this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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It's a question of continuity, not uniqueness. If flowing water breaks against an impediment and forks into separate streams that never rejoin, then you have a situation that is parallel to the situation with the superfluous Riker. The two branches after the fork are simultaneously separate from each other and continuous all the way back to the source of the flow.
As to the original question, "Would you use it?", I certainly wouldn't go first, because although I generally subscribe to the "I am an emergent phenomenon" perspective I am left unconvinced that the singular phenomenon of Experience could be emergent from only the aspects of our universe that we have been able to measure.
Once the system was tested and used regularly, sure! I'd like to ask people who had been through it what it was like, and if they felt fine then I don't see any reason to fear teleportation any more than I fear sleep.
So if you had a biologically identical twin would you be ambivalent about losing one of the two of you?
No, I would be me, and he would be him. Even if there is some ethereal unknown quantity that somehow is involved with my tangible experience of consciousness, the continuity of the experience is the thing that is important.
If there is no ethereal, then I am purely emergent from the physical, and the oblivion I would pass through as my physical pattern is translated through spacetime is no scarier than that of dreamless sleep or even anesthesia.
If there is an ethereal element to me, then there is the distinct possibility that teleportation would interfere with that. So I wouldn't go first.
Once there are reports from prior teleportees that are all telling me that it felt like this or that, and that they were experiencing reality the same as ever, then I've got to take their word for it the same as I have to take their word for it in the first place.
Even in the case of a mistaken double-output from a teleporter in which one of me was beamed up, but two 100% identical mes get materialized next to each other on the transport pad or whatever, I don't think either would be ambivalent. At this point we're just widely spectating, but (assuming there is no "souls are totally real and being called to two different minds at once is instant insanity" thing going on) as soon as there are two different bodies with different experiences, then both of me would surely feel quite strongly about their personal persistence.
That's making a lot of assumptions, any of which could be wrong.
For one, consciousness as an emergent property doesn't necessitate a continuity of consciousness. Fire is an emergent property of the proper fuel and sufficient heat, but that doesn't mean that every fire is the same fire.
Consciousness could be an emergent property while also being unable to be transferred from vessel to vessel by destroying the body.
Sleep isn't death, it's sleep. If someone destroys your body while you're sleeping, that's a distinctly different state. Just having a break in the narrative you're currently paying attention to isn't equivalent to death unless we make a bunch of further assumptions.
As far as believing people who 'came through' a teleporter, that's a pretty terrible decision, as we'd expect that they have no idea that their predecessor is dead. That's the whole point. We're hand-waving an ambiguity that's literally a matter of living or dying.
You've got to understand that I'm approaching this from the perspective of, well, my literal perspective. I'm considering what I would experience as the only thing that I can really consider as valid evidence for decision making.
In responding above, I tried to avoid making assumptions, but I also tried to avoid overexplaining ever little thought I had in generalizing away from assumptions.
If there is no ethereal, no soul, no spirit, no woowoo of any kind, then the physical configuration is all that defines me. This scenario isn't particularly interesting, so I'll leave it at that.
If there is an ethereal element to me, then there arise all sorts of additional questions about how that works, exactly. Is my brain like a bucket that holds some special spirit juju from an otherwhere in which the ethereal element is not unique or special to me, but simply a catalyst for consciousness? Is there some discrete soul that is unique and mine alone, never to truly appear again even in a body with the exact same physical configuration? Is there an actual dimension of time or space in the physical I observe that matters for that ethereal element that we postulate, or is the orderly progression through time that I experience merely an artifact of my ethereal self experiencing through the filter of a physical body? Will I begin experiencing some sort of afterlife as soon as I am dematerialized, leaving my clone to yank some fresh occupant from the beforelife?
Any conclusions about whether or not teleportation really "counts" as dying is going to hinge on answering the questions about what we really are, and I don't think we'll get any firm answers in that regard any time soon. We still need to act, though, even with incomplete information.
My motivation in interrogating prior travelers isn't to determine whether or not they are technically the same people as before they teleported, or to decide whether or not it technically counted as them dying. I am just guarding against the risk that teleportation has some immediate and noticable disruption to the normal conscious process. If there is a soul that gets stripped away when a person is dematerialized, but no new soul gets sucked in to the identical body that appears somewhere else? That sounds like a recipe for instant death, or a distinct mental illness, or something else unpleasant.
From the perspective of other people, my sleep is very different from my dying, but from my perspective it's just a jump cut in a movie. I very rarely am conscious of any dreams, and I've even had the experience of becoming conscious in recovery from a surgery after my body had been awake and actively watching TV for awhile.
If the people feel fine coming out of the teleporter, then I'm all for it. Death is inevitable anyway, and if every piece of measurable evidence is telling me that I will feel fine afterwards, then I'll decide based on that evidence. Perhaps I've made a tragic mistake, and I'll not get to experience the after-teleporting part because it really does count as dying and my conscious soul is diverted into some otherwhere. ๐คท
Risk is everywhere, and death is inevitable. I'm not suggesting I would just hop in a teleporter for gumdrops and giggles, but if I had a reason to, then why not? We've established in this scenario that it seems safe enough (no drop-deads or crazies coming out the other side), and I take a very real and measurable risk of death every time I drive to the grocery store.