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"
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.
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.
> 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.
Only if our conscious experience truly stops during sleep (which as far as I know isn't actually backed up - there's a world of difference between minimally consciousness and stopped consciousness. From my understanding we simply don't know enough about consciousness) and if you believe whatever makes up experience isn't baked into the physical i.e. panpsychism, unless you want to classify that as a 'soul' (but then I'd reject your characterization of a soul as some magical thing that influences personality).
The sleep example was a bad idea, I only complicated things with it. In fact, my claim is that there is that the continuous nature of consciousness is an illusion in general. Just because I remember when I started writing this comment doesn't mean I am the same thing that started writing it. From one moment to another, everything is different, or at least there are no clear boundaries. Am I the same thing as the feritilzed egg? Present-me and past-me are just as related as copy1 and copy2 with a hypothetical perfect copy machine.
And even if 'whatever makes up experience is baked into the physical', that doesn't give a path to a time-stable identity. In fact, it makes that even less plausible, as it implies that every atom leaving your body, every cell that dies, and certainly something like losing a hand or getting a transplant, fundamentally changes your psyche at the physical level.
>In fact, my claim is that there is that the continuous nature of consciousness is an illusion in general.
I'm not sure what that even means. How can an experience be an illusion? It seems to me that at point everything just breaks apart.
>Just because I remember when I started writing this comment doesn't mean I am the same thing that started writing it.
The point isn't that you remember it (false memories are a thing), but that you're experiencing continuity from moment to moment.
If you think this continuity doesn't exist, how could you care about anything at all?
>From one moment to another, everything is different, or at least there are no clear boundaries
How is everything different? On the contrary, I'd say that actually most things seem to change only marginally and as time periods approach the infinitesimal, so do the changes. And I don't understand what you mean by clear boundaries. Why would there be any? Isn't lacking clear boundaries what actually makes it continuous.
>Am I the same thing as the feritilzed egg? Present-me and past-me are just as related as copy1 and copy2 with a hypothetical perfect copy machine.
If you reject continuity, sure, but otherwise the key difference is that there's continuity between the objects.
Let me ask you, why do you care about your future 'self'? That is, why do you not just maximize _your_ (current) pleasure, rather than caring about the experience of someone that you seem to think isn't actually yourself. At the very least, it seems like from your point of view there is no reason to place more importance on your future self than any other future person.
>And even if 'whatever makes up experience is baked into the physical', that doesn't give a path to a time-stable identity. In fact, it makes that even less plausible, as it implies that every atom leaving your body, every cell that dies, and certainly something like losing a hand or getting a transplant, fundamentally changes your psyche at the physical level.
'time-stable' identity doesn't mean that it must be forever frozen, but rather that it's continuous in the time dimension and happens slowly enough that the subject can experience this. You can replace parts of the 'soul material', without identity being lost as long.
An illusion is an experience of something that doesn't really happen. When you have a fever, you may experience a feeling of cold, but it is an illusion, you're actually very hot (it can be argued that it's not an illusion, the feeling of cold is just misinterpreted, but that's beside the point).
This experience of continuity is built from memory, I think I am the same person I was 2 minutes ago because I can remember what it was like to be that person. If I take a roofie or drink too much or sleep walk, I will feel that the things that I did happened to another person, because I don't remember them at all. Likewise, the experience of continuity is often lost - I generally experience sleep as "falling asleep" -> "waking up", even if an EEG would show that I am not even entirely losing consciousness for this time.
> How is everything different? On the contrary, I'd say that actually most things seem to change only marginally and as time periods approach the infinitesimal, so do the changes. And I don't understand what you mean by clear boundaries. Why would there be any? Isn't lacking clear boundaries what actually makes it continuous.
Yeah, that phrase was really bad, I didn't get my point across at all. What I wanted to say is that in physics you actually look at every moment in time individually, even if functions of time are continuous; and you look at every piece of every object individually - any object can be equivalently represented as multiple objects held together by strings (or springs). There is no need or use for object identity across time.
> Let me ask you, why do you care about your future 'self'? That is, why do you not just maximize _your_ (current) pleasure, rather than caring about the experience of someone that you seem to think isn't actually yourself. At the very least, it seems like from your point of view there is no reason to place more importance on your future self than any other future person.
Because in this view, a single experience is extremely fleeting, far too little to gain any great pleasure. Also, my future "self" is the person I can empathize most with in the world, so I feel it is natural to want to help him. Not to mention, for any desire I have, he is the most likely to actually see it through.
Also, we often sacrifice our happiness for other people, often ones that we have much less reason to empathize with than our future selves. Not to mention, of course I occasionally sacrifice my future self's happiness for my current one - such as eating an extra piece of cake, or drinking another glass. But there has to be some limit, especially when I have such an intimate idea of how much the future person will suffer.
> 'time-stable' identity doesn't mean that it must be forever frozen, but rather that it's continuous in the time dimension and happens slowly enough that the subject can experience this.
Yes, I think we mean the same thing by time-stable. It doesn't have to be frozen, but it must be well defined for more than one moment of time (it's pretty trivial to define an object at time T, even the Atlantic Ocean, but it's much harder to define an object that remains itself over some interval T0-T1).
> You can replace parts of the 'soul material', without identity being lost as long.
This is the part I don't understand. In the materialistic computational theory of the mind, it's pretty clear why the mind doesn't change just because cells die and are replaced, or just because every atom in a body is replaced. But if each atom carries a part of the soul, I really don't understand how this works, or at least what it buys you in terms of identity or mind.
> 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.
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.
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.
> There is no known process in physics that could give meaning to that identity.
I am arguing that we don't know enough about consciousness or about the universe to claim there is no difference between the original and the copy. So saying "there is no known process in physics" doesn't undermine my position.
Here is one possibility, perhaps a bit silly, but if we are in a simulated universe, not that I think this is likely, but if we are then each person could maybe have a unique hash. A copy then would have a different hash to the original.
Like I said I am not saying we are in a simulation. It is just an example scenario where a perfect copy would not be the same as a move.
Sure, there is always the possibility of new physics being discovered. But we know A LOT about the universe, and the fact that we can explain so much about how things work, from the atomic to the galactic level, without any kind of a time-stable identity being necessary does suggest that we shouldn't hold our breath hoping for one to be discovered.
Also note, a hash or a mind in a higher-level universe is exactly a transcendent soul: it transcends what we call physical reality (or it transcends 'the simulation' in that story). Just because it's framed in scientific concepts doesn't make it any more or less scientific than Brahman or Christian souls.
Yes, we know a lot, but we don't understand consciousness or even why the universe exists at all. You are probably right, there is unlikely to be a necessity for a "time-stable identity". But who knows, as Lord Kelvin said 1901 “there is nothing new to be discovered in physics now"!
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.
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"