Let's suppose that the fictional Star Trek transporter works like this:
A computer records the identity and position of every particle of your body as the transporter disassembles it, and the particles are stored locally in some sort of storage space, or perhaps annihilated by conversion to energy.
Simultaneously, it recreates those particles at a remote location, or perhaps harvests them from existing matter at that location, and reassembles your body to form an exact duplicate of what it disassembled. The important point here is that the only thing actually transferred to the destination is information; no actual particles of matter travel across the gap. Thus, you've been transported.
Or have you?
Objectively, it seems so to everyone, including you. After you've been transported, you seem to be the same person with the same memories that you had before, but are you?
Or did the "you" that stood on the transporter actually get killed? Does the transporter actually execute people and replace them with duplicates? Is it suicide to step on a transporter platform?
This seems more like a philosophical than a scientific question, so I'm posting it here. Some might argue that the Star trek transporter must be forever impossible because of the difficulty of resolving the paradox. Some might argue for the existence of a soul. What do you think? -
I
think there have been a lot of transporter threads in R&P this month -- maybe August is transporter month at JREF -- which have engendered some at times interesting, at times puzzling, discussions; but no matter how you untangle the strings and reassemble the atoms, all boil down to the same thing (part of a very old debate in philosophy); as philosophically as I can:
The transporter dilemma seems to trade on a simple, yet deep confusion of class and instance (and latterly perhaps, of the implications of materialism and idealism).
Let's say that I am conscious.
When I say I am conscious, I mean that I have that property: I am an instance of a conscious thing, something that is being conscious. We call being conscious, the active process, consciousness.
So my conscious activity or consciousness is an instance of the class of all activities that could be described as consciousness.
At this point, that is a very large class: it includes descriptions of all possible instances of consciousness, my own and anyone or anything else's capable of consciousness.
Now let's restrict this class to a unique member: a description of my own instance of consciousness at this moment. Let's call this class "my consciousness".
Now, as in the teleporter scenario, let's create a copy of me: that is, another instance of "my consciousness". We now have two instances of the same class, so it seems not to matter which we destroy, we will still have preserved "my consciousness".
The catch is: what have we preserved? Recall that "my consciousness" is "a description of my own instance of consciousness at this moment." But is a description identical with that which it describes? There seems to be something funny going on here.
Is an instance of a color identical to "a certain range of wavelength of light"? More plainly, is the description "a specific round orange-colored fruit" identical to an instance of "a specific round orange-colored fruit", that is, a specific orange? Two oranges, an original and a perfect copy, are certainly identical instances of the descriptive class "a specific round orange-colored fruit"; but are they identical with the description? Is the class more real than its instances?
This is a very old question in philosophy, going right back to Plato and Aristotle. Plato, the Idealist, would say yes, the "descriptive class", the idea, is more real than the "instance", or object; that the illusion of the instance is derived from the eternal reality of the class; Aristotle, the Materialist (actually, non-Idealist would be a better term, as Aristotle's "materialism" isn't fully worked out, but for the sake of contrast calling him a materialist doesn't do his philosophy too much harm) would say no, the class is a description of the instance(s), an order we perceive and describe, it arises out of the systematic world of things, and has no prior existence. It is a description of possible order, which is different from an actual object, an actual instance of that order. That even identical instances, therefore, are different things, not strictly interchangeable instances of a prior thing.
If two materially, algorithmically identical thermometers in different places are recording, conscious of, the same temperature at a given moment, have I lost anything by destroying one of them? Of course I have. I have lost a thermometer: have lost the possibility of recording temperatures at the location of the destroyed thermometer. I shouldn't expect that because for that moment the two thermometers were identical, right down to the process that gave rise to their identical temperature readings and the algorithm that describes it, that they are the same thermometerization. Just because they are identical temperature readings at that moment, doesn't mean they are identical readings of temperature. They are in different places. Destroying one discontinues the temperature reading in that place.
By the same token, just scaling up our thermometer consciousness to human consciousness, if two materially identical humans are conscious of the same things, have the same consciousness at a given moment, what do I lose by destroying one of them? One of them. Put more philosophically, I lose a local possibility of consciousness. Just because what they are conscious of is momentarily identical (from the point of view of class description), doesn't mean they are identical consciousnesses (and we're careful to differentiate here between the class of conscious experience and the two material instances, failure to do which creates the paradox). They are in different places. Destroying one discontinues the instance of consciousness in that place.
If I am that material instance, that destruction concerns me a lot, as a materialist. If I am an idealist, otoh, and believe that I am the descriptive class of my material consciousness, that I am the Idea of my consciousness, then no problem, let's teleport, destroy away...
But count me out,
I think (therefore, I am).
