this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Well, if the technology actually existed, it would solve that whole "soul" question.
We would know pretty quickly if we transported humans and they came out the other side as soulless aberrations because their original just got killed.
So yeah, I would 100% use it after it first proved once and for all that the sum of our consciousness really is all the synapses and signals and grey matter in our heads. Because if so then what does it matter if your original matter has been erased and then recreated. Your clone is just as much you as you are you at that point.
Absolutely this.
Someone else can be the guinea pig, but if it's been tested and everyone came out fine? Yeah. I'll absolutely take advantage.
Even if the clone is undistinguishable from your old self, that old self has died. "you" has died. You didn't teleport to Mars, you died on Earth.
You're repeating what OP said.
Thing is, the idea that an "old you" has "died" is a modern soul conceit. If "me" is just the combination of meat, electricity, and memories - then for all intents and purposes I was simply taken apart in one place and reassembled in another. Continuity of all three is maintained when I am reassembled on Mars with my body and memories intact. There is no "old" and "new" me - because what you or OP think defines "me" isn't something that dies when the meat stops working briefly.
This isn't some radical complicating factor people just aren't thinking of - it's the same base debate as the existence of a soul. Interesting, but unprovable and utterly irrelevant to practical day-to-day life.
"Soul conceit" is the right term here. The belief humans can't seem to shake that I am more than just the sum of my parts.
I don't know if I have a soul or if my consciousness is really just electric meat. But it seems that if I am more than the sum of my parts, the soulless me that comes out the other side will just be "my parts" and will be obviously different than the original me.
If we really are just our atoms, and the technology can be trusted to reliably replicate me atom for atom on the other side then there's nothing to be afraid of. The original you hasn't died, it's just ceased to exist. No big deal. The clone of you is also you, so you still exist.
But we can "prove" that isn't true because what if you aren't disassembled on the first side? Just copied over. Either you have a sense and control of both bodies at once, or in a real teleport where you are disassembled, you're gone the moment you teleport and the "you" that remains is another different person with exactly your thoughts, feelings, motivations, memories, etc.
Using the star trek transporter as the example, you actually experience the teleportation process. In one episode, we see the perspective of someone being transported and they go into a white void, briefly, and then appear in the 2nd location. It takes like 8 seconds. We also know that some transporters are faster than others.
I don't believe there's anything special about my current body. Barring teleportation, I fully believe that if it were possible to disassemble a person, but them in a box, ship them across the Pacific Ocean, and then put them back together again, that they'd be the same person.
I don't see how being converted into energy and back represents death.