[thechat] Dudes! Star Trek transporters are here

[Martin Burns]

On Tuesday, June 18, 2002, at 07:21  pm, aardvark wrote:

> similar experiment, too...  around the same time they stopped a
> photon of light and restarted it later on (although it was a different
> photon with exactly the same properties as the original)...

See, that's the bit that worries me (the thought struck me reading
Michael Crichton's Timeline).

If you were transported, and all of your molecules were annihilated at
one point and an exact copy recreated in another place, you'd be dead,
but the entity recreated would think it was you, and would report that
being teleported is fine and dandy. So on that evidence, I decide to
teleport over to Oregon for the weekend to suck back some beers with
Jeffy, Erika, Judah and co, and die in the process, but they'll never
know.

And there is no evidence possible to find which would tell anyone that
one consciousness ends and another takes up the thread. So there's only
a thought experiment to back up a rational argument why not to do it...

Cheers
Martin
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