SubJeff on 22/9/2012 at 11:21

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io9 has a little piece on The Philadelphia Experiment ((http://io9.com/5944616/what-really-happened-during-the-philadelphia-experiment)) and this bit stuck me:

"No incident, regardless of the horrific nature, would stall development of teleportation technology if the military believed it feasible. Such a resource would be an invaluable front line weapon in war and the backbone of many commercial industries, yet decades later, teleportation is still caged within the realm of science fiction."

It suggests that teleportation would be useful. Sure, I can see that in theory. I had a discussion with some of my friends about this and we came to the conclusion that the ability to teleport (like Nightwalker) would be cool, but that actually using a teleporter designed by scientists would potentially be a Very Bad Thing.

As I see there are 2 ways a teleporter could work.

1. It copies you, disassembles you, transmits the "template", then rebuilds you at the destination.

2. It folds space/opens a portal somehow and allows you to skip across the distance. Like the Navigators in Dune.


The second method I have no problem with. The first method doesn't really teleport you, imho, it kills you and builds a copy. There have been a number of stories about process failures where the original has not been disassembled of course. There was even a ST:NG episode with 2 Rikers. How they skirted over the fact that philosophically the Riker that didn't teleport was the real one and one that had been on the ship was a copy I don't know. I heard the start of a short story on the radio a few months ago about a similar failure. The "original" was scheduled for termination as per the contract with the teleportation company but sadly I missed the rest of it as it sounded quite interesting.

And of course there is the question of whether your soul can be teleported. If you believe in that sort of thing.

One of my friends is so arrogant that his only comment was "I don't care if I'm disassembled. As long as there is still one of me in the world that's the important thing." I still think he doesn't get that the disassembly = death and that the copy is a soulless doppelganger.

demagogue on 22/9/2012 at 11:48

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There is a classic essay on exactly this topic in the book The Mind's Eye by Doug Hofstadter & Dan Dennett. It has the same punchline, what does it mean for personal identity when you're making an exact copy and killing off the old one, or what if you left the two branches (going down their own personal time branches from that point on)?

I recommend everybody read that book anyway. Along with Godel Escher Bach, it's the best popular exploration of philosophy of mind of our time, also one of the most fun (it has a lot of short stories & fun thought experiments too). But that essay is a good reflection on this problem.

Then you have stuff like Derek Parfit's famous essay on personal identity to get close to an actual answer to the issue (which I think that Mind's Eye essay references), which said you can't really pin down a single monolithic "identity" in a brain, but the system running on it evolves from one identity to another over time (and it's the "system" in the mind that's maintaining a "self", not the wetware itself; i.e., "functionalism"). So in that framework, the same self survives the teleportation, and if you don't kill off the entry-guy, then both are the same self coming out, but they very quickly evolve into different selves (with relation to each other) because the system-histories instantly diverge so radically. If I thought it over, I could probably put it more technically, but I think that idea captures a respectable answer to the question.

Jason Moyer on 22/9/2012 at 12:30

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Obviously I'm not killing off the old one because I haven't been to Stavromula Beta yet.

demagogue on 22/9/2012 at 13:24

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He covered that distinction in the first post. *Real* teleportation is something like Dune space-bending or wormholes, where you move the actual particles through time & space, or rather you move time & space around the particles.* What most people think about is the Star Trek version, which is replication & destruction.

By the way, that book The Mind's Eye also has a section on telepresence and controllable drones, or unified consciousness across multiple agents -- so you could feel yourself in two places because you effectively *are* in two places experiencing and controlling both agents.

All of these kinds of thought experiments are pushing on what consciousness and agency actually are. The thing is, when you zoom in far enough in the brain, you already get very weird results of consciousness being distributed in multiple places and smeared through time -- experienced time doesn't track real time but jumps forward & backwards in time & smears it at a small scale. And we already know your visual experience of "what" a thing is is separate from "where" it is. We know because some people can experience one and not the other. This is part of the massive modularity thesis (consciousness is not one monolithic system, but an interconnected network of 10,000s of systems working laterally, which is pretty well established empirically) and functionalism (consciousness exists in the functional architecture, so you can instantiate the "same" consciousness in different physical instantiations, which is a popular idea but it's hard to think of an experiment that could prove it.)

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*Edit: One catch though. I read a book on Fundamental Particles & Quantum Field Theory, and as I understood it, fundamental particles themselves are constantly "re-instantiating" themselves in a churning sea of virtual particles and transformations. When you draw a Feynman diagram of nothing more than a particle moving from point A to B, one thing you *don't* do is just move the particle unchanged from A to B and know that you have the same thing at B that left from A. You have to take into account every conceivable path and transformation, and we have this business that it's in a superposition with a dynamic wave function anyway. So even the space-bending brand of "teleportation" might not be real teleportation but replication anyway; or for that matter, just standing still we're being perpetually replicated with new particles like a wave at sea.

Another catch is, I recall someone saying as far as the physics is concerned, one fundamental particle is identical to another. Only their relative locations are different. But there's no fact of the matter to say how one electron differs from another, and I recall someone proposing a physics model where there was, e.g., just one electron in the whole universe replicated (and so on with the other particles), and the physics doesn't care. So there may be no fact of the matter between transformation and replication at that scale anyway.

Again though, if functionalism is right, you can instantiate the same consciousness in a different physical manifestation (e.g., from a carbon based brain to a silicon based brain; and it's the same consciousness). If that's right, then even looking at the scale of the fundamental particles is wrong to begin with. Consciousness is always replicating itself in the physical hardware it happens to be running on at the time, and it's even blind to the physical properties. A hard version of that thesis (like Haikonnen's book telling us how to make conscious robots; good book) would say that the consciousness moving through a transporter, even changing every single particle, would go right on without even knowing anything has changed at all, and there's no fact of the matter to even call it a new replicated consciousness. It's the same (in his analogy) as an analog tv set where the image on the screen can't know the very EM waves that are constructing that image, and if you were fast enough to switch from antennae to closed circuit, the screen wouldn't even blink or know the source of its signal has even changed. As far as the emitters are concerned, the information coming in is the same.

SubJeff on 22/9/2012 at 17:50

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See, it's this kind of opinion that makes me think people don't get the Star Trek teleporters. You realise it kills you, right? The copy is a copy, it's not you. It may act like you and have all your memories, even be you for all other purposes. It may even lead the exact same life that you would have but you are dead and it has taken your place.

dema - whilst the discussion on the nature of conciousness is interesting (and I've just order The Mind's I) I was viewing conciousness as a function of the brain architecture. How it arises from that architecture is another story.

Vivian - the copy wouldn't think anything had changed. It would insist that the teleportation was easy and no one else would be able to tell that there was a difference. But that conciousness would be a copy too and the real one would be gone.