The Ethics of Teleportation
Today, we thought that Echoes of Apollo would do something a little different. Here is a transcript of a recent discussion on “teleportation”. It is an interesting ethical problem whether you are religious of not. We believe that it is worthy of inclusion on our pages as ethics is a large part of space travel. Some Basic ethical questions would be: What safety requirements do you have for astronauts? Would a one way mission to mars be acceptable?
Today we look at the future – Teleportation. This discussion was started by Teresa Tutt of Houston Texas who is well known to those interested in space travel. She authored the four scenarios below to set the scene for the discussion. The names of those partaking have been changed. Teleportation is fiction today, but could happen in the future. If you wish to comment, the comment box is located the the bottom of the page. Links to relevant Wikipedia topics are below the scenarios. It should be noted that there was little discussion from the religious viewpoint, but issues are clearly mentioned below.
———————————————–
“A popular science fiction motif is teleportation. Despite having different forms (booth, beam, portal, etc.), they all work the same. You disappear one place and reappear in another.
Though it is highly unlikely that such a device a device will be invented in our lifetime, recent advances in quantum physics suggest that such a thing may eventually become possible. All engineering issues aside, there are certain philosophical and metaphysical issues involved.
The most serious of such issues is the one of continuity of existence. To illustrate, let us digress slightly by assuming that it becomes possible to make an exact copy of a person, right down to the quantum states of the individual atoms. The duplicate would be indistinguishable from the original. The duplicate would have all of the memories of the original. In fact, the duplicate would believe him/herself to be the same person as the original. Yet the original still exists. This gives rise to several disturbing scenarios:
Scenario 1
A device makes an exact copy of you. The duplicate, for all practical purposes , is you. Yet you exist separately from your duplicate. Now the duplicate leaves, and the two of your never have contact with each other again. The duplicate has a completely different life, as if you had a completely separate second life following your duplication. Yet the original “you” has no knowledge, experience, or sense of it.
Scenario 2
The device makes a copy of you as before. This time, the copy is created on the other side of the world. As before, you never have contact with each other, and your duplicate with your memories lives out a completely different life on the other side of the world. And you never know about it. Did you teleport across the world? Or did you stay home?
Scenario 3
Same as Scenario 1 with a disturbing twist. The device makes a copy of you. The duplicate “you” appears, then immediately fetches a disintegrator and proceeds to vapourise you. The duplicate has all of your memories and is essentially “you”. From the point of view of the duplicate, “you” have teleported into another location and then destroyed a copy of “you” that “you” found left behind. But did you?
-OR-
did you inadvertently commit suicide by having a copy of yourself made that then proceeded to kill you?
Scenario 4
Same as scenario 2 with the following change. Your duplicate is created in a far away location, but unfortunately it is necessary to destroy you in the process of creating your exact duplicate. Your duplicate will appear at the remote location with all your memories. From your duplicate’s point of view, “you” have teleported, plain and simple. Or did you?
-OR-
did you simply destroy yourself in order to create a duplicate at a remote location, one whose life of which the original “you” will never have any knowledge or experience?
Fortunately you or I are unlikely to have to face this issue in our lifetime. But in the unlikely event we do perfect a teleportation machine in our lifetime, please understand my reluctance to ride in one.”
Further reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleportation#Dematerialising
———–
Bill: Oh, this totally pushes all my buttons. When I was in grad school, the seat-of-consciousness problem was a huge on-going topic. I’ve probably done more than 100 hours of debate on this topic …
Sue: This raises the question as to what makes you “you.” Are you merely a physiological system or are you a soul presently housed in a body? Consider also that most (if not all) of the physiological “you” that existed 10 years ago is gone, replaced by other cells. So, are you still you?
Ted: I once read a short story in a science fiction magazine about this. I believe it was called “Searching for the Master” but that was 40 years ago. In the story, Sufi has become the official religion. Apparently Sufi believes at a person is a collection of information so that when a person is destroyed at the teleportation transmission point, all of his information is reconstructed at the teleportation receiving point and S/he continues to live. This is the theory behind the transporters in Star Trek. I tried googling the story but cannot find it.
Bill: This subject arouses serious conflict between cognitive scientists, attacking so deeply as it does the so-called “Mind-Body Problem” …
Jill: Did you see the TNG Episode “Second Chances”? That was one of the few Trek stories to have a true Science Fiction theme.
Sam: These sort of hypotheticals tend to beg the question of their extreme assumptions. Who is going to believe that the duplicate is truly an exact one? Lacking exactness means it feels like a fake – a simulacrum. Even if it were perfect, the copy would be left wondering if he lost something. (Too many Star Trek teleporter mishaps 
. ) Of course we aren’t even near perfect copies of ourselves. Our individual cells divide into two daughter cells – both are as much the original as the other, and yet neither are the exact original. Continuously our cells die, our bodies, thoughts and brain pathways change. What connection do we have to that little child of 5, or to that “self” of tomorrow?
Kerry: I’ve heard that teleportation would take an enormous amount of energy. I’m not sure whether that’s true. In the meantime, we should try astral projection. When teleportation technology first becomes available, we first should try it on buggy whips, pencils, and politicians.
Bill: Everything depends upon the distinction clarified in the scenarios of the original note. Do we consider a person the information that defines the physical object that instantiates the person, or do we consider the person to be the actual physical particles? If the former, we will be completely mapping that information in real-time capture within our lifetimes. If the latter, then the energy math has already been done, and it is prohibitive, for now.
Ted: Unfortunately, I don’t remember that TNG episode Teresa. The short story was either in Amazing Stories or Analog, the two science fiction magazines that I read at the time.
Bill: The answers to these questions are actually concrete and clear, empirically. Philosophy obfuscates them as a matter of stirring its own soup. The need to perpetuate emotional comfort is so great, however, that even thinkers like Ray Kurzweil can’t unflex …
James: I agree about emotions and religion making things more complex than they really are. From my viewpoint it is simple. If it is an exact copy, the copy has everything to the point of the copy and believes it teleported and unless you destroy the original, there are now two of you diverging at the point of copy. It is when we invest a soul into the picture that we cloud the waters. Is the copy soulless? Have we copied a soul? Have we created a new soul as they will differ over time?
I would like to believe that we are no more than the parts that make us, even though we feel that spiritually we may be more than the sum of our parts at times. This simplifies it for me. Most of the movies simply talk about dis-assembly and that sort of negates the need to kill off the original. It takes the question out of the movie unless they want to use it for the plot.
Bill: Ah, but one can leverage the “soul” argument in the case of natural clones, too, and this is one I’ve heard used against Pro-Lifers who feel that a “soul” goes into a zygote when the gametes fuse. In the instances when a “clone” split occurs, and identical twins result, is an extra “soul” toted in for infusion into the accidental twin?
Kerry: Interesting comment by Scott. (Actually, interesting comments by everyone, but I want to talk about Scott’s comment.) Nobody knows when the soul shows up — it could be at conception, it could be at birth, or sometime between those two events or before conception, or perhaps it is something that just develops over the course of a lifetime. I don’t see any reason to get all balled up with worrying about that when it comes to teleportation.
The soul either exists before an individual is created or it is created with the individual, or the individual creates it as a part of mapping living flesh. These are interesting thoughts to ponder when it comes to thinking about reincarnation, but it doesn’t much matter.
James: Sure, but this is a mature being that we are discussing with experiences. With clones or twins splitting off, they supposedly start out as fresh soul and immature beings. Transportation does differ from these scenarios in that if the two are indistinguishable at the instant of copying, the supposed souls are complete and identical at that instant. They only diverge a spilt second later. Anyway, no argument on the issue of souls. If we transport other animals without souls and it works, then the outcome must be challenging to religion if we ever transport people.
Yes, destroying the original will be killing it, but we cannot have copies running around every time we “transport”.
Kerry: But how would we know whether an animal we intend to transport has a soul? I know my dogs and cats have souls — I can see it in their eyes.
James: Aaahhh…. Is that just us projecting what we feel and since many of us believe we have souls, we thus believe that they have souls or are we talking about the attributes of an animal’s persona. Many religion disagrees with this. Most say that animals do not have souls. I believe that we have issues with understanding the totality of the animal and thus the old story of being greater than the sum of our parts. When you talk about impulses and neurons being simple physical happenings and you then look at “who we are” our cognitive being appears to be more than just these chemical constructs and chemical reactions, but is it really? We physically change our connections in our brain by the choices that we make, so we are changing our persona as we go along. People change when they want to and they become different. So do their brains. If the brain did not change I suggest that the person does not change either. I am very sure that we are who we want to be and that the physical construction of the brain is us – then diseases of the brain tend to change “who we are”. Anyway animals are who they are and pushing souls on to them is probably not the right question. The question is do we have souls – “now that is the right question”
Kerry: Yup, that’s the question. But we can get around the “soul” problem by transporting mass murderers. Seriously. First we transport objects, then mass murderers.
Bill: If we grant that consciousness is independent of “soul,” we can go a long way in terms of seating identity.
Kerry: Perhaps consciousness is the soul in flesh.
Bill: That is definitely the sentiment of those who approach this as science.
James: Yes, but can we destroy the original? Creating a copy is one thing (even it is done in the name of transporting), but destroying the original is another. Of course it is simpler if we have to disassemble the original to make this happen, but if the dis-assembly is unnecessary……???
Bill: There are various schools of thought. One posits that we can convert the actual particles of the body into an interim state, relocate them, and collapse them back to their original state. In this model, the original is not destroyed. In the second, the body’s information is completely copied and rendered using new matter. There are scenarios that are non-destructive, but the Uncertainty Principle dictates that this method could not be completely accurate. The alternate scenario is destructive: full, certain information about every component of the body is collected, and then rendered with new matter, but the original body is destroyed in the process.
Jack: I just hope I don’t have a fly in my teleportation device!
Hidden Cove Solutions – Specialist Information and Communications Technology Consultancy.
Teleportation – a Discussion
Today, we thought that Echoes of Apollo would do something a little different. Here is a transcript of a recent discussion on “teleportation”. It is an interesting ethical problem whether you are religious of not. We believe that it is worthy of inclusion on our pages as ethics is a large part of space travel. Some Basic ethical questions would be: What safety requirements do you have for astronauts? Would a one way mission to mars be acceptable?
Today we look at the future – Teleportation. This discussion was started by Teresa Tutt of Houston Texas who is well known to those interested in space travel. She authored the four scenarios below to set the scene for the discussion. The names of those partaking have been changed. Teleportation is fiction today, but could happen in the future. If you wish to comment, the comment box is located the the bottom of the page. Links to relevant Wikipedia topics are below the scenarios. It should be noted that there was little discussion from the religious viewpoint, but issues are clearly mentioned below.
———————————————–
“A popular science fiction motif is teleportation. Despite having different forms (booth, beam, portal, etc.), they all work the same. You disappear one place and reappear in another.
Though it is highly unlikely that such a device a device will be invented in our lifetime, recent advances in quantum physics suggest that such a thing may eventually become possible. All engineering issues aside, there are certain philosophical and metaphysical issues involved.
The most serious of such issues is the one of continuity of existence. To illustrate, let us digress slightly by assuming that it becomes possible to make an exact copy of a person, right down to the quantum states of the individual atoms. The duplicate would be indistinguishable from the original. The duplicate would have all of the memories of the original. In fact, the duplicate would believe him/herself to be the same person as the original. Yet the original still exists. This gives rise to several disturbing scenarios:
Scenario 1
A device makes an exact copy of you. The duplicate, for all practical purposes , is you. Yet you exist separately from your duplicate. Now the duplicate leaves, and the two of your never have contact with each other again. The duplicate has a completely different life, as if you had a completely separate second life following your duplication. Yet the original “you” has no knowledge, experience, or sense of it.
The device makes a copy of you as before. This time, the copy is created on the other side of the world. As before, you never have contact with each other, and your duplicate with your memories lives out a completely different life on the other side of the world. And you never know about it. Did you teleport across the world? Or did you stay home?
Scenario 3
Same as Scenario 1 with a disturbing twist. The device makes a copy of you. The duplicate “you” appears, then immediately fetches a disintegrator and proceeds to vapourise you. The duplicate has all of your memories and is essentially “you”. From the point of view of the duplicate, “you” have teleported into another location and then destroyed a copy of “you” that “you” found left behind. But did you?
-OR-
did you inadvertently commit suicide by having a copy of yourself made that then proceeded to kill you?
Scenario 4
Same as scenario 2 with the following change. Your duplicate is created in a far away location, but unfortunately it is necessary to destroy you in the process of creating your exact duplicate. Your duplicate will appear at the remote location with all your memories. From your duplicate’s point of view, “you” have teleported, plain and simple. Or did you?
-OR-
did you simply destroy yourself in order to create a duplicate at a remote location, one whose life of which the original “you” will never have any knowledge or experience?
Fortunately you or I are unlikely to have to face this issue in our lifetime. But in the unlikely event we do perfect a teleportation machine in our lifetime, please understand my reluctance to ride in one.”
Further reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleportation#Dematerialising
———–
Bill: Oh, this totally pushes all my buttons. When I was in grad school, the seat-of-consciousness problem was a huge on-going topic. I’ve probably done more than 100 hours of debate on this topic …
Sue: This raises the question as to what makes you “you.” Are you merely a physiological system or are you a soul presently housed in a body? Consider also that most (if not all) of the physiological “you” that existed 10 years ago is gone, replaced by other cells. So, are you still you?
Ted: I once read a short story in a science fiction magazine about this. I believe it was called “Searching for the Master” but that was 40 years ago. In the story, Sufi has become the official religion. Apparently Sufi believes at a person is a collection of information so that when a person is destroyed at the teleportation transmission point, all of his information is reconstructed at the teleportation receiving point and S/he continues to live. This is the theory behind the transporters in Star Trek. I tried googling the story but cannot find it.
Jill: Did you see the TNG Episode “Second Chances”? That was one of the few Trek stories to have a true Science Fiction theme.
Sam: These sort of hypotheticals tend to beg the question of their extreme assumptions. Who is going to believe that the duplicate is truly an exact one? Lacking exactness means it feels like a fake – a simulacrum. Even if it were perfect, the copy would be left wondering if he lost something. (Too many Star Trek teleporter mishaps
. ) Of course we aren’t even near perfect copies of ourselves. Our individual cells divide into two daughter cells – both are as much the original as the other, and yet neither are the exact original. Continuously our cells die, our bodies, thoughts and brain pathways change. What connection do we have to that little child of 5, or to that “self” of tomorrow?
Kerry: I’ve heard that teleportation would take an enormous amount of energy. I’m not sure whether that’s true. In the meantime, we should try astral projection. When teleportation technology first becomes available, we first should try it on buggy whips, pencils, and politicians.
Bill: Everything depends upon the distinction clarified in the scenarios of the original note. Do we consider a person the information that defines the physical object that instantiates the person, or do we consider the person to be the actual physical particles? If the former, we will be completely mapping that information in real-time capture within our lifetimes. If the latter, then the energy math has already been done, and it is prohibitive, for now.
Ted: Unfortunately, I don’t remember that TNG episode Teresa. The short story was either in Amazing Stories or Analog, the two science fiction magazines that I read at the time.
Bill: The answers to these questions are actually concrete and clear, empirically. Philosophy obfuscates them as a matter of stirring its own soup. The need to perpetuate emotional comfort is so great, however, that even thinkers like Ray Kurzweil can’t unflex …
James: I agree about emotions and religion making things more complex than they really are. From my viewpoint it is simple. If it is an exact copy, the copy has everything to the point of the copy and believes it teleported and unless you destroy the original, there are now two of you diverging at the point of copy. It is when we invest a soul into the picture that we cloud the waters. Is the copy soulless? Have we copied a soul? Have we created a new soul as they will differ over time?
I would like to believe that we are no more than the parts that make us, even though we feel that spiritually we may be more than the sum of our parts at times. This simplifies it for me. Most of the movies simply talk about dis-assembly and that sort of negates the need to kill off the original. It takes the question out of the movie unless they want to use it for the plot.
Kerry: Interesting comment by Scott. (Actually, interesting comments by everyone, but I want to talk about Scott’s comment.) Nobody knows when the soul shows up — it could be at conception, it could be at birth, or sometime between those two events or before conception, or perhaps it is something that just develops over the course of a lifetime. I don’t see any reason to get all balled up with worrying about that when it comes to teleportation.
The soul either exists before an individual is created or it is created with the individual, or the individual creates it as a part of mapping living flesh. These are interesting thoughts to ponder when it comes to thinking about reincarnation, but it doesn’t much matter.
James: Sure, but this is a mature being that we are discussing with experiences. With clones or twins splitting off, they supposedly start out as fresh soul and immature beings. Transportation does differ from these scenarios in that if the two are indistinguishable at the instant of copying, the supposed souls are complete and identical at that instant. They only diverge a spilt second later. Anyway, no argument on the issue of souls. If we transport other animals without souls and it works, then the outcome must be challenging to religion if we ever transport people.
Yes, destroying the original will be killing it, but we cannot have copies running around every time we “transport”.
Kerry: But how would we know whether an animal we intend to transport has a soul? I know my dogs and cats have souls — I can see it in their eyes.
Kerry: Yup, that’s the question. But we can get around the “soul” problem by transporting mass murderers. Seriously. First we transport objects, then mass murderers.
Bill: If we grant that consciousness is independent of “soul,” we can go a long way in terms of seating identity.
Kerry: Perhaps consciousness is the soul in flesh.
Bill: That is definitely the sentiment of those who approach this as science.
James: Yes, but can we destroy the original? Creating a copy is one thing (even it is done in the name of transporting), but destroying the original is another. Of course it is simpler if we have to disassemble the original to make this happen, but if the dis-assembly is unnecessary……???
Bill: There are various schools of thought. One posits that we can convert the actual particles of the body into an interim state, relocate them, and collapse them back to their original state. In this model, the original is not destroyed. In the second, the body’s information is completely copied and rendered using new matter. There are scenarios that are non-destructive, but the Uncertainty Principle dictates that this method could not be completely accurate. The alternate scenario is destructive: full, certain information about every component of the body is collected, and then rendered with new matter, but the original body is destroyed in the process.
Jack: I just hope I don’t have a fly in my teleportation device!