transporter located, and what’s the waiting list for experimental access?
Scientific? Hardly! Speculative, purely!
I have described something similar on this SF page
http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4a3d78dc77e6f
thinking about the possibility a bit more cynically, this sort of ‘beaming’ may become to dominant type of travel in the future- but not for humans; instead it will probably be AI software sending itself from star to star, with no humans involved at all.
The reason for the apparent paradox is simply that we have no way at present to ever experience an existence-fork like this.
Absent any kind of immaterial soul, the break in consciousness from one transporter booth to the next is no different to the break in consciousness that happens when you are put under anaesthetic - the new ‘you’ wakes up and the only continuity is the fact that you remember being the old you (after all, it’s not like the old you of yesterday still exists somewhere with a piece of string linking it to the current ‘you’)
So if the transporter makes two copies of you at the output end, they both experience continuity of self - they’re both you (although distinct from each other now). The only reason that’s hard to swallow is that we have no current real-world requirement for a conceptual framework that deals with it. In the real world, people don’t split in two (well, not completely - although this is interesting), so we have not developed a way to think about what that would mean, or rather, we have built a paradigm that assumes singular continuity, in which we are somewhat trapped.
Split-brains, eh; I wonder if you could split a person in two, and reconstruct the other half of the body for each original half. You would end up with two people who both include part of the orginal person.
This would be a bit like binary personality fission; tricky to do in reality, but it would make an interesting thought experiment.