Ironically this also seems like the final defeat of the 'teleporters are dangerous' argument. Even if you accept that consciousness is somehow an exceptional fact, the only absolutely certain and incontrovertible fact, then you now must concede the teleporter will be safe: barring dualism, you know that whoever comes out the other side has exactly the same first-person capacity to say 'I am conscious' and 'I exist'. The alternative is postulating that these capabilities somehow arise from nonphysical fantasy.
So I've been away for a day and a half and already I see Battuta clinging to his ideas and declaring his victory by fiat. All of these arguments really boil my blood because they are basically objectifying every aspect of humanity and consciousness, and treating it as any other object, capable of being trasnferable in algebraic terms. This certainty is ludicrous. The belief is not. You can believe in all these things, but what really annoys the hell out of me is the nagging certainty you have of them without presenting any shred of philosophical argument for there being so. You just assume that if a certain brain state is equal to another brain state, then it
follows it is
the same consciousness. If we collapse one and create another at the exact same state, we are effectively
moving Consciousness.
But this is just a definition of Consciousness that is being challenged. Not, again, that it is not true, but that you have no way to test if it
is true.
I'll go back to my "two rooms, one wall" example, because your counter points are, quite simply, insufficient. I was very disappointed in them. So let's see, here was your counter:
From the pre-teleport person's perspective, they only know that their body's going to be scanned. If they knew the actual terms of the deal, they would say 'wait, wait, if we do this, one of my causal descendants is going to die! They'll diverge and then terminate irretrievably! Sure, the other fork will survive, but I don't want my child subjectivity to experience that!'
From Fork A's perspective, on the far side of the wall, they've suddenly jumped into an identical room but without the presence of the scan operator. Weird!
From Fork B's perspective, they have been given a body scan, and now suddenly they're going to be murdered! They are causally divergent from Fork A, and their brainstate is about to be eradicated. It will not feed forward through ordinary causality or through a teleporter. It's just done, gone, leaving.
This quote exposes such a simple flaw of the teleportation problem that I am aghast on how you, instead of acknowledging it, recognizing it, simply diverted your attention to a mere technicality that could be easily swept away.
Here are simple questions regarding my scenario:
A) Can the destruction of "Fork B" be called "murder"? It seems that it is. If this person is not exterminated, it can continue existing in the world, if he is exterminated, the Cosmos is accounting for one less Consciousness in it. There's blood in the ground, there's a killer, there is an energy discharged to destroy this fork. I don't see how it is not murder;
B) Is the murder of "Fork B" dependent on the
pre-knowledge of Fork B that he is going to die? That is, does the determination that what happens to him is murder depends on the words the scan operator tells you? If the scan operator is silently killing you, does that stop being murder? Clearly, that is ridiculous. People don't get out of jail sentences for being silently killing people.
C) Is the murder of "Fork B" dependent on the
speed of his death? If he is
immediately killed after the scan, can we say that the operator is therefore innocent of his actions? This is absurd: if he does not kill the Fork, the Fork lives as the laws of physics allows him to. It is the
action by the operator that
causes the extermination of the Fork. The speed to which he does this is irrelevant: He could wait an hour, he could wait a minute, he could wait a second, he could wait a micro-second. The murder is murder nevertheless, a Consciousness *has* been erradicated nevertheless.
D) Something has been hinted at the "suffering" of Fork B. Oh, the humanity, so concerned with the "suffering". It's a total strawman. You can easily depict a scenario where this person was given a drug before being scanned that prevented his psychological suffering. This administration of this drug
does not absolve anyone from the crime of murdering him.
What I *do* believe some people here are having an issue is they are suffering from the same illusion people going to see magic tricks suffer. They see a ball in one man's hand. And suddenly he closes his hand and opens his other hand, and voilá, the ball is there! But if he misses the sync, he will expose that in fact there were two balls there, and your brain will cry foul! "That wasn't really magic, those were always two balls!" They'll be quite right. And here it's the exact same thing. You
pretend it's the same consciousness if the technical magicians are able to exactly transfer the information and rebuild the same brain state to another body, while killing the first
before your brain calls it an illusion and the illlusion gets broken.
But it was an illusion all the time. Teleportation is, as described in this thread, killing a consciousness just after copying it into another body. And killing the
only thing we know we have is, by far, the worst crime you can ever commit to anyone.