researchers teleport light

wat? read what?

is the tron laser murder? i don't know. i'd say if nothing's stored in the computer, if you're suspended in some particle wave instead of copied into memory, then it's the same you with different molecules. once you can burn a person to DVD it gets a lot more morally fuzzy.

like, there shouldn't be able to be two of you coming out, or however many copies....

like, there shouldn't be able to be two of you coming out, or however many copies....

This better mean that I get faster internet. For real.

likely the pentagon and darpa have dibs on weaponizing it so we can vaporize all of al queda and the taliban in Afghanistan thus save us from spending 2 billion dollars per week as we have been.

Still doesn't feel like we're living in the future.

  On 4/16/2011 at 9:35 AM, Rhombix said:

There is a serious philosophical issue that, if a human being was transported, they would temporarily cease to exist. Here are some thoughts by Julian Baggini on this matter, from his book "The Pig That Wants To Be Eaten". I typed this all out, don't ignore it.

 

  Julian Baggini said:

  Derek Parfit said:

For Stelios, the teletransporter is the only way to travel. Previously it took months to get from the Earth to Mars, confined to a cramped spacecraft with a far from perfect safety record. Stelio's TeletransportExpress changed all that. Now the trip takes just minutes, and so far it has been 100 percent safe.

However, now he is facing a lawsuit from a disgruntled customer who is claiming the company actually killed him. His argument is simple: the teletransporter works by scanning your brain and body cell by cell, destroying them, beaming the information to Mars and reconstructing you there. Although the person on Mars looks, feels and thinks just like a person who has been sent to sleep and zapped across space, the claimant argues that what actually happens is that you are murdered and replaced by a clone.

To Stelios, this sounds absurd. After all, he has taken the teletransporter trip dozens of time, and he doesn't feel dead. Indeed, how can the claimant seriously believe that he has been killed by the process when he is clearly able to take the case to court?

Still, as Stelios entered the teletransporter booth once again and prepared to press the button that would begin to dismantle him, he did, for a second, wonder whether he was about to commit suicide...

 

Source: Chapter 10 of Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit (Oxford University Press, 1984)

 

On what does our continued survival depend? In normal circumstances, we would say the continued functioning of out body. But since there is no part of the body that couldn't conceivably be replaced by a synthetic substitute, perhaps this is not necessarily true. Isn't it rather that we continue to exist just as long as our consciousness continues? The day no one wakes up thinking he is me, with my memories, plans and personalities, is the day I have died.

The 'psychological continuity' theory of personal identity has an intuitive appeal. It is only because it seems to reflect our fundamental intuitions that we can make sense of stories such as Kafka's Metamorphosis, in which a man wakes up in the body of a beetle. We instantly recognise that the man is the beetle because his mind inhabits it. Mental, not physical continuity, marks him out as the same person.

But in the case of teletransportation, although we do have psychological continuity as complete as it is in ordinary life, it also seems beyond doubt that what has been created is a copy, a clone. A clone, however, is not the same individual as the person cloned. It is the same only in the sense that two statues cast from the same mould are the same: they are identical in every detail but they are distinct entities nonetheless. If you chip one, the other remains undamaged.

It is not as though Stelios doesn't know how his teletransporter works. He just doesn't see why the fact that, strictly speaking, the machine 'clones' him every time should matter. What matters to him is that, as far as he is concerned, he walks into the booth and wakes up onto another planet. The physical mechanism is irrelevant.

If that sounds glib, consider for a moment the possibility that one night, a few years ago, you were kidnapped in your sleep, processed by the teletransporter, and the resulting person returned, unknowing, to your bed. Had this happened, you would have no way of telling, because your conscious expereinces of your ongoing life as a continuing being would be exactly the same if it had not happened. The fact of teletransportation, in some sense, leaves your life and world exactly as it was.

Perhaps then to ask whether Stelios is a clone or ' the same' person is the wrong question. Perhaps we should instead ask what matters about our past and future existence. And maybe the answer to that is psychological continuity, by whatever means necessary.

You see this talked about a lot on technology forums and i dont know why people cant get over it. This is only a problem if you believe the myth that there is a permanent you in the first place, which there isn't.

The only thing really there is a continued illusory sense of self that the brain maintains (which can be totally lost with a brain injury or tumor at the wrong location) as the body gradually changes into a totally different person through time.

i want heavy light

  On 4/16/2011 at 3:35 PM, chimera slot mom said:

Still doesn't feel like we're living in the future.

No flying cars, am i rite?

"a wave packet that's simultaneously a one and a zero in its phase"

this fucks with my head... and the idea of quantum observation is fundamental here...it's like saying you have to forget what you're saying as you say it for someone else to understand the absence

  On 4/16/2011 at 3:35 PM, chimera slot mom said:

Still doesn't feel like we're living in the future.

u never are

I've finally gotten over the avatar thing. (no that doesn't mean i now like the movie, I'm just talking about your epic pointless thread.)

eneewae, hi karmakramer. :sup:

  On 4/16/2011 at 9:19 PM, chenGOD said:

  On 4/16/2011 at 3:35 PM, chimera slot mom said:

Still doesn't feel like we're living in the future.

 

No flying cars, am i rite?

Uh... Airplanes? Where have you been.

  On 4/16/2011 at 11:55 PM, delet... said:

I've finally gotten over the avatar thing. (no that doesn't mean i now like the movie, I'm just talking about your epic pointless thread.)

 

eneewae, hi karmakramer. :sup:

lol cheers

I always say this but it's true. We wont have flying cars until autonomous cars have become widespread on the ground. We will never be allowed to fly a flying car manually - maybe there'd be special places where people could pay to go and learn and fly around for fun but never in public. I know it's usually said tongue in cheek but some people are seriously like "where's my fucking flying car?"

The physics hasn't caught up with their expectations. Be like moaning that we still don't have working magic wands.

i just realized... once this tech runs the internet, ninjam will finally have playable latency!!

  On 4/17/2011 at 3:22 PM, Rambo said:

I always say this but it's true. We wont have flying cars until autonomous cars have become widespread on the ground. We will never be allowed to fly a flying car manually - maybe there'd be special places where people could pay to go and learn and fly around for fun but never in public. I know it's usually said tongue in cheek but some people are seriously like "where's my fucking flying car?"

you could say that the sky is the last earthly frontier for men. you can fly around now in your gyrocopter and no one's going to fuck with you. i think it will be much different in 25 years