this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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I don't buy the idea that disintegrating my molecules and reconstructing new ones is tantamount to murder or suicide.
If all I experience is being one place one moment and another place the next, then it's me. It's isn't some fucking clone, it's me. You're just being turned into some other form (energy, if we're using Star Trek rules) and then being turned back.
I'm pretty sure that at 26, I'm already a completely different person than the baby I was born as, literally. My cells have all died and been replaced. The horror. ./s
I definitely don't think teleportation in science fiction is meant to be killing the person using it and making a clone of them. Like unless a story is specifically about that, I don't think any given sci-fi author is trying to set up some sinister background plot where everyone is unknowingly killing themselves all the time.
But I do still have to wonder if that's how it would end up working out in real life. Sure all our cells have died and been replaced since we were born, but that typically doesn't happen with all your cells at the same time lol. imo it's probably less about cells and more about like... Consciousness or "the soul" or whatever, I don't know. Whatever it is, I accept that teleporters in fiction have some way to store and transport it, whether it's stated in the narrative or not. But in real life I have no idea how we'd be able to tell if such a thing could even work.
In real life, I think we'd probably glean some insights to the soul in the development process. Like say, if one of the first human test subjects goes through it, only to have their personality irrevocably changed, and no one can identify any external reasons why, then that would warrant further research before billions of humans start using it and it becomes an actual problem.
I think part of my "resistance" to this question is that by default, I'm approaching it from the assumption that I'm living in some hypothetical world where a teleporter is as common and everyday as a car or train, and extrapolating from there, so a lot of the hypotheticals don't exist for me because I'm imagining public use. "What if someone puts the version of you that didn't teleport in their basement" well then they would have to coerce me out of the presumably public location for teleports between cities or wherever, because if I step on a pad expecting to be halfway across the globe in two seconds and instead I'm still in the same room, I'm not gonna leave until it's explained to me what went wrong and I'm given assurances for future service and compensation for the failure that already happened.
"oh well what if it only created copies of you" well then it probably wouldn't supplant any existing forms of transportation :), and of course then I wouldn't use it to get around.
If I make an exact molecular copy of you and set that copy free into the world thinking it had just successfully transported, but then I take the original you that entered the transporter and lock them up in a basement somewhere, how is that any different? From the perspective of the conscious being that came out the other end their continuity is uninterrupted. They will think they are the only version of themselves to have ever existed and that they simply moved from one place to another, as opposed to being a duplicate of the original entity, and that the original entity may be dead or in this case locked in a basement.
Now I want to see a dystopian fiction where the original instances of a person are taken away and used as slave labor while the clones come out the other side thinking they're the only copy.
If I make 100 exact molecular copies of you and lock them up in my emerald mine to slave away for the rest of their lives, but then I take the original you and give you $10 and send you on your way, how is that any different? You know you are the original and nothing can change that, so YOU you have nothing to fear, right?
If I walk to the teleport pad, expecting to blink from Point A to Point B, but instead I experience a blink from Point A to Point A, I'm the kind of person who'd need to be physically coerced, threatened, or tricked into captivity, because I'd immediately hop off the pad like "uh why am I still here I'm supposed to be in Berlin, I'm not leaving until you refund my transport cost or get me to Berlin". If I'm not conscious, then I'm the victim of criminal action, not the teleporter.
Likewise, the version of me that just experienced a normal teleport would live their life as they would have anyways.
Death is information-theoretic, fight me OP. /s
I'll add the caveat that it's entirely possible I still couldn't afford teleportation.
If you were a Federation citizen living on any of the core worlds (earth, vulcan, andoria, and tellar prime) I think you'd be okay. It's not like it's something you have in the home anyways - we don't get much civilian life in Star trek but it's implied that you just physically go to the transport pad you want to use and use it.
Oh, if we're in Star Trek I'm fine. Post-scarcity utopia and all. Only Star Trek-style teleportation was specified, though, and in our lifetime a gritty cyberpunk world seems more likely.
People seem to think that inventing a matter replicator would prevent this, meanwhile all I can think is "they'd DRM the living shit out of replication tech". You want HEALTHY food? Better pay us 12.99 a month for the "Fit Package". "Sorry, but only Apple-certified replicator patterns work with the iWant."
Do they ever address the replicability of replicators in Star Trek? I suppose if you need a traditional manufacturing facility and special know-how to make replicators that could be exactly what happens. Vulcans, who IIRC give us replicators, might not have any such vulnerability to commercial anti-features, though.
Not directly. We know that there are materials a replicator can't replicate - latinum (Ferengi currency) and dilithium (part of the power for warp drive) - or that are hard to replicate and so people prefer the real thing. I imagine that there are 24th century versions of the heavy metals we put in our modern day computers that can't be replicated. We even have references to "industrial replicators" in DS9, which implies to me something that spits out a prefabricated factory that then makes things, in addition to just being food replicators that can be deployed in a refugee camp.
What if the original wasn't destroyed? Wouldn't it be a clone then? Which one would feel like it was really you?
Both of us would be me. Then, as our experiences diverged from the point of duplication, we'd become different people (See: Thomas, the duplicate of William Riker in Star Trek. The only reason Thomas and not Will is considered the copy is because of audience perspective, but empathizing with each of them makes one see how both are Will Riker at the start of the episode). This all of course, assumes we don't discover something like the popular conception of souls during the early trials. But I don't believe there's anything about a "soul" that can't be tied to the sum of one's lived experience, which would be copied too.
I would consider a clone to be more expansive of who it could include besides copies of myself as I am now - it would also be someone grown from the literal same embryo as me who'd lived a completely different life with even a different name.
I think I pretty much agree. I think they would both be me just like me from yesterday and me from a week ago are the same me. They aren't exactly the same, but they are both versions of me that my current self grew from.
Alright, but now instead of disintegrating and reconstructing, consider if a similar machine just duplicated your body atom for atom. Is that "you", or a clone?
Let's assume the machine works one of two ways. It either destroys the original as it's read into the machine and reconstructing on the other end, or it's not destroying the original and simply reading and copying simultaneously.
In the first case there are zero complete copies of you in existence as you're undergoing a phase of removing information from place and reconstructing it in another, I'd call that death and cloning.
In the second case there are two identical copies of you in existence until they destroy the original, I'd call that a clone.
Yes, and in neither case would you experience your consciousness being moved to a new body (which is what the commenter above seems to suggest). Your current "you" would be annihilated or just continue to exist in your old body.
Is the subjective experience the thing that defines what is the most palatable form of this?
If that's the case then as someone else suggested they could simply remove the memory of the experience up until right before you walk out the other end. For all you knew it was incredibly excruciating but you're none the wiser. Would the lack of that memory negate the experience?
To me the issue lies with the person who steps into a teleporter and stops existing, not the one that walks out on the other side. If anything, if the cloned person retained their memory it would probably make them feel better about this whole thing.
As for the original person, they would lose consciousness as their bodies are being disassembled... and then what exactly? It feels like there's a missing step between Person A losing consciousness and Person A' waking up.
Though I guess you experience something similar every time you fall asleep, and personally it doesn't feel much like dying.
I think what matters is are you conscious the whole time. In my view, I feel like if I stepped onto a pad at Point A and walked off a similar part in Point B, and was awake for the whole experience, or at the very least experience no gap in memory, then it's not death. I think that if there's a break in consciousness, then sure, it opens things up to the death/cloning question, but I've never seen a depiction of teleportation that knocks the user out each time.
A clone. As far as I know, there's nothing in our established understanding of the world to suggest that merely copying the physical materials of my atoms would reproduce my memories and personality.