this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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You know those sci-fi teleporters like in Star Trek where you disappear from one location then instantaneously reappear in another location? Do you trust that they are safe to use?

To fully understand my question, you need to understand the safety concerns regarding teleporters as explained in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQHBAdShgYI

spoilerI wouldn't, because the person that reappears aint me, its a fucking clone. Teleporters are murder machines. Star Trek is a silent massacre!

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[–] DrQuint 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Maybe it is dying, but not in the medical sense.

Like, if you're resuscitated using a defibrillator, then by all accounts, your heart stopped for a moment there. Without intervention from a machine that at one point in history didn't exist, tou were indistinguishable from a corpse. So, a teleporter would just be the same but taken to an extremely abstract degree - you are dead, but your body exists in a state and within range from a machine that can resuscitate that body, so no doctor can yet declare you dead.

[–] 4am 7 points 1 year ago

Let’s put it this way: if you stepped into a teleporter, the last think you’d ever experience is being disassembled. Doesn’t matter if it hurts or whatever. It just goes black. You die. You, YOU, will never see the other side. You won’t be the one to come out; it’s a clone of you.

Even if it is the very same atoms, the very same dendrites and synapses, reassembled perfectly.

Your clone will think it’s you and it will go “oh wow, it DOES work”. It’ll know your mother. It’ll bang your wife. It has your degree in Computer Science or whatever. And it even has all your experiences up to and including the moment the teleporter turned on.

But it’s not you. You blinked out of existence, your experience ended. You ended the self, and a new self was born at the other end, endowed with everything that encapsulated you previously.

Nah, I’m good.