SpeedOfSound wrote:Has anyone developed a though machine that kills us, erase us from that space, and then recreates us as an exact duplicate in the same space once per nanosecond?

Not sure as per exact description, but China Mieville played with a sorta similar idea in Kraken. He had a character who was able to teleport but doing it meant he actually died upon leaving a location and a replica that just thought it was the original emerged at the other end. Eventually the character ended up haunted by ghosts of his dead "selves".

The simple reason I do not believe that quantum teleportation is true teleportation is because if the original was not destroyed in the process, there would be two separate individuals with separate consciousnesses, therefore the destruction of the original does not change the fact that the copy on the other side is not the same person. If I were teleported somewhere, and I was destroyed in the process, I would cease to exist, and the world would go dark for me, there would be someone else living my life at the destination who appeared to be me. To those who survive me, it might even be as if I never left, but that is not the point. The point of the teleportation is to get places quickly so that you can gain new experiences, so it becomes pointless if you never make it to the other side, even if a clone with all your memories does. You yourself will never actually experience the destination.

This conundrum proves that death is purely an intellectual construction. The only way to describe the situation is in terms of absence or presence. Death has no meaning in this situation - by extension it has no meaning for any of us in any situation except as a well-known intellectual idea.

If my friend teleports, Version 1 of him becomes permanently absent, even if Version 2 of him is present in his place. But we cannot say that Version 1 of him is 'dead'. A man is the sum of his actions, and Version 2 has all the same memories of all the same actions that Version 1 of him had in the final nanosecond before his body disintegrated, so the personality that is him remains alive. Even if you say a man is the sum of his actions plus his physical body, there is nothing to distinguish Version 2's physical body from Version 1's physical body, except only that we, the observers, know that Version 2 was physically created in an instant a short distance from where Version 1 was made permanently absent.

It is no skin off Version 1's nose that he knew he would soon no longer experience himself. As he planned to move to the teleporter he may have experienced fears about the fact that he would soon stop experiencing anything as Version 1 of himself. But this would hardly matter to Version 1 once the teleportation process had taken place (we must really assume there is nothing wrong with the teleporter). If he is not present then he cannot witness his own presence, nor his own absence, in fact he will not be able to experience anything, so there is nothing to fear.

Once Version 2 is created, he will have a memory of the anxiety that Version 1 had in the moments before he teleported. This will only be a problem if he buys into the concept of death, which as I have said, doesn't exist. If people are advanced enough to create a teleporter, then they should be advanced enough to have tackled and defeated judeo-christian concepts like death, I would have thought.

Personally I think that the idea that just because you teleport, you must consent to being killed, doesn't stand up to scrutiny. It won't stop us worrying about it though, because that's the way we are conditioned; however we are free to jettison our conditioning at any time.

TdotSoul wrote:If I were teleported somewhere, and I was destroyed in the process, I would cease to exist, and the world would go dark for me

'Dark' only has meaning for a person witnessing the 'dark'. If you cease to exist, you cannot be such a witness. I only say this because the use of the 'dark' metaphor exposes of fear of being dead but at the same time experiencing an absence of light - i.e. a fear of death. But what concept of death means that the dead person can witness anything? A religious concept.

TdotSoul wrote:The simple reason I do not believe that quantum teleportation is true teleportation is because if the original was not destroyed in the process, there would be two separate individuals with separate consciousnesses, therefore the destruction of the original does not change the fact that the copy on the other side is not the same person. If I were teleported somewhere, and I was destroyed in the process, I would cease to exist, and the world would go dark for me, there would be someone else living my life at the destination who appeared to be me. To those who survive me, it might even be as if I never left, but that is not the point. The point of the teleportation is to get places quickly so that you can gain new experiences, so it becomes pointless if you never make it to the other side, even if a clone with all your memories does. You yourself will never actually experience the destination.

On the other hand given the "You" is constructed by a brain then a copy of that brain would copy the "you" as much as a copy of a hard disk copies a host. And equally if you clone a host disk you would be foolish to startup the copy whilst you have the original running and expect them to remain the same - they diverge in content immediately they are both running.

Machines don't think like us so we have no ethical problems of making image backups of systems but for psychological reasons we have problems when it come to humans even though the same problems apply.

The problem is that when people think about this they construct what I call an "Overwelming Point of View" in which emotionally grounds you into one instance of "You". The Overwelming Point of View swamps the very idea that the clone could be them as well. When a monist and materialist sits down and looks at the problem though the only logical conclusion is that the clone and the original is both "You" but as we are our memories then in the same way that a host is its hard disk then running both at the same time means a potential for divergence. Then each is "You + a difference" and that is not a good thing though you only have you to argue with.