Fiction:PGPS/Philosophy of Teleportation

Philosophy of Teleportation

by Prof. Kiqhle Sostoui

As soon as the concept of teleportation arises with a technologically-minded society, individuals strive to figure out how such an action may be achieved, and it seems to be a universal cultural invariant that one idea is quickly invented and then leads to incessant philosophical debate: disintegration and replication, or destructive teleportation. While teleportation in the real world is usually a form of whole-body hyperspace transit, it is still worth considering the implications of teleportation of the destructive variety. Here, I shall discuss and analyse the common metaphysical viewpoints that are commonly brought up within debates on this topic.

First, let us consider the process. A destructive teleporter would work by taking the information about how matter is arranged within a conscious being and destroying the body. Then, the information may be stored or transmitted to an appropriate receiver, and used to assemble raw materials into a replica of the original being. Leaving aside the practicalities of this process (inefficiency, transfer rate, uncertainty principle, etc.), the related philosophical issues can be summarised by "does the new body have the same consciousness as the original?", where "consciousness" should often, but not always, be understood to mean "possession of qualia". If the answer is negative, then this raises ethical considerations, particularly whether teleportation is murder.

To many people in the modern world, it might seem strange that the existence of does not immediately refute the doctine of physicalism, which states that only non-physical properties - those relating to the interactions between objects - exist, and thus qualia do not. While the discovery of Essence did refute a related ontology, materialism, Essence is still something that has physical effects. Modern physicalists maintain that consciousness is not an object, but merely an activity performed by a physical system, and that Essence is perfectly capable of playing the role of said system.
 * Physicalism

Regardless of whether physicalism is correct or not, it does provide an answer for an analogy that is commonly applied to support the duplicated consciousness being distinct from the original, namely that if the new body is created before the original is destroyed, then there will be two distinct minds, and after the destruction of the latter, the new body will not gain the post-replication memories of the original. The explanation of this is simple: there is no further transfer of information between the two minds after replication. Being an activity rather than object, the consciousness is split between two minds, not maintained in the first and merely duplicated in the other, and the post-replication history of the original mind ceases to continue when said mind is destroyed, while the pre-replication history continues to exist in the replicated body. Despite appearances, it is physically a very different situation to if original mind is destroyed and all of its history becomes part of a replicated body.

With physicalism, the outcome of destructive teleportation clearly does result in the new body possessing the consciousness of the original, since consciousness is just an activity performed by a physical system, and if the intial state of a system - whether it is made of atoms or of Essence - is the same as the final state of another system then, as far as physics is concerned, it is completely indistinguishable to if the original system had been allowed to continue to run uninterrupted. If one wishes to maintain that the consciousness of the new body is not the same as that of the original, one must believe that there is more to consciousness than the physical process.


 * Continuity of identity


 * Soul migration


 * Probably some other stuff if Ghelae can think of it

Comments
Use Message Templates