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Would you be prepared to be teleported? If so why?
It seems to be an article of faith for many atheists that we are nothing but information. We have no soul. The body and brain we run on is just hardware, we are the software, the program that is running on the hardware. If we can copy the entire state of the brain and the body (putting the uncertainty principle and the colossal challenge of actually doing it to one side) any copy we will make will be us just as much as the original because there is nothing special about what we are.
I have been rejecting this line of thinking for a long time despite in many ways being drawn towards it and the charm of its cool detached and thoroughly right-on materialism. This reluctance to embrace the concept has led many people to accuse me of believing in a soul or having some other kind of supernatural hangup. I find this charge deeply insulting, boorish, aggressive and as distasteful as the yahoo tactics of the church of the ignorant redneck.
My attachment to being me lies in the simple and scary idea that there seems to be an infinite number of ways of not being conscious and aware and I am holding tight to the only way of being aware that I know. There are billions of people and animals alive on the planet, none of them is able to live and experience and appreciate life or existence except from their own first person perspective. How should the existence of another person who happens to be more similar than the other lives which I cannot experience change any of this? I really don't think that the fact that other brains are a little bit different to mine is the only reason why I am not them and I cannot experience consciousness through them. I put down my inability to be you to the fact that there is no wideband two-way connection between your brain and mine in the same way as there is between my left hemisphere and my right and between my brain and my body.
The integrity of me is what counts. I am me because I am connected to me. I am thinking meat, not information, not what the meat is thinking about. I am not an idea (still less am I a meme). Because I am not information but thinking meat information about me is only ever that, information about me and never me, I can't be digitized. I am neither the hardware on which my consciousness runs nor the consciousness but decidedly and inseparably both. I am the meat that thinks and the thoughts in the meat. The word meat here meaning organic tissue not lean muscle. I am the system as it is working. If at any time the system stops working I cannot be sure that if it restarts it will be the same consciousness. Sleep and anaesthesia does not cause me any problems and fears of somebody else waking up inside my body because the system is not stopped, only quieted to below the normal threshold. When deep in sleep I have not stopped being me I simply continue existing and thinking at a level which is too low to generate the full consciousness experience.
If my brain stops thinking completely I cannot know whether the consciousness that starts up if that body is shocked back to life will be the same consciousness because I know it isn't the same stream of consciousness, the original stream stopped, dead. At this point I can imagine some people reading getting very excited and wanting to tell me all about their experience of coming back to life. I am not interested for the simple reason that a rebooted body with a second-hand brain would supply memories to whoever lived inside, believing you are the same person proves nothing, it is the way you are made, the memories laid down by the original owner of your body will be the only memories you can access. In contrast if you have a profound belief that you were born yesterday when the original owner of your body died, that the life you can remember before a full stop isn't really yours then I will be very eager to converse with you. Believing that you are the same as you always were proves nothing at all, if there is no memory of discontinuity you will not have any reason to believe there was a discontinuity and coming to life in a brain full of memories it is to be expected that you will believe the memories you experience are your own. I would also be interested in the experiences of anybody who is really close to somebody whose brain stopped if they believe they have become a new person in a way more meaningful than the one usually implied by that phrase. Note that the important thing is the brain stopping, this is not the same as the heart flat-lining, which is a relatively common phenomenon and often has no more effect on the brain than holding your breath for two minutes or getting a bit dizzy.
If an ended stream of consciousness (and unconsciousness too) means death and restarting the pumps and bellows breathes quite literally a new life into a corpse we should not expect the new life to think differently. A new life would be the same as rebooting your computer, once everything is loaded into RAM things appear to be the same as they were before, even if what is being "restored" is a seventeenth generation copy of an image on a hard drive long since destroyed. The new consciousness would access the same messages from your body, would have access to the same memories and would see the same image in the mirror: they would have the same perspective, the same brain, the same body, the same memories so it is to be expected that they be indistinguishable. The meat would start thinking again, but they would be new thoughts. Would it be a new life? I don't know. I don't quite know what I mean by a life. I certainly am not suggesting something like a fresh soul coming in, that would be silly. But neither am I sure that the life which stopped with the brain stopping still exists to be restarted, if it doesn't, and being by nature a transient and precious thing that does not seem too crazy an idea, then by default it has to be a new stream of consciousness that is formed even if the hardware is second-hand. If the previous life has ended then it has to be a new life. How long could life hang around in a dead body waiting to be restarted? Does that question deserve consideration?
Is perhaps consciousness like a fire? If it has died it has died. Setting the same fuel alight again, reanimating the meat, is making a new fire, a new person and new point of view. Is that a meaningful distinction? When we go to sleep and wake up again our fire never goes out, it just burns less brightly, there is no break in continuity, it is the same fire. But if the fire goes out, if all activity stops rather than merely continuing on in a modest level isn't that death?
Here we come to the issue of forward continuity of consciousness. Does it exist at all? In some sense of course it doesn't. My consciousness consists of experiences and memories which go from my birth up to as close to the present moment as I can manage to perceive. Nothing goes forward beyond the now. But does that mean anything? Declaring that there is no forward continuity of consciousness does not of itself make every copy of my brainstate into me in any meaningful way and neither does saying there is no soul. Neither of these assertions change the reality that two separate people who share the same memories cannot both be me, the definition of me does not allow there to be more than one me. As soon as a copy is made that is a new person, a me only to himself. I am only me to the brain and body I am a part of, that comprise me.
Imagine you are asleep, you're down for the night. As soon as you appear to be soundly asleep you are given ether to ensure you stay out of it for a while, then you are bundled into the new UBBCTM (Uncertainty be buggered copying and teleporting machine) where every atom is traced and recorded allowing the evil men to build a perfect and fully functional replica of you. They then wake up and brainwash this replica while you sleep on undisturbed. The “other you” is very disturbed, they go out of their way to unhinge him and instill a hatred in him sufficient to make him into a murderer. Three hours into your sleep your replica kills. Four hours into your sleep your replica is killed. Five hours into your sleep the replica and the UBBCTM are destroyed. After a good eight and a half hours sleep you wake with a clear head and no memories of anything except innocent dreams. Who was the murderer?
Bony prison cell
It is incredibly easy to imagine ourselves into the mind and point of view of a replica of ourselves stepping out of a teleport machine in a more interesting place. We can do it with no effort at all. In contrast we can't in reality move our point of view anywhere outside our own bony prison cell. I have never spent one moment looking out of another pair of eyes in reality. Do not let our human gift for empathy and reflection fool you into believing that being somebody else as well as or instead of just yourself is a trick that you could ever pull off.
If a copy of you is made at a distant location or right beside you, whether you are killed in the process of being analysed or not the copy is never you. This is nothing to do with souls or the illegitimacy of copying it all comes down to what it means to be. If the one on the left is the same as the one on the right it not the one on the right. There is a fundamental distinction between similar and the same. You cannot make the same person twice any more than you do the same fart twice. Similar is as good as it is possible to get. Not being able to find a reason to choose between them does not remove the fact that there is a choice, there are two and two isn't the same as one.
Classic teleporting consists of a conveniently destructive reading, a transmission, distant reception and “assembly of the same person again” somewhere it can help move the plot on. Having the reading phase be destructive is vitally important to pulling off this bit of theatrical magic. The audience see the person destroyed, not exist at all, then appear in another place. They never see two people, they are never aware of the simple reality that the person in the more interesting place is a copy who thinks he is the first person rather than being the first person. Avoiding there ever being two people enables them (the audience at home and the people of Starfleet) to believe that the process moves a consciousness as if that was possible. If the consciousness cannot be removed from the first person how can it be put into the copy? If instead of a fatal reading process the reading allowed the person to continue living the reality would become clear. The person who is left behind is unchanged by the process of transmission and the building of the copy.
Consciousness cannot be digitized or sent by radio or sub-ether transmissions. There isn't any such “thing” as consciousness, it is a process, you can't encode consciousness in a map of the brain any more than you can capture a dance in a single still photograph. Consciousness is kindled by thinking meat, consciousness is part of the way the meat thinks. Consciousness emerges from thinking meat thinking. If a copy of your thinking meat is made somewhere else it kindles its own consciousness, which is perceivable only inside its own system, inside the thinking meat. If this thinking meat has access to stored memories these will shape the nature of the consciousness that the new copy has. If the copy is indistinguishable from the original it will think in exactly the same way. It too will be an island of solitude in its own (indistinguishable) bony prison cell, forever unable to leave. But the old person hasn't moved or even been made aware of the existence of the new copy. The old person is the point of view in the old body, unchanged as long as we can assume that the process of mapping the location of atoms isn't inevitably fatal.
In what way is the new person you? You died, if we are considering classic Star Trek teleporting, you died before the copy started to exist. Then somebody very like you came to life with second hand memories in a body that had never been a part of the system that formed you. The new person is, from the point of view of Starfleet and the Star Trek audience, and his wife and his children and his pets exactly the same as the old dead person. Functionally identical. The copy is as good as the original. But as good as isn't the same thing as being the same person, any child being fobbed off with Hammy the Hamster mark two knows this instinctively. The copy is a new me to himself. The old you is dead, never more to experience anything even the passing of empty eons of non-experience, and to add insult to injury this murder victim is not mourned, not missed, not avenged.
Starfleet would be happy to reward the imposter who stole my life and sleeps with my wife by paying him my salary and giving him my long service medal. The fascist bastards!
I get into what they call a teleport machine (in reality a patsy murdering agent respawner). They make a copy of me somewhere else and kill me here and now to avoid the legal complications of two men sharing the same wife, salary, CV, house and MasterCard account.
You can easily imagine yourself into the body of the copy, just as you can imagine yourself into the body of Jason Bourne, Ron Jeremy or Mr Darcy. The process is identical: wishful thinking. Actually experiencing a life anywhere else through another body is not possible. Lives are experienced only from the inside. It doesn't matter whether or not the distant copy believes he is you, you remain in your body until you die or are killed.
A copy of you is another person, not you, they will never experience what you go on to experience and vice versa. If they have your memories that merely creates paradoxes of identity, the copy is always separate from you. This is not to say that the copy isn't real. Of course they are, a replica of a separate real person with the capacity to love and suffer is a separate real person with the capacity to love and suffer. The copy has a separate life and a separate right to life, but a shared history, obligations and possessions. Killing either the original or the copy would be murder as both are capable of living and suffering and being fully human.
Replicating an individual is a crime against humanity and should be made illegal before anybody gets around to proving whether it can actually be done.
Why this nothing to do with souls
I am definitely not arguing about a soul here. What I am referring to is probably best given an easy to pronounce acronym: MEPOV, Me or my Ego Point Of View.
1] Souls can move (down corridors of light, up escalators to heaven etc. or wherever Starfleet orders you to be “beamed down”) the MEPOV can't, it exists in the meat machinery that spawned it.
2] Souls are made of God-stuff. The MEPOV is an illusion, its own illusion, a serial virtual machine running the parallel circuitry of the brain.
3] Souls are created by God or gods. The MEPOV is generated and modified on the fly by the thinking meat.
4] Souls outlast bodies. The MEPOV dies with the body and may, perhaps, in extreme circumstances die and be replaced by another MEPOV in the same body.
5] Souls can exist outside bodies. The MPOV is effectively the running software part of a brain, asking where it is when there is no body is like asking where the car is when you have removed the chassis, bodywork, engine, wheels, trim and interior fittings.
6] Souls can go to heaven or hell. With no living body there is no MEPOV.
7] Souls can be bought and sold or owned by external actors. The MEPOV cannot be extracted or divorced from the body, experienced by anybody else, identified as an individual or delivered up therefore it is at once valueless to anybody else and priceless to its owner who is itself.
The MEPOV is not a translucent image of the body with wings and a harp. Neither is it the soul, the Mojo or the spirit. All such things are fictional inventions.
You can't excise the MEPOV from a brain without killing it, while certain brain structures seem to contain more of the first person perspective than others and damage to some brain structures changes the personality more than damage to other structures the brain works as a whole and the MPOV is no exception, it is a whole brain phenomenon. Of course the MEPOV is synonymous with consciousness, as long as we don't thoroughly understand consciousness we won't be able to reach a definitive conclusion about whether teleporting will ever be anything other than fantasy dressed as science.
The question boils down to is there a distinction between identical copies. Are all identical copies literally and essentially the same as each other? Not just X is like Y or equal to Y but X IS Y if it can be shown that they are indistinguishable. This is a clash of thinking, mathematics against natural language. If the two cannot be distinguished does the one on the left become the one on the right? To me the answer is no, of course not, that is why we invented the number two to cope with the concept of there being two distinct things whose only difference may be the fact that they have to be different because there is more than one of them! It might be a subtle difference but it is pretty fundamental. A copy of your body containing a copy of your brain contains a copy of you, not you. How could it ever be any other way? MPOV isn't some precious commodity that needs to be recycled, a human brain-body needs one and in working it generates one.
Stepping into a teleporter machine is effectively suicide. The only reason to do it would be if you were trapped in a hopeless situation and doomed to die no matter what you did. In those circumstances you can kill yourself in the transporter (with an anaesthetic if there is time) and a copy of you can live on to avoid your family having the pain of grieving for you or missing you. The more I think about it the more obvious it becomes, the people who will make transporters happen if anybody does are life insurance companies, avoiding teleporting when you have an option to would invalidate your cover in the same way suicide would, which is a really mind-buggering paradox when you think about it! They wouldn't care that it was the copy that carried on paying out the premiums and saved them from paying out. The copy could prove by DNA, retina scans, fingerprints, signature, PIN codes, passwords and answers to questions nobody else could answer that he is you as far as the entire universe is concerned except for you, who will be unable to be concerned, pained or interested by anything ever again. Your wife and children wouldn't know the difference and you would smell identical to your dog.
The superstitious soul-chasers amongst you will already have planted their imagination firmly behind the copy's eyeballs. Let them, poor deluded souls, it may give them solace in their last moment of consciousness. It seems whenever this subject is debated it is impossible to crowbar them out from that favourite vantage point: they so want teleporting to work the faith they demonstrate is quite touching. As soon as a copy is postulated they zap themselves inside it as quick as a flash and give up any link to the body they were born in so keen are they to zoom off into space and appear scientifically correct, it's quite pathetic at times.
Never forget why teleporting has entered our world as anything other than a fantasy concept e.g. the story of Aladdin's magical djinn, able to move people and things instantly from one part of the world to another or a science fiction fantasy story written around and exploring this intriguing concept e.g. Edward Page Mitchell's The Man Without a Body, 1877, Arthur Conan Doyle's The Disintegration Machine, 1927, or the 1958 film The Fly). It was a decision made by the producers of the television series Star Trek used the transporter as a way to economize on production costs by eliminating the need to film models of transporter shuttle craft taking off from the Enterprise or landing and taking off on the surface of numerous alien planets. By avoiding the use of a shuttle they got away from having to film scenes like these:
Teleport special effects can be done by a 13 year old child in three minutes flat: Beam me up Scotty (WMV file, 903 KB)
Once established as a “legitimately scientific” plot device teleporting became a sci-fi standard, if anybody made out that it was impossible they would be dismissed as supernaturalists. Strangely not even those with “the force” inside could teleport in the Star Wars universe despite dabbling in both telekinesis and a degree of telepathy, but as always this is thoroughly explained in the usual fantasy film way - you can see it happening can't ya? Shut up there's kids enjoying it, don't spoil it for them. No refunds!
Join in the debate, this one never ends!