Depends if teleportation uses TCP or UDP
SCTP
UDP teleportation sounds pretty questionable.
And what compression algorithm are they using?
Quantum mechanic wavelengths in mp3. So you might arrive a bit off.
ok, i’m too stupid for this picture…why are commenters implying you die when you use the transporter? it’s next to the rails isn’t it?
A common conundrum with science-fiction teleporters is that they’re often described as breaking down, and then recreating, matter.
With a human being (or other sentient life form), this brings up the philosophical question of whether the ‘recreated’ you is really you? If you were taken apart in chunks, and then someone put an exact copy of you back together from those chunks, would it still be the same ‘you’ that was taken apart? Or would it be a new ‘you’, some copy or clone with all of your memories?
A fun little thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUXKUcsvhQc
Can confirm, was a fun little thing. Thanks for that!
ok, so the question is actually “would you use a teleporter to save someone’s life not knowing if you would still be you afterwards”. i was thrown off by the train tracks because usually it implies sending someone else to certain death. thanks for clearing that up.
so i guess my answer would be of course. if transporters have become so ubiqitous that they are installed in seemingly random locations and with no fee or safety measures before using them i guess they are safe to use :)
I suggest watching CGP grey’s video on teleporters.
Is it still the same ship if all of its parts have been replaced?
It depends on how it works. The most popular form of transporter works by scanning your body down to the subatomic level, deconstructing the original body, and creating a perfect replica somewhere else. Imagine for a moment that it didn’t deconstruct the original body (as seen in Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Second Chances). The original and the copy are two separate entities.
A transporter doesn’t move you, it kills and reincarnates you. Unless it uses some kinda space bending wormhole tech to physically move the atoms from one spot to another, of course—then it doesn’t kill you, and you’re safe to pull the lever
well, as someone with a buddhist mindset that is not a problem for me :D
Have you seen “the prestiege”? I think that movie explains the problem perfectly.
It’s also a really good movie so enjoy.
Doesn’t that make it even more selfless?
Easiest one ever, ship of thesius here I come!
I tend to think what “you” are is the pattern formed by the various electrical and chemical signals in your brain and whatever other parts of your body are involved in cognition, and since patterns are ultimately information, and a completely identical copy of some information is the same information with nothing to distinguish it, that a sufficiently perfect copy of you literally is you, and as such, if the teleporter works the way fictional teleporters are generally described as working, then yes, it is you.
I think the real argument or concern behind this is, do we have a soul?
If not, then yes, stepping into a transporter means that you die, and that some other version of you continues on, but that doesn’t matter because nothing was actually lost.
If we do have a soul, then the question becomes, does your soul survive the transport?
If it does, then it’s no worries, it’s just a means of transportation.
But if it doesn’t, then does the version of you that pops out of the other side have a brand new soul, or is it now soulless?
And finally, how could we ever tell?
I think the first of those approximates my view, just with the added caveat that your consciousness is “something”, since we use the word to describe some aspect of our experience even if we don’t fully understand it, and if there’s no physical basis for anything to have been lost in this process because the copy is the same, that implies to me that your consciousness must have been preserved or recreated as well.
For everyone else, yes. But the you you are now will cease to exist. Your consciousness won’t transfer.
Your consciousness ceases to exist every time you go to sleep though. Your brain changes significantly during sleep - memories are solidified, motor skills will be hardened etc. The new consciousness is clearly different from the old one. Why is teleportation so different?
I don’t believe continuity of consciousness is actually required to maintain the identity of consciousness, is the thing. I think that, if you died, and then were brought back some how, you wouldn’t have some “new” consciousness that merely think it’s the first one, but literally would have the first one again, to the degree that such a thing can be called the same from moment to moment even under normal circumstances anyway.
so if i copy myself perfectly while still alive, my consciousness would span both bodies like The Multiple Man?
This is where this idea breaks down for me personally.
No, because you also change with time. You from today are slightly different than what you are yesterday, and you from a second from now will be slightly different from you from right now, because your thinking requires the patterns in your brain to change, just a little. If you copy yourself, both of you will experience different things, and dont have a means to sync those different inputs between you, and so you immediately diverge into two separate if similar entities. Youre both equally a progression of the original and so both are that original person in the same way that you as an adult and you as a kid are the same person, but once diverged youre no longer the same person as eachother. If the teleporter destroys the original while scanning them and then recreates them, theres only ever one of you at once. You only get an issue if you make the copy before destroying the original, because then there are experiences formed after the scanning process, and that new version of the identity is lost.
A bit like how theres a notion you sometimes get in sci-fi or some hypothesis about quantum stuff, that any event where more than one outcome is possible creates a different branching universe for each of the outcomes, and if you could somehow travel to one of those places, you’d find someone that was you up to the point of that event, but now has been shaped by different experiences since.
Would you just have two yous if there were two existing copies?
Youd get two people who are both “you” from before the copying, in the same sense that you are the same you that existed in your past, but arent the same as eachother anymore because they both get different inputs and experiences and develop along different paths.
But if you say that a perfect copy of you is literally you, why would it matter if the “original” is destroyed or not? The result should still be the same (as in a copy that is a separate conciousness) no?
What “you” are changes with time (consider that you’re quite different now from when you were, say, 5). The implication of this is that once a copy is made, new experiences are formed by both copies and their patterns change in divergent ways. If you destroy one after a copy is made, the changes undergone by the destroyed one after the copying aren’t transferred to or recreated again, and so are lost. Or in other words, if you make a perfect copy, they’re identical at the moment of creation, but virtually immediately afterwards won’t be. If you destroy the original before making the copy, then the copy is identical to the original at the moment it is destroyed, ideally, and so the same state last experienced is re-achieved and can develop further.
I’m struggling to think of the proper words to explain my thoughts on this subject, so I’m sure my responses about it are somewhat confusing, and my attempts to elaborate make them fairly long, I’m sorry about that.
Something that I think might be a source of some of that confusion is that I get the impression that many think of consciousness as a distinct nonphysical “thing” that is somehow tethered to the brain, such that the destruction of the brain results in the severing of that connection in a way that means it can’t be caught and pulled back again by any physical process, similar to how people that believe in souls posit them to behave.
I do not believe consciousness works this way. I think that it literally is a specific form of information, or perhaps an emergent effect of certain kinds of information processing, and thus, is a part of the physical universe in the same sort of way that a digital image is (the image itself isn’t “made” of any substance and can be encoded into any form of matter that can be organized into a sufficiently complex arrangement, but that organization physically exists, changing it changes the image, or produces a new but similar one depending on how you define it, and it cannot exist if no matter exists in an arrangement that can encode it), and as a result of that, getting it back just requires getting some matter into an arrangement that encodes it again. The tricky bit is that unlike a digital image, it isn’t a static sort of information but a changing one. So, to take the analogy further, replace the image with a computer program that takes inputs from the world around it, and then rewrites it’s own code in response to those inputs. If you take this algorithm, pause it, copy it’s state and destroy the original machine while rewriting that state into a new machine in a new location, and unpause the program on the new machine, you’d get the same results as if you had just paused it, moved the original machine to the new location and unpaused it at the same time you would have unpaused the copied program. There’s no basis to say that you have a different program, because they have the same code and are behaving the same. But if you unpaused the original machine, its instance of the program will change itself, and then if you destroy it now, the copy won’t reach the state that that last version of the original would have reached had you brought it to the new location too. In this analogy, killing a person is equivalent to one of these programs reaching a state that is no longer continued, so if you continue it later, somewhere else, even on new hardware, that’s fine, and if you create a branch and keep both running, that’s also fine, but if you create a branch, and then destroy one without recording it’s state to recreate it later, or just never actually run it again on a new machine, that branch has reached an end state that doesn’t continue changing itself, and so you’ve had “someone” die.
I think I get what you’re saying, and I completely agree with the first parts. What I don’t quite understand is how the conciousness would differentiate between the two clones in all scenarios.
If we create a copy and pause at the exact moment of creation, where both copies are exactly the same, how would the conciousness “choose bodies”?
If we kill the person first, doesn’t that necessitate that the clone has been killed as well in that case?
I’m assuming this is a transporter as exists in Star Trek, and not some kind of wormhole.
Imagine if it didn’t deconstruct your original body, and only made the perfect copy at the exit. Would there be two “yous?” Under your definition, yes, but they are very clearly two separate entities. There is a “you” that walked into the entrance, and there is a “someone else” who walked out of the exit. I think a continuous consciousness is not only relevant, but crucial to a meaningful definition of “you.”
And nobody post that “you die when you fall asleep” comic. It equivocates different definitions ofbghese words in a confusing and misleading way.
I don’t see an issue with having two yous that are nonetheless separate people from eachother, that’s actually exactly what I think would happen in such an instance. Asking which is “you” would be like watching a cell undergo mitosis and then asking which one is the original cell. Continuity mattering seems like a problem to me because it feels like it should require involving something outside the material universe to make it make sense. I’m not sure how best to explain this, but it seems to me that:
- you exist, for obvious reasons, since you perceive yourself
- you aren’t everyone and everything
- the previous two things should mean that there is something about what you are that makes it, you, and not someone else, nor some unconscious zombie
If that thing, whatever it is, is part of the material universe, then the perfect copy must have it too by definition, it wouldn’t be a perfect copy if there was something materially different about it, and then it would have to be you, because it has whatever that thing is that makes it “you”. If that thing exists but is not present in a physically identical copy, then wherever it exists must be outside the physical universe, yet capable of some kind of interaction with it (since presumably you cease if killed materially). That isn’t logically impossible, but requires adding an entire layer to reality to make it make sense, which seems premature when other interpretations don’t require this (and we could end up in the same boat anyway, if I made a thought experiment that suggests some really advanced technology has found a way to manipulate this other layer too, and copies you there as well) Continuity (for anything, not just humans) by itself isn’t really a “thing”. It isn’t made of anything, and doesn’t seem to interact with the physical world in any measurable way. As far as I can tell, it requires making fewer unproven assumptions about how the universe works to assume that continuity is merely a concept we made up due to the manner in which we perceive time, without any actual physical validity to it.
Apologies for the point-by-point reply. I have many responses to many things, which don’t necessarily fit into a cohesive structure of paragraphs.
Asking which is “you” would be like watching a cell undergo mitosis and then asking which one is the original cell.
Disagree. In mitosis, both child cells contain parts of the original. This is akin to Farscape Season 3’s “twinning—” a method of cloning in which neither result has any claim over being the “original.”
This is different from a Star Trek/The Prestige style transporter—you can keep track of which one is the original: it’s the one who went into the entrance. No part of their physical body is present in the transporter clone.
the previous two things should mean that there is something about what you are that makes it, you, and not someone else, nor some unconscious zombie
Yes. A continuous conscious experience. Notably different from an experience of continued consciousness. We must avoid equivocation here. “You” has multiple definitions, some of which are more useful and relevant than others.
If that thing, whatever it is, is part of the material universe, then the perfect copy must have it too by definition, it wouldn’t be a perfect copy if there was something materially different about it, and then it would have to be you, because it has whatever that thing is that makes it “you”.
There is something materially different about the you that steps out of the transporter. They’re made of different atoms and subatomic particles. This isn’t even a Ship of Theseus situation—like, if you replace every single part of your car over the course of a year until every single part is different, there’s some ambiguity about whether it’s the same car as it was the year before. But the car that came off the production line right after it may be made using the same materials in the same pattern, but it is unambiguously a different car.
You could say it’s the “same” car, in that it’s the same color, make and model using the same materials, but if someone crashes it, you would not say they crashed your car, no matter how arbitrarily similar they were at the time of the crash.
Continuity (for anything, not just humans) by itself isn’t really a “thing”. It isn’t made of anything, and doesn’t seem to interact with the physical world in any measurable way.
Continuity isn’t a physical object, but it definitely exists. For one example, the lithium in my phone’s battery is the same lithium that was in it when it was made. The phone would work just fine if the lithium atoms were constantly being replaced, but they don’t seem to be. Continuity is a real phenomenon.
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Is cloning that much faster than running to the lever? Do you also keep a cloning machin always handy on you?
The teleporter is basically a cloning machine
Use a stick.
Shit like this always remind me of the videogame SOMA.
That game has the best story and atmosphere I’ve ever seen in my life (maybe except for HL2)
I kinda wish SOMA hit for me but I was already well-aware of the “teleportation problem” and have an established position, so instead I was frustrated at the slow pace of much of the game and annoyed that the protagonist didn’t understand. It felt like “Bioshock at home”.
Half-Life is very different but also extremely good. And that’s despite it not even being my favorite Valve series, Portal is.
If you liked Portal 2, check out The Entropy Centre on Steam. It’s extremely similar but the puzzles are based on a different concept. Super freakin’ fun though. And a great story, just like Portal 2.
Also Portal Revolutions (fan made mod) is absolutely fantastic. It really felt like Portal 3.
And by HL2 you mean Half Life 2? Which has a shitty and unfinished story and way less atmosphere than its original game HL1???
Lol ok buddy.
^ This comment was presented by the Combine.
I mean it though. HL1 was way better, storywise. HL2 just had upgraded graphics that couldn’t make up for worse gameplay. That endless water corridor run with the swamp boat at the beginning bored me to hell and back.
Have had that game in my library for years, maybe I need to play it
You should. It’s incredible. Just realize it’s a walking sim. If you’re okay with that then def play it.
Yeah that’s fine, Death Stranding was amazing too and that’s mostly a walking sim aswell
Define “you.” An identical collection and pattern of atoms and subatomic particles? Then yes. A continuous consciousness as experienced by the “me” on the entry side of the teleporter? No.
Would I kill myself to save five lives and create one? Yes
You’re not a continuous consciousness anyway. Sleep is a thing.
I hate that comic. Equivocation is a fallacy. Your alarm clock is proof that you don’t lose experiential consciousness when you sleep.
What comic and no it doesn’t. And reading through your exchange with the other guy it’s clear we have very different ideas about the nature of self-identity. I don’t think of my body as necessary for “me” to exist, I am my thoughts and memory rather than my neurons and chemistry. If that information can be copied and transmitted then there will be a “me” that continues from a new location.
I’d go deeper and say that “continuous consciousness” isn’t a concept that makes sense. You only live in the moment, with access to part of your past selves’ memories.
So there’s no distinction for you between “you have been destroyed and an identical copy of you has been constructed an imperceptible amont of time later” and “an imperceptible amount of time had passed in which nothing has happened to you”
I’d go deeper and say that “continuous consciousness” isn’t a concept that makes sense. You only live in the moment, with access to part of your past selves’ memories.
I posit that consciousness is a chemical process occurring in your brain. This process is continuously ongoing, and when it stops, you die. If a transporter constructs a perfect copy of you, down to the chemical process that constitutes your consciousness, then there is no continuity between your original body and this new one, because it’s a wholly different brain.
When people talk about continuity of consciousness, they usually mean the ego, and believe that when teleporting “you die, but someone else completely indistinguishable from you but somehow not you” is born.
I say that this little piece of magic “you”-ness that doesn’t make the jump just doesn’t exist.
I already explained how the thing that makes the consciousness continuous doesn’t transfer over to the new body. It’s not magic.
Really, all of this philosophical posturing is pointless. When you step into the entrance of the transporter, the entity that experienced stepping into the entrance of the transporter does not experience stepping out of the exit. If that entity is deconstructed, it dies.
If you interrupt a chemical process and then let it continue, it’s indistinguishable (and therefore identical) to letting it continue in the first place.
If you’d e.g. freeze your body, it doesn’t matter if you call the frozen state “dead” or don’t: your life would continue if it’s possible to unfreeze you.
Death or no death is meaningless if an indistinguishable individual resumes life after.
My transporter clone and I may be indistinguishable to you, but I can distinguish between us pretty easily. A transporter is not interrupting a chemical process and then letting it continue, it is stopping a chemical process and then starting another one elsewhere. Death or no death is very meaningful to me, the person who is about to be disintegrated at the entrance of this transporter.
The person who shows up at the lever looks like me, acts like me, thinks they’re me, and they are not me. No matter how arbitrarily similar we are, they’re a different person. If the transporter fails to disintegrate me, I do not see through that person’s eyes. I do not hear through that person’s ears. Because they’re a different person.
So it stands to reason that if the transporter does disintegrate me, I still will not see through that person’s eyes nor hear through that person’s ears. And because my eyes and ears are gone, I will never see or hear anything again. There’s a word for this state of existence, in which you do not experience anything.
You didn’t explain, you begged the question
This here, although teleporters might actually be implemented in a way that transmits the original being to the destination. It’s a fictional technology after all, so why not?
What makes you think that “continuous consciousness” is a thing and not just the way it feels like to exist?
Do you fell like you’re made out of cells? Do you feel the hormones influencing your thinking? Then why do you think that the perceived continuity of having an ego is a real thing that exists? No soul has been measured so far.
I’m not a philosopher, so this response will be imperfect and is subject to revision.
Then why do you think that the perceived continuity of having an ego is a real thing that exists?
My current response to this is that something can exist without being made of something. Consciousness is an emergent property of a sufficiently complex, chemically active neurological system. (Someone can poke holes in this definition if they like, but come on dude, principle of charity. You get what I mean.) Essentially, “how it feels like to exist” is a real, if immaterial, thing. Just like mathematics and language.
If someone makes a perfect copy of my brain and body over by the lever, using none of the materials from my original body, then it is a different brain and body, no matter how arbitrarily similar it is. The consciousness that was by the entrance to the teleporter will never experience pulling the lever.
There is no way to know that were not constantly dying and being replaced. The experience of continuity may be an illusion because you don’t notice that you’re only alive for a split second, and replacing the consciousness that was alive a split second before you.
Okay? That’s all well and good, but there is a way to know that a transporter does kill you. Given a choice between maybe living or definitely dying, I’m gonna choose the former.
I know how teleportation machines work and I won’t be using one.
Wait, you… you do?
No. Not because teleporter but because no need for multi track drifting if other path clear.
Psychopath!
Nah, I’ll send Tom Riker.
It won’t be me and, unless I have some loved one there, I’m not thoughtlessly jumping into suicide.
I think teleportation is a really interesting philosophical question. If life is deterministic and there is no soul, then there should be no problem with teleportation. From a deterministic atheist perspective it should not be a problem, I wouldn’t teleport myself though 😅
Doesn’t matter because your original brain was destroyed. You would be dead and a copy of you would remain.
What is death? If everything is deterministic, then there is no consciousness. If there is no consciousness, then no death and a copy is pretty much exactly the same
Was it though? I’d argue it was disassembled. And a pen wouldn’t stop being the same pen if you disassemble it, take the pieces somewhere else, and assemble it again. This is the same but at an atomic level.
Nope. If it makes a perfect copy of you during transport … you die during the transport.
If you come through with a transporter clone your original mind doesn’t inhabit both of them … so your original mind will not inhabit either of them.
What is your “original mind” though? Is there such a thing? Are you the same you you were last night? You only “Inhabit yourself” in the present, so the continuity of your mind is just an illusion. For the clone, they would be as “you” as you are, and in fact it would be impossible to tell the difference between you and your clone for anyone, including yourself. Maybe you’re the clone?
There is an easy logic test to see if a person’s “mind” is really in a clone/copy/backup. If the original and the copy exist at the same time would the original perceive itself in two places? If not, then that “exact copy” method doesn’t work … the original just dies and a near copy is made. Someone mentioned the zombie theory earlier in the post … just about as creepy.
Why would the “original” be able to perceive itself in two places? Are you able to perceive yourself in the past? That was literally you, yet you only perceive the present. There is no reason why you should be able to perceive a brain identical to yours but separated in space either.
Also the point is the “original” doesn’t make sense in the first place, both the copy and you would perceive the same thing in your hypothetical case, because you are the same.
That’s stupid, of course you don’t have access to the brain of a different “you”. The moment you get forked into two, there’s now two separate beings.
But none have more claim to be the original than the other, since your continuous experience of reality is only an illusion anyway.
Hi, I’m a naturalistic determinist atheist. I won’t be taking a teleporter. The problem is that my body (which my continuous conscious experience resides in) will get erased if I do.
Replace “dismantled by the teleporter” with “shot in the head,” and it might make it a bit more obvious why it matters that the original you dies. I wouldn’t want to be shot in the head, even if I knew there was a perfect facsimile of me being constructed the moment the bullet entered my brain. The fact that this me would die makes intuitive sense to me.
Oh, I am very aware of it being like death. My point is that we were never alive at all. We have no consciousness because of determinism, we follow a path that cannot be changed. That’s why teleportation is not a problem from a deterministic atheist standpoint.
However I do fully acknowledge that I can not live like that. I live as if I have free will, because that is the easiest and most comfortable way to live. Beside nature / nurture arguments of course, I don’t dismiss those.
I think it’s mostly a semantic argument: nothing is being “teleported”, it’s a copy. That copy will surely be a perfect copy of me at time T, and after T we’ll drift and become different folks, but a copy of me is not me, and if you punch the copy it doesn’t hurt me. SOMA showcases it pretty well! Anything else cannot even be conceived, right? And even if matter could be “transported” FTL into a different place, wouldn’t the “zipping” process destroy me? The silver cord would be cut, and even if the person on the other side wakes up feeling like me, I would already be gone. It’s consciousness and the vessel for consciousness, not one or the other.
I like your time T example. Kind of a ship of Theseus theme. If your own body is constantly replacing your cells, are you still the same you from last month? So what’s the difference if the cells are replaced by your own biological mechanisms or this teleporter machine?
Also, if this is a copy, why destroy the original in the first place? I could use a second me. Just the they would be located elsewhere for some time. Maybe they could also develop some kind of merge process where we re-integrate back together and our common experiences become part of the same memory.
Still I prefer the concept of some kind of wormhole or space warp type of teleportation, where you can bend space to move from location a to location b and no matter is destroyed or recreated.
This is the same reason I feel like peoples ideas of being “uploaded to the Matrix” are just as flawed. All of the same talking points but with a digital output. Being uploaded means death because my consciousness will cease to exist and simply be emulated by a computer after.
The only one who gain the benefit of me uploading is everyone but myself.
That one I can almost see happening but not full ‘upload’ style. It would have to be gradual in like a Ship of Theseus’ style where the parts that make you ‘you’ are gradually replaced with digital equivalents.
i think the big question is continuity of consciousness. when you sleep or especially when getting surgery and dont dream you just sort of accept that you now are the same you that existed before the disconnect. if when you went under and we tossed you into a teleporter would you know?
Well the person being teleported would cease to exist. If life is deterministic then there is no consciousness, just a predetermined path. So my argument is basically that you don’t exist anyways, and by that extension teleportation is not a problem, because the copy is not alive either.
Deterministic atheism isn’t at odds with a soul or non-physicalism. See: Walden Pod
It’s one or the other. Cogito ergo sum vs. esse est percipi.
If it’s a wormhole or Niven-style teleporter, it’s unarguably you coming through the process. Star Trek… I’ll grant that the conversation gets a little more complicated.
i think this particular case implies itbis quantum teleportation where your body is destructed and simultaneously reassembled on the other side
But if I don’t do it, I’m not who I think I am.
Define ‘you’.
