I read with interest how scientists at ANU have been working on teleportation. Awesome. Of course, they admit that it will probably never happen for humans, but that didn’t stop millions of Star Trek fans and even normal people getting excited. Of course, I myself hope that I can just zoom around at the speed of light and end up in another place, but I’m not holding my breath. However if something like this were ever possible, how could we know it’s the same person at the end and not just a copy?
Consciousness is one of those things that is hard to grasp. I know that I’m me, I’m aware of my existence. But what if, when I step into the teleportation device, everything goes black and my conciousness ends. At the other end, another consciousness awakens with all my memories, thinking they are me. Will it be me even though I didn’t actually make it through. Where does the body end and the “I-ness” begin? The thing that religions call the soul I guess, the inescapable feeling that you feel like a vessel within your body. I know in reality that they aren’t seperable, that our complex minds give rise to our own feelings of awareness, but it doesn’t stop me worrying about it.
If it were possible to copy a person exactly, to an outsider they would appear identical. But to the copy, he would feel as though he were the original, as though he had already been living his life up to that point, not just created out of thin air. A testimony of both the original and the copy would start the same, they’d say “I remember lying down on the bed and the machine scanning me…” but while the orignal wouldn’t note anything after that, the copy would say “..then I was suddenly in the recreation chamber.” The shift would be instant, though they would think themselves the same person. Now the interesting thing would be to take them both and put them in identical rooms and observe if they do everything exactly the same. Provided they aren’t spoken to before they go in, wouldn’t they necessarily do the same things?
The reason I talk about copying is because when you’re using teleportation to break things apart atom-by-atom and send them through fiber optics around the world, as we do with information now on the internet, then why wouldn’t we have the same copyright issues arising when people learn to replicate atoms as they send them. If your atoms are broken down piece by piece, they could then be cataloged and this catalog could then be used to recreate your body.
I am all for this. I’ve often thought that the world needs more people like me. In the future, I very well may be able to bring this into effect. Everyone could. After all, what better roommate than another version of yourself. You know the saying, “you gotta look out for number one” well how great will it be when number 1.2 and 1.3 are there to look out for you as well! Best of all, no-one will criticize you for talking to yourself anymore. [Potential unwanted consequences of cloning: mass copies of annoying pop stars and porn actresses. One Paris Hilton is already too much as it is.]
Another sci-fi development I’d like to see is the transferral of memories. Let’s say a friend of yours calls and tells you that they just rode in a fighter jet through the Swiss Alps. He could send you the memories and you’d instantly be aware of all the things that had happened. All without risk of life and limb. People trying to quit smoking or eating could download a cancer patient’s memories of pain and suffering to scare them straight. Too busy to take a holiday? Take someone elses memories and enjoy a holiday you never had. The possibilities are endless.
There, I have lain out a plan for the future, so take note scientific community. Stop wasting time trying to make paper whiter or whatever it is you’re doing these days. Start working on all the cool stuff that we’ve been seeing in movies and reading about in comics and books for a good half-century now. If you could get that done by next Christmas that would be great.
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