Video - The Trouble with Transporters
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Source: YouTube, 30 September 2016
Paper - Abstract

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Introductory Notes


Transcript
Comments
  1. 1:11.
    1. This is a real challenge.
    2. If – as in this idealised case – you are ‘exploded’ (which normally means death if anything does) but your parts – your very atoms – are reassembled in the very same configuration, so that the individual is fully functional and – naturally – thinks he is you, then why is he not you? What’s the difference between this case and that of the disassembled and reassembled watch or bicycle?
    3. There’s no reduplication objection as we’re using your very atoms.
    4. It’s true that there’s an interruption of consciousness but – as is pointed out at 4:45+ – this happens in anaesthesia or dreamless sleep.
    5. Normally there have to be ‘appropriate’ causal relationships between the stages of a purported persisting individual. This is an objection to resurrection of a thoroughly decayed and dispersed corpse. Again, normally ‘external causes’ aren’t allowed – but they do seem to be allowed in the case of artifacts which don’t disassemble and reassemble themselves yet are normally taken to persist through the process. Of course, artifacts and organisms have different persistence conditions – with those of artifacts being ‘conventional’ and those for organisms ‘natural’. Is this sufficient to explain the difference?
    6. Certainly, there are insuperable practical, technical and maybe theoretical / nomological difficulties in the procedure, but is this the real reason why teleportation can’t be a form of travel?
    7. Returning to resurrection, as well as causal considerations, there are other issues in the general case (but not with the resurrection of Jesus’ intact corpse); normally some of – and maybe all of – ‘your atoms’ – if this makes sense for an organism that exchanges atoms with its environment on a moment-by-moment basis – will have been incorporated into other bodies that also want to be resurrected. Not so in this idealised teleportation case, which might be seen as a ‘best case’ resurrection situation.
    8. The video skirts the issue by saying that teleportation ‘can’t work that way’ in Star Trek because of fission and fusion cases. Well, fair enough, but it might have worked that way – it’s fiction, after all – and – as philosophers – we have to deal with the most challenging TEs.
  2. 1:17.
    1. This is my intuition exactly.
    2. The teletransportee is a duplicate, and you have died.
    3. Certainly, in the ‘information and local matter-recruitment’ case. But I’m not sure in the ideal ‘dismantlement and reassembly’ case given at 1:11.
    4. Is there any reason why a committed Animalist should resist this latter case as genuine travel? Would the reason be solid or just an intuition?
    5. But I like the video’s expression ‘nothingness eternal’ for the teletransportee’s experience after entering the transporter. See my Note on Forward Psychological Continuity2. I’m just not clear whether this would be your experience in this special case. But if this wasn’t your experience – ie. you had the experience of waking up and carrying on – what would be your experience in slightly different cases; say with some local recruitment of matter. What would be the principled reason for any experiential difference?
  3. 1:56.
    1. This is a good point.
    2. It’s only metaphysical worries that give pause.
    3. If it was the general practice, and the only way to get about, or hold down a job, would you not be happy – or at least constrained – go along with the crowd? As the video goes on to explain, there would be no third-party difference.
  4. 2:03.
    1. But say this was the way the transporter works.
    2. So fission and fusion are ruled out … would we then have identity?
    3. The video says – to allow such fission and fusion cases – ‘atoms must be converted into energy and energy into atoms’. This is a bit quick. This wouldn’t, in itself, solve the problem as energy – and not just matter – is conserved (or – at least – ‘mass + energy’ is conserved).
    4. However, to allow for fission and fusion cases, something more than simply disassembly and reassembly must be (supposed to be) going on. Most likely ‘local recruitment’ of matter at the receiving end.
    5. So, if you’re recreated anew from pure energy, it would seem that you had died prior to transmission. I agree with the video’s parting shot on this bullet.
    6. Of course, the expression ‘recreated anew’ is tendentious (but then so is the term ‘transporter’).
  5. 2:28.
    1. Ship of Theseus3
    2. This is in the context of persistence through replacement of parts.
    3. As noted above, the persistence conditions of artifacts differ from those of organisms such as ourselves.
  6. 2:52:
    1. Cutty Sark
    2. There’s a comment from someone who was a custodian (‘shipkeeper’) of the Cutty Sark at the time of the 2007 fire. He claims that the superstructure of the ship had been removed for conservation at the time of the fire, and only the iron frame and decking were damaged.
    3. See RMG: The Cutty Sark fire, which basically confirms the story. 90% of the current ship is original, albeit reassembled. The decking that was burnt wasn’t original in any case.
    4. Also, see Wikipedia: Cutty Sark.
    5. Not that this matters as far as the TE is concerned. The point is that – in this case (though counterfactually, in point of fact) – the whole ship – more or less – was replaced in one go and yet was deemed still to be the same ship.
    6. The trouble with artifacts is that there’s no naturally correct answer to questions of persistence – it all depends on convention and what suits us. We’re back to the ‘Trigger’s Broom’ paradox.
  7. 3:04.
    1. It looks like the Ship of Theseus is a genuine parallel to the gradual replacement of matter in an organism – though the source of the causal links – internal versus external – may still be an issue.
    2. Maybe the Cutty Sark situation is parallel to organ transplants – or even to head (or body) transplants. But it’s difficult to know what to intuit in these unusual circumstances.
    3. Hard-line animalists differ from the majority view here in denying the ‘brain transplant intuition’.
  8. 3:12.
    1. This is a bit quick.
    2. The ‘disassembler’ is – presumably – the part that breaks you into atoms or quarks. But, if – when it is ‘broken’ it leaves the original ‘you’ behind, the idea must be that the sending process involves a non-damaging information scan, followed by the destruction of the original ‘you’ and a creation of the new ‘you’ at the destination location.
    3. The reason this is surely ‘death’ is that if you are still around after the transport has taken place, so there are two of ‘you’, the only way to make it even look like transport is to kill the original – which you will obviously not want.
    4. I agree that this is a fatal objection to the ‘information-only’ transfer mechanism.
    5. Of course, the only practical way of getting the information out of you is total destruction, but we let that pass.
  9. 3:22.
    1. Agreed. This shows that this version of teleportation is suicide.
    2. Even if the process didn’t malfunction, it might have.
    3. Then we have the ‘Only X and Y principle’.
  10. 3:42.
    1. ‘The problem of consciousness’.
    2. While the video raises many interesting questions from this point on, I thought it veered off course a bit.
    3. The original objection to the ‘unmeasurable’ was to immaterial souls.
    4. By saying that consciousness is ‘unmeasurable’ we’re sliding somewhat in our terminology. There are lots of things – brain states – that are correlated with consciousness that are measurable. It’s just that our private sensations are – well – private. We can measure brain states and infer from them that the ‘raw feels’ of those with similar brain states are likely to be similar, though we cannot ‘feel’ them ourselves (though we can get confirmation if the actions of the possessors of such states are similar to our own.
  11. 3:55.
    1. I don’t see what the transporter TE has to do with consciousness as elaborated at this point in the video.
    2. The ‘hard problem of consciousness’ (how mere matter gives rise to sensations) is not really the issue here, and
    3. The ‘problem of other minds’ (read on …) doesn’t usually make mention of Star Trek.
  12. 4:04.
    1. This is important.
    2. The author is right that phenomenal consciousness can only be felt ‘from the inside’, and we ascribe it by analogy to others with similar neural machinery (or – prior to the rise of neuroscience – to other members of our species. We naturally assume that our conspecifics are engineered like us, however that may be, and so will feel the same; racism and sexism aside, of course).
    3. Neuroscience becomes important when we think about assigning phenomenal states to non-human animals.
  13. 4:15.
    1. Computer claims to be conscious will be difficult to assess.
    2. Current claims by chatbots are absurd. See the Blake Lemoine4 controversy.
    3. I’m not sure how future claims will be assessed. I hope that the architecture will be taken into account to assess whether – as currently – the AI is just parroting back verbiage in its associative memory.
    4. Currently, we’ve no real idea what it is that ‘generates’ phenomenal consciousness.
  14. 4:20.
    1. Your stream of consciousness isn’t really ‘your life’ but is what makes your life – which is an extended biological event – valuable to you.
    2. Nor is it ‘continuous’; there are gaps, as is noted below.
    3. But I agree that the individual is the only one who can experience it, though others can know that there is – most likely – some experiencing going on.
    4. Sometimes this is disputed in cases to PVS, and even brain death.
  15. 4:30.
    1. This now gets a bit silly. We know that we persist through breaks in consciousness, so teleportation isn’t ‘scary’ on that account. It’s ‘scary’ because – except in the purest and simplest case – we’re pretty sure it’s not identity-preserving.
  16. 4:45.
    1. As Anthony Grayling was fond of saying, don’t confuse knowledge with certainty. ‘Certainty’ is a psychological term. ‘Knowledge’ is epistemological. We can be ‘certain’ of things that ain’t so, and that we therefore can’t know. We can also be uncertain about things that we do know (though this is harder to credit, for me, at least; knowledge is – admittedly – more than ‘justified true belief’, as the Gettier cases show. But it is at least this, and if you’re uncertain of something, do you really believe it?
    2. Admittedly, the video uses the term ‘can’t be sure’, but this sounds like ‘can’t be certain’, rather than ‘can’t know’. We can’t experience unconsciousness. So, we might be doubtful whether it’s really us that wakes up after an operation (or after a peaceful night’s sleep). But we can know this based on testimony and common sense. If we can’t know this, we can’t know very much. Universal scepticism is a much wider topic than teleportation.
  17. 4:50.
    1. When we wake up from sleep, what is it impossible to know?
    2. I find this very difficult to get my head around.
    3. We’ve admitted that the most likely situation in the teleporter is that you go in and thereafter – for you – is just ‘eternal nothing’.
    4. Say this was the case when we go to sleep. But ‘your continuer’ – even if it strictly speaking was not you – would have your FPP (or at least your window on the world) and the ‘Future Great Pain Test’ would apply.
    5. If you thought the ‘waker’ would – strictly speaking – not be you, you’d not be comforted. You’d not think a night’s kip would cure all your ills.
    6. Indeed you couldn’t believe this; it’s just not psychologically possible.
    7. But – I believe – this is so only because you know that the ‘waker’ really is you, for all sorts of sensible, rational reasons.
    8. Whereas in the ‘information teleportation’ case you know it’s really not you that wakes up. But in the simplest – disassembly, matter transfer and reassembly – case I’d have some doubts.

Footnote

Text Colour Conventions (see disclaimer)

  1. Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2025
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