If teleportation is ever invented ( as in Star Trek or The Fly ) would it be a form of mass murder ?
Since it would be deconstructing you and then putting you back together , would the person who walked of the teleport pad be the same person or just an exact replica ?
Does it even matter since my cells are constantly dying and being replaced . Am I the same person I was a year ago ?
If you want a good book with a theme that runs along the line of the OP, check out “The Unteleported Man” by Phillip Dick. It is currently out of print, but if you can find the 82 edition I highly recommend it.
For those of you who don’t read ;), did anyone else get the impression that the “Teleporter” in “They Live” that was supposed to sent humans loyal to the aliens off to a live of riches on the alien homeworld was most likely a futuristic gas chamber?
Joel
Heck, why would you need to destroy the original at all? Why not just let the Transporters make a perfect duplicate of you down on the hostile alien planet you’re orbiting, while the “original” you stays safe and sound on the Enterprise? God knows sending down an army of duplicate Lt. Cmdr. Datas would have saved Picard’s bacon more than once.
Another good book that deals with the OP, and many other interesting questions like it is “The Mind’s I”, compiled by Douglas Hofstadter & Daniel C. Dennett. This book screwed my head up for months!
>> Would teleportation be a form of mass murder?
No, it would be a form of mass transportation
Here’s why they would never do that. The mamby-pamby Federation would feel obliged to pick up any survivors of a hostile situation. This would include duplicates. When these duplicates came back to the Enterprise, their feelings would be hurt when they found out that they were not the “real” (original) person. Whhhhaaaaaaaa! 
I think the star trek physics manual gets around that little problem by claiming that what really happens in teleportation is that you get ripped to tiny little bits, then some sort of wormholeish tunnel is established between the ship and destination, you are accelerated down it and reassembled.
Sounds painful. No wonder they had a few types in the series who insisted on shuttlecraft…
Then again, that explanation contradicts that episode where someone was conscious in the beam. Oh well.
Let’s say this: You get the top half of your brain chopped off because you skiied into some low-hanging wires. Luckily, this is 2103, so nanomedicine has been all but perfected. Most of you is found almost immedietly, but it takes a few hours for them to find the top half of your brain. Unfortunately, by then the top half (where most of the important stuff resides) has decayed past the point of no return. So they take a file, essentially a copy of your brain you had made as a form of life insurance, and use that as a blueprint to rebuild the part of the brain where the personality, memories, etc. reside. You wake up a little later, in no pain but having lost all recollection of the time that passed in the few days since you last got your brain scanned. Question: Are you still you? 99% of your memories are intact, your personality is whole, and no objective test can say that you’ve changed since the accident. But half of your brain has been rebuilt from plans, fer chrissake! How say you, yojimbo? Anyone?
My reply:
If it looks like Derleth, talks like Derleth, and acts like Derleth, and no test can say it isn’t Derleth, it’s doubtless yours truly. If you dispute that claim, how can you presume to be who you claim you are? Obviously, you change every moment of every day.
My point:
There is nothing ‘sacred’ about keeping the same pile of flesh. If it was an option, I’d dump my carcass in favor of something less prone to complete and utter destruction. No, I don’t believe in a ‘soul’. I just think the mind is just another program, one that can be run on any system advanced enough to do the processing. Getting back to the OP, copies of a program can be said to be that program. If I give you an exact copy of a file, you now have said file. If you make an exact copy of yourself, there are now two yous. There is nothing complex here. Just basic concepts being applied to humans.
Yeah. It would take a lot less engery to simply move an atom from point a to point bb than just make a new atom at point b entirely. If you conserve the engery by transfering the atom or the energy thereof you are going easy on the warp drives.
Can’t do it – heisenburg uncertainty principal comes into play. You might get a brain without any ongoing electric movement you could then jumpstart via electroshock or something – but I don’t think you’d be you anymore.
Well, the question of “Are you you” kind of goes along with the idea of the holodeck in Star Trek. Say you had that accident, and they couldn’t save your body. Instead, they took your memories, thoughts, personality and put it into a hologram. Are you you, or are you a copy of you?
The idea of a soul, or human consciousness are so beyond what we can comprehend now, and maybe ever, that these questions are baffling. The same goes for Artificial Intellegence with computers. How do we know if its really thinking?
I took a philosophy class while in school and this very idea came up. The first question stated, “If you took your car in to get the fender replaced, is it still your car?” Everyone said yes. Second question, “If you replace the fender and the steering wheel, is it still your car?” Everyone said yes. This went on and on until, “If you took your car in and every single piece was replaced with an exact replica, is it still your car?” The class was extremely divided. The next step was to compare that example with the human body destroying and rebuilding cells everyday. Needless to say, the debate was not resolved.
I contend that you are the sum of your parts. Individual pieces only provide the building blocks. Start removing those blocks and you start to alter who you are. If the blocks make up, say an arm, your physical identity changes. If those blocks make up your brain, not only does your internal physical identity change, but your personality (or mental identity?) changes because those blocks come together to make you who you are.
So, yes, IMHO, you are pretty much the same person you were a year ago, maybe just a little newer. But that’s not to say you may not have changed. I’m sure you have changed physically in a year, and you have most likely connected a few more of those synapses in the melon. Besides those things, you’re still the same wonderful person that your mother loves.
If the teleporter reconstructs the person EXACTLY as they were. Then I say yes, they are still the same person.
Kyberneticist wrote:
Except that in one 6th or 7th season episode of ST:TNG, they had a transporter accident in which they unknowingly created a perfect, duplicate Riker.
Since they now know that transporter duplication can be done, they could invent a way to do it intentionally. Then we’d be right back to the Army of Duplicate Datas.
I’m pretty sure time travel is murder, if you send the victim into the past and strand him there.
Into the future, and it would be life extension.
If your saying he goes back in time but as soon as he arrives he ceases to be coz he didn’t exist there in the first place I’d agree that this is murder .
But if the guy is living and breathing in the past then how could this be murder ?
I would have to say that the teleported being would NOT be you. Now, I say that initially because I believe in a soul. However, if you think about it logically, the reconstructed you would HAVE to not be you. The current theory for teleportation would be that the teleporter creates a copy of you in the remote location and destroys the original. Well, what happens if you just do the first part, and wait a while to destroy the original. We know based on our own consciousness that the copy would not “be” us. It would be the exact same “person” with the exact same memories, and the exact same knowledge, and the exact same personality…but since you, the original, is still occupying your body and still conscious, the copied you would have to have it’s OWN consciousness. Of course, the copy would explain that he is 100% you, and he remembers going into the teleporter on one end, and coming out on the other, but he would have a different consciousness. There’s no reason to think that your consciousness could just “jump” bodies. Since there’s seemingly no possibility that YOU could control 2 bodies at once, teleportation would simply kill you and start a new life on the other end that thinks they’re you. This makes my head hurt, but I think it’s hard to reason it the other way.
Jman
Jman:
Why is the second conscious different from the first? The only difference is that up until a specific point in time both consciouses recall the same experiences. From that point on they start to have diverging life experiences which creates separate memories, but they were both you up until that point. How could a perfect replica of yourself not be you? Sure the original could say, “He’s just a copy.” But couldn’t the copy say the same thing? How would you distinguish the two?
How about a different theory on teleportation? Does anyone have one where destruction/reconstruction is not used? I seem to recall reading an article about scientists who “teleported” the state of a subatomic particle to another one in the room. Something like that. I’ll see if I can dig it up.
jmullaney:
How does Heisenburg enter into it? Neurons are not that complex. We could make copies of them down to the molecular level using various methods, not all of them destructive, and that would be more than good enough to call the neurons built from those files exact copies of the original. We’re talking about atoms and molecules, not quantum states and photons.
I don’t know the name of the book (short story?), but a teleportation device was invented where you got in one end, and the machinery re-created you elsewhere, and then actually had to destroy the original. In the story, the original wasn’t destroyed - then there were two of the main character.
If I find the name of it I’ll post it. Sounded like a cool funky read.
Esprix
Someone brought up The Jaunt in another thread recently. It was in a Stephen King collection. Look there for inspiration.
Basically, if you have a teleport device, and send someone through it, it is supposed to still be them on the other side. Otherwise, it would be a replicator.
So, how about if you turn off the other side, and push your enemy through? Where do they go? Wooooooooooo