Scientists Want to Teleport a Whole Human. A Quantum Breakthrough Could Make It Reality.
Scientists Want to Teleport a Whole Human. A Quantum Breakthrough Could Make It Reality.
There’s just one catch: every atom in your body would be fully disassembled to the quantum level, effectively leaving your original body totally destroyed.
There’s just one catch: every atom in your body would be fully disassembled to the quantum level, effectively leaving your original body totally destroyed.
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Even if they manage this, I'll bet "you" die each time something 'effectively ... destroy[s]" you down to a quantum level.
I'm of the opinion that it doesn't really matter. My consciousness ends every time I fall unconscious.
Knowledge and memories have to be physically encoded somewhere right? Surely it's just chemistry
Yeah. Not only that, but if there is some sort of quantum state that represents the you that is you, beyond just your memories, but literally down to the spins of sub atomic particles that make you up, and you are able to transfer that state one way, making it appear exactly somewhere else (and presumably causing the state to cease to exist where it started), I'm happy to consider that full blown teleportation, no death whatsoever. You weren't deconstructed at point a and rebuilt at point b, you literally teleported.
True. It's also physics.
That depends on the nature of what "you" ultimately turn out to be. I tend to suspect (though with only a suspicion to go on and not proof, I probably wouldn't be volunteering) that what "you" ultimately are is the pattern of information stored in the structure of your brain, and thus, any sufficiently perfect copy of that information is the "same" person regardless of continuity of the body. Though creating a second copy before destroying the original would have the caveat that as soon as the second you exists, the different perspective and experience will lead them to diverge into two different people who both have equal claim to the original identity, so that I think to do this, you'd want to destroy the original slightly before, making the process more like resurrection in a new location.
I believe current understanding is that quantum shenanigans mean you can't truly make a perfect quantum duplicate of something without destroying the original at the same time, so what you're describing (destroying the original after making the copy) would only be possible for imperfect duplication - e.g. manufacturing a clone and syncing its memory with the original.
We are easily thousands of years away from genuinely understanding this stuff. Right now we have absolutely no clue.