If I teleport from Mars, does the original me get destroyed?

This is not an essay written by me, but is an essay written by a certain Charlie Huenemann who is professor of philosophy at Utah State University. It's an Aeon article that can be found here. He makes the same argument as I do in my own:

Do we die when we teleport?

So if people don't understand my essay they can read this one. Or vice versa! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



I am stranded on Mars. The fuel tanks on my return vessel ruptured, and no rescue team can possibly reach me before I run out of food. (And, unlike Matt Damon, I have no potatoes.) Luckily, my ship features a teleporter. It is an advanced bit of gadgetry, to be sure, but the underlying idea is simplicity itself: the machine scans my body and produces an amazingly detailed blueprint, a clear picture of each cell and neuron. That blueprint file is then beamed back to Earth, where a ‘new me’ is constructed using raw materials available at the destination site. All I have to do is step in, close my eyes, and press the red button…



But there’s a complication: a toggle switch allows me to decide whether the ‘old me’ on Mars is preserved or destroyed after I teleport back home. It’s this decision that is causing me to hesitate.



On the one hand, it seems like what makes me me is the particular way in which all my components fit together. I don’t think there is such a thing as a soul, or some ghost that inhabits my machine. I’m just the result of the activity among my 100 billion neurons and their 100 trillion distinctive connections. And, what’s more, that activity is what it is, no matter what collection of neurons is doing it. If you went about replacing those neurons one by one, but kept all the connections and activity the same, I would still be me. So, replacing them altogether at once should not matter, so long as the distinctive patterns are maintained. This leads me to want to press the button and get back to my loved ones – and back to Earth’s abundant food, water and oxygen, which will allow me to continue repairing and replacing my cells in the slower, old-fashioned way.



So: if I put the toggle in the ‘destroy’ setting, I should survive the transfer just fine. What would be lost? Nothing that plays any role in making me me, in making my consciousness my own. I should step in, press the button – and then walk out of the receiver back on Earth.



On the other hand, what happens if I put the toggle in the ‘save’ setting? Then where would I be? Would I make the trip back to Earth, and then feel sorry for the poor sap back on Mars (the old me), who will be facing slow death by starvation? Or – horrors! – will I be that old me, feeling envy for the new me who is now on Earth, enjoying the company of friends and family?



Could I somehow be both? What would that be like? Would I be seeing the scene on Earth superimposed upon the Martian landscape? Would I be feeling both pangs of hunger and exquisite delight in eating my first home-cooked meal in years? How would I decide at the same time to both walk over the dunes of red sand and go to sleep in my own bed? Is this even conceivable?



A residual conservatism in my nature prompts me to think that I would stay the old me, and the new me – whoever he is – would be like a twin to me, indeed more similar to the old me than any natural twin could possibly be. He would feel all the things I would feel, have the same memories, and be so very glad that he’s not starving on Mars. But, for all that, he would not be me: I would not be thinking or experiencing the things he is, nor would he be aware of my own increasingly desperate experience. But if this line of thinking is correct, I am suddenly very reluctant to turn the toggle over to the ‘destroy’ setting. For then it would seem that I would simply be annihilated on Mars, and some new guy on Earth, some guy a lot like me, would falsely believe he had survived the trip.



But why ‘falsely’? The memories are just as much in his brain as mine, are they not? From his point of view, he experienced stepping into the teleporter, pressing the button, and walking out onto Earth. He’s not lying when he says that that’s what happened. Still: I – the one who steps into the teleporter and presses the button – would not subsequently have this new guy’s experience of walking out onto Earth. My next experience after pressing the button would be – well, it would be no experience at all, as I would be dead.



Perhaps I need to adopt a more objective point of view. Suppose others were observing all this. What would they see? They would see me step in, press the button, and then – depending on the toggle setting – they would see either two copies of me, one on Mars and one on Earth, or else just one copy of me on Earth and some smouldering remains on Mars. There is no real problem, from this outsider’s point of view. There is no test an observer could perform to determine whether I survived the trip to Earth – no personality test, no special ‘me-ometer’ readings, no careful analysis of discrepancies among the neurons. Everything proceeds as expected, no matter what the toggle setting is.



Maybe there is something to be learned from this. Perhaps what seems to me an extremely obvious truth – namely, that there should be some fact to the matter of what I experience once I step in and press the button – is really not a truth at all. Maybe the notion that I am an enduring self over time is some sort of stubborn illusion. By analogy, I once joined a poker club that had been in existence for more than 50 years, with a complete change in its membership over that time. Suppose someone were to ask whether it was the same club. ‘It is and it isn’t,’ would be the sensible reply. Yes: the group has met continuously each month over 50 years. But no: none of the original members are still in it. There is no single, objective answer to the poker-identity question, since there is no inner, substantive soul to the club that has both remained the same and changed over time.



The same goes, perhaps, for me. I think I have been the same thing, a person, over my life. But if there is no inner, substantive me, then there is no fact to the matter about what my experience will be when ‘I’ press the button. It is just as the observer says: first there was one, and then there were two (with the toggle set to ‘save’), each thinking himself to be the one. There is no fact about what ‘the one’ really experienced, because ‘the one’ wasn’t there to begin with. There was only a complex arrangement of members, analogous to my poker club, thinking of themselves as belonging to the same ‘one’ over time.



Small comfort that is. I went into this problem wondering whether I could survive – only to find out that I am not, and never was! And yet the decision still lies before me: do I – do we? – press the button?



Note: I make no claim to originality in this thought experiment. A very similar sort of question was raised in 1775 by the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, in a letter to Lord Kames referencing Joseph Priestley’s materialism: ‘whether when my brain has lost its original structure, and when some hundred years after the same materials are again fabricated so curiously as to become an intelligent being, whether, I say, that being will be me; or, if two or three such beings should be formed out of my brain, whether they will all be me’. I first encountered it, with the Martian setting, in the preface to the essay collection ‘The Mind’s I’ (1981), edited by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett. The British philosopher Derek Parfit made much hay out of the idea in his book ‘Reasons and Persons’ (1984). And the podcaster C G P Grey provides an insightful illustration of the problem in his video ‘The Trouble with Transporters’ (2016).





Charlie Huenemann



This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

Do we die when we teleport?

Consider a teleporter. Let's say you go into the departure teleportation booth. Your body is scanned. Your body is then disintegrated and simultaneously, from the information that was scanned, a replica is created in the destination teleportation booth. As part of your ongoing experiences, you will have seemed to "jump" from the departure booth to the destination booth. A splendid way of travelling!


What implications are there though if the machine malfunctions and there's a 10 minute delay before your body is disintegrated? Apart from this, the teleporter works, and the replica is still created at the time it should be. So, for 10 minutes there will be 2 versions of you. As part of your ongoing experiences, you might still seem to "jump" to the destination booth. However! Equally possible is that you seem to remain exactly where you are. If the latter pertains, then how would you feel about your impending disintegration 10 minutes hence?

Well, of course, one would be horrified. One would typically presumably think this shows the copy is not actually you -- it is merely a copy.



But wait!


The replica is physically identical. Hence (assuming materialism), the replica's memory and personality are also absolutely identical. And the replica looks absolutely identical too.


To insist, nevertheless, that the replica is not a legitimate continuation of the original person is, therefore, to deny that one's physicality wholly determines one's self. That there must be something over and above one's total physicality -- a soul or whatever. But this then is a straightforward denial of materialism.


So materialists cannot deny that a physical replica would be you, it is simply incompatible with all forms of materialism to maintain this.

But do we have a paradox here? In the case of the malfunctioning teleporter, what if you do not appear to "jump" to the destination booth but remain exactly where you are? How can the replica, therefore, be you?? Is this then a paradox? No, not for the materialist.

Imagine the following scenario. Imagine that every infinitesimal fraction of a second you are getting teleported from place to place. Obviously, if you keep your eyes open, you'll just see a confusing blur. But you could close your eyes, and everything would seem to be normal. You could be thinking of a problem, daydreaming, or whatever. Nothing would seem different as compared to when you have your eyes closed normally, except in the teleportation scenario you are continuously being killed and spontaneously coming into being every infinitesimal fraction of a second!



Now, if we suppose that precisely this is happening in our second by second everyday existence then there is no paradox for the materialist, at least not in this regard. We do not actually exist from one second to the next -- a persisting self, and indeed a self, is an illusion. It merely seems we have a continuous existence.

Notes

To see why I believe such a momentarily existing self is incoherent, see my following blog entry:

Does the self as opposed to a mere "sense of self" exist?


Also, see an entry from my other blog where it seems that Buddhism shares a similar belief:
Buddhism and a persisting self

Finally, the following webcomic featuring a teleportation machine might be of interest.

Ian Wardell

Update 2/8/17: Just posted an essay on the same topic written by a certain Charlie Huenemann who is professor of philosophy at Utah State University. He comes to the same conclusion as me. It might be useful to read if people didn't find me sufficiently clear.
If I teleport from Mars, does the original me get destroyed?

Does the self as opposed to a mere "sense of self" exist?

An interesting blog entry by someone regarding whether the self actually exists.


Can the Chariot take us to the land of no-self?

Here is the issue as I see it. It seems to me that materialists cannot believe in a self. This follows when we remember our bodies are in a constant state of change and hence our mental states too. There can be nothing permanent to which materialists could hang their hat on and call a self. And materialists sometimes approvingly speak of Buddhism as sharing their belief here.


But what does it mean to claim the self doesn't exist? Well first of all it certainly doesn't mean that they are claiming that we are not conscious. We know in a most immediate manner that we are conscious. Nor would they deny we have a sense of self. Thus from one minute to the next we feel we are the same self, or the same person, enduring during that time.



The materialists (and Buddhists) claim this is an illusion. In other words, although we have a sense of self, this does not correspond to a real self. This can most easily be seen when we compare ourselves now to when we were children when we had very different personality characteristics. If our intelligence, interests etc have changed so radically since then, then in what sense can we be claimed to be the same person?



But the materialist and Buddhist are claiming much more than this. They claim that even from one second to the next there is no actual enduring self. To understand what they mean by this we need to be aware of the distinction between alterational change and existential change. The author of the article expresses it in the following way:

Phenomenologically, mental
change is not existential change, but alterational change, or in a word,
alteration.  Existential change, as when something comes into being or
passes away, is not a change in something, or at least it is not a
change in the thing that suffers the change: a thing that ceases to
exist is no longer available to be that in which  this change occurs,
and a thing that comes to exist is not available prior to its coming to
exist to be that in which this change occurs.  We express this by saying
that there is no substratum of existential change. Alteration, however,
requires a substratum: alteration occurs when numerically one and the
same individual is in different states at different times.

Let me put this in a more readily easily understood manner. Consider a table. We could paint it a different colour. That's alterational change. It's the same table, but has been altered slightly. But now consider destroying a table, and putting in it's place a table looking identical. That's existential change.


I take it that commonsense takes it for granted that, at least from one minute to the next, we undergo alterational change and emphatically not existential change. If the latter were true then, since we continuously change from one second to the next, then we would, from the commonsensical perspective, be effectively constantly "dying" from one second to the next. And this is precisely what materialists are obliged to believe. Hence both materialism and Buddhism entail a profound shift in the manner in which we view ourselves -- for one thing it would entail our fear of death is wholly misplaced!



In part one of the linked article we are presented with an argument for such existential change. I want to supplement the arguments there with my own. Imagine that in the future teleporting is possible. In the teleportation booth we scan a person, and simultaneously destroy (kill) that person, and create an identical person in the destination booth. That person will feel as if he has "jumped" from the original booth to the destination booth and will have the same memories etc and will feel that he is the same person that was killed.

So the teleported person will feel he is the same self i.e his sense of self will be intact. But in reality he has been killed and been replaced by a different self who looks exactly like him, shares the same memories and in every other way is psychologically identical to the original.



But -- so the materialist will argue -- the exact same position pertains in our everyday second by second existence. We have an almost identical physical appearance, almost identical memories and more generally an almost identical psychological state from one second to the next. However there's absolutely nothing persisting any more than a table does if we were to continually destroy the table and replace it with almost identical versions every second.

The author of the blog argues that this no-self hypothesis is untenable. As he puts it:

Suppose
my mental state passes from one that is pleasurable to one that is
painful.  Observing a beautiful Arizona sunset, my reverie is suddenly
broken by the piercing noise of a smoke detector.  Not only is the
painful state painful, the transition from the pleasurable state to the
painful one is itself painful.  The fact that the transition is painful
shows that it is directly  perceived. It is not as if there is merely a
succession of consciousnesses (conscious states); there is in addition a
consciousness of their succession.  For there is a consciousness of the
transition from the pleasant state to the painful state, a
consciousness that embraces both of the states, and so cannot be
reductively analyzed into them.  But a consciousness of their succession
is a consciousness of their succession in one subject, in one unity of
consciousness.  It is a consciousness of the numerical identity of the
self through the transition from the pleasurable state to the painful
one.  Passing from a pleasurable state to a painful one, there is not
only an awareness of a pleasant state followed by an awareness of a
painful one, but also an awareness that the one who was in a pleasurable
state is strictly and numerically the same as the one who is now in a
painful state.  This sameness is phenomenologically given, although our
access to this phenomenon is easily blocked by inappropriate models
taken from the physical world.  Without the consciousness of sameness,
there would be no consciousness of transition.

If we are aware of not only a pleasurable state followed by a painful state but in addition an awareness that I have changed from a pleasurable state to a painful state, then there must be something enduring which persists through both states. So, in addition to mental states at specific instances in time, there is an underlying awareness of these mental states at specific instances in time. This underlying awareness plays the role of uniting these experiences. To wit:

 . . the self is experienced not as an object alongside objects, but as the conscious transtemporal unity of the pleasurable and painful states.

Has the author established that it is plausible to suppose the self exists? I certainly think the example of the self is very different to that of a chariot or any other physical object. The self or I seems to serve the purpose of demarcating one set of experiences from another. I do not experience your experiences, and you do not experience mine. The prospect of an enjoyable night out down town seems very different if I were to experience it rather than an identical twin of mine were to experience it. Simply because the self can neither be pointed to nor is discernible in isolated conscious experiences does not entail such a self does not exist. In short if the materialist or Buddhist is to assert that there is no persisting self then he needs to address this challenge of the "conscious transtemporal unity" of successive conscious states.


But what about the teleportation example? Indeed we can imagine the following scenario. Imagine that every infinitesimal fraction of a second you are getting teleported from place to place. Obviously if you keep your eyes open you'll just see a confusing blur. But you could close your eyes, and everything would seem to be normal. You could be thinking of a problem, daydreaming, or whatever. Nothing would seem different as compared to when you have your eyes closed normally, except in the teleportation scenario you are continuously being killed and spontaneously coming into being every infinitesimal fraction of a second! Does this then refute the notion there can be an enduring real self? Well, yes, but only if you believe that teleportation in the manner described is possible. And this possibility is dependent upon some materialist position being true. When the original body is scanned it is typically implicitly being supposed that a person is exhausted by the total sum of information constituting his body. But to suppose this is to assume that reductive materialism is true, or more specifically that human beings are nothing but their material bodies. But non-materialists will reject that either consciousness or selves are themselves material. More specifically they will deny the self or its conscious states can be constituted by information (for if they could why would they not by definition be material?). A weaker materialist position could be adopted which holds that even though conscious states are not the very same thing as the brain or its processes and hence cannot be scanned and reproduced, conscious states are nevertheless produced by a person's brain. In which case the teleported person's body will produce consciousness and teleportation will be possible after all, even if we reject strict materialism. 


None of this though says anything about the possibility of a persisting or enduring self should we reject all materialist positions. Perhaps the body doesn't produce either selves or their conscious states but only modifies conscious states whilst leaving an unchanging self intact. This might be compared to tinkering with the innards of a TV set and altering the picture quality being displayed, yet without altering in any way whatsoever the actual content of the programme being screened. It seems to me that if this is so then the implications for teleporting would be that it is impossible, at least in the manner described, and a mere corpse would appear in the destination booth.


Edited to add: For those who might be interested there's a paper on why Berkeley's conception of a real enduring self is not susceptible to David Hume's dismissal (I also talk about Berkeley's philosophy here: )


Berkeley's Refutation of Hume On the Self

Is a "life after death" possible if we are wholly physical creatures?

Keith Augustine has written extensively on the net regarding what he considers the unreasonably notion that we somehow survive the death of our bodies.  In a forthcoming volume edited by Keith entitled "The Myth of the Afterlife: Essays on the Case Against Life After Death" is a paper written by the philosopher Gualtiero Piccinini.  The abstract for this paper can be found here.  Unfortunately the actual paper itself is not available on the net.  However Gualtiero Piccinini was good enough to email me a copy.  Predominantly this paper focuses upon the contribution the neuroscientific data brings to the debate.  It argues that this data strongly suggests that brains produce consciousness, hence there can be no "life after death".

As an aside one can of course concede that the neuroscientific data does indeed constitute strong evidence that brains produce consciousness.  However this fact is blunted somewhat when we consider various alternative evidence. For example, near-death experiences and the closely related phenomenon deathbed visions, crisis apparitions, and so on.  Moreover it can be argued that ESP at least indirectly suggests that we survive the death of our bodies.  In contradistinction to the brain produces consciousness hypothesis, this alternative evidence with its implication of a "life after death" has the not inconsiderable bonus of being consistent with our intuitive conviction that we are persisting selves.  I have previously written about this here (in contrast naturalism/materialism is simply incompatible with the notion of a persisting self. This will be attempted to be made clear below in the context of the replication/teleportation thought experiment).  What for the sake of simplicity I didn't mention in my paper is that I also consider the notion that brains produce consciousness to be deeply philosophically problematic (each of the various positions eg reductive materialism, non-reductive materialism, strong emergence, seem to be untenable for differing reasons). However I don't want to address these deep philosophical problems here -- that can be deferred to when Keith's book is published and I write my review of it.



What I intend to do in this blog entry is to put aside my own beliefs and accept for the sake of argument that brains do indeed produce consciousness.  At first blush, even if this were a fact, it cannot rule out a "life after death".  I'm primarily thinking here of resurrection, or uploading our consciousness into a robot or some other artificial body.  Even the prospect of reincarnation does not seem to be ruled out so long as we understand it need not be a "soul" that survives in order to conclude that reincarnation might be meaningfully be said to have occurred.



However Gualtiero Piccinini disputes this, and he does so by a thought experiment involving the teleportation and replication of individuals.  In his paper he argues:

" imagine that teleportation is invented. A teleporter disintegrates your current body, extracts precise information about the location of each particle that constitutes you, and makes an exact particle-by-particle replica of you in another location. To go from New York to Paris, says the advertisement, you can take a plane, which takes seven hours and costs $1,000, or take the teleporter, which takes only a minute and costs $100. Which one would you take? If you are in doubt, consider a more advanced teleporter. It makes a copy of your body by scanning your present body without destroying it. Now it should be pretty clear that after you enter and exit the teleporter in New York, you are the person who is still in New York, while the new body in Paris is a mere replica distinct from you. Regardless of how many replicas are made and whether making replicas requires the destruction of your current body, your replica is not you. No one can make your replica numerically identical with you—not even god (contra Baker 2011)".

 

Unfortunately this is simply inconsistent with naturalism/physicalism/materialism, or indeed any position which holds that mental states are produced by brain states and are tightly correlated with them. Under naturalism there is no distinction between numerical and qualitative identity.  At that instant when the replica is created the replica necessarily must be you if it is physically identical. To deny this is to affirm that what "you" are is something over and above the totality of your physicality.



But let's press this further. The replica will look the same, share the exact same character traits and in general be absolutely psychologically indistinguishable from the original. Moreover this ostensibly teleported person will have memories of her life before being teleported -- she will remember standing in the teleportation booth, experiencing a sudden shift in perspective, and finding herself in the destination booth. In every way this newly created person will feel herself as being simply a continuation of the original and that she has merely instantaneously transported from one place to another. 



So to deny that the replica is the very same person is not only to deny that ones total physicality fixes identity, but also that the totality of ones psychological states, including memories, fails to fix identity too!   Of course under any materialist based metaphysic the former will entail the latter, but it is pertinent to stress this point.



So how does the materialist escape the seeming paradox the author alludes to? Imagine the following scenario. Imagine that every infinitesimal fraction of a second you are getting teleported from place to place. Obviously if you keep your eyes open you'll just see a confusing blur. But you could close your eyes, and everything would seem to be normal. You could be thinking of a problem, daydreaming, or whatever. Nothing would seem different as compared to when you have your eyes closed normally, except in the teleportation scenario you are continuously being killed and spontaneously coming into being every infinitesimal fraction of a second!



Now if we suppose that precisely this is happening in our second by second everyday existence then there is no paradox.



What this means then is that the materialist has to reject the notion of a persisting self. That's all an illusion. There is only the sense of a self, but that sense corresponds to no real self.

Let me try to be more clear about this.  If the original body is killed at the precise moment of replication then, from the perspective of the person being teleported, she will seem to “jump” to the remote destination.  But of course there’s no reason at all why the original should be killed at that particular instant.  Perhaps we might delay the termination of the original; by an hour say.  But then this creates the interesting scenario whereby it seems to the person that at the precise moment of replication she will have a 50/50 chance of either suddenly “jumping” to the remote location, or simply remaining where she is with the unpleasant prospect of being killed in an hour's time!

If you think this represents a paradox then you haven’t understood what I’m saying.  Should naturalism/materialism be true then, even in our apparent day to day existence, we do not even survive from one second to the next.  The overwhelming feeling we are persisting selves is all a horrible illusion.  The original person will die in an hour's time.  But intellectually, and as a good naturalist/materialist, this ought not to perturb her in the slightest since she is effectively “dying” every infinitesimal fraction of a second anyway.  Of course psychologically she is likely to be very frightened indeed!  This reflects the fact that we are all instinctively strong dualists, or at least that we are persisting selves i.e substantial selves.  It is overwhelmingly counter-intuitive to suppose otherwise.



Gualtiero Piccinini's thought experiment reveals that he too is instinctively a strong dualist.   In his paper he derides substance dualism, yet affirms that the self is substantial in his teleportation thought experiment.

Incidentally the philosopher Gualtiero Piccinini whose arguments I address here has actually seen this blog
entry and has commented in a blog entry here. Unfortunately he doesn't understand
my argument, although the people commentating underneath do appear to
understand it.  It will be interesting to see if he has modified his
contribution to the volume. 

UPDATE:  It's almost 3 years since I wrote the above. Myth of an Afterlife: The Case Against
Life After Death has now finally been published and I shall be
reviewing it in due course.

Further Update 8/5/22  Almost 10 years after my original post.  Here is my ~13,000 word review of this book. 

A Response to The Myth of an Afterlife