this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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People experiencing the transport process is due not understanding how copies work. Damn, they don't seem to grasp the idea of a backup.
Seeing as anything that we copy or make backups of now is not self-aware, I don't see what that has to do with anything. If anything, a teleport (as conceived of and described in science fiction, not how it might "actually" work) is more like moving a file from one tree to another. The whole idea of the teleport as a plot device is to create a form of near-instant transportation. I feel like these thought exercises where "what if the teleporter cloned you and killed the original copy" miss that.
Its like, "hmm what if the train from New York to Boston actually brought you to a cloning facility in New Haven, shot you in the head and then replaced you with a lab-grown clone that went on to Boston in your stead" well then it wouldn't be what most people think of when they think of taking the train.
In order for me to be convinced that the common depiction of teleportation is a form of cloning and murder, I would need someone to prove to me that humans have souls in a metaphysical sense - that there's something about us as individuals beyond the sum of our lived experiences and the atoms that make up our bodies.
Sorry, no it's not. When you introduce technobabble related to "buffers" and "caches" where the information is stored temporarily, the working must conform to the way files are handled. Yes, you can handwave whatever you like for narrative purposes, but this discussion is not supposed to have as a valid answer "a wizard did it".
That is ridiculous. Please search the short stories "The phantom of Kansas" by John Varley and "Think like a dinosaur" by James Patrick Kelly to see the implications of this kind of transport. Neither posits the existence of a soul, and the scenario of "the original dies, a copy keeps living" is very clearly shown as the only valid explanation, and how the assumption that the person is the same after the transport (or the cloning, in the first story, but the effect are the same) is merely a legal fiction for convenience.
In any transport there's a copy, and any copy takes a non-zero time and an instant where the copied person must exist in two places at the time. Unless the spacetime is curved and poked and you transit through the hole, there is no other viable model.