Juma

Assume that a teleportation device has been invented and built.
Its tested on animals and works 100%. That is: each animal is copied to the new position without any medical sideeffects. So the company starts to makes tests with humans. Assume that this also does not show any medical sideeffects when 1000 person has tested the teleporter.

Lets sketch the teleportation principle
1. The body at the orginal is "plankscanned". That is each quantumstate is registered.
2. A new body is created with the exact same quantumstates but at a different location.

The first question is : Would you dare to use this teleporting device?

Now there is step in the teleportation procedure that wasnt meantioned above: The "plankscanned" has a sideffect: it disintegrates the first body.

The second question is : Would you dare to use this teleporting device?

El Martin

Why not? Would you dare to use airplanes?
Think about this, it doesn't matter how simple or complicated is a transport system, a car, plane, a teleportation device (assuming that has been invented as you say), or just walk. Accident always happens.

Chris Porter

I don't see how such a thing would be possible. My quantum states are pretty well tied in the location they are in. Maybe they can subtract out the ultra-nano surface layer of me that is constantly trading stuff with my surroundings.


Sure I would.

Similar threads only dealing with "who's body are you in, anyway?" sort of thing have come up regularly. Maybe a search for "teleportation" would reveal some.

Loxos

Juma,


Read Philip K. Dick's The Unteleported Man, and find out why not to use this machine.




Loxos

lpetrich

I think the problem is: would one's consciousness be continuous from one's original body to one's reconstituted body?

It also poses a problem for soulist theories of mind: if mind is due to some non-material substance, would that substance be transmitted by the teleporter?

Teleportation ought to be familiar to many of you people from the Star Trek series as the Transporter device; I wonder why so little attention has been paid to the philosophical and theological implications of that device.

blueshuttle

Exactly. This is the problem with body duplication/electronic transportation.

Think about it this way. A device destroys your body and translates the information into electronic data. The data is passed to another device in a different location, and the data is re-translated into a copy of your body.

The problem is that the person that pops out of the destination device is not you but a carbon copy of you. You the original are destroyed.

Its the same as a telephone. You speak sound waves into a device, they get translated into electronic code, and the code is re-translated into new sound waves at the receiving telephone. You must realize that the person hearing your voice is not hearing the sound waves made by your vocal chords, but is listening to a carbon copy of your vocal chords sound waves.

spooky!

Wiploc

Staying Alive is an interesting philosophical game on this subject.

crc

The AntiChris

What property of the atoms which constituted the original is missing from the atoms which constitute the "carbon copy"?

If there is no missing property, then why, in terms of personal identity, is the copy not "you".

Chris

Legend

Isn't using that... murder .

Anyway, I'd probably use that machine, as long as it has a probability of mishap as much as a car or plane. It'd seem to me anyway, that I am still me.

_Naturalist_

Yes I would use it. As you said, it seems pretty safe.