Teleportation. It isn't you that comes out the other side. Or is it?

faetal on 24/9/2012 at 13:04

Quote Posted by DDL

And of course, if we're taking it as read you could translate people into information for subsequent reintegration elsewhere, why not just store the information? We've basically invented the quicksave key. "Risky activity? Better quickly make a backup."

You'd have massive anxiety of the restored subject based on how much time had passed between hitting F6 and F9. It's be like waking up from a coma, only without there being any personal entropy to tie you in with the passed time.

[Edit] Why haven't we mentioned The Prestige yet?

DDL on 24/9/2012 at 14:51

Coz the prestige is really really annoying.

"You had a fucking DUPLICATOR, and you used it for the crappest revenge ever."

(When I watched it, I really wanted the whole thing to be a long-con -complete with hiding cats and hats out in the woods- run between Bale and Bowie to get Jackman to spend all his money on a giant machine that didn't do anything, not least because that would've put the film squarely in the realms of reality, and also not produced an outcome where someone apparently uses a magical duplication machine to make and murder hundreds of copies of himself as a long-con revenge strategy, rather than..say...make stacks of gold)

Though regarding the quicksave thing, Peter F Hamilton touches on that a lot in some of his space opera stuff*. Crystals in the back of the head that store mindstates at death, allowing you to be reinstalled in a new clone body, and let you make regular backups in case of catastrophic head destruction. And yes, it'd be potentially traumatic if you went a long time without a backup, especially since the person resurrected would be quite different to the person that died, purely coz of consciousness drift and experience and so on.

*when he's not endlessly harping on about staying young forever and having stupid amounts of sex, that is

faetal on 24/9/2012 at 15:04

The whole point of the film though is Wolverine's obsession with getting one over on Batman for being his arch-rival, killing his wife etc... He was rich anyway all along, hence the pseudonym. The story is essentially about the lengths obsession will take people to. Batman was obsessed with the magic, to the extent of hiding a twin and destroying his marriage etc..., Wolverine was obsessed with the wonder of the audience and the fame. Your idea would also have worked well, but I think the poetic mechanism is that the line is crossed when he resorted to something which was not simply an illusion - that was a key narrative mechanism.

It is a frustrating and at times tedious film, but one I seem to always keep re-watching.

Sombras on 24/9/2012 at 16:51

Nonsequitur alert:

So, using the copy-based teleportation model, teleportation could be employed as a type of "hyper-sleep". I mean, using Star Trek as an example, all the hundreds of time Kirk & Co. were teleported meant that they were effectively taken out of the finite cell-division/aging process, resulting in their lives being prolonged just a little bit each time they underwent teleportation. Extend this over decades, centuries, and/or millennia. Rather than freezing people, which seems terribly inefficient in terms of space taken up and energy used, one could theoretically be put into something like a "teleportation loop", in which your matter is sent and re-sent continually until it's time to be reconstituted into a person again. Who needs FTL when you could be "looped" for as long as it took to reach your destination?

DDL on 24/9/2012 at 16:54

Er..or couldn't you just use teleportation as..teleportation, and avoid the need for physical travel at all? ;)

Phatose on 24/9/2012 at 19:37

I don't know - there's some sci-fi potential there. If you don't have magic signalling, the energy requirements for sending a person even as data stream become pretty big once you account for significant distance.

It could be used like the used the gel-stuff in Ironseed - a way to leave your body behind so it's not adding dead weight to your ship.

scarykitties on 24/9/2012 at 22:00

As others have mentioned, consciousness isn't just the neurological make-up of the brain, but also the chemicals and electrical signals at play. To throw in my own IMHO, I'd say it's like consciousness is the unique ripples in water and the brain is a spinning vessel with certain pits and bumps within it. The spinning water, when in the vessel, fluctuates from its container's shape, and that's what makes a unique consciousness. Think of the bumps and pits in the vessel as memories and the way that the liquid is sloshed when it spins against those bumps and pivots affects your predisposition towards things, either born or learned.

The question is--can you "pour" one consciousness from one mind into an exact duplicate while maintaining that single consciousness? I would suggest no, because as soon as the electrical activity is removed from the mind, it loses to pattern that was made by it being bound to a mind. Unless one brain could be literally instantaneously swapped for another--and I mean faster than the energy that makes up consciousness could change from the brief absence of a brain, then one single consciousness could not be transported from one brain to another.

Of course, the unique qualities of the more primitive parts of the brain that regulate emotions and primal urges also play a strong and separate role from consciousness per se, yet they still shape one's personality, as does any signal that the body sends to the brain.

LarryG on 24/9/2012 at 23:20

Here's a thought. :idea:

All matter is made up of elementary particles which aren't really particles as we would like to think of them, but are instead probabilistic wave-particle-temporal-thingies. They aren't really there where and when we think they are, because we can't know both position and motion at the same time, they are only there where we expect them to be in a statistical sense. They are really everywhere all the time, only more likely (much more likely) to be where we experience them to be than anywhere else at any given moment. So, there's no reason, except for the extremely unlikely probabilities otherwise, that all of our constituent particles should be anywhere in particular, or even to continue to hang around together.

With me so far?

So, why not, if we are speculating about currently impossible super-scientific machines, consider a probability influencing device which, by whatever currently unknown super-scientific process, "convinces" all of your constituent particles to relocate, probabilistically, to someplace else, just jump, say, ten paces to the left? This would all take place in the subatomic probabilistic time it takes for a subatomic particle to "move." This amount of time is for all intents and perceptible purposes zero time, so such a probabilistic shift would be truly instantaneous. Now this process is clearly superior to any previously discussed teleportation schemes as it eliminates all issues with killing and cloning, or consciousness issues of who you are, and it doesn't require folding the whole universe (whatever that means in an n-dimensional universe) to allow you to take a step. Imagine the energy needs for folding the universe! Whew! This probabilistic machine simply makes it less likely that you are where you were and more likely that you are where you want to go, and voilà, there you are. At least seemingly, for the most part, as far as we can tell, that's where you stay.

Another application of this same super-scientific process would be a disintegration "gun", though whether it could be made to be hand-held, or would require a city-block of machinery to get it to work, who knows? But "point" it at a person, press the "trigger", and poof: all your constituent sub-atomic particles are convinced that they want to be some random place else away from each other.

Another possible application would be instantaneous manufacturing. Simply (ha!) provide the specification for a probabilistic table and the machine could convince random subatomic particles from "elsewhere" to probabilistically assemble themselves together (whatever that means) and become the desired table.

Now all of this presupposes the ability to define probabilistic boundaries around things so that the machine can tell what is you and what is not-you and only act on the probabilistic you. You shouldn't get mixed in with too much that isn't you, or leave behind too much that is you. The machine would need to be properly calibrated to ensure that doesn't happen most of the time ... :cheeky:

:erm: :wot: :weird: :laff:

Yakoob on 24/9/2012 at 23:35

LarryG, that's a pretty frikking awesome background theory for tons of science fiction (and potentially fact) stories! Not only teleportation, you could use that for time travel, object-morphing, nonperforming, invisibility, alchemy, turning iron into gold (or rather, increasing statistical probability that the iron is actually gold), etc. etc. Me likeey!

It also reminds me of an old idea I had for a game with magic in it, where the magic is actually the ability to manipulate matter on the atomic level. So "casting fireball" is actually being able to somehow influence the particles in the air to either start moving rapidly (bringing up the temperature) or exchanging hydrogen, thus triggering a fire-inducing-chain reaction.

Quote Posted by demagogue

Edit: Another fun thing regarding time: There's an experiment where they had a LCD screen that had numbers flipping by so fast it was an unreadable blur, but when a person is dropped from a bungee cord, for a few split seconds time slows enough in their experience that they can see the number-flipping slowing down, the blurring stops & they can see the numbers actually ticking off and read them. It's a good empirical result because the subject can either read the numbers or they can't. Experienced time is a construction, and there are times (when adrenaline starts running) when we do actually see the world move by in slow motion.

That's cool shit, actually. It makes me think of another question - how can we be really sure everyone perceives the flow of time the same? Maybe, to some, it moves faster than others? But of course, being used to it, one would not notice and would not have better/worse reflection time (since its just "perception" that gets affected, their brain still physically takes just as much time to respond to inputs triggering a reflex). Though I am thinking of this more in terms of "time flies when having fun" rather than "whoa, bullet time for me!"

Quote Posted by Subjective Effect

Awesome experiment. I've experienced this during training. The first time you spar... [snip]

Just curious, what kind of fighting you talking about?

Quote Posted by faetal

It's not that I wouldn't care per se, it's that being sedated and then injected with e.g. a respiratory depressant and anaesthetic wouldn't cause suffering (unless you REALLY hate needle-sticks). This whole hypothetical scenario presumably rests on the notion that this is proven technology, you go into it knowing that you'll come out the other end. I guess it comes from realising that you need to separate yourself from the idea of continuum. Going into the procedure would be indistinguishable from going in for a surgical procedure. The only people able to discern a difference would be outside observers. It'd never catch on simply because no one would every be able to separate themselves from the ego going in to the machine. The surviving copy would have all of the exact same memories, so would experience the whole thing as a journey without travel. I don't think our brains are very good at dealing with this kind of scenario tbh, as we're so complex, than we're kind of guaranteed to be unique, so this thought experiment messes with the fundamentals of experience and consciousness existing only once.

faetal & DDL I totally agree that the copy would think it's the original, so if we got rid of the original then, for all intents and purposes, it indeed doesn't matter. But then, as the video posted on page 1, what if you don't kill off the original? Oh the moral, ethical, and philosophical dilemmas that arise...

scarykitties on 24/9/2012 at 23:49

I like LarryG's idea, too. Great science fiction material, there.

Though the reason that we can't know the location and velocity of a fundamental particle at the same time isn't due to any mystic qualities of the particle being everywhere at once--it's simply because the only instruments we have for detecting fundamental particles involves using particles, so we contaminate the result by taking measurements.

Things like quantum entanglement come from folding a particle through another dimension, so, to our third-dimensional perceptions, it is in two places at once, when in reality it is one place, but it's being intersected twice by the third dimension.

It would be like rolling paper into a tube, connecting one side to the other. To a two-dimensional creature on the paper, it would seem like one could vanish from one side of the paper and appear on the other, when in reality one would just be crossing the point where the two ends of paper met in three-dimensional space.