Ethics of Teleportation?

Avatar Korra

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I started thinking about how teleportation could possibly work. I could not fathom being able to teleport a whole human body through time and space, but I could fathom the idea of single atoms/particles.

So basically what the machine would do is desintegrate your body, and then reconstruct it somewhere else. So if it's pretty much breaking down your body, would that kill you? Would you be dead? Would the "person" teleported just be someone else living with the other person's body parts?

This is a statement I found in another forum after researching this after I thought about it.

"You could claim that you are essentially vapourising someone and then recreating an exact clone of them a few seconds later in a different place."

Here are some outcomes I figure would result from teleportation

- teleported body would be dead
- the body would be teleported so fast that your body is still living, but you would lose memory
- your brain/thoughts/memories would be restarted and your brain would be in an infant stage where you would need around 18 years to mature and learn to an adult level
-your "duplicate" thinks it's you and everybody else would think it's you but little do they know you're actually dead


So speaking of ethics, would this be ethical? Would creating a new body from the exact make-up of another human down to the very particles be ethical? I imagine this is in the same caliber of creating Frankenstein's monster where it's a living being living through other humans body parts.

So would the new constructed body have a soul?

Also, ignore the caption "Why teleportation is Evil" in the picture, that does not reflect my opinion of it, I just found that picture after researching what I had just thought about and it pretty much sums up what I was thinking.
 
Avatar Korra said:
- your brain/thoughts/memories would be restarted and your brain would be in an infant stage where you would need around 18 years to mature and learn to an adult level
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this is assuming that thoughts and memories arise from something else but the physical structure of the brain, which is a ridiculous assertion.

Maybe a way round this is to look at the net death: you kill the person in disintegration, but you also reform them exactly at the other end, undoing it. Overall you haven't killed anyone (as far as your knowledge of teleportation and what makes up a human being).
 
and most importantly, how many teleports should each person be allowed to have per day? surely we wouldn't just be allowed to teleport everywhere all of the time, that'd just be silly and an exploitation of what would probably be an expensive service, at least initially.

assuming you could teleport via. some kind of hand held device (so you could be anywhere you wanted, but only teleport to a teleportation bus stop, rather than only stop-stop travel), how many would we be allowed to have per day? surely the most important question and what we should really be discussing, rather than any ethical dilemmas- if that kind of technology is ever available, people will end up using it regardless. my friend said he thought we should only be allowed 3 per day, so we didn't get lazy. but then i asked what he'd do if he had already used (wasted) his daily 3 and then found himself in a life or death situation, where the teleport could save his life? 3 and 1 for emergencies

and also could we teleport anywhere we wanted? or only to certain 'teleport spots' like i mentioned earlier- like bus stops or train stations, but more conveniently placed. and obviously it'd all be set up and monitored by the government, so would you be able to teleport into other countries? you'd probably have to teleport into an airport and then be allowed into the country, ha.
 
Depends on whether or not a soul has a physical make-up. I think some guy measured that dying people lose a couple grams when they die, which he concluded was the soul leaving the body. Due to this, the soul would be transported to the new body, so you would still be you in every sense of the word.

Also, it doesn't really matter who the person at the other end is if you're wearing a red shirt; you're just gonna die a few seconds after you get there, anyway.
 
This stuff actually scares the hell out of me.

I'd want extensive and repeatable scientific research into the nature of consciousness before I ever step in a teleporter.
 
I'm....more worried about what happens during dc's you know..

"Sorry mam we disconnected during your son's teleportation, would you like to restore the last saved version"?

Yikes.
 
Several episodes of the various Star Trek series explore these thoughts. Most of them explore what would happen if something went wrong. McCoy wouldn't dare use a teleporter for the first season because he was so afraid of an accident. And especially in the original series, as well as Enterprise, they had sufficient reason to worry. The crew of Deep Space Nine discovered a second Riker, who, in the chaos of abandoning a defunct space station, should have been destroyed on the sending end during transport, but wasn't, and was trapped, alone, on the powerless space station for 15 years. In an episode of Next Generation, they found Scotty (who should have been dead about a hundred years before), who had stuck himself in an "ancient" transporter, and set it to loop, when his ship was about to run out of life support.

Honestly though, while these are interesting thought experiments, and I so dearly do wish they were in any way realistic, I can't convince myself that we'll ever come to a point where anything like this will be possible. The human body is so complex, and we're nowhere near doing even the simplest version of this kind of teleportation.

But who knows. Maybe someone will think up a different kind of teleportation that doesn't have these kinds of moral quandaries. Maybe we'll be able to Tesseract someday. Then we wouldn't have to worry about the morality of destroying and recreating human life. Instead of destroying, sending information, and rebuilding, we'll just scrunch up space and time between us and where we want to go. Or maybe we'll somehow step "around" all the stuff between us and where we want to go (a shorter route than a straight line). Teleportation doesn't necessarily have to have that baggage.
 
Basically, this thread is about the Hugh Jackman plotline in The Prestige. Which just happens to be an amazing film, and tackles these very issues squarely.

Basically, Jackman created a duplicate of himself and then was forced to kill off the old one by drowning it beneath the stage. Thus, he "disappeared/transported".
 
Remember, bits of your body are continuously replaced. Only a few cells in your body today were there ten years ago. The rest of your cells anno 2003 are dead and shed from your body now (some bone marrow cells stay alive as long as you do (and then some) if I remember correctly). Doesn't that mean you've gone through the exact same before, just slower?

For that matter, can you be certain that the mind you woke up with this morning was the same as you had when you went to sleep yesterday? What if everything you remember is nothing but memories a now-dead conscious mind left as neural patterns in your brain the last time your body went to sleep? And that your (current) conscious mind will die away tonight, for the memories to be passed on to a totally new mind that unknowingly accepts them as memories of its own?

Philosophy is awful. That's why I became an engineer.
 
Having slept many thousands of times, I can say that I have the same consciousness as I have always had with at least enough certainly that sleeping doesn't scare the shit out of me. Sleeping is hard enough already. But I've never been teleported so I don't know about that.

But then again I am also more of an engineer than a philosopher.
 
Assuming there is a machine that can 3D-print a perfect living clone of a living being in a split-second, the means to gather the data for it in a split-second, the means to disintegrate an entire body with virtually no remains in a split-second, and something to power all that easily enough to make it practical...

There'd probably be a work-around.

Like, instead of actually making new bodies all the time, it just freezes the ones you're not using currently up, and synchs memories. Or it doesn't freeze them, there will be two or more yous active, and memory synchronization is applied. Or not applied, and you just discuss matters frequently with your clone. Or whatever.
 
I don't think the issue at hand is the physical body being destroyed but rather the specific person - while for an outsider, it might seem as if the two people are the same, it is likely and very possible that the person teleporting simply dies, only to be replaced by an identical clone, with the same personality and memories.
 
the question of this debate is whether you believe that we have free will and/or we have "something" more than matter governing our actions. If we do not... then this leads to all sorts of... interesting routes such as saving the exact particle configuration of your body as a "save state" to revert to / teleport / clone.
there would be a LOT more to the technology behind teleportation than just teleportation itself is we are able to measure to that degree.
also, to really make an exact copy you would need to violate heisenberg's uncertainty principle. if you have particles with slightly different momentums and positions in the brain, it could potential lead to a "different" person. this would remain a concern until we have completely... fleshed out what exactly makes us people and what exactly goes on in our brains to simulate sentience.
 
Yeah, we'd have to figure out how to use annihilation power first.

After all, mass can't just vanish. It can only go over to other forms of mass. Or, in extreme circumstances, converted to energy. The amount of energy contained in any amount of mass is E = mc^2. And since c is the speed of light in metres per second, c^2 is a HUGE number for most values of m. A person weighing 75 kilograms has a stored energy equivalent to 1,611 megatons of TNT (a significant percentage of the combined power of the US nuclear arsenal). Somehow, all this energy would have to be harnessed and sent safely to your destination. If anything goes wrong with the harnessing, and the energy is accidentally released at once, there goes your city.

But that's not the worst part. The worst part is that for a 100% teleportation to take place, some assembly would be required. You'd have to put every single atom in a person in the exact same place as it was before teleportation. Just the coordinates of those atoms would fill a whooping number of Petabytes. This data has to be gathered, sent over without any loss, and put to use to reassemble a new you.

The worst part of the assembly process is that you'd have to convert all these atoms from pure energy - individually - then place them in the right spot. And as any big LEGO structure can tell you, it requires a lot more effort to put things together in the right fashion than it took to take it apart. And a teleportation is akin to melting the individual LEGO bricks down, moving them along a hose, then re-moulding them at the other end before putting every brick in the right position. All those Megatons of TNT would only get you the mass back from energy, as a cloud of particles. Now have fun assembling. You'd need a gargantuan amount of energy to move the individual particles in place.

I think scientists would have found a way around the "death" problem some time before we develop the technology to do all that. Perhaps the process won't even involve conversion of matter to energy and back, instead exploiting some loophole in physics we've yet to discover.
 
Why would we have to destroy the original body? Why would we have to create a perfect replica on the other end?

What if, instead of all the effort spent on creating a perfect copy, we just built a temporary body, maybe not even a fully-functioning, self controlled body, but something we could control from our end, did the work we wanted to do, and destroyed that body?

Strictly speaking to the type of "teleportation" you mention in the OP, the original body, the atoms, the molecules, the body itself, is never "transported" in any way to the destination. You don't really go there. So we're not really losing anything if we don't create a perfect replica on the other end. You weren't there in the first place.

Something like those remote-controlled putty people in that acid factory in that Dr. Who episode. Except probably not putty and probably a robot.
 
vonFiedler said:
Having slept many thousands of times, I can say that I have the same consciousness as I have always had with at least enough certainly that sleeping doesn't scare the shit out of me. Sleeping is hard enough already. But I've never been teleported so I don't know about that.

But then again I am also more of an engineer than a philosopher.
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you only think you do :oooo
 
vonFiedler said:
Having slept many thousands of times, I can say that I have the same consciousness as I have always had with at least enough certainly that sleeping doesn't scare the shit out of me. Sleeping is hard enough already.
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Yeah no shit I think I do, the important part is I'm literally willing to bet my life on it. Teleporters not so much.
 
A person is more than just the sum of his components, I don't put any thought into the idea of being disintegrated and rebuilt at another location.
 
teleportation is essentially a sped up version of the ship of theseus; if the atoms of your body are ripped apart one by one and then rearranged in the exact same order at another location, would you still be you? can human consciousness be expressed in terms something as tangibly humble as a string of atoms? one can only wonder
 
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