Great blog, Sean! And I recommend to everyone your “The Teaching Company” course on cosmology. Excellent!!

I think a related question also is the “Ship of Theseus”: if you have a ship and once every year you replace one plank of wood or part until finally no original parts are left, is it the same ship? If you believe that it is, then you should therefore think that the “new” person is definitely “you” , and if you think it is a new ship than you should think that the “new” person is indeed a new person. That in itself is a whole ‘nother debate though isn’t it?

For me, it is very difficult to decide whether or not it is something you should “who cares?” about; it perhaps is not relevant, but that does not mean you should not care. In fact, that’s a whole different debate isn’t it? I think you could spend ages just debating whether or not you should. Most philosophers say they are awful at finding out the truth, just good at asking questions and I think this is a good example.

The whole continuity of self question has so many different explanations, and some of them are definitely the religious metaphysical views… Another interesting thing to think about is the nature of the mind in this situation… whether it is the “software of the brain,” just the brain, or completely separate.

Sorry if I was vague at all I’m pretty undecided on this one (which I think is totally fine… I think that most philosophers are undecided about most things…). I think that it is good to just lay out all the views.

P.S. This blog is the best… How many blogs talk about astrophysics and Philosophy of the Self?
P.P.S. Can’t wait for your book… definitely buying it.

In the story “Think Like a Dinosaur” by James Patrick Kelly, there is a teleportation station which operates as follows: the person to be teleported is rendered unconscious; all the information about her is sent to her destination, where she is reconstructed; and then the original is killed, while still unconscious. The part about the original being killed is kept secret. In the story there is a screw-up and the original wakes up after being teleported, but the aliens who run the network as a whole insist that the human operator of the station kill her.

Possibly nothing. That’s why this sort of philosophy is known as metaphysics

Also, as for continuity, what’s so special about that?

Again, possibly nothing. It is an older concept that may or may not be relevant since the development of quantum theories.

Six months later she is killed in an accident. He is devastated, but eventually learns from a friend in the teleportation industry that in peak periods passengers are sometimes recorded for later transmission.

Their records are still available; the friend pulls strings and gets her reconstituted. The groom is ecstatic, of course, but discovers that she has no memory of the honeymoon, of their time together, or of course the accident. The marriage breaks up.

The story would have been even more poignant if they had had a three-year-old child at the time of her death.

…Also, I’m 90% sure that the duplicate of me would be a lot bigger jerk than I am.

So there is no single particle in your entire body that actually exists from moment to moment! Every particle in your body is constantly being annihilated and recreated! You’re essentially being “teleported” from one moment to the next! The metaphysical problem of teleportation is therefore entirely moot.”

I don’t see why you think details of QM (which I’m pretty sure many here know quite well) somehow make “metaphysical problem of teleportation entirely moot.”

Yes, virtual particles impinge on real ones but for most purposes the effect is negligible and since energy is conserved if you have one electron at some location it will still be roughly in the same place later. Going by the usual terminology it will be the same electron as there is no way to tell the original one from the virtual-promoted-to-real one.

It’s also a matter of interpretation, for example I consider virtual particles nothing more then an artifact of forcing particle description on fundamental fields so to me it is always the same localized electron excitation anyway, it is just continually perturbed by vacuum fields.

Wanu: “In your face, philosophers! Learn a little quantum mechanics, and your lives will be easier.”
Learn even more quantum mechanics and you see it is an incomplete, inconsistent mess open to many vastly different interpretations so if anything it makes philosophy much harder not easier.

But it’s one thing to acknowledge this formally, and it’s totally different to have a deep understanding of this by breaking the illusion. When a Buddhist achieves this deep understanding, it’s called “awakening”.

Of course, they didn’t have to worry about many-worlds, quantum teleportation & such, but it was an astute observation nonetheless.

Another interesting related subject is memory storage. Humans can’t really hope to be 100% eternal and invulnerable – accidents do happen. But we can, in principle, create a central storage bank for all memories, where you could “back up” your consciousness before going to try to do something foolish (to explore the galaxy, perhaps, or even jump into the black hole). Then, if the word gets to the central bank that the individual got killed by an accident, the central bank simply spawns a new instance of the same individual.

1) Continuous conscious experience is illusory, based on a reconstruction of one’s memories. In this case, my consciousness does continue into the new body, and I survive, since the new body has a copy of my brain and can reconstruct my past through the memories stored in it.

2) Conscious experience ends when the brain is destroyed, therefore I am dead once the teleporter breaks down the original body. This idea scares me a little. Ultimately, no matter how perfect the copy is, this brain will be destroyed and will no longer experience qualia. Maybe the copy can be considered to have my identity, but I have still, in a sense, died.

That doesn’t even get into the duplicate question. In a way, that can be comforting, my original brain and body are still functioning and experiencing, but then we get into the thorny identity question: Are we both the same person, or is this the original “me” and a false “me”?

However, there is the small matter (pun intended) of information. Before I was born, there was no information about me: I did not exist in physical space or in information space. While being teleported, I no longer exist in physical space but I do exist in information space – my information is preserved and I am reconstructed from it on the other end. After I die, it should be possible (in theory) to save my information and reconstruct me later. If my information (configuration and quantum state) is lost, then I cannot be reconstructed. So there are two types of death, physical death – the body no longer can maintain itself in the steady state we call life and the atoms disperse – and information death – all information about your living configuration is lost. Information death is final.

Of course, identity is not stored in a person’s body, it’s in the mind, which is still not a well-defined entity. If you reconstruct someone’s body but not his/her mind, you have a clone – genetically identical but a separate person. So people are not the same as the ship of theseus or a lego house; it is not the structure of the body but the mind that is important. Can a teleporter capture and reconstruct the mind? That’s the key question.

I have to admit that it would be great to teleport at lunch and carve a few turns at my favorite ski resort, then teleport back for that afternoon meeting; and with teleportation, no lift lines!

Do they think they are the same house?