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Teleportation
I've been bouncing this about my head for a few weeks now, and I decided to post it here and see what everyone thinks about it.
Assume that the teleportation method is as follows:
1. matter is measured in teleport machine #1
2. measurement data is transferred to teleport machine #2
3. a checksum is run (this step is fail-safe, for arguments sake. no data will be misinterpreted or lost)
4. original matter at teleport machine #1 is destroyed
5. measurement data is used to recreate object in teleport machine #2
It is a way to travel with the speed of the internet, transforming your body into a few gigs of data piped over a fat future line, making transport to anywhere on the planet possible in under a second.
Would you use this method of teleportation? I have a few problems with it.
First of all, there's the philosophical question that depends on whether you believe that you posess a soul or not. For arguments sake, lets say you do (because if you don't, this point is invalid). What happens when your original body is destroyed? If your soul doesn't consist of measurable matter, when your body is zapped will it simply be released, and the body created on the other side will be soulless, because if the machine on one side couldn't measure it, the machine on the other side can't recreate it. Depending on your definition of the soul, this could be a major problem, but you can contemplate this based on whatever it is.
Then I'm a little uneasy about killing my body. Will I be in the body that is created on the other side, or will I be instantly dead? My new body will think that everything went through fine. After all, its brain tells it that it was there a second ago, it has the memories that my old body did. But in reality, it has only existed for nanoseconds. I'm trying to figure out if I have a problem with this. Does it really matter if my old body is dead, as long as there is a copy of my body that is completely the same as my old one, mind and all?
Any other strange problems that can arise from this form of teleportation? What are your opinions on the issues that I've brought up here?
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