Self: Philosophy In Transit by Barry Dainton

Author:Barry Dainton [Dainton, Barry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780718192419
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2014-04-24T00:00:00+00:00

Teleportation revisited

According to C-theory, you will be numerically identical with someone who exists at some future time only if there exists a potential for stream-like consciousness linking you to that person – or more precisely, if you are C-continuous with that person. Can the relationship of C-continuity be preserved by the informational teleportation procedure?

It seems unlikely. If you were to use this procedure in an attempt to cut down on the costs of transportation to Mars (say), to start with your body would be completely annihilated. You would then (in effect) be reduced to nothing more than a pattern of information encoded in radio waves, and it is these waves which make the trip to Mars – their journey can take nearly half an hour. When this radio signal is received on Mars, the information it contains is used to construct a replica of your body, as it was at the point of departure. Would you be C-continuous with this newly produced replica? Alas no. This is because a human brain has the capacity for producing experience but an encoded pattern of data in radio or light-waves does not – even if such data does permit the reconstruction of a physical brain that does.

So, by the lights of C-theory, this form of teleportation is not a way of getting around, it’s a method of killing people.

This may be bad news for those of us who are weary of the drudgery of more conventional means of transport, but it could also be seen as bad news for C-theory. For there are those who argue that it would be crazy not to make full and frequent use of teleportation technology, if it were available, since it preserves everything that could possibly matter when it comes to our continued existence. This is the verdict Derek Parfit reaches in his discussion of teleportation in Reasons and Persons, when he is considering how to get himself to Mars:

On my view, my relation to my Replica contains what fundamentally matters. This relation is about as good as ordinary survival … ordinary survival, is, on my view, little better than – or about as bad as – being destroyed and Replicated. It would therefore be irrational to pay more for a conventional spaceship journey. (1984: 285)

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