What if you die when teleporting and it only creates a perfect clone?

What if you die when teleporting and it only creates a perfect clone?

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sleepassociation.org/sleep/rem-sleep/
npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/07/29/427161157/beam-me-up-teleporting-is-real-even-if-trekkie-transport-isnt
youtube.com/watch?v=owPC60Ue0BE
twitter.com/AnonBabble

Disproven in both Next Generation and Enterprise.

How can you disprove something that's not even real

What if you quit being an idiot and stopped saving thumbnails?

I recall a post about this a few months back referring to how characters were aware and just didn't give a fuck

>a perfect clone
Then what's the problem?

What if, despite being a clone, it's like when a person has a heart attack and is 'dead' and then revived?

What if your consciousness ends every time you take a nap and when your body wakes up it has an entirely new consciousness.

Ah so refreshing to take a nap.

I think it's more like saving state on a VM and then resuming execution

Then teleporting doesn't make sense. Why destroy the original? Why would anyone want to die just to have a clone spawned at another location?

i'm not familiar with how star trek transporters work

if it destroys and recreates a perfect copy, then either you die before and the copy is dead, or you die after and the copy dies
if the copy process is not instantaneous, such that the copy is comprised of parts of you captures from slightly different times, and you die /during/ this process, then whether the copy dies depends on how you died
for example, if you're shot in the head, but your head was already scanned, then the copy will have the pre-shot head, and should be fine

Your soul then possess you're clone. No problem there

The problem is that the teleported person cannot know if hes the original or not. So there is no known way to prove if the original died and a new lifeform was created or not.

Play Soma OP

This. Everyone who has been transported thinks it works. But in truth, Reg was right. Transporters kill the original.

A man is only a concept, his DNA+personality+memories. A system, you might say.
If the system is perfectly recreated, then the man hasn't truly died.
This is hard to accept for humans, though, since we don't think of ourselves as merely systems. We think of ourselves both as an entity and as a gathering of cells. And, well, in a way the cells we are made up of after teleportation won't be the same as before, so our intuition says this "clone" won't truly be us.
But it will, to the world and all our friends and to everybody who looks, unless the recreation isn't perfect. It's not even the matter of them being stupid, since the information, who we were, is perfectly transmitted and the system is recreated.
Also, though if somebody dies right at the time they are recreated on the other end of the teleporter, it's all simple and easy, if the time of death and recreation is further away, it gets harder to answer whether it's the same man.
Especially if the original doesn't die after the teleportation, since the systems start to diverge, so the more time passes before the original is dead, the less it is like the two men are identical.
Plus, what if the second teleporter, the one that recreates, glitches out and never recreates a man? Then the man is just dead, and the teleporter killed him.
But yet a perfect teleportation still hasn't truly killed a man, unless we find an immortal soul, or something.
In the end, it just shows yet again that the universe doesn't care what we think about something (for example, what really constitutes a death), and we will have to deal with it somehow.

>This. Everyone who has been transported thinks it works. But in truth, Reg was right. Transporters kill the original.
No. See

Consciousness doesn't work that way. It changes every second.

Perfect clones are impossible

why?

Good question, Jayden.

Someone discovered CGPGrey.

If the clone is perfect, then the end result is the same.

This thought experiment is only challenging to christfags who believe in a “soul”

what version of teleportation?
star trek one?
sg1 asgard one?and the stargate itself
charmed magical teleportation one?
doctor who?
heroes?
power rangers?

logically speaking the only thing close enough to what humans are researching now "Quantum teleportation" is the stargate

i remember watching some special on the science channel a few years back that had neil degrasse, michio kaku, and a few other university professors on it talking about teleportation and the possibility of star trek type teleportation. iirc, they spoke in lengths about how a star trek teleporter actually works and how we can theoretically duplicate it, with a few successes already with teleporting atoms.

what they argued was essentially, star trek teleportation works by making a MRI style scan of the body, but down to the molecular, atom level. saving that image in a "computer" and then using something similar to a human 3D printer to reprint the body back at a different location. with the data being transferred at the speed of light and be recreated in a matter of minutes by the destination printer.

so yes, teleportation would work by destroying the old and recreating a perfect clone.

Teleportation is easy

Atomic level may not be enough to fully recreate a human being. We don't understand whether or not the human brain depends on quantum effects in any macroscopic way. By distorting the quantum state, it's possible you'll irreversably damage the human's thoughts, memories or perception.

What's the point of breaking down the original person though? Wouldn't it be easier to make a cloning machine this way?

>What if you die when teleporting and it only creates a perfect clone?
user this assumes that there is some facet of 'you' which is not contained in the physical structure that is your body. If you are perfectly cloned via teleporter then it really is you, per the definition of perfect cloning.

>b-but what about that episode where riker and his double
Again, you're making a false assumption, namely that there can only be one instance of you; if you accept that there is no facet of youness which exists independently from the structure that is your body, since the body is just an object it's entirely plausible that more than one you could exist, should we have a process capable of producing sufficiently accurate replications of your body.

>This thought experiment is only challenging to christfags who believe in a “soul”
This is basically correct.

>user this assumes that there is some facet of 'you' which is not contained in the physical structure that is your body. If you are perfectly cloned via teleporter then it really is you, per the definition of perfect cloning.
Minor nitpick: Teleportation is not the same thing as cloning.

Perfect cloning is impossible. Perfect teleportation is.

>If you are perfectly cloned via teleporter then it really is you, per the definition of perfect cloning.
They keyword here though is "perfect" and there's a possibility that teleporters can never achieve perfect cloning, even if the resulting person looks and acts just like you do.

And how do you think they're going to add that functionality? Is there gonna be a command line -soul flag as well?

We don't know what consciousness is yet

It would be unsettling and create a bunch of problems for people who just want to "teleport.". Who would take over the role of (you) when there are two (you)s? When the clone is exactly the same as you, what gives one or the other priority?

It probably work as a regular cloning machine though.

>you die
>you
Prove it

The question that naturally arises, of course, is how sufficiently accurate you have to be to consider yourself “you”.

I mean, the whole concept of “you” is fuzzy to begin with. Where do we start and stop? Do the atoms you're constantly losing from your skin still count as you? What about all the atoms you're exchanging with your local nearest body of water? Your cells are in a constant cycle of dying, being replaced by new cells made from whatever atoms you recently ate, dying again, being shed, etc.

There's a lot of room for error. Heck, you could deliberately introduce “errors” during the teleportation process, to do stuff like remove fat or change the shape of your nose. Basically plastic surgery - or any surgery, really - taken to the absolute extreme.

Would it still be you? Sure, because the shape of my nose is not really something that I think of as strongly defining me. It wouldn't be a perfect copy, but it's not like people complain about no longer being themselves every time they go in for surgery either.

Yes we do. People just don't want to admit it because religiousfags will start rebelling against the truth that it isn't a magical force independent of our bodies.

You do this every day though. When you go to sleep your consciousness ceases to exist for some time, and when you wake up a brand new consciousness gets generated by your body. So "you" woke up for the first time this morning, and your memories have been created in your brain by previous consciousnesses generated by your body.
If this doesn't trouble you neither should teleporting

well, to "teleport" to preserve "one copy." if you want teleportation on a mass scale, you can't really endure 40k+ copies of the same person running around all over the place.

but they also noted that yes, indeed, this is essentially a cloning device. every time you use it, another copy of your state is saved. a copy of your ten year old body, twenty, thirty, and so on. immortality in a way would be achieved.

>What's the point of breaking down the original person though?
You'll end up with a ton of clones of yourself in various places for no reason?
Why duplicate yourself if you don't want/need to

oh fuck someone already said it, I feel dumb now

I think most people consider the line to be conssciousness. As in, the difference between seeing through your own eyes as opposed to looking at an image of you in a mirror.

You die everytime you use the transporter

both of them will be "you"

it's not an easy thing to imagine

take a VM for example, if you paused it, transferred its state and disk to another machine, then resumed it on both machines, which is "the VM"? both of them are, it's the same VM, just now there's two of them

we barely can understand what short of information the brain needs in order to achieve Consciousness
and anons already took it to the next level...throwing out of the windows the very thing we know its one of the signs of Consciousness...the rem cycle..

>sleep=rem cycle
hmmm

If you want to make a perfect copy of something down to the quantum level, you're going to need to analyze the original on a quantum level, which implies destroying the quantum state.

Basically teleportation works by producing an entangled pair of quantum particles. You send one copy to the destination and leave one copy in the source. When you teleport a quantum particle Q, you first let Q transform one half of your entangled pair, and then measure both of them (collapsing the quantum state in the process).

You send the results of your measurements via classical means to the destination, and then use that information to reconstruct the original quantum state from the second half of the entangled pair, by rotating it based on the information you received.

( for a diagram)

But in the process of reconstructing an identical copy, you *had* to measure the original state, so you had the information required to know how to sufficiently rotate your entangled qubit to reproduce the original.

tl;dr, in quantum mechanics, you can't copy a qubit (no cloning), so a quantum-accurate clone is impossible. Of course, a sufficiently good macroscopic clone might still be. (For example, perhaps the atomic level is enough - without needing to worry about quantum states?)

Also, teleportation is still very limited, because

1. you can't send information faster than light, so at best, teleportation is a way of travelling at the speed of light

2. you can't travel anywhere without there being a receiver in the location you want to travel, so it won't let us explore the universe any better - just teleport between places we've already been

3. For a quantum-accurate teleportation, you need to exchange tangled particles between the source and the destination beforehand, so every 1 kg of mass you want to teleport requires 1 kg of entangled particles to be transported via classical means first.

>take a VM for example, if you paused it, transferred its state and disk to another machine, then resumed it on both machines, which is "the VM"? both of them are, it's the same VM, just now there's two of them
Precisely this.

Well, don't you die when you get separated into tiny pieces and teleported to somewhere else?

This would be a huge improvement over contemporary transportation. It doesnt even need to be perfect.

E.g.: An eight hour flight will expose you to a considerable level of radiation, induce problems with your blood-circulation, put your eyes and ears under pressure stress, literally take 8 hours off your lifetime, put you into hazard from germs on the plane, put you in a considerable risk of accident.

Compared to this, creating a near-perfect clone and killing the old me for technical or social-ethical reasons seems 100% fine.

The real problems with this will be so much more important: Imagine the social impact if you have a technology that can literally create a human being (that is h2o, carbon and other elements) with the highest precision instantly out of nothing.

tl;dr, utopian thought is dumb

How do you know humans work as VMs do?

-- i should say, they /were/ the same VM
moments after unpausing, they are independently free to diverge from one another, as you would if you were copied
but i wouldn't call that proof of one not being you, you are constantly changing, the you from yesterday is not exactly the same as the you right now

mow they will argue that the magical force also travels to the new body

>>sleep=rem cycle
god damn it that was just..hmm
sleepassociation.org/sleep/rem-sleep/

>Yes we do.
What is consciousness?

Consciousness is not really some rigid, solid thing. Consciousness, thoughts and perceptions are malleable and flexible.

For example, every time people take drugs, they're affecting their perception and their consciousness. When you're high, you have different thoughts. Same shit when you're sleeping. Do you stop becoming yourself when you're in your sleep? No, you're just in a state of severely warped consciousness.

What about somebody suffering a stroke and losing memories? What about somebody who got a pole shot through their head and lost parts of their personality as a result? What about somebody stuck in a coma? Are they still the same person as before? The border isn't an easy one to draw, because all associations we make with the things we believe to know are fuzzy connections at best. The brain doesn't operate on rigid definitions, after all.

My point is: you have a lot of playing room for error before people start getting really uncomfortable with the concept of themselves.

kek

There is no difference for the observer.
Therefore you do not die.

i haven't seen anything solid that suggests otherwise

Sure, at the exact moment of the cloning, they will both be you. But both versions of you will go through different experiences, and after enough time passes, there will be some difference in personality and other degrees of youness that eventually you'll be two different people. In this case, what if for example you're some super bigshot with lots of authority. Which clone or version of you is entitled to that authority? Don't say both because eventually, different people will have some sort of conflict and that becomes a mess.

What the fuck are you even implying? I said sleep was more than rem, why are you linking me this?
Your original post was written in some of the most butchered english I've seen here for a while, so that might be the source of this confusion

>yfw the teleporting device malfunctions and two of you come out on the other end

Humans occupy matter and obey the laws of the universe

This means you can fundamentally describe humans as the combination of (their current state) × (the laws of physics), similar to how you can describe a VM by a combination of (its current memory) × (the execution rules of the processor).

In both cases, the only evolution over time depends on the inputs you feed into that system. Give two VMs the same inputs, and they will evolve the same way over time. The only thing keeping us different is the fact that we're all living life from a different perspective (different parents, different surroundings growing up, etc.)

and this is why much of the research that has come out in the past two years has concluded, at least right now, for the sake of interest, we should focus using this to advance quantum computer designs.

NPR did somewhat of an article about it: npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/07/29/427161157/beam-me-up-teleporting-is-real-even-if-trekkie-transport-isnt

Because this recent video that was too dumb to follow said so!
youtube.com/watch?v=owPC60Ue0BE

>yfw script kiddies infect the device with a virus. people come out with pepe faces.

>Because this recent video that was too dumb to follow said so!
What was wrong about the video?

Not a problem: all cloning must be done in 3's, and vested authorities in the original agent must be agreed upon.

If only two clone exist, or if there is no consensus, the original agent takes precedence in all legal matters.

lets be clear about one thing...
star trek version of teleportation isnt even close to what we know now as quantum entanglement
its more close to asgard beaming technology or goauld rings(aka ancient ring transport) than to an actual instantaneous transport that the stargate showcased...

You are half way through it.
Reliousfags are also half way through it in a different way.

Don't let yourself to fall for the dunning-kruger effect.

You think you know what consciousness is, go ahead, write it down, listen carefully to any intellectual who talks about it. I'd say that if you are capable of deconstructing consciousness fully, you are probably the smartest man that ever lived and you are ready to stop being one, you are ahead of yourself.

>When you're high, you have different thoughts. Same shit when you're sleeping. Do you stop becoming yourself when you're in your sleep? No, you're just in a state of severely warped consciousness.
You're not talking about consciousness as a philosophical phenomenon, just the psychological aspect of it. The awareness of the subject will be altered by the drug, but they're still running the same iteration of their "track of mind" so to speak.

Arguably, memories and cognitive functions are chunks of the whole complex of consciousness. Perhaps there's a reason why severely mentally impaired people are sometimes considered to be "not the same person" by their families. But on the other hand, we have no way of knowing what those people truly experience firsthand.

>My point is: you have a lot of playing room for error before people start getting really uncomfortable with the concept of themselves.
Killing yourself to create your identical twin somewhere else seems to be way past that point.

>nothing disproves it so it's true
I'm a sexy alien spider.

Blergh, I meant to write that *I* was too dumb to follow. Terrible mistake on my part

isn't this what badger said in breaking bad

And what constitutes the "current state" of the human being? How do you know it stops at the atomic level? Isn't it necessary for a clone to be "exactly the same as the original" to also share the respective position of his particles with the original?

>die
Define this, and then we can begin to have a rational discussion.

yes, the two people will diverge to become effectively different people
it's not possible for two people to have precisely the same things happen to them

property ownership and relationships have no simple solution
presumably you both would need to either divide them or one of you would need to abandon them altogether

realistically, "the original" would probably have a higher legal standing, but this is assuming that this is unknown
a copy having degraded legal rights over the original also comes back to teleportation, your teleported self is a copy, but there is no original to contend with, do you legally become the effective original?

And what if the teleporter bugs out and creates two.. Three, maybe ten copies?

Still not dead? Then which of them is you?

>>nothing disproves it so it's true
that's not what i said

All of them are.
This is a bit of a problem, though.

and who governs the stupid notion that you NEED to be cloned? for all we know in reality the device can dematerialize you store you in a buffer and send the data on the location you wanna go without you being cloned or paste or or or

Because atoms and data are fundamentally about as different as a house and a blueprint of it.

>And what constitutes the "current state" of the human being? How do you know it stops at the atomic level? Isn't it necessary for a clone to be "exactly the same as the original" to also share the respective position of his particles with the original?
The point of the thread is not about the practical (or in principle) feasibility of teleportation, merely whether or not you would be dead if you used one. For the purposes of the hypothetical the feasibility of it is irrelevant.

Hypothesizing about technology that is not feasible is mere fanfiction and not really technology related.

>but they're still running the same iteration of their "track of mind" so to speak.
I don't really understand what you meant by this.

but,
>Arguably, memories and cognitive functions are chunks of the whole complex of consciousness.
This is true for sure. The entire concept of a thought makes no sense in isolation - we think in terms of relations to experiences we've already have, by relating what we're currently experiencing to existing patterns we've imprinted upon ourselves.

The concept of a ‘tree’, for example, is not something that's rigidly imprinted in my brain; it's more like I've seen so many trees that I recognize them by association. When I think of the concept ‘tree’, the only things that come to my mind are all the trees I've seen in my life, coming together to form a concept of “tree”-ness that I can frame my thoughts against.

It's the same for every single word. It's the same for every single thing we've seen, heard, felt or experienced in some other way. And if you ask me, it's the same for the very concept of stuff like the flow of time, “self”, causality, etc. - everything we can understand as a concept is just some sort of pattern we've trained ourselves to recognize, including the part where we can recognize “ourselves” simply by having looked into mirrors and learned to associate our previous thoughts with our actions, and our actions with our observation of ourselves.

The brain is nothing but a big pattern recognition machine that is really, really, really good at recognizing patterns - not just first-order patterns but second-order, third-order and so on up to n-th order patterns as well. The more intelligent among us are just those who are more capable of recognizing higher-order patterns.

So consciousness, memories, cognitive input etc. are all just deeply related concepts that sort of form the concept of intelligent thought by way of associating every stimulus/situation/etc. with other, similar stimuli.

That's pretty much exactly how it works. It dissolves you into particles, saves your pattern, then materializes the pattern again at a distant location. The original you is instantly obliterated and it constructs a new you at the target location. You couldn't pay me to step into a Star Trek transporter.

>I don't really understand what you meant by this.
Think of two identical twins, that wear the same clothing, went through the same life experiences, share the same interests. Do they share their respective consciousness?

>And what constitutes the "current state" of the human being?
Assuming our laws of quantum mechanics is sufficient to desdcribe the evolution of a human being (which we can't know for certain, but it seems to be the case so let's assume it is), then a human being would be defined by the collective sum of particles and their associated quantum states. (Being a superposition of classical states)

Of course, in reality, due to (perceived) quantum randomness, even an identical quantum copy would in principle start behaving differently over time. For example, a random mutation due to quantum fluctuations could create a cancer cell and kill off one person while the other survives.

We don't have a satisfactory answer yet to whether or not the universe is deterministic (which the “human being is like a VM” argument would imply) or not, so whether the argumentation in applies is also an open question.

>I'm a sexy alien spider

Pics?

That's why I can't see star trek teleportation as something everyone would use casually.

If anything goes wrong during the de-materialization process, you're effectively dead.

Someone has been watching The Prestige

These sorts of questions are why the transporter and to an extent the replicator are fucking terrifying.
Their lives are worthless, all of them.
They are reduced to mere concepts dispatched across the stars yet somehow the pattern buffer isn't utilised to shit out a clone army, meaning once they die they're absolutely fucked. It's a savestate for a replicator and they're lying to themselves.
Even reviving the dead should just be a party trick if they have a working pattern, or close enough to one to make a few changes.

>Think of two identical twins, that wear the same clothing, went through the same life experiences, share the same interests. Do they share their respective consciousness?
Depends on a number of factors:

1. Is this a purely hypothetical thought experiment in which you could literally _exactly_ duplicate their life experience?

I mean, differences will start to arise in the womb already. I think that due to the nature of chaotic effects, you will very quickly start to diverge identical twins even if you try very hard not to.

2. Does the human brain's decision-making process depend on quantum random effects?

We don't have an answer to this question. It's an open question; basically the question of superdeterminism vs free will, which has been unanswered for a while.

But then again, people are somehow very uncomfortable with the notion of giving up the (imo poorly defined) concept of “free will”, so it's possible that we just aren't finding solutions to this question because we subconsciously don't want to contemplate it.

>If anything goes wrong during the de-materialization process, you're effectively dead.
Or until your family buys a new teleporter, pulls a recent backup of your state off the cloud, and spits out a new you

Lives are inherently worthless. The perfect cloning thought experiment just makes it easier to see.
Not that perfect cloning exists or will ever exist if this video is true: So, I guess it won't ever be as big a problem in real life as it is in our heads.

>Their lives are worthless, all of them.
It's funny how you consider somebody's life worthless if it's a machine spitting out the humans, but not when it's another human doing the human-making.

We have billions of people on this earth, all of them produced on a mass scale by self-replicating devices (human beings). What makes their lives any less worthless than the hypothetical humans who came out of machines instead of other humans?

There are two reasons why what you're saying is complete conjecture. First, we don't have a full understanding of how the human brain even works. Beyond that, we have a hard time defining what consciousness is to begin with, let alone how the human brain uses its structures to create it. So as this () user said, there are any number of quantum effects that could affect the brain that we don't know about because nobody has has any reason to check.

As for the teleporter as it exists in Star Trek, it's very interesting as it's similar to the notion of quantum immortality. If the many-worlds theory is accurate and quantum immortality is also accurate, then what religion calls the soul is actually consciousness.

Based, interesting perspective.

What if teleporting makes you cum lol

>Not that perfect cloning exists or will ever exist if this video is true:
That assumption depends very strongly on whether or not quantum states are an important part of the human cognitive process, to which we don't know the answer.

If the human brain is dictated entirely by classical physics and chemistry, an atomic-level classic copy (which is *not* excluded by the quantum no-cloning principle) would be sufficient for reproducing an essentially identical copy of a human being. The exact same legal / social / philosophical issues would apply.

>Lives are inherently worthless. The perfect cloning thought experiment just makes it easier to see.
Here is where it gets interesting: What does the word ‘worth’ mean, to begin with? There's no such thing as an objective concept of ‘worth’ and ‘worthlessness’ in the universe. ‘worth’ is a social construct, arising from a person's or collective people's desire for something.

A person has no inherent worth, but people are worth something to the people around them. For example, you're worth something to your family. This kind of worth - a social worth - inherently comes from the relationships, connections and meaningful interactions you have with the people around you.

So let us ask ourselves this: Would a cloned human retain those relationships with their “original” families? Would the family just choose to keep one copy as their family member and send the others out into the universe, to go and find their own relationships (thus also giving them “social worth”)? Would the family alternatingly interact with any member of the you-collective, and treat you all the same?

Would you share a house with yourself? Which one of you would show up for work? Probably there's going to be nothing better than randomly selecting one and christening it as the “true successor”, killing or isolating the rest.

Asking the important questions