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Offline Karlos

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Re: Teleportation
« on: May 20, 2007, 01:14:47 PM »
Nothing will be like it is in Star Trek, which is cringingly lame in just about every technological prediction it has made. You can forgive the original series for a lot of its naivety, but the ones that were made subsequently...

Proof: Do you really think a race which has achieved molecular level replication, FTL travel, artificial gravity, matter teleportation would be using touch-screen computer terminals? ;-)

I find either wormhole generation or something like Greg Bear's "descriptor theory" based teleportation far more likely for a species that has a decent grasp of cosmology / quantum mechanics.

-edit-

Which is nice, because it completely disposes with your original problem. Neither solution implies any required deconstruction/information transmission/reconstruction of the teleported matter. The closest you get to that is Bear's descriptor theory approach in which every particle in the body to be moved is momentarily made congruent with one under explicit quantum control and simply have their positional data "edited" in place. The universe doesn't care, provided the net change in energy is zero... He uses the mechanism in "Moving Mars" to, erm, well... move Mars. To an entirely different star system.
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Offline Karlos

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Re: Teleportation
« Reply #1 on: May 20, 2007, 01:20:32 PM »
@A4000_Mad

If you subscribe to the notion that the future is a divergent set of possible outcomes based on the present, it might be possible to rationalise the past in the same way.

That would open up a possible solution. If you were to go back in time and kill an ancestor, it may only be one possible alternate history in which it happend. There could be a near infinite number of alternate histories in which it didn't. A congruent history convergent with it up until the present would still exist, otherwise identical except you didn't kill your ancestor and that one would become the originator for your existence in the present, ready to go back in time and eliminate yet another....

Maybe...:lol:
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Offline Karlos

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Re: Teleportation
« Reply #2 on: May 20, 2007, 02:41:24 PM »
It is a difficult question. First of all, if the original person is not destroyed before their clone is reconstructed at the receiving end, they are not the same person anymore. Any overlap conscious existence immediately renders them different people. The clone would have the memory of arriving at the destination, the original would not. They diverge from that moment onward.

If the process physically destroys the original prior to the construction of the clone, it's harder to say. The clone would have the conscious memory of the original and would likely regard him/herself as the same person, despite the obvious interruption of physical existence.

A persons identity is strongly bound to their past experiences, which in turn exists only as memory for that individual. If you think about it, when you woke up this morning, your sole connection to the past is only a memory. You have no conscious recollection of the intervening time asleep. So, from that perspective, a teleported person has a sense of continuity that we are likely comfortable with.

However, you do have the additional knowledge that your body is the same one that got into bed and went to sleep. I would suggest that this knowledge, often overlooked, is also subliminally fundamental to our sense of continuity. A person teleporting according to your proposed method, fully aware of the way in which it operates, would not have this reassurance.

In my opinion, a clone, no matter how perfect, is not the original entity. Without continuity of their physical and mental existence, they would cease to be the same individual.

Worse still, I would imagine the cloned entity would eventually develop some form of neuroses deriving from the knowledge of the destruction of their original self.
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Offline Karlos

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Re: Teleportation
« Reply #3 on: May 20, 2007, 02:49:21 PM »
Quote
Worse still, I would imagine the cloned entity would eventually develop some form of neuroses deriving from the knowledge of the destruction of their original self.


Having said that, I'm not sure. After all, there are people alive that have received organs from other people. What psycological effects occur when you know that the heart in your chest was actually someone elses?

In these situations, people probably overcome any qualms they may have via the knowledge that without it, they'd probably die.

Still, the teleport situation is different. It's your whole body that is being replaced. None of it is the original one you remember...
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Offline Karlos

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Re: Teleportation
« Reply #4 on: May 23, 2007, 10:00:13 PM »
Quote
How can you copy something without knowing its current state?


Easy, make sure whatever it is implements the following:

Code: [Select]

class Cloneable {
  public:
    virtual Cloneable* clone() = 0;
    virtual ~Cloneable() {}
};


and leave it up to the thing itself to worry about how it is copied ;-)
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Offline Karlos

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Re: Teleportation
« Reply #5 on: May 24, 2007, 01:29:32 PM »
Your signature said as much already ;-)
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