3 ms·

I always imagine this will be the divide between rich and poor in the future. The more expensive technology will break the person down and send their atoms to t

I always imagine this will be the divide between rich and poor in the future. The more expensive technology will break the person down and send their atoms to the destination to be reconstructed, it will be slower but it will be the same person. The less expensive technology will scan the person send that data and they will be printed out from a a futuristic atomic printer in a process that kills the original. I imagine a mining colony around the asteroid belt where the CEO uses the more expensive tech that is slower to visit every so often but the workers are forced to use the tech that kills them everyday but they are just a light beam of zero and ones on their "commute"

cgriswald 6y ago
For that to matter, atoms would have to be unique. But an identical atom is literally identical. A transported you wouldn’t be any different than a printed you. I rather suspect that “you” are simply information. If that information is copied, there’s another you—at least for the instant before that “you” starts having its own thoughts and receives information through its own senses. For you to die on transport and “someone else” to come out the other side, you’d have to exist in some way separate from your physical self; which might suggest you can survive death anyway.
pontifier 6y ago
If you're gonna go that route, why even bother with an organic body... much easier to just throw the poor into a generic robot or something.
tsimionescu 6y ago
You are presupposing that there is a material difference between these two. Whenever you have a discontinuation of your conscious experience (for example, when you go to sleep and wake up), you can view that as one person disappearing, and a copy waking up in the morning. In fact, unless you believe in a transcendent soul as the seat of consciousness, it must be equivalent. So, when you step into the teleporter, you can perfectly equivalently think of the person that will come up at the other side as a "copy" of you, or "future you". Let's say that the teleporter doesn't affect the local copy, it just creates a remote copy. What reason do you have to care more about the local copy than the remote copy? Why are you imagining that hacking the body up into tiny pieces, sending the pieces, and reassembling them would be any different from just killing the local copy and sending the information away? You'd still die and another person would be assembled on the other side. Now, if you do believe in a transcendent soul (I don't), things get much more interesting. In fact, teleportation in this way would amount to experimentation of this hypothesis. If humans have unique souls given to them by some god at the moment of birth, then copy teleportation should not be able to produce two copies - either one of the body copies would not be conscious at all, since one of the bodies would not have a soul, OR the two bodies would be completely different in personality, as one would have the original soul, and the other would have the new soul, which would be a completely different person. For the "move" style teleportation, the risk would be that the disassembly process kills the body and causes the soul to be separated, so that the reassembled body ends up being soul-less and doesn't function, or is inhabited by a different soul, so it must act differently.
- Gupie 6y ago
  > unless you believe in a transcendent soul as the seat of consciousness, it must be equivalent. That is a big claim considering we have no idea what causes consciousness. It is however certain that the copy is not you. Whether the original gets destroyed on teleportation or not, the original you will not feel, see, hear etc anything that the copy does.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    > It is however certain that the copy is not you. That's not certain at all, and depends on how we define "you". And, as you say, we don't know enough about consciousness to flesh out that definition. If consciousness depends only on the layout of neurons in the brain (for example), then a teleporter that destroys your body and makes an atomically (quantum-ly?) identical copy at the destination actually does move "you" from one place to another. But if there's more to it than just that, perhaps it doesn't.
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    Sure, the two copies won't feel, see, hear anything in common. But I also don't hear the sounds I heard yesterday, or feel the sand I felt last year, or even taste the tea I tasted this morning. Regardless of what gives rise to consciousness, there is no continuity in physics, every moment is separate, even if it is caused by the previous one. If you copy me, I am not either of the copies, I am the thing that existed for a brief moment while the copies were created. Even if I stepped into the teleporter, stood right there, and a copy emerged 2m away, the one that stood in the pad is no more identical to the one that walked onto the lad than the one that materialized 2m away. There is no known process in physics that could give meaning to that identity. So regardless of whether consciousness is emergent or quantum or computational or whatever we will discover it to be, unless it is transcendental, there is no way to physically define this continuity or give it some special meaning, such that teleportation would be meaningfully different from the normal passage of time, or that perfectly copying an individual could be said to produce anything different than moving them.
    - Gupie 6y ago
pawelmurias 6y ago
If you are killing someone to print them elsewhere why not print more copies? Teleporting people this way seems to be a faster horses way of thinking method of travel.

cgriswald 6y ago

For that to matter, atoms would have to be unique. But an identical atom is literally identical. A transported you wouldn’t be any different than a printed you. I rather suspect that “you” are simply information. If that information is copied, there’s another you—at least for the instant before that “you” starts having its own thoughts and receives information through its own senses. For you to die on transport and “someone else” to come out the other side, you’d have to exist in some way separate from your physical self; which might suggest you can survive death anyway.

pontifier 6y ago

If you're gonna go that route, why even bother with an organic body... much easier to just throw the poor into a generic robot or something.

tsimionescu 6y ago

You are presupposing that there is a material difference between these two. Whenever you have a discontinuation of your conscious experience (for example, when you go to sleep and wake up), you can view that as one person disappearing, and a copy waking up in the morning. In fact, unless you believe in a transcendent soul as the seat of consciousness, it must be equivalent. So, when you step into the teleporter, you can perfectly equivalently think of the person that will come up at the other side as a "copy" of you, or "future you". Let's say that the teleporter doesn't affect the local copy, it just creates a remote copy. What reason do you have to care more about the local copy than the remote copy? Why are you imagining that hacking the body up into tiny pieces, sending the pieces, and reassembling them would be any different from just killing the local copy and sending the information away? You'd still die and another person would be assembled on the other side. Now, if you do believe in a transcendent soul (I don't), things get much more interesting. In fact, teleportation in this way would amount to experimentation of this hypothesis. If humans have unique souls given to them by some god at the moment of birth, then copy teleportation should not be able to produce two copies - either one of the body copies would not be conscious at all, since one of the bodies would not have a soul, OR the two bodies would be completely different in personality, as one would have the original soul, and the other would have the new soul, which would be a completely different person. For the "move" style teleportation, the risk would be that the disassembly process kills the body and causes the soul to be separated, so that the reassembled body ends up being soul-less and doesn't function, or is inhabited by a different soul, so it must act differently.

Gupie 6y ago
> unless you believe in a transcendent soul as the seat of consciousness, it must be equivalent. That is a big claim considering we have no idea what causes consciousness. It is however certain that the copy is not you. Whether the original gets destroyed on teleportation or not, the original you will not feel, see, hear etc anything that the copy does.
- kelnos 6y ago
  > It is however certain that the copy is not you. That's not certain at all, and depends on how we define "you". And, as you say, we don't know enough about consciousness to flesh out that definition. If consciousness depends only on the layout of neurons in the brain (for example), then a teleporter that destroys your body and makes an atomically (quantum-ly?) identical copy at the destination actually does move "you" from one place to another. But if there's more to it than just that, perhaps it doesn't.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  Sure, the two copies won't feel, see, hear anything in common. But I also don't hear the sounds I heard yesterday, or feel the sand I felt last year, or even taste the tea I tasted this morning. Regardless of what gives rise to consciousness, there is no continuity in physics, every moment is separate, even if it is caused by the previous one. If you copy me, I am not either of the copies, I am the thing that existed for a brief moment while the copies were created. Even if I stepped into the teleporter, stood right there, and a copy emerged 2m away, the one that stood in the pad is no more identical to the one that walked onto the lad than the one that materialized 2m away. There is no known process in physics that could give meaning to that identity. So regardless of whether consciousness is emergent or quantum or computational or whatever we will discover it to be, unless it is transcendental, there is no way to physically define this continuity or give it some special meaning, such that teleportation would be meaningfully different from the normal passage of time, or that perfectly copying an individual could be said to produce anything different than moving them.
  - Gupie 6y ago

pawelmurias 6y ago

If you are killing someone to print them elsewhere why not print more copies? Teleporting people this way seems to be a faster horses way of thinking method of travel.