Self, death, and teleportation devices

[Mise]

In sci-fi, especially in space-based sci-fi, teleportation devices are a fairly commonplace. It makes the plot a lot less tedious if you can teleport from the ground to a spaceship in a matter of seconds, rather than having to take a shuttle or something. Now, legend has it that they work in the following manner:

1) Machine scans your body, notes down exact position of every particle in your body
2) Machine turns all your matter into energy
3) Machine sends stream of energy at light-speed to another machine some distance away, along with the information on how to reconstitute your body at the other end
4) Machine at the other end uses information and energy stream to reconstitute your body
5) You walk out of the machine, feeling fine and dandy.

Now, lets say that the machine is perfect -- it records perfectly all information on your physical self perfectly, sends it perfectly losslessly, and reconstitutes it perfectly at the other end. Also, lets assume that consciousness/intelligence is purely a physical matter, i.e. there's no element to consciousness/intelligence that depends on something the machine can't or doesn't scan and send.

Also lets ignore whether it's physically possible, for obvious reasons.

Now, the guy that walks out of the machine would swear that he was the same guy that walks in, i.e. Mise. All his memories are identical -- indeed, ostensibly, the particles themselves are identical, since they were beamed (as energy) to the distant machine, along with information on how to recreate the person identically. He is, to all intents and purposes, Mise.

My question, though, is what happened to the guy that walks, i.e. Mise. Do I die? Is my consciousness the same as the consciousness that walks out? I mean, I don't believe in an afterlife or a soul or any of that crap, and believe that death is just the end of consciousness. So if the machine destroys consciousness at one end and then create a new consciousness (albeit identical to the original one) at the other end, then that basically means I die and some other guy (albeit, to all intents and purposes, identical to me) takes my place.

And the worst part of it is, you'd never know. You'd test it on a vegetable first, then a rabbit or something, then a human. And the human that walks out would tell you that he was, in fact, Dr Mise -- that the thing worked as a charm, and with no side-effects. But if people knew that they were actually going to die, and that a new thing was going to emerge the other end that wasn't actually them but at the same time not actually someone else either, who would use it? I wouldn't.

What if the machine worked in a slightly different way. What if it worked like this:

1) Machine scans your body, notes down exact position of every particle in your body
2) Machine sends information at light speed to a machine some distance away
3) Distant machine draws power from the electricity grid to create matter from energy
4) Machine uses this energy to create your body & mind exactly as the first machine described it
5) As soon as you are "constituted" (as opposed to reconstituted) at the distant machine, the first machine shoots your original person in the face and disposes of it in a giant vat of acid, where you become fuel for constituting future teleported people.
6) Your constituted self steps off the machine, swearing on his life that he was, in fact, the same person that stepped onto the machine.

Would that make a difference? I would imagine that the process of being turned into pure energy feels a lot like getting shot in the face.

 

[amadeus]

If a copy of my consciousness is being made and sent to X location, then that doesn't make it me so much as it does a copy of me. When you die, if someone clones you, it doesn't mean you're going to be reborn with your consciousness, it's going to be a separate entity.

(...am I getting this right?)

 

[Mise]

Well, none of the individual particles in your body are the same from one decade to another. IIRC, after 7 years, all your cells will have changed. So you're kind of a different person, materially, to what you were 7 years ago.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding (or misremembering) that "fact", though.

If it's not "you" that walks out the other end, does it matter? It may matter to the "you" that walked in, but it wouldn't matter to anybody else. No-one would even know you were dead.

What about when you die for a minute or so, then get resuscitated?

 

[azzaman333]

The only aspect of that which would worry me is the possibility that there could be two of me.

 

[El_Machinae]

If I can ask a question regarding the physics of your proposal (compare to the technology, which is variable)? Is the teleportation technology capable of making copies? Like, after I teleport, we could re-run the machine to make a second me?

If so, it seems the machine is killing you and replacing you with a copy.

However, if the scanning/transmission/reconstitution uses information that is so fine-grained that it can only be in one place at a time, then it's actually you that's moving. Remember, grabbing information from one location has to delete that information in the first location. If it doesn't delete the information in the first location, then it hasn't grabbed that information with sufficient detail.

At that stage, it's no different from you just walking across the room, very quickly.

However, in your first scenario, the type of people who were 'okay' with killing and resurrecting themselves would be just fine (it only involves a little bit of self-deception). And they'd have a pretty big strategic advantage. There'd be social pressure for the self-deception to propagate.

 

[Mise]

I guess I can take things too far and question whether I die every night and a new but identical person replaces me in the morning. I don't think that's what happened, but I'd never know whether it's true or not, so it doesn't bother me. Does the same thing apply to the copying thing? If I don't know whether the original "dies" and is replaced by a copy, or whether it's truly analogous to moving really, really fast, then can I just ignore the question, call it solipsistic nonsense, and step onto the machine?

El_Mac: I'm not sure what you mean by "information so finely-grained that it cannot exist in two places at once". I've never come across that idea before.

But if I run with it anyway, are you saying that it's not enough to simply describe everything about a person in sufficient detail that the physical self can be copied? Or are you saying that it is (or may be) impossible to do this? If the first, what would be sufficient for it to be really "you" that's travelling, rather than just "sufficient information about you to create an identical copy"? We all seem to think that there is a difference between the two, at least.

 

[holy king]

pfff, who cares as long as the result isnt two mes?

 

[Souron]

My question, though, is what happened to the guy that walks, i.e. Mise. Do I die? Is my consciousness the same as the consciousness that walks out? I mean, I don't believe in an afterlife or a soul or any of that crap, and believe that death is just the end of consciousness. So if the machine destroys consciousness at one end and then create a new consciousness (albeit identical to the original one) at the other end, then that basically means I die and some other guy (albeit, to all intents and purposes, identical to me) takes my place.

And the worst part of it is, you'd never know. You'd test it on a vegetable first, then a rabbit or something, then a human. And the human that walks out would tell you that he was, in fact, Dr Mise -- that the thing worked as a charm, and with no side-effects. But if people knew that they were actually going to die, and that a new thing was going to emerge the other end that wasn't actually them but at the same time not actually someone else either, who would use it? I wouldn't.

Consciousness isn't a soul. It's just a sense of identity and continuity. It's the product of biology. So a Consciousness dieing only mean that a body is dieing.

So you can have multiple people who exist at the same time that perceive themselves as having identical childhoods. And there would be no way to say which is the original, because atoms in your body recycle regularly. Biologically, all copies would be the same, and see themselves as the original.

 

[El_Machinae]

I guess I can take things too far and question whether I die every night and a new but identical person replaces me in the morning. I don't think that's what happened, but I'd never know whether it's true or not, so it doesn't bother me. Does the same thing apply to the copying thing? If I don't know whether the original "dies" and is replaced by a copy, or whether it's truly analogous to moving really, really fast, then can I just ignore the question, call it solipsistic nonsense, and step onto the machine?

Yeah, I agree with the premise that (a) we don't die when we sleep and (b) people who call such an idea 'nonsense' have a much easier time falling asleep. These people have a huge pyschological advantage to those who'd refuse to lose consciousness for fear of dying and being replaced by (essentially) a copy.

El_Mac: I'm not sure what you mean by "information so finely-grained that it cannot exist in two places at once". I've never come across that idea before.

Here's what I loosely remember:
To collect the information regarding all of my particles, you must actually (in the process) destroy the previous state of the particle (i.e., perturb what it was doing). This information is then stored as photons. These photons cannot be 'read' without disturbing the information state of the photons. Once the data is collected in the disk, it will not contain the 'true' information of those photons unless they are retained in a state that requires their destruction in the process of reading them (a less fine-grained retention is merely an approximation of what information the photons contained). Then, in order to recompose the body, the information must be harvested completely.

This is only fuzzily remembered, on my part. If it doesn't make sense to somebody who's studied physics, it might just be an imaginary concept on my part.

But if I run with it anyway, are you saying that it's not enough to simply describe everything about a person in sufficient detail that the physical self can be copied? Or are you saying that it is (or may be) impossible to do this? If the first, what would be sufficient for it to be really "you" that's travelling, rather than just "sufficient information about you to create an identical copy"? We all seem to think that there is a difference between the two, at least.

Yeah, I think there's a difference. It's much easier to create a copy that thinks it's you. I think that such a technology could be available within the next 40 years, if there was any type of concerted push for it. This technology, creates a nightmare economic scenario. If it even becomes cheaper to copy a person than to raise a person, the whole world will change.

 

[Rashiminos]

Also, lets assume that consciousness/intelligence is purely a physical matter, i.e. there's no element to consciousness/intelligence that depends on something the machine can't or doesn't scan and send.

The responses to your discussion depend overwhelmingly on this one point.

 

[Abaddon]

If that was the case, whats stopping "you" being sent to several locations? Creating multiple of you?

If your data is recorded at the point of transportation.. are you immortal? You can be recreated whenever desired...

 

[Souron]

I also want to comment on this love affair with energy:
There is no benefit to somehow reuse the energy of the original person. Once you scan a person in, only the data matters. energy can be obtained from other sources, and in fact must be, because transpering energy necessarily results in a loss.

That being said, if some information is read into quantum bits instead of bits, then those qbit cannot be copied, only moved. But this isn't energy. It might be done because some sensor is designed to scan information directly to a quantum computer in place of a more conventional sensor. Or it might be done to compress some of the data if a function similar to averaging, except that it can only be done by a quantum computer. Possibly, this could be vital or optional to future matter transfer technology.

 

[Cutlass]

@ Mise, that was done in one of those old scifi Tv shows. Outer Limits or something, I don't recall which. A woman went into the teleporter, but there was a glitch and the machine on the far end did not send the confirmation report, so the machine on her end didn't kill her. But once the confirmation report came, the operators were supposed to kill the "old" self, so there wouldn't be 2 of them. But it was a healthy aware woman.

 

[warpus]

If a copy of my consciousness is being made and sent to X location, then that doesn't make it me so much as it does a copy of me. When you die, if someone clones you, it doesn't mean you're going to be reborn with your consciousness, it's going to be a separate entity.

(...am I getting this right?)

This could be the first time you have ever been right

But yes this is exactly true.

By the way, Star Trek goes around this by claiming that your actual body and consciousness is teleported, instead of a copy of it being made elsewhere. I used to watch a lot of Star Trek - the way it's done on the show is that your body is dematerialized into constituent particles, and those particles are sent via a matter stream (or whatever they call it, I forget). I'm not sure how they explain that your consciousness survives this process.. they probably don't.

But yeah, a true teleportation machine, should we ever build one, would mean that you die and an exact replica of yourself is constructed at the other end. I wouldn't step into one.

Well, none of the individual particles in your body are the same from one decade to another. IIRC, after 7 years, all your cells will have changed. So you're kind of a different person, materially, to what you were 7 years ago.

Yeah but you have had an uninterrupted continuation of consciousness since birth. Your brain and thus your consciousness has been in one piece. Sure, it slowly changes over time, but that doesn't matter.

If it's not "you" that walks out the other end, does it matter? It may matter to the "you" that walked in, but it wouldn't matter to anybody else. No-one would even know you were dead.

It doesn't matter to anyone except to the person who walks into the machine. That person is killed.

Think about it this way: That person doesn't have to be killed. What would happen if you made a perfect replica of yourself using some sort of an advanced xerox machine? Would your consciousness magically transfer to the new copy? What would happen to the original? Would the cousciousness only transfer once the original is killed? That doesn't really make much sense, does it?

I guess I can take things too far and question whether I die every night and a new but identical person replaces me in the morning.

When you sleep your consciousness remains an uninterrupted entity. If your brain shut down for 8 hours and then got rebuilt from scratch to the exact state it was when you fell asleep - that'd be a bit more like this teleportation business.

Also, lets assume that consciousness/intelligence is purely a physical matter, i.e. there's no element to consciousness/intelligence that depends on something the machine can't or doesn't scan and send.

I don't see why we can't make that assumption - there is no reason to believe that consciousness isn't a product of the atoms that make up your body. Those who argue otherwise have not been able to bring a piece of evidence to the discussion that supports that assertion. Until then we must assume that our consciousness is a product of what's in our bodies.

And either way, it doesn't really affect the discussion. If our consciousness was something mystical, on another plane, a soul, or whatever, teleportation would just not work. You would end up with bodies without souls on the other side - bodies without consciousness.. or whatever you want to call it.

 

[Souron]

Think about it this way: That person doesn't have to be killed. What would happen if you made a perfect replica of yourself using some sort of an advanced xerox machine? Would your consciousness magically transfer to the new copy? What would happen to the original? Would the cousciousness only transfer once the original is killed? That doesn't really make much sense, does it?

When you sleep your consciousness remains an uninterrupted entity. If your brain shut down for 8 hours and then got rebuilt from scratch to the exact state it was when you fell asleep - that'd be a bit more like this teleportation business.

There is no such thing as consciousness as you describe. There is no evidence for it. An individual perceives themselves as a "thing" that is separate from their environment, because it is evolutionarily advantageous. But this is just a mental model. It does not mean that there is some uncompilable part of the mind where the consciousness sits. Your consciousness does die when you go to sleep, and is revived when you dream or wake. Even in your dreams you can be a very different person. And it is effected by forgetfulness, brain damage, pheromones, and other subconscious influences. The only thing that stays the same is that a person remember their past, and thinks it is themselves. If two people remember the same past, whatever the cause, then neither is more right than the other.

 

[warpus]

There is no such thing as consciousness as you describe. There is no evidence for it. An individual perceives themselves as a "thing" that is separate from their environment, because it is evolutionarily advantageous. But this is just a mental model. It does not mean that there is some uncompilable part of the mind where the consciousness sits.

Call it what you will. The part of me that goes "Okay, now I'm going to hit shift and the apostrophe key"

Your consciousness does die when you go to sleep, and is revived when you dream or wake. Even in your dreams you can be a very different person. And it is effected by forgetfulness, brain damage, pheromones, and other subconscious influences. The only thing that stays the same is that a person remember their past, and thinks it is themselves. If two people remember the same past, whatever the cause, then neither is more right than the other.

You are way off here. Consciousness is not interrupted during sleep - it's just that the subconscious takes over while you dream. There is no sudden discontinuation of what your brain is doing - your brain continues to do its thing while you sleep.

Anyway, your points are very philisophical and I don't really see how they apply to what we're talking about anyway. I mean, sure, we don't have consciousness and the human brain quite figured out, and some of the arguments you make make sense, but it doesn't change the fact that you couldn't fall asleep in one body and wake up in another. which is what is claimed by people who say that a xerox/teleportation machine would achieve this somehow.

 

[Souron]

Call it what you will. The part of me that goes "Okay, now I'm going to hit shift and the apostrophe key"

Right. That isn't an actual thing. There is only a brain with all it's parts that has a model if such a thing is responcible for.

You are way off here. Consciousness is not interrupted during sleep - it's just that the subconscious takes over while you dream. There is no sudden discontinuation of what your brain is doing - your brain continues to do its thing while you sleep.

Your brain is certainly active when you sleep, but you do loose consciousness. During that time, no part of the brain has a model of an individual self. It is only restarted when you dream and wake.

It is perhaps confusing that Consciousness means both self awareness, and wakefulness, but the reason for this semantic similarity is because there is a close cognitive relation between the two.

Anyway, your points are very philosophical and I don't really see how they apply to what we're talking about anyway. I mean, sure, we don't have consciousness and the human brain quite figured out, and some of the arguments you make make sense, but it doesn't change the fact that you couldn't fall asleep in one body and wake up in another. which is what is claimed by people who say that a xerox/teleportation machine would achieve this somehow.

There is no "you". But an entity can have a memory of falling asleep in one place and finding itself in another place, and possibility another body. Two entities can have the same memory. There is nothing that we know of that would prevent that.

This is a philosophical question, so my answers are naturally philosophical too.

 

[El_Machinae]

The brain remains alive when you sleep. But there is no consciousness during many portions of sleep. Perceptively, you should know that this is true, because there're periods of sleep where you're barely conscious. And there're periods of sleep where you're conscious but wildly hallucinating.

The processes of consciousness are interrupted, however. The brain does other things than engage in cognition.

edit: xpost

 

[warpus]

I think we are getting sidetracked here.

The only question worth asking in this thread is: Is it possible to fall asleep in one body and wake up in another?

I don't think it is.

There is no "you". But an entity can have a memory of falling asleep in one place and finding itself in another place, and possibility another body.

Sure, if you put me to sleep, make an exact replica of me, and wake the clone up on a mountain in the Himalayas - the clone is going to have memories of writing the post, and all the other things I've done.

But I don't dispute this at all.

Two entities can have the same memory. There is nothing that we know of that would prevent that.

Of course, especially if we ever were able to build a teleportation/xerox device that duplicated everything perfectly, down to the atom. I don't dispute this!

The brain remains alive when you sleep. But there is no consciousness during many portions of sleep. Perceptively, you should know that this is true, because there're periods of sleep where you're barely conscious. And there're periods of sleep where you're conscious but wildly hallucinating.

The processes of consciousness are interrupted, however. The brain does other things than engage in cognition.

edit: xpost

Maybe I shouldn't be using the word 'consciousness' when I say "consciousness doesn't interrupt"..

Consciousness is only a small part of the 'thing' that I am describing.. the thing that I am describing is all the stuff that goes on your brain, conscious, subconsious, or whatever.

Your brain is continously doing stuff, be it subconscious or conscious.. there is always something going on. It doesn't just stop.

Brain death = the end of you no matter how many copies of you were made. Sure, those copies might run around and claim to be you - but from your perspective you die. You don't transfer to another body and get to continue living. That's just absurd.

 

[Ramius75]

reminds me of this


Link to video.