Cute comic, thanks for posting it! I don't think it's its main point but it touches a lot on how star trek type teleportation is killing and creating a new person. I always liked that idea and...
Cute comic, thanks for posting it!
I don't think it's its main point but it touches a lot on how star trek type teleportation is killing and creating a new person. I always liked that idea and thought it made sense before even getting familiar with it as a trope.
Less so now, actually.
First, if we invented a way to create humans from atoms, or from nothing, would we waste this on teleportation? Would we create copies instead of outright new humans, bypassing the morality questions of fork clones? (Not like there aren't moral questions to ask about fresh new humans with a templated set of memories, nor is that the exact same problem. Are there sci-fi books about this concept?)
Second, intuitively we think of teleportation as moving people. The comic repeats the two usual disproving arguments:
what if you get there late?
what if you get there early?
In the first scenario, i would argue that uncomfortable as it might be to think of ourselves as temporarily dead, it doesn't mean much that isn't touched upon by the idea of all forms of loss of consciousness being death. Skipping this because I think the comic addresses this point.
Second one is more interesting though because teleportation that gets you there early has the direct implication of not transporting things (the port part of teleport), but rather creating from nothingness.
I like to go with the assumption that teleportation can work one of two ways: through wormholes (which this isn't), or via a speed-of-light friendly state of matter. In other words, you'd achieve teleportation if you could move matter from one place to another. Converting said matter into energy, then back into matter, still works. You are still transporting information. You COULD observe and subsequently duplicate that information, but if all you need is to move one person around, then you move the energy to a place where it can be reshaped into atoms and recombined into the person.
Beaming people around with no machine at the end of it (a la star trek) still has this implication. It's just that on short distances, we don't make the distinction between speed of light and instant. How such recombination happens in the case of a beam is an exercise left to the reader. (Beam is magic yo)
In these scenarios i don't believe there is a way to arrive "early", because the "destruction" of the original vessel is an integral part of the process, and it's not just there to ease your conscience. You are being turned into energy, moved to another place, then turned back into matter. And thus if pain was to be felt you would either remember it, or be anaesthetized for its duration (in this case, a necessary component of the machine).
An easier parallel might be to think about an ice cube melting, moving it as water through a pipe, then reforming an ice cube at the other end.
If you could be melted and moved through a set of pipes, only to be reformed at the other end, would you do it? What if it were painless? Instant? Invisible?
Maybe teleportation is more intuitive than we give it credit for.
I'm often afraid to express this for a number of reasons (including the thought of people thinking less of me because of that), but here you go: I believe in the immaterial soul. Whatever that...
I'm often afraid to express this for a number of reasons (including the thought of people thinking less of me because of that), but here you go: I believe in the immaterial soul. Whatever that constitutes ourselves is at least partly immaterial. So there's no guarantee that our true selves will be reattached to our teleported bodies. It probably would, I think. But I'm not sure.
Yes there's a big questionmark about what makes consciousness separate between two different people / is there even such a thing as other people's consciousness, etc. I agree with you it's harder...
Yes there's a big questionmark about what makes consciousness separate between two different people / is there even such a thing as other people's consciousness, etc.
I agree with you it's harder to measure if the "right" "soul" would get re-attached to the person, but then again, there's so many questionmarks about what the right soul is; some, raised by the comic itself: Do you have any guarantee that you're the same person after falling asleep and waking up? After taking drugs? After learning something new? After 10 minutes?
But there's so much unknown there that I wonder if it's really worth considering as a variable. Personally, I subscribe to the idea that we all share the same soul, but are physically incapable of sharing memories (right now) so we can't consider ourselves the same "person", even if we are.
Orson Scott Card wrote a series of stories about people going into stasis by being injected with a drug. In the story, you get your mind mapped, get injected, go to sleep and then wake up and have...
And thus if pain was to be felt you would either remember it, or be anaesthetized for its duration (in this case, a necessary component of the machine).
Orson Scott Card wrote a series of stories about people going into stasis by being injected with a drug. In the story, you get your mind mapped, get injected, go to sleep and then wake up and have your mind reprogrammed according to the mapping.
It's eventually revealed that the process is extremely painful, feeling like you are dying, but because of when it happens in the process, you wake up thinking it was completely painless.
Yeah, I think everyone who's gone into general anaesthesia has wondered "what if I can feel pain but simply won't remember it?". At the end of the day, does physical pain matter if it's just as...
Yeah, I think everyone who's gone into general anaesthesia has wondered "what if I can feel pain but simply won't remember it?".
At the end of the day, does physical pain matter if it's just as quickly forgotten?
Cute comic, thanks for posting it!
I don't think it's its main point but it touches a lot on how star trek type teleportation is killing and creating a new person. I always liked that idea and thought it made sense before even getting familiar with it as a trope.
Less so now, actually.
First, if we invented a way to create humans from atoms, or from nothing, would we waste this on teleportation? Would we create copies instead of outright new humans, bypassing the morality questions of fork clones? (Not like there aren't moral questions to ask about fresh new humans with a templated set of memories, nor is that the exact same problem. Are there sci-fi books about this concept?)
Second, intuitively we think of teleportation as moving people. The comic repeats the two usual disproving arguments:
In the first scenario, i would argue that uncomfortable as it might be to think of ourselves as temporarily dead, it doesn't mean much that isn't touched upon by the idea of all forms of loss of consciousness being death. Skipping this because I think the comic addresses this point.
Second one is more interesting though because teleportation that gets you there early has the direct implication of not transporting things (the port part of teleport), but rather creating from nothingness.
I like to go with the assumption that teleportation can work one of two ways: through wormholes (which this isn't), or via a speed-of-light friendly state of matter. In other words, you'd achieve teleportation if you could move matter from one place to another. Converting said matter into energy, then back into matter, still works. You are still transporting information. You COULD observe and subsequently duplicate that information, but if all you need is to move one person around, then you move the energy to a place where it can be reshaped into atoms and recombined into the person.
Beaming people around with no machine at the end of it (a la star trek) still has this implication. It's just that on short distances, we don't make the distinction between speed of light and instant. How such recombination happens in the case of a beam is an exercise left to the reader. (Beam is magic yo)
In these scenarios i don't believe there is a way to arrive "early", because the "destruction" of the original vessel is an integral part of the process, and it's not just there to ease your conscience. You are being turned into energy, moved to another place, then turned back into matter. And thus if pain was to be felt you would either remember it, or be anaesthetized for its duration (in this case, a necessary component of the machine).
An easier parallel might be to think about an ice cube melting, moving it as water through a pipe, then reforming an ice cube at the other end.
If you could be melted and moved through a set of pipes, only to be reformed at the other end, would you do it? What if it were painless? Instant? Invisible?
Maybe teleportation is more intuitive than we give it credit for.
I'm often afraid to express this for a number of reasons (including the thought of people thinking less of me because of that), but here you go: I believe in the immaterial soul. Whatever that constitutes ourselves is at least partly immaterial. So there's no guarantee that our true selves will be reattached to our teleported bodies. It probably would, I think. But I'm not sure.
Yes there's a big questionmark about what makes consciousness separate between two different people / is there even such a thing as other people's consciousness, etc.
I agree with you it's harder to measure if the "right" "soul" would get re-attached to the person, but then again, there's so many questionmarks about what the right soul is; some, raised by the comic itself: Do you have any guarantee that you're the same person after falling asleep and waking up? After taking drugs? After learning something new? After 10 minutes?
But there's so much unknown there that I wonder if it's really worth considering as a variable. Personally, I subscribe to the idea that we all share the same soul, but are physically incapable of sharing memories (right now) so we can't consider ourselves the same "person", even if we are.
Orson Scott Card wrote a series of stories about people going into stasis by being injected with a drug. In the story, you get your mind mapped, get injected, go to sleep and then wake up and have your mind reprogrammed according to the mapping.
It's eventually revealed that the process is extremely painful, feeling like you are dying, but because of when it happens in the process, you wake up thinking it was completely painless.
Yeah, I think everyone who's gone into general anaesthesia has wondered "what if I can feel pain but simply won't remember it?".
At the end of the day, does physical pain matter if it's just as quickly forgotten?