Last week I Twittered/Facebooked some provocative results from a poll of philosophers. In particular, this little tidbit:
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death?
Accept or lean toward: survival 337 / 931 (36.1%) Other 304 / 931 (32.6%) Accept or lean toward: death 290 / 931 (31.1%)
Yes, that’s all the detail presented in the question: “Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death?” As a professional philosopher, you’re supposed to be familiar with the issue, which I reconstruct as follows. Imagine that someone has invented a working teleportation device. You step in the box, lights flash and sparks fly, and “you” rematerialize in another box, exactly the same in every way, but constructed out of a completely new collection of atoms. The original version of you is destroyed. Did you die? (And then, what if a million years passed in between the two events?)
It would probably be annoying to real philosophers, but I personally put this question in the category of “Not that hard.” And I would phrase my answer as: “Who cares?” What we should care about is how well the teleporter actually works — is the reconstructed person really in exactly the same quantum state as the original one was in? Same memories, feelings, etc? That’s an interesting technology question.
But there’s no interesting question associated with “Did you really die when you were teleported?”, or “Are you really the same person after being teleported?” These are just bad questions. They assume a certain way of looking at the world that ceases to be useful once we’ve invented teleportation. Namely, they assume that there’s a certain “essence of you-ness” that is (somehow) associated with your physical body and continues through time. That’s a perfectly sensible way of talking in the real world, where we don’t have access to duplicator devices or transporter machines. But if we did, that conception would no longer be very useful. There is a person who stepped into the first box, and a person who stepped out of the second box, and obviously they have a lot in common. But to sit down and demand that we decide whether they are “really” the same person is just a waste of time — there is no such “really.”
Which isn’t to say there aren’t interesting questions along these lines, but they are operational questions — how should I actually act, or what should I actually expect to happen, in these situations? — rather than arid metaphysical ones. What if you murdered someone, and then teleported — would the reconstructed person still be guilty of murder? That’s not quite the right question, because it still relies on the slippery essence of continuous personhood, but there’s a closely related sensible question — should we treat the reconstructed person as if they had committed murder? And it seems to me that the answer is clearly “yes” — whatever good reasons we had for treating the pre-teleportation person in a certain way, those reasons should still apply to the post-teleportation person.
The issue of duplication seems much thornier to me than the issue of teleportation. If someone made an exact copy of a known murderer, should we treat both the original and the copy as murderers? (I vote “yes.”) Fine, but what about the view from the inside? Let’s say you have an offer to get paid $100 if you let yourself be copied, with the proviso that after being copied one of the two of you will randomly be chosen for immediate painless execution. Do you take that deal?
I think problems like that are legitimately interesting, although to a great extent their mystery relies on the inadequacy of our conceptions of death. Most of us don’t want to die, at least not right away. But if we did die, we’d be gone, and wouldn’t have any wants or desires any more — but it’s very hard to consistently reason that way. Note that if we replaced “immediate painless execution” with “prolonged torture,” it seems like a much more straightforward question.
This showed up in our long-ago discussion of the quantum suicide experiment. In the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, you can make measurements that split the wave function of the universe into distinct branches. In some sense, then, you really do have a duplicator machine — it’s just that the whole universe gets duplicated, not just you. Some folks have tried to argue against this idea by pushing adherents into a logical cul de sac. You shouldn’t (to make a long story short) be averse to bargains that leave you dead with large probability, as long as there exist branches of the wave function where you are alive and flourishing — after all, in the branches where you are dead you don’t care any more, right?
My point in that earlier post — a point I somehow managed to completely obscure — was that these are misleading thought experiments, because very few of us would take seriously the corresponding classical suicide experiment. “Here, I’ll flip a coin, and give you $100 if it’s heads and shoot you instantly dead if it’s tails. Deal?” Very little temptation to take that offer. But the logic is essentially the same — if you’re dead you don’t care, right? (For purposes of these thought experiments we always assume you have no friends or loved ones who would miss you; it’s just part of the philosophical game, not a comment on your actual social situation.)
At some point in thinking about the many-worlds interpretation, issues like this inevitably do come up. That’s what David Albert and I talked about a bit on Bloggingheads. There might be a certain measurement that yields result A 10% of the time, and result B 90% of the time. But in the MWI, the measurement splits the universe into two branches, and you end up either in the branch where you saw A or the branch where you saw B. What does it mean to say that you had a “10% chance of measuring A”? You either did or you didn’t — there is no ensemble of millions of you all doing the same experiment. People have made progress on these questions — here’s a talk by David Wallace on his work with David Deutsch in attacking this problem. (Don’t ask me why everyone who thinks about these issues is named “David.”) I haven’t ever looked at this work closely enough to have an informed opinion.
All I know is that being able to teleport around would be really cool.
“Now, to fully change out my atoms takes a long time”
Not really. Soft tissues change over on a weeks to months timescale, and even bones exhibit significant exchange on the decadal scale. The only atoms that really stay put are in your teeth.
Followup question for philosophers who answered “death”: David is sentenced to death for a murder. David then walks into a teletransporter and David Prime walks out the other side. Is David Prime free to go?
As soon as I can verify the existence of angels, and ascertain the minimum amount of real estate it takes for each of them to be able to dance, I’m sure I’ll be able to answer the question concerning how many can dance on the head of a pin with at least some authority.
Similarly, just as soon as someone develops a supportable hypothesis as to how teleportation or copying of human beings might take place I’m reasonably sure there will be some viable clues in the hypothesis as to the identity of the copies or teleportee. Until at least that time, I’d just as soon the legal and political systems–or “philosophers”– didn’t spend effort determining who is responsible for any crimes that may have occurred prior to teleport/copying activities. Can’t you guys speculate on how to develop an inexhaustible, safe, non-polluting, and easily transportable form of energy?
Knee jerk reaction makes me believe it will not be me, no matter how close to the original it is. By the same token, I am not ok with the concept of some kind of “soul” to some way guarantee a single unique me.
If we extent the concept to more mundane example… someone knocks you out, you lose all consciousness for some hours. The process of waking from this lapsed consciousness may be akin to what would happen if my “self” was faithfully reconstructed. However where does *me* reside if the glitch that keeps the original occur?
Diving off the deeper end here…
In fact, death may be nothing more than a permanent lapse in consciousness, so to lose consciousness may be akin to an impermanent death…
Even sleep may count… in which case night’s sleep may be a death/rebirth.
Now the tricky part… even if you DID do this experiment… how would you answer the question?
Requisite xkcd strip here.
So if you have two lego houses, made with the exact same design, are they the same house?
George Musser Says:
December 15th, 2009 at 11:39 am
Has anyone ever calculated how long it takes for all the atoms in our body to be turned over — that is, to be excreted and replaced with atoms from the air or food? (Like the ship of Theseus.)
George
First, I thought Sean’s treatment of this subject was pretty good.
Now, do we really CARE that every atom and molecule in our body is replaced periodically? We just know factually that they are and can measure the processes involved.
I’m not at all sure this question of teleportation is all that philosophical. Rather, in a universe where all information is permanently embedded in the manifold and where time is an illusion…well, we exist as ourselves permanently…we just observe and experience ourselves over and over again.
I agree with Sean’s intuition. A murderer is a murderer, is a murderer. What we are is what we are- forever. The number of “readings” (presumably a near infinite number) we make of the information doesn’t change what is in place within the manifold.
We are instinctively interested in this kind of subject not just because of idle philospohical curiosity, but our scientific aquaintence with current scientific cosmological models…models, some of which imply continuity in the existience of everything in the universe- including us.
To my mind, the duplication question makes it pretty clear that the person stepping out of the transporter on the other end is -not- the person who stepped in. It is an identical copy, and will surely -think- it is the same. It may not be distinguishable from the original, but if, as stated, the only difference between teleportation and duplication is the destruction of the original, how does the destruction (or not) of the original alter the identity of the teleported?
The teleportation creates a new person if the old person may or may not be destroyed. The legal ramifications, of course, are a matter for the lawyers, but the teleported will feel like a continuation of the teleportee and the teleportee will insist that he hasn’t gone anywhere at all. The instant the two exist in different points in space, they are two different objects. If the destruction of the original is a necessary part of the teleportation, that just means we don’t have a dissenting opinion on the identity of the teleported. If the teleportation actually moves the teleportee from one point to another bit by bit, then there is no potential for duplication, at no point could the singular become multiple objects, and the situation is equal to moving the person via spaceship (Theseus’ spaceship, presumably).
Identity isn’t really well defined here, it seems to either rely on the opinion of the identified, or be a purely empircal external measurement – but if you can measure that well, you’ll measure the difference of opinion, no?
It’s the human aspect that gets people – if someone told you to go into a little room and be destroyed, but don’t worry, a person who thinks they are you will step out on mars, would you do it? If you went to sleep and woke up to find another you, the one who stayed up all night and therefore thinks he is the real you, what would you do?
Side question: if 8 electrons are all identical, are they all the same electron? If four are arranged in a square formation, and the other four are arranged in the same formation elsewhere, are the squares identical? Are they the same square?
PS: Atoms, shmatoms, it’s the macroscopic configuration of molecules and the emergent dynamics of my brain that makes me (think I am) me, not the specific carbon atoms.
Perhaps I’m missing something here, but, assuming the teleporter renders a duplicate that is physically indistinguishable from the person who was duplicated, that “duplicate” IS the person, correct? If you can’t physically tell him or her apart from the “original”, it makes as much sense to call that person a copy as it would if they walked across the room, no? If there’s no physical difference, there’s NO difference. Maybe this is what Sean is getting at, but isn’t the question “If you’re teleported, are you killed?” simply a non sequitur? If I walk across the room, no one asks about my soul, so why should they if I’m teleported? If every atom in my body is copied exactly, precisely nothing happened to me but a change in location. No other means of distinguishing my before and after states are possible, even in principle, right? So where’s the puzzle?
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A PS to post 17,
The periodic replacement of every atom in our bodies without changing our identities might well be dimensionally projective of our possible continuing existence within a higher dimensional structure.
Our day to day lives in that scenario are a 4D cross section of reality, and we can see interesting hints about the true nature of our eternally existing selves when we carefully observe phenomena in the 4D world around us…Platonism…a universe in a marginally closed spherical geometry.
Thanks George!
Sean–
Let me blow all of your minds: When you zoom in on any electron or quark in your body, you’ll find that it’s in a sea of indistinguishable virtual particles that are constantly switching places with it. (Through the magic of renormalization, the effect of these processes averages away at larger scales.)
So there is no single particle in your entire body that actually exists from moment to moment! Every particle in your body is constantly being annihilated and recreated! You’re essentially being “teleported” from one moment to the next! The metaphysical problem of teleportation is therefore entirely moot.
As for the problem of what happens if you make two copies of a person, well, that’s impossible, as was pointed out earlier—it would violate the quantum no-cloning theorem to make an exact duplicate of another quantum state, at least not without the first state being destroyed in the process. So that problem is likewise moot.
In your face, philosophers! Learn a little quantum mechanics, and your lives will be easier.
It would be so handy to be duplicated! Conversation would be strained at first, since we’d start out identical, but we could split up the stack of unread books and neglected tasks and before long we’d be a team.
I have a particular problem for which a double would be ideal, taking care of a mother with Alzheimer’s, which drastically limits my freedom. One might think that I could just foist her off on this or that sibling for a couple of weeks so that I could take a vacation, but in practice it doesn’t work very well, since I’m the one she’s used to. With two of me we could alternate and each have a better time than one could have alone.
In terms of the work I used to do, some electronic design but mostly programming, it’s not clear how much would be improved; we might get through projects more quickly and debug more thoroughly, but we’d probably be better off working on separate problems. It would at least give us more to talk about.
Questions like this, ie whether the original is dead after it is copied for the teleportation, make me like wormholes more than transporters 🙂
Wormholes may have other issues but I think it would be easier to create one (or possible use an already existing?) than to copy the quantum state of a buzzilion atoms…
Skoonz: “So if you have two lego houses, made with the exact same design, are they the same house?”
Do they think they are the same house?
We’ve all been dead – where were we before we were born? Physically, we did not exist before we were born; we do not exist after we die; and we do not exist while being teleported. Existence in this case means physical existence – a set of atoms arranged in a particular way and state.
However, there is the small matter (pun intended) of information. Before I was born, there was no information about me: I did not exist in physical space or in information space. While being teleported, I no longer exist in physical space but I do exist in information space – my information is preserved and I am reconstructed from it on the other end. After I die, it should be possible (in theory) to save my information and reconstruct me later. If my information (configuration and quantum state) is lost, then I cannot be reconstructed. So there are two types of death, physical death – the body no longer can maintain itself in the steady state we call life and the atoms disperse – and information death – all information about your living configuration is lost. Information death is final.
Of course, identity is not stored in a person’s body, it’s in the mind, which is still not a well-defined entity. If you reconstruct someone’s body but not his/her mind, you have a clone – genetically identical but a separate person. So people are not the same as the ship of theseus or a lego house; it is not the structure of the body but the mind that is important. Can a teleporter capture and reconstruct the mind? That’s the key question.
I have to admit that it would be great to teleport at lunch and carve a few turns at my favorite ski resort, then teleport back for that afternoon meeting; and with teleportation, no lift lines!
The continuity of existence is just an illusion created by memory — we’re constantly dying, it just doesn’t feel like it, because we remember all this stuff. So the answer to whether one dies in a transporter is a very strong yes and no.
“we’re constantly dying”
@44. Fraser: That’s a very nihilistic attitude to life!
I’ve come up on this idea myself. I don’t really worry so much about my “essence of personality” or my soul. My criterion for survival is: does my own concious experience continue. I can see two possiblities:
1) Continuous conscious experience is illusory, based on a reconstruction of one’s memories. In this case, my consciousness does continue into the new body, and I survive, since the new body has a copy of my brain and can reconstruct my past through the memories stored in it.
2) Conscious experience ends when the brain is destroyed, therefore I am dead once the teleporter breaks down the original body. This idea scares me a little. Ultimately, no matter how perfect the copy is, this brain will be destroyed and will no longer experience qualia. Maybe the copy can be considered to have my identity, but I have still, in a sense, died.
That doesn’t even get into the duplicate question. In a way, that can be comforting, my original brain and body are still functioning and experiencing, but then we get into the thorny identity question: Are we both the same person, or is this the original “me” and a false “me”?
This way of looking at things is actually very old and it is part of the essence of Buddhism: there’ no “you” separate from the aggregate of your body, your memories, etc. And Buddhism also takes one step further and says that nothing is permanent, because your body changes, new memories are formed, old memories are lost, … And therefore the “permanent self” or the “soul” is an illusion.
But it’s one thing to acknowledge this formally, and it’s totally different to have a deep understanding of this by breaking the illusion. When a Buddhist achieves this deep understanding, it’s called “awakening”.
Of course, they didn’t have to worry about many-worlds, quantum teleportation & such, but it was an astute observation nonetheless.
Another interesting related subject is memory storage. Humans can’t really hope to be 100% eternal and invulnerable – accidents do happen. But we can, in principle, create a central storage bank for all memories, where you could “back up” your consciousness before going to try to do something foolish (to explore the galaxy, perhaps, or even jump into the black hole). Then, if the word gets to the central bank that the individual got killed by an accident, the central bank simply spawns a new instance of the same individual.
Wanu: “Sean–Let me blow all of your minds: When you zoom in on any electron or quark in your body, you’ll find that it’s in a sea of indistinguishable virtual particles that are constantly switching places with it. So there is no single particle in your entire body that actually exists from moment to moment!
So there is no single particle in your entire body that actually exists from moment to moment! Every particle in your body is constantly being annihilated and recreated! You’re essentially being “teleported” from one moment to the next! The metaphysical problem of teleportation is therefore entirely moot.”
I don’t see why you think details of QM (which I’m pretty sure many here know quite well) somehow make “metaphysical problem of teleportation entirely moot.”
Yes, virtual particles impinge on real ones but for most purposes the effect is negligible and since energy is conserved if you have one electron at some location it will still be roughly in the same place later. Going by the usual terminology it will be the same electron as there is no way to tell the original one from the virtual-promoted-to-real one.
It’s also a matter of interpretation, for example I consider virtual particles nothing more then an artifact of forcing particle description on fundamental fields so to me it is always the same localized electron excitation anyway, it is just continually perturbed by vacuum fields.
Wanu: “In your face, philosophers! Learn a little quantum mechanics, and your lives will be easier.”
Learn even more quantum mechanics and you see it is an incomplete, inconsistent mess open to many vastly different interpretations so if anything it makes philosophy much harder not easier.
@45: How so? The word ‘dying’? Let me rephrase. We are not the same person from moment to moment. We think we are, because of all those memories telling us, but really, the situation is indistinguishable from memories which have just been created, and in any case, memory works really badly. There’s nothing wrong with this, and we certainly feel some sort of duty towards a future “I” (although I hate the way that guy is going to be enjoying himself in Australia in a few days, while I’m sitting in frozen Holland). I don’t see the nihilism myself.
This question appears to be similar to the following:
Assume that medical science is/will be able to construct prostheses for each and every part of an individuals body – including the brain.
If over a period of time, every part of a persons body is replaced by a prosthesis, presumably as the original organic part fails, is the resulting entity the same ‘person’ as the original organic entity? If the answer is no, then at what point does the original cease to exist?
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