Teleportation... possible?

"If some disassembles you and reassembles you, you are no longer the same consciousness. "

Thats evading the question.. You are constantly being disassembled and reassembled.. Atoms are constantly being discarded from your body, at this very moment.. Moreover, your brain, never returns to a state that it was in the instant before. In fact, just probing it alters you. So what is the logical line that determines when 'you' are 'you' and when 'you' are not?

One day I suspect we will be able to cheat death biologically. For instance, it might conceivably be possible to restart neural activity after brain death. I'd be interested to see how that would effect people's moral view points.

Either way, I don't believe in a soul. We are just machines deep down. Our 'ghost' is just a vast set of electric potentials and wired brain states..

If you can isolate those data points with suitable enough precision, then you can in principle recreate it for something like teleportation. Now, how you actually do that, is .. well hard.

You'd have to figure out a way to scatter a particle of each individual atom in your brain without altering the base atom too much, such that the incident particle retains knowledge of what it scattered off of. Obviously, quantum mechanics forbids perfect precision, but then again our brains aren't perfectly precise either, so just getting 'close' to what 'you' are is probably biologically good enough.

 

I know this has been the core of the 'soul problem'. Give me a working teleporter and i'll volunteer so we may find out.

 

So, if we assume that at the exact instant I lose consciosuness as I go to sleep tonight, a 3rd party extracts all the information allowable by uncertainty from me (which as you said, assuming a strictly NN derived model is more than acceptable for neural modeling). As I sleep, we can assume no external stimulii and analogous biological properties just for argument. This 3rd party makes a copy of me in Paris and kills the initial entity.

You're telling me I'm going to wake-up in Paris?

Better yet, if they impliment 'me' (which you'd claim is reducable to just an aperiod code) using the septic system of Paris, will I awaken from SWS as Paris?

The word 'soul' is a charged word, thank you religion, but the concept (sans the common perception of what a soul entails) is valid and is common in the philosophy of Identity. It's what lies at the core of the arguments of people like Searle or Penrose, Walker, et al. My friend maybe enjoying Paris and wondering how he got there, but I will be enjoying my fork in the world line in a state of eternal nothingness.

 

I highly recommend "The Mind's I" for putting these arguments in perspective, it is a collection of essays by those philosophers preemminent in the field and contains arguments and counter arguments. By twiddling around with the "parameters" of the thought experiments, one can induce people to whole contradictory viewpoints, as was shown when Searle was suckered into a contradiction of himself.

All of this eventually boils down to, if you keep arguing long enough, dualism and vitalism. Opponents will ultimately insist that their particular biological matter is imbued with something special, some special function or identity. Searle just asserts it. Penrose tries to push a (bogus) mechanism from Quantum Gravity for it. Searle was suckered by a thought experiment in which the neurons of the original are left intact, but a demon is proposed as the signalling mechanism which carries instructions between neurons. (Haugeland's nano-demon). He agreed a hypothetical women in this scenario would understand Chinese. However, in another separate argument, Searle claims a similar thought experiment, one in which the women's neurons are supersized, and a normal human being runs between neurons carrying messages, the women actually would not understand Chinese (the "awaken *AS* Paris example)

There are so many of these scenarios to imagine: gradual neuron replacement with circruitry, gradual neuron copy, physical separation of brain into pieces connected by wireless link, slowing of the brain so it operates over different timescales, all of these confound people's personal identity concepts when they try to imagine themselves in that position.

The simple answer is that we have an extremely strong survival instinct around our personal identity. If we were more like ants, or a hive, we would not worry about clones of our brain, and being killed. Death would become meaningless and you wouldn't mind having your consciousness terminated, especially if it was going to be preserved and merged with another copy of yourself.

Our perspective on the way we perceive ourselves is what causes us difficulty with the concept of what "me" is, if "me" becomes perfectly cloned. I associate my identity not only with the pattern of information being executed, but with the physical hardware process it is on. I do not like the idea of the hardware being terminated and the software being rebooted on another system or several systems.

But the fact that we do not like this scenario does not mean there is any special "identity" imbued on the matter that we inhabit, or that we have a soul, or that consciousness utilizes a bogus Quantum Gravity microtubule hypothesis in order to try and confer "beyond classical" capabilities to our brains.

What it means is that we evolved with certain instincts, and we do not like those things which clash with our instincts. People always try and ascribe religious meaning to these things because they are arational and can't be explained. Ditto for why we don't like (by and large) committing evil on the people we know. Moral codes handed down by a deity, or evolved instincts needed by a social animal?

 

I disagree, you're making a psychological argument where one doesn't apply and retracing alot of things. The comment more to the point IMHO is:

The concept of consciosuness or identity as 'software' and those who wish to make them casually analogous is inheriently wrong IMHO. I can agree, in fact I often state, the reduction to information argument; but it's fundimentally different than this 'software layered over biological hardware' argument. You are 1:1 mapped to your underlying biological structures, when the structures are nolonger functional, you aren't functional.

Say I were to 'clone' a used TV that has a specific history and pattern of images traced into it's screen with the information obtained at point t and create the clone with said information using new material. Are they functionally equivalent at t? Sure. Are they the same? No. Did the clone ever experience the same physical occurances as the origional? No. If I were to break the one, origional, picture-tube with a sledgehammer, would that 'death' not count in the functioning of that hardware? Assuming for argument a way around uncertainty, would the loss of functioning of the origional TV not count simply because there is a perfect clone out there?

If we look at the World-Lines of the TV's, sure there was a fork in which the given data splintered into a clone, but it does split. And this split is fundimental to this issue, that there is a 1:1 mapping of consciosuness to the underlying biological structures. You have never answered me on this point and still have yet to address it.

Neuronal Replacement isn't an answer, you skirt the issue by talking of 'merger' or other ambiguious words that doesn't address the core argument against teleportation/cloning/etc. Your constant bashing of Penrose is funny (although odd since I never said I support that flavor of belief). All-in-all, it's just been left out there...

And the only solution, paradoxically, which would seem to allow for a continuation of consciosuness as outlined here IS by a dualist mechanism such as, say, a soul or one of the QM-based explinations you hate which would allow for non-local or universal continuance of ones consciosuness.

PS. If we were ants, we wouldn't worry about death because we wouldn't have the cognitive ability to relate death on a conceptual level, due in no small part to their inability to internally model and project occurances based off them. If an ant were as evolved as, say, Z*, you can bet your ass he'd he scared of death -- the clonal/hive/borg concept isn't very valid IMHO for a variety of reasons.

* As in a reference to the movie Antz.

 

The argument about whether something is software on hardware, or pure hardware is a red herring, since any information process that can be implemented in software, can be implemented in hardware, and vice-versa via Church-Turing. I can choose to build a neuron and upload software to be, or, build a complete software emulation of the whole thing. I can put any biological process into 1-1 correspondence with a system that emulates the biological process via the principle of universality. Penrose is mentioned, because Penrose needed a mechanism to try and violate universality. Because the classification of 4-manifolds is undecidable, and because it sometimes appears in quantum gravity (which QG? ), he thought he had found a mechanism, a Godel statement in physics, by which a universal computer could not emulate it, and thus, a privileged place for "real stuff"


All of the gedanken experiments surrounding these AI or mind cloning subjects presuppose that any "cloning" of the mind clones all of the functionality of the neuron, not just the "information state", but the entire structure of the brain, and any properties thereof. It doesn't really matter the medium you choose to implement the thought experiment in.

You're trying to make some argument that two objects, even if identical, follow different trajectories in space-time and are therefore different. All well and good, but its begging the question. You have defined a definition of what it means for me to be "me" (e.g. world-history in spacetime) and then argued that your examples fit this definition, but that presupposes one accepts a definition which a) is not well accepted b) can be distinguished by someone who is not a 4-dimensional deity and c) does not have inconsistencies.

There is even the tacit assumption that continuation of consciousness is a prerequisite, which has certainly not been established (do we even know that our consciousness is continuous? by what definition?). First of all, consciousness is ill-defined, so to assert that a continuation of it is required to determine whether one is dead or not is somewhat surprising. Dead by what definition? Even death is a loaded word. We used to think it meant heart death, now irreversible brain death is the standard. When I am unconscious every night, or via barbituate overdose, am I dead? Thus, when I awaken everyday, am I a new person, resurrected clone, with no connection to my former self? Should I feel sadness that I died yesterday when I fell asleep, and I'm merely a fake today?


Secondly, who says which worldline denotes "continuity" and which doesn't? Your body, every tick of the clock, is diverging, and producing new cells. Yet, you might claim this represents continuitity of identity. I suppose that even if your brain cells were naturally continually replaced like the lining of your stomach, you'd still assert continuity. Thus, you imagine, that anything the body does biochemically overtime as it is evolving on its worldline, is "continuous" and generates a single identity. Yet, what privileges those biochemical processes over any other? If your body were biochemically programmed to produce a cloned-brain and head, while your old head "self decapitates" every month, would you still assert continuity of identity. What if neurons got replaced with new ones gradually? How do you draw the line as to what divergences on the world-line via biochemistry result in continuity and which ones do not?

You treat copying as a disruptive event, when it could indeed by a continuous operation. And I fail to see how a dualist mechanism is required as "the only solution", because I even fail to see as to what problem it is supposed to be solving. Solution to what? What is this solution needed for?


And yes, for the record, I think the issue is psychological. Even our conception of the afterlife is tainted by this, as if, our body dies, our "soul" is not a copy, but the "original" floating to heaven (teleported if your will), identity maintained perfectly. We could even imagine our soul being "put back into" a new body by god, giving us a second chance. The difficulty that arises when one is asked to imagine that your soul leaves your body, but the body remains alive. What is it? We call it a zombie. But what if it cannot be distinguished in behavior in any way whatsoever? It's basically a clone, but because people cannot deal with this scenario, they fall back on the "it's a zombie/not real/something is wrong with it" feeling.

People cannot deal rationally with the idea of body death vs death of personality.

 

Not in the real world. Your comment is theoretical, not practical as it runs head-long into Maxwell's Demon. That's why the talk of 'software' consciousness running on a biological 'hardware' makes me cringe, it's a horrible parrallel and allows for people to think that just as software can survive forever and be manifested on different systems, the same is applicable to biological systems. It isn't.

Namely what? (a) and (b) are somewhat irrelevent when all is said and done. That being said, do you dispute that they are seperate objects?

I have yet to see a reason why this isn't valid and applicable.

You can't play someone's hand against them Demo... heh. While I often state the 'unconsciosuness during SWS' argument as it's effective, it's somewhat wrong in the way you're applying it when you get into the actual neurology governing consciosuness on a molecular level. Um, sleep is more akin to a mediated/altered state of consciosuness during the REM and NREM stages; there is no truely discontinuious period as you propose. Much to the opposite, there is continued neural activity and specialized sub-structures which begin firing after neurotransmitter mediated activation. The rest of the argument follows logically....

The argument I've made is that when people center arguments off the concept of "consciousness", you can create arbitrary classifications in which during SWS or "paridoxical sleep" you're not analogous to the known voltage patterns seen during "conscious" human activity.

Ohh, and IMHO, continuation of consciousness is most certainly a prerequisite for this debate over teleportation. Unless you're willing to die so someone else can travel to X, Y or Z.

This is more of a philosophical question as identity must relate to any object, living or non-living. And to that end, I admit I don't know the specifics of their metrics, I'd have to look into it. But, AFAIK, the question of identity and transworld identity is somewhat well defined in their fields.

And the head example is kinda funny since you keep talking about how it's 'us' (my term), the people who feel a deep emotional and psychological desire to be superior and not want to die, et al, et infinitum, that create these beliefs. Yet, it's you who keeps interjecting the concept of "heads" and implied consciousness into the debate, striking me with the same black-box that you also call "ill-defined." I don't think it goes both ways Demo

 

It has to be distruptive, the deletion of information is.

So, what do you believe then? Someone steps in a "transporter" which observes all the data composing said person that's attainable vis-a-vis uncertainty, then that body has to be destroyed as a new copy is created elsewhere from the transmitted data.

So, you believe that the same person who entered the "transporter" will exit it on the otherside? So, when you destroy the nervous system, indeed the entire body, of the guy who entered the transporter, that doesn't effect his livelyhood? How can it not? As I proposed, the guy who enter's world line ends at the teleporter... thats the last thing he'll ever see (given Star Trek style)

And if you claim it doesn't, why not? Because of some mysterious dualist phenomina which allows for the first guy who stepped into the transporter to have his consciosuness beamed or flown by an angel or what to the newly created body?

 

^^ Define consciousness.

 

I'd say a prerequisite to call the process teleportation is that there is no loss of information, only transfer to another place and time. I don't know much about quantum physics but i remember reading that time itself cannot be infinitesimately divided so there would be no real continuity. I don't understand this emphasis in continuity anyway. That you're life progresses differently after the teleportation than it would have been had you not been teleported is obvious. I fail to see how a change in location and a gap of a few seconds in time would suddenly make you another person.

 

What if the gap is bigger than a few seconds? Does that mean that one day, when we'll be able to store enough "information", we'll be able to be "uploaded", saved somewhere, and wake up 100 years later when someone remembers that we're stored in some hard drive?? From teleportation to immortality...

 

I wouldn't call this immortality as you wouldn't be alive in this form. For me true immortality requires consciousness.
The whole thing is theoretical for todays point of view because not only all quantum states would have to be instantly captured but simultaneously the relative positions of all atoms of the body to be teleported. Only one of those actions is possible, however, due to the uncertainty principle.

 

Yeah u're right, wrong choice of words. But i was thinking, who needs hybernation with big enough hard drives then. Methinks something's not right here...

 

As i said, i think from the current point of view recording and reconstruction as used in teleportation experiments is impossible on the macroscopic scale. Hibernation, at least not the shock frosting type, might be possible some day.

 

First of all, all of these arguments are theoretical, in fact, many are strictly thought experiments (e.g. Chinese room) That said, what does Maxwell's Demon have to do with the viability of simulating physics or higher level structures or the principle of turing completeness? Maxwell's Demon is an artifact of thermodynamics, and the only posssible connection has to do with the minimum amount of energy needed to erase a bit of information. This lower limit is in fact zero, given reversibility.

Secondly, if the brain *isn't* dependent on quantum mechanical (or worse, quantum gravitational) effects being amplified to the macroscopic level (which most neurologists believe it is not), but is an artifact of classical molecular mechanics, can be modeled purely at neuron functional level, then one can live forever in software. Thus, the thought experiments where one slowly replacing dying neurons in the brain with functional replicas until, after some point in time, the entire brain is artificial, yet, at no point in time was there ever a non-continuity of consciousness.

Separate objects, identical identity. Two electrons with identical quantum state may be two electrons, but if no experiment can be performed to tell one from the other, it makes no sense to talk about "identity". Likewise, if we postulate an exact copy of something, it makes no sense to talk about the original and the copy if no experiment in the universe, nor the objects themselves, can detect which is which.

All that can be said is that both individuals of a cloned pair, consider themselves the original, have identical personal identity, and that no one can tell the difference. Are they separate objects? Yes. Are they different people? No. Now, one can make an argument that just by virtue of the fact that they are standing in two different places, their future histories will be different. But your future history will be different if I punch you in the nose too. Does that make you, "not you" if I chage your destiny with a sucker punch?

Define consciousness. Define neurology governing consciousness. "Consciousness" is a loaded word, so when someone says "actual neurology governing consciousness" I have to be skeptical. What aspect of conscioussness. It can't be consciousness as philosophers define it. And even clinical definitions differ, such as the inability to agree as to whether people who are vegetables are conscious. There is no universal objective definition of consciousness nor test for it in the philosophical sense.

But fine, let's drop the sleep example and use the hypothermia + barbituates example used in neurosurgery, which creates a zero EEG response in the brain. Or, if you prefer, cryopreservation of the brain, which has been accomplished in the lower animals, demonstrating that memory is not lost (worms, rats). Granting that cryonics works, are you going to claim that someone who's cellular activity was reduced to zero via fixation, and then un-fixed is no longer the same person because their metabolism was "paused"? What if it is merely slowed to 1/10000th it's rate? 1 millionth? 1 billionth?

The only reason I'm not willing to die is because psychologically, I don't like it. What would a society, in which immortality is a given, in which people can copy their personality and merge it with others, think? I don't know. I might very well perceive in such a future that death is no big deal at all and have no problem sending copies to the far end of the universe, being deleted in the process, or merging their experiences back into my own later.

Two objects in the same quantum state have the same identity. The proof is from Tipler who showed that assuming otherwise, breaks fundamental physical laws which are already well established.

Look Vince, I have the same desires. I want cryonics to work. I want biotech to work. I want to live for many hundreds of years. I don't take drugs because I don't like anything interfering with my consciousness. But that said, I recognize that these desires are arational, and that our evolutionary history has not prepared us concepts like immortality, consciousness uploading, etc. We have a profound and strong identification with other individuals and place a deep value on their life, so teleportation definately seems like the murder and creation of another individual.

But that does not mean that a future society, after a long time of evolution, would not perceive it differently. I think if actual real immortality existed, people's perspectives on these things would eventually change, and yes, individual "life" would be very cheap, which places a high premium on society's evolution of rights and respect. (e.g. killing and torture still not ok, just because one can be resurrected willy-nilly) Perhaps this is the single issue I can agree with Kass on, but I don't neccessarily know that its a problem per se. Such a society's values may be alien to us, and we fear such differences, but it is not neccessarily the case that it is bad. (and I don't think increasing human lifespan by a few hundred years will cheapen anything, since we can still die by crime, accident, etc)

 

I prefer to teleport the destination to where I am at the time, instead of me being teleported there. It sounds too cheap to be teleported around like that

 

Two things..

1) The worldline of a particle is notoriously problematic in quantum mechanics. It is a semi classical concept that is good for bookkeeping. For instance, take a vacuum world with two electrons with the same quantum #s, and move them arbitrarily far apart. The worldlines classically will be distinct for each. However we know from quantum field theory, that in fact they are just excitations of the same and unique field, the *thing* that seems to be most fundamental quantum mechanically in this context (eg the electron field). What is the worldline for a quantum field?.. Ill defined in that context, it has infinite degrees of freedom.

So replace the example with the teletube with the electron example.. Its not as clear cut logically any more, and the concept of identity becomes problematic at the deepest lvls.

But ok, forget about that.. Its just a quantum notion, probably applicable enough to be safely ignored.

2)I claim that the only reasonable quantitative test of identity would come from bounds on a Turing test.

Obviously Vince, and Vince + 30seconds are going to give a different Turing test in the limit of infinite questions.

So too would Vince clone at t = 0, and Vince original at t=0.. Merely by inexact equations and 'experimental' uncertainty

However you probably could impose a (sanity) bound to the test so that identity could be defined as the set ~ Vince mod (vince +- some time t, where t is fairly small).

I claim that you could probably close the clone into that bound, such that a sanity bound Turing test would yield identical results.

 

Yep, if no objective experimental test can distinguish between two phenomena, it makes little sense to claim they are different. This comes up in cognitive philosophical arguments all the time, because the proponents against mechanism postulate that even if you could build an intelligence that could pass all tests for humanity, it would still, nonetheless, not truly understand the "meaning" of what it was saying, or have "intention". A literally walking soulless zombie, and those like Searle would insist that it was a zombie, no matter its protests, and no matter that no tests could tell the difference.

(I think this is symptomatic of the uncanny valley effect however. We have great ability to anthropomorphize and project ourselves on others if they are suffiently similar in behavior and appearance, and as Star Trek TNG showed, people could emphasize with a "soulless" android as long as it was sufficiently "human" enough.)

 

In the case of the "duplicate and destroy" method of teleportation, there is no possibility of a truly objective test, unless you restrict the question to the dispostion of matter, which overwhelmingly favors the answer that the person was not teleported.

You can ask all the questions you want of the person who comes out of the destination teleporter, and he will always answer as the original person did, assuming the copying of the original's state is perfect (if it is not, then the original was by default eradicated). It does not mean the person who came out at the destination is somehow not human, just not the same human.

This is shown by the possibility of an erroneous copy. The original person was defined as a singular consciousness, and the creation of two copies shows that what defines a person as unique is not carried over reliably. Both copies will insist they are the original, and from their respective point of view they will be correct.

However, objectively, this cannot hold true for either. The original person was singular, and could not somehow gather sensory input and process thought in more than one place. Since the copies will look exactly alike and think alike, they will both argue they are the original. Having two of the same person at the other end can only be reconciled objectively in this case if one accepts that neither person at the end is the original.

The experience of the original person is forever lost to scrutiny after the elimination sequence, but that does not mean others can assume he made it out fine just because the copies believe they are him.

Teleportation using that method would always be unprovably safe in that regard. Personality can only be the subjective questioning of memory and thought processes. Checking where the original person's chunks went is the only objective test, and it is very specific as to where the original person is.

 

Point taken. What was ment by the Maxell Demon is that I was inferring that I don't see many "software" based entities in the natural world just spontaneously occuring at any level - for good reason. Ergo, it's not a Smoke-Screen to bring up such points. Especially when the 1:1 mapping directly to biological structures is seen exclusively in all of known world and fundimental to this argument.

Thanks, but I never claimed it was. Why you must keep brining up strawmen to knock down (such as Penrose) instead of my core argument, which you barely comemnt on, I don't understand.

I consider this argument fallicious at the most fundimental of levels. You, after bashing QM-based consciosuness, turn to QM principles and apply them to macroscopic objects of which we have ZERO real world understanding or concept outside of the abstract mathmatics.

Your entire argument is centered around the idea that the de Broglie Wavelength of the electron which allows for you to mask it's identity behind a cloak of uncertainty, allowing for perceptual similarity. Prove that this holds for macroscopic entities.

If we clone a segment of DNA - F - by methods which, for argument, have infinite precision -- does the fact that an exact copy exists elsewhere influence the fact that I'm destroying the origional strand by denaturing it?

If they are seperate objects, they can't be the same entity/person by definition. Perhaps they are an exact 1:1 mapping, but they are autonomous entities at that point without any casual link. The destruction of the first will result in the destruction of the first entity, without tangible effects upon the second. Thus, if we assume that no 'superluminal' or otherwise space-time independant correlatable link exists between the first and second, we must assume that they can't be the same person as casual effects upon one don't influence the other. Lets return to the scenario we're discussing:

• So, what do you believe then? Someone steps in a "transporter" which observes all the data composing said person that's attainable vis-a-vis uncertainty, then that body has to be destroyed as a new copy is created elsewhere from the transmitted data.
  
  So, you believe that the same person who entered the "transporter" will exit it on the otherside? So, when you destroy the nervous system, indeed the entire body, of the guy who entered the transporter, that doesn't effect his livelyhood? How can it not? As I proposed, the guy who enter's world line ends at the teleporter... thats the last thing he'll ever see (given Star Trek style)

Refute that the person who walks into the teleporter will not be destroyed and killed when I put a bullet in his head because the information that he contained exists elsewhere.

And if you still contend that they are the same person due to their exact infomation content still remaining elsewhere, why limit it to just this case and not self-contained fragements: why not ideas or concepts, memes?

Why do you have this seemingly contradictory belief that the passing of information via teleportation allows for an entity to continue living, yet you don't agree with the passing of your culture or genes going the same in an abstract fashion? There is a logical disconnect between these views, and I'm not going to accept your imminent responce and appeal to QM and electon identity as an answer -- I want you to give me a real-world macroscopic object.

I don't have to define it, and here's why. My comment appeals to the fact that it's been found that there are certain "enabling factors" as Crick called them that underlie all neurological activities above the level of a coma, such as the intralaminar nuclei of the thalamus or the controls over the neurotransmitter levels in the thalamus & forebrain cenetered in the reticular activating system as eplained by Baars. And this shows that neurological activity levels never cease, which is backed-up for by a plathora of evidence from EEG testing as well as testing into the so-called phenomina of lucid dreaming.

Way to create a another strawman. I've never questioned cryonics or the concepts of a dicontinuality emerging from temporal-lapses in the same structures. What I've been arguing against for the last 5 posts is that there is a discontinuality between the initial person who steps into the teleporter and the one who emerges - they are two seperate spatial entities. The entity which enters the teleporter is killed, their world-line ending at that point. It is superceeded by a splintering that continues (eg. the transported and created individual) onward and will have the same background and information present, but that doesn't mean much for the poor guy who entered the transporter and was killed, for him, the world ends so another individual can be moved.

Ok, now this just mind boggles me. How is "immortality a given" when you're killed upon entry of the teleportation device?

Ohh, so you're saying that infomation passage alone is enough for immortality, not your continued life. So, you can already achieve forms of immortality today according to your abstract thinking.

I seem to have trouble with your comments, which on one hand, state that you don't have problems being deleted (dying) in the process if you *know* that the end result will be another entity with your knowledge living on forever -- yet you've previously stated that you don't consider your children as a form of immortality. How seemingly contradictory when all is considered.