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| If Teleportation = Death, Would You Do It?
Posted: 9/9/2007 3:54:23 PM | We're all familiar with teleportation as we've seen it depicted on Star Trek, and there's always been a lot of interest in bringing teleportation to reality. Already there have been successful experiments in the news the last few years - first teleportation of photons, and later atoms. But lets consider what teleportation would really involve, atleast in the direction the technology seems to be heading. A good analogy would be moving a file on your computer's hard drive to another location. You can't truly "move" a file, instead what you do is make an identical copy of the file, save it to it's new location, and then delete the original. Teleportation, as we understand it today, would work pretty much the same way. It still doesn't seem so bad, right? But here is where the problem comes in. I haven't heard much discussion on this, except a comment from a physicist once, but lets say you're going to go to Disneyland with your friends, and decide that rather than deal with traffic, you'll just beam yourself there. You spend all day there, then beam yourself home. And Monday morning you go back to work. To everyone else - your friends and coworkers - you're the same person. But you're not. You're just an identical copy who thinks he's the original. But the original you, who decided to spend the day at Disneyland with your friends, never made it to Disneyland. He never saw his friends and coworkers ever again, because he died that day. Just as with moving a file on your computer, you have to delete the original copy. So from your perspective, after you step into that transporter and say "energize", life is over. So, would you do it? It may be many hundreds of years before the technology is finally here, and I'm sure when it does come, people will be dying to try it  | |
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| If Teleportation = Death, Would You Do It?
Posted: 9/9/2007 5:49:59 PM |
Posted By: swamp thing
When you copy a file you don't have to delete the original.
No, but if you use the 'move' function found in your Operating System file manager, that's just what happens. And that would be a possible solution to the teleportation delima (just copy), but then you'd have a copy of yourself having fun with your friends at Disneyland while you're stuck at home. And then, what happens when your copy comes home, and finds you there? And then when you both try to go in to the same job Monday morning.... :) | |
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| If Teleportation = Death, Would You Do It?
Posted: 9/9/2007 6:00:13 PM | | You could use a compare and update feature and keep one of yourselves as a back-up when not off having fun someplace else. People would probably settle on some optimum number of copies of themselves. I would do it. It would be a blessing for people with multiple personalities, each having their own body for once. It seems like a lot of trouble to go to just to visit Disneyland. | |
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| If Teleportation = Death, Would You Do It?
Posted: 9/9/2007 7:19:53 PM | did Liberace's love child enlist as the first teleported guinea pig? "the way technology seems to be heading?! umm, hello, is this raelian thinking, or what? technology is headed in so many divergent and fascinating ways it's impossible for me 'ittle pea brain to understand a handful of them, but they are interesting nonetheless...
heck no i wouldn't do it; what would be the real point or advantage?
my life is and has thus far been too interesting and fun to even want to fully comprehend this concept...
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| If Teleportation = Death, Would You Do It?
Posted: 9/9/2007 9:52:00 PM |
what happens when your copy comes home, and finds you there? And then when you both try to go in to the same job Monday morning.... :)
No need for ego at this point, just save and integrate the copy's experiences, right? | |
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| If Teleportation = Death, Would You Do It?
Posted: 9/9/2007 11:07:31 PM | Like so many science questions, I'd have to say that this is a matter of "frame of reference."
If your teleported "copy" transports all configurations and energies into a new pile of biomass, my memories, feelings, thoughts will all be exactly the same. I'd have lost most of that matter soon anyway, as most of the body's sustaining chemicals are rotated out quickly, and even most cells die and are replaced with some regularity - I just swapped out the basic matter all at once instead of waiting.
If exchanging matter is "death" then I've died a few times over already, and I'm just getting started. | |
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| If Teleportation = Death, Would You Do It?
Posted: 9/10/2007 12:11:09 AM | ^^^^yuppax, absence of absolute.
You could use a compare and update feature and keep one of yourselves as a back-up when not off having fun someplace else. People would probably settle on some optimum number of copies of themselves. I would do it. It would be a blessing for people with multiple personalities, each having their own body for once. It seems like a lot of trouble to go to just to visit Disneyland.
That probably won't be possible. Even though classical teleportation (transfer of energy/matter) might not ever be possible, if its built on the quantum teleportation concept, each of the original particles (qubits) after transferring its state would be in an undefined state, hence only "transferring" and not cloning. | |
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| If Teleportation = Death, Would You Do It?
Posted: 9/10/2007 4:00:25 AM | This is a subject I've thought about a lot.
The move function for a computer file is probably the most applicable for what you see them doing in Star Trek. They never discuss the possibility that all of the characters die every time the go through the transporter and the people serving as the crew are in fact the 100 th. or so copy. As I remember, Dr. McCoy never liked using the thing and obviously for good reason.
Sure, the copy is exact in every respect, right down to the memories, so it doesn't know it's only a copy. Every body's running around thinking they are the original.
Now, the real question you are asking is about what could only be described as the SOUL .
Just because the transporter teleports every atom of your body doesn't mean it teleports " YOU ", that is your being, your SOUL if you will.
I don't see how you can get away from this quandary.
How can you be sure that " YOU ", the whole and complete " YOU " gets transported. The only way to know for sure is to get in and try it.
If it's not " YOU ", then naturally you would have to stay behind and let your copy go to the destination. But then, that rather defeats the purpose of teleportation, doesn't it ?
This brings up a whole slew of interesting and disturbing questions.
Is your exact copy an individual in itself or do you own it ?
Can you demand of your copy that it give up it's memories of it's trip to you and get erased ? | |
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| If Teleportation = Death, Would You Do It?
Posted: 9/10/2007 6:00:51 AM | | Lets fact facts here, a file on a computer has no life. If you move your dog from Dallas to London what happened to the original dog in Dallas? Get the point? | |
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| If Teleportation = Death, Would You Do It?
Posted: 9/10/2007 1:30:05 PM | "So, would you do it?"
maybe. if the operating system is Windows then probably not. =P
"im not a fish" nails the point, but to a point. he posts [If exchanging matter is "death" then I've died a few times over already, and I'm just getting started.]
the physical principle he's suggesting is that particles are substitutable. take an electron somewhere inside your brain - it's exactly the same as an electron somewhere in the dried ink of a harry potter book that sucks (no matter where in the world you're reading it).
the assumption you're making is that we'll discover exactly how our brain particles positions are related over time to give us the unique consciousness each one has. we can swap out a kidney and our consciousness will be mostly the same (i'm sure you'd be aware of some pain afterward). swap out a brain (oooh me first for the brain transplant op) and "you" are gonna notice something quite a bit different. i would strongly argue that a patient who undergoes a complete brain transplant dies, whether the patient survives the op or not.
if you don't get the brain right, nothing else about you matters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Mind_and_Brain | |
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| If Teleportation = Death, Would You Do It?
Posted: 9/10/2007 1:51:06 PM | "Aren't we teleporting when we sleep?"
wow. hmmmm.... i guess you could set up a video camera to see if you fly off somewhere when you're sleeping. or maybe have a friend keep tabs on ya.
then again, each of these observation systems have a sampling rate which could miss you when you're gone. you could be "switching" or teleporting out somewhere during these periods. i'd give it a probability close to zero though.
as an experiment, you could build a laboratory with very dense material or constructed such that signals of any kind would have difficulty crossing it. keep a camera going whose single-exposure film is continuously exposed to some dim light bouncing off your body. mount the camera on a motorized mount such that the motor moves the camera's focus across your body as you sleep. if there's a discontinuity in the image of your body as a blur - well you might have teleported then, assuming the system does not have mechanical failures and the film has infinitesimal resolution.
bleah, nevermind. i think you're safe if you guess that you dont teleport when you sleep. =P | |
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| If Teleportation = Death, Would You Do It?
Posted: 9/10/2007 1:53:45 PM | "I might do timetravel if it = death... but only if I could be sure I could report my experiences before I died."
wow - my hero! since you're going to the future, can i place a small side order with your trip?
i'd like
1. a file set containing all data published by the nasdaq
2. mickey d's fries - i'm wondering if they can actually improve them with time. i don't see how, but i'd like to know.
=P | |
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| If Teleportation = Death, Would You Do It?
Posted: 9/10/2007 2:51:29 PM | In Star Trek it's very obvious that the transporter teleports the whole and complete person through space. Not only does Capt. Kirk's atoms and photons get transported but his " self identity " goes too. From Kirk's point of view, the transporter room disappears and the new location appears. The characters have a sense of going from one place to the other with no loss of consciousness.
But exactly how does the transporter do this ?
It implies that we are not more than the sum of our particles.
Is a persons " self identity " a fuzzy energy field, in-between the particles ?
Or is the " self identity " the compilation of all the particles together ?
If Humpty Dumpty is taken apart physically, then put back together again, at what point does Humpty Dumpty lose himself in the process ?
Does the old Humpty die and a new Humpty arise ? | |
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| If Teleportation = Death, Would You Do It?
Posted: 9/10/2007 8:29:47 PM | .......look at the matter of the 'identical twin'
...........both twins come from the same genetic material....that is, the same egg and sperm (which later split) and formed its own life entity.
.......thus if an individual were to be 'replicated' (which is basically what is being said here) instead of TRULY undergoing transportation, then obviously you are gonna get a whole different person on the other side ( the receiving end) that looks exactly the same as the original but devoid of the essence of the original being.........in other words, you got an automatic twin who has no concept of who or what he/she is! | |
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| If Teleportation = Death, Would You Do It?
Posted: 9/21/2007 5:25:27 AM | Actually, there is more to that story. When each file is composed of multiple fragments on your hard drive. Each fragment by itself is useless. But when you have all of the fragments and the order they go in, they make a file. When you move a file, there are several ways this can happen:
1) Each fragment is moved one-by-one. The old system of moving files. Requires a high level of data integrity, but very efficient.
2) All of the fragments are copied into the new location, and then the old file is deleted. Uses a lot more room, very inefficient, but does not require data integrity.
3) The "pointer" to the file is moved from one location to another, but the file never really moves. Only possible with some file systems, and requires very high data integrity to match files with locations.
Now consider the 3 system in regards to teleportation:
#1 is like movement, so you are the moved object. There is no copy, and you don't die.
#2 is like making a clone, and killing off the original. Requires complete and utter transference of the data: genetic, chemical, electrochemical, electric signals in the brain, blood flow, brain flow, synaptic flow, and chemical flow. It would be like taking an exact 3-D snapshot of a car whilst it's moving at 50 miles per hour, copying each part, and then restarting the car at the exact same state as when you copied it, namely at 50 miles per hour, but with no acceleration at all. Quite simply, it would be practically unfeasible. You could copy it, but you would not be able to reproduce the exact electro-chemical flows. As the body's electrical and chemical states quickly degrade once these flows cease, you would have an equal problem setting these states up in the first place. Be more reasonable to grow a clone from scratch, and have it run through every experience you ever had in an artificial manner. But then, you cannot truly reproduce the exact events and the clone really WOULD be someone else.
#3 is like a wormhole, or a TARDIS. You don't move. The universe moves around you. So again, you're the same person.
Quite simply, you forgot that files are static. People are dynamic. Different processes altogether and rely on completely different systems of transportation.
You just cannot copy a dynamic system without copying everything that led up to it being in that dynamic in the first place, and the dynamics would be different, because the subtleties rely on the exact set of forces down to an almost infinitely small degree, and those rely on the state of the universe, which is a unique state for a specific time and space. So you cannot "copy" a dynamic object.
Better to consider if you could copy a running instance of a program while it is still executing, from your computer to another computer halfway across the world. Ask any computer programmer if that can be done. He'll tell you: without an exact duplicate of the computer, it would be unbelievably different. Some small data reference would mess it up, and the program would crash. | |
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| If Teleportation = Death, Would You Do It?
Posted: 10/7/2007 6:02:31 PM | well,i would imagine that some women might actually prefer this....isnt it every woman's fantasy to have TWO guys at the same time? one to cook, and one to clean!!
lol | |
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| If Teleportation = Death, Would You Do It?
Posted: 10/7/2007 9:54:42 PM | Any of you see the movie "The Prestige" with christian bale.. based loosely on experiments of Tesla.. this very question is posed.. what do you do with all the newly created copies?
I think once we get to the point where we can actually answer any of these questions, we'll be in a much better position to truly understand the ethical implications.. how do we know that if we were to perform this procedure on a living thing, that the end result would be an exact replica of the person, except without any mental functioning, an inert biomass, or if the clone had the mind of a newborn child.. without any real information we can only speculate..
.... would an army of newborn people be so bad? I'm sure we could find a use for that kind of a new labor force.. you dont need to pay a clone right?
what about having clones of yourself as slaves? Is slavery wrong when we enslave ourselves?
Aren't we doing that now? | |
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| If Teleportation = Death, Would You Do It?
Posted: 10/8/2007 4:59:03 AM | I was always under the impression that Teleportation was a means of Transportation.
In near death experiences there have been many cases where one has recalled periods of 'out of body' sensations. I recently read a book where a Doctor compiled a series of exeriments, one of which was in a Heart Surgery ward. Basically it inlvoved putting upturned pictures (so not visable to a patient lying in bed) high up near the ceiling. He was tring to dispel the theory that out of body experiences are mere hallucinations. However some patients having reported an out of body experience, were able to tell what were on those pictures. And they weren't dead at the time remember lol
Hmmm maybe food for thought, maybe not.
Maybe your 'spirit' can teleport, well if your spirit can teleport that's kewl, but it still needs a functioning alive body to do so. So I don't think it could ever be possible.
And anyway, I've already been to Disneyland
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| If Teleportation = Death, Would You Do It?
Posted: 10/10/2007 3:22:05 AM | Scorpio I was hoping someone would explain how all that happens. Thank you (saved the fingertips)
Taking a computer file as an example. It is indeed made up of lots of 0's and 1's? Scuse if I am out of my depth here but I am. This is something I believe to be true. But could have wrong.
Now if all this complicated stuff we have on our computers is just 0's and 1's, (the basic building blocks of cyber life) then how does it manifest itself as it does? It's assembled in a certain way, that 'creates' the seen and known version we are so familiar with. How?
If all it is..is 0's and 1's?
To take it back to something easy to visualise (seems how we are very visual creatures) a B&W photograph is a series of dots. Stop dots we see white, type dots we see black. Until it forms a likeness (visually) of what we can recognise visually in life. But its just DOTS! Row upon row of dots.
Even this typing is dots. Pixels. This B looks like a letter called bee does it not? Dots formed into a shape.
Sending something on our own computer is one thing. But when we teleport it over the air. How does that happen? How does your television work? It reduces it all to something that 'can' travel over the airways, in all kinds of directions all at once, and at the other end is something that can 'find them' and 'interpret them' and 'reassemble them'.
Text messages, voice, emails from cells phones. I can stand in one place and hit SEND and that phone could be anywhere in the world, and as long as its near an interpreter that can find that phone, it will be reassembled/teleported.
Pictures, sounds, writing..all disassembled then reassembled, provided the instrument at the other end can speak the same language and interpret correctly.
If this current technology that can project a copy of 0's and 1's (or the basic building blocks) can be mastered, then I dont see why a person could not be reassembled provided the instructions were there. Whether it would have the same thoughts is another thing. But then of course we are left with the Disneyland dilemma.
Q: What makes people so sure this is not their intent? Physically, we cant travel far in space. We need gravity - gravity ages etc etc. It takes too long. yad yada. And the earth if it keeps going how it is, is pretty much screwed n'est pas? And we need to be able to get off. And right now we cant.
If the basic building blocks could be 'beamed' in this way, and reassembled at some other destination. The clone would just 'wake up' and think (if it could think) ZAP it had arrived at destination Z only 3.7 seconds after leaving earth. But in fact it might have been a loooooooon long time. But it only has the 'sensation' of 5 seconds because during the rest of the time, it was disasembled. It did not actually exist in any concrete form.
The original then dies in the cess pool called earth. The original doesnt know about the clone. The copy doesnt know. Survival of the species.
I believe this is exactly what they might be trying to achieve. And are.
Something that does, and I believe will continue to hold back achieving 'critical energy' to teletransport humans or other life is 'fear'. It simply cannot be achieved. Fear fights against the whole process.
Study those who meditate and levitate (go beyond physical laws but with the body) and you will find an absence of fear, and a state of peace and acceptance. But if they are in a state of acceptance and are unafraid, why would they want to change it?
The rest of everyone who do want to leave would be simply too afraid.
Catch 22.
Those clones that are beamed, may not have the 'thoughts' of the originals, but may have the capacity to learn. This might actually give them an advantage in a new environment, as their thoughts wont be programmed to the environment they came from. They will learn and adapt and evolve or simply die out.
Mathematically, if you beam enough clones in enough directions, some will survive. Somewhere.
Asimov and his DOORS story (what this is based on) is cute. What was the one called where there existed many worlds? Where each path actually created whole new worlds each time? And they found a way to colonise those other EARTHS that had evolved in different ways. Cross through the dimensions.....
Clever fellow that Asimov. | |
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| If Teleportation = Death, Would You Do It?
Posted: 10/10/2007 4:25:08 AM | | what if teleportation involved folding space by the time it becomes possible for us t achieve it? or something along those lines then it wouldnt involve making copies or destroying the original. However, I suppose, it may experience minor difficulties like dropping you off accidentally next to pluto or something. Oh well all new technology usually has some bugs to work out tho lol. | |
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