I don't want to live on this planet anymore.

[Uncle Sparky]

Debra Messing was in "Jesus".

But was Jesus in Debra Messing?

[Lorizael]

Rockets? This is 2016. Use a transporter.

Teleportation is suicide.

[rah]

I've always thought about that.
Is it really you if it's just a copy of you someone else?
I'm in the camp that it's not really you.
So no, teleportation wouldn't be an option for me either.

[Aeson]

The regular passing of time has the same problem, just less obviously so.

[Lorizael]

The regular passing of time has the same problem, just less obviously so.

I've written essays on this subject. Here's an excerpt from one, because I don't feel like typing up a whole bunch right now.

Imagine a poor copy. Imagine that your entire life experiences have been recorded--everything you see and hear from birth to death. And when you die, a very, very gifted actor reviews all of the footage of your life and then takes your place so convincingly and so faithfully that no one can tell the difference. Are you still alive? Your answer is almost certainly no. Which means that copies of the original are not the real thing. And you are dead.

Now, obviously, there is some line between an actor taking your place and a quantum teleportation. This gets to the real heart of the matter, which is that consciousness is a fuzzy thing. You can start to offer counter arguments such as: are you still you when you wake up the next morning? Or from one moment to the next? How is consciousness maintained at all? Or is it? Theseus' ship and all that. The only good answer is that consciousness is a high level abstraction of various phenomena that we observe. And what we observe is that, at some point, consciousness does not persist. There is a certain level of elasticity, such that we say the person you are as a child is the person you are as an adult, despite the great differences in personality, but that at the moment of death, your consciousness snaps.

There are other things we describe in this fashion. Take matter, for example. Matter is elastic, and can be pulled and squeezed to various degrees, but eventually it will become deformed. And it won't go back to its original shape. But really, it's still just atoms, and the degree to which a lump of matter can be deformed is an emergent property of that lump's chemical makeup. We can say that a certain spring has a spring constant of x newtons/meter, but the spring law is an approximation, and that constant doesn't really describe anything fundamental. It's just a useful description for a limited range of values. Consciousness is much the same. We can make up useful terms to describe consciousness, such as awareness and a sense of self, but the reality is a much more complicated, possibly impossible to analyze system.

The upshot is this: consciousness is defined by its continuity and its self-referentiality. After a certain point, we say that this continuity is violated, such as by death. Or the self-referentiality is violated, such as by, I don't know, brainwashing or a spike to the head that manages not to kill you. Teleportation--destroying the body here, reassembling the body over there at something less than the speed of light--seems to me to violate the approximated limit of what we call continuity. You may disagree with that, but then you have to propose increasingly absurd scenarios in which we know for a fact that consciousness is maintained. And, of course, there is the fact that we can never really know that consciousness is maintained, and we're just basing this on our somewhat arbitrary classifications.

[Aeson]

And, of course, there is the fact that we can never really know that consciousness is maintained, and we're just basing this on our somewhat arbitrary classifications.

This is basically what I'm getting at. You being you in the "next" moment (with an expected and "normal" configuration) is as unsure as you being you after the teleport.

To illustrate, imagine a situation where you are being teleported without your knowledge, with adjustments being made to your configuration conforming to "expected" from your perception, constantly at a very high rate, in such a way that you can't know that the teleportation is being done. How would you differentiate between that progression and what we assume the real progression is?

[DaShi]

I was going to post something really profound and then "Wheels and the Legman" came on and I got distracted.

[rah]

How would you differentiate between that progression and what we assume the real progression is?

I don't know. Falling asleep at night and waking the next day is one we accept.
Teleportation could be similar but what if you were teleported to two different places? Which would be the real you?
IT's that type of thinking that puts teleporting in a different category for me. It more of a copying then a moving.

[giblets]

You can start to offer counter arguments such as: are you still you when you wake up the next morning?

Maybe not

[rah]

Yeah, sometimes it's confusing. I wake up and think I'm Ming
NAH

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

I've written essays on this subject. Here's an excerpt from one, because I don't feel like typing up a whole bunch right now.

Imagine a poor copy. Imagine that your entire life experiences have been recorded--everything you see and hear from birth to death. And when you die, a very, very gifted actor reviews all of the footage of your life and then takes your place so convincingly and so faithfully that no one can tell the difference. Are you still alive? Your answer is almost certainly no. Which means that copies of the original are not the real thing. And you are dead.

Now, obviously, there is some line between an actor taking your place and a quantum teleportation. This gets to the real heart of the matter, which is that consciousness is a fuzzy thing. You can start to offer counter arguments such as: are you still you when you wake up the next morning? Or from one moment to the next? How is consciousness maintained at all? Or is it? Theseus' ship and all that. The only good answer is that consciousness is a high level abstraction of various phenomena that we observe. And what we observe is that, at some point, consciousness does not persist. There is a certain level of elasticity, such that we say the person you are as a child is the person you are as an adult, despite the great differences in personality, but that at the moment of death, your consciousness snaps.

There are other things we describe in this fashion. Take matter, for example. Matter is elastic, and can be pulled and squeezed to various degrees, but eventually it will become deformed. And it won't go back to its original shape. But really, it's still just atoms, and the degree to which a lump of matter can be deformed is an emergent property of that lump's chemical makeup. We can say that a certain spring has a spring constant of x newtons/meter, but the spring law is an approximation, and that constant doesn't really describe anything fundamental. It's just a useful description for a limited range of values. Consciousness is much the same. We can make up useful terms to describe consciousness, such as awareness and a sense of self, but the reality is a much more complicated, possibly impossible to analyze system.

The upshot is this: consciousness is defined by its continuity and its self-referentiality. After a certain point, we say that this continuity is violated, such as by death. Or the self-referentiality is violated, such as by, I don't know, brainwashing or a spike to the head that manages not to kill you. Teleportation--destroying the body here, reassembling the body over there at something less than the speed of light--seems to me to violate the approximated limit of what we call continuity. You may disagree with that, but then you have to propose increasingly absurd scenarios in which we know for a fact that consciousness is maintained. And, of course, there is the fact that we can never really know that consciousness is maintained, and we're just basing this on our somewhat arbitrary classifications.

Well, that's one whole heap of words.

[Lorizael]

Blame past Lori.

[Kidlicious]

If people were checking to see if she was in a show called "The Bible" then they should have capitalized their search query.

Are the Grammar Nazis watching that?

[The Mad Monk]

"Ah, but don't you see, Dr. Einstein? Everything is spooky action at a distance."

[Lorizael]

What's that from?