Our understanding of consciousness is not complete, but it is bounded. We know the explanation falls within a certain territory. The territory has parameters: it is monist, it is physical, it is causally closed. These parameters speak to the risk of teleportation. It's not like claiming that thunder must come from God, because what else could it be; it's like claiming that thunder must be a physical event, because we have no evidence for nonphysical events.
I like debating this stuff, but still if you don't mind, I'll retort yet again.
My point about the "thunder" is precisely to say that we cannot say exactly what "bounds" consciousness until we actually
know how it behaves. Someone who didn't even
imagine what those "physical" things could even be, he would obviously run to his most parsimonious explanations. The correct explanation was just beyond his scope of understanding. Knowledge is inherently unbounded at all times, which is not to say that it is impossible. We do believe we understand thunders because we have modeled them and correctly identified all the parameters that enable them, etc. But consciousness? I'd say we are at a new level here. We have
no idea if even other people have consciousness (we just assume they do, it's parsimonious, etc.). But if we would really wanted to know, there would be no means (and by means, I even say,
philosophical means) to correctly detect if others have it or are plainly zimbos.
The monist attitude is fine (and I do have opinions on how to tackle this problem, but that's for another time), but the problem is at the very core of experience and how it is fundamentally undetectable by the outside (indistinguishable from "zimbos").
The objection to the engineering parameters of the teleporter is valid, which is why I've been careful to specify a philosophical teleporter: arbitrarily precise reconstruction of the physical body.
Except that the engineering objection destroys your philosophical one. You yourself claimed that what makes "me" "me" is the correct localization of my entire brain atoms (and more), so that if we correctly copied all of this, then that would be "me". Then you said something apparently contradictory: that there is no such thing as a constant mental state: we are always different. My brain state in a nano second ago differs from mine now. That should mean that my "me" me is just inherently different that the "me" me a nanosecond ago. We are two different people. This is true even colloquially, but it nevertheless demolishes the first point altogether.
Furthermore, if it is indeed true that these small differences do not matter because "what I am now is different than I was before", then those engineering differences
shouldn't matter as well, at least philosophically speaking. The end result is just someone with a differerent mental state than myself, but that was going to be a given anyway, since I
change myself every second, so we're still good.
But, philosophically, this escalates quickly into a reductio ad absurdum because you'd be forced to recognize that
all mental states are therefore "equivalent" to you. What if the teleporter would kill you and substituted you for someone completely different? Clearly that is as philosophically valid as your own proposal. But this is clearly absurd and goes against your premise.
So something went awfully wrong. And what I am claiming is that this paradox points to an incompleteness of how you are framing consciousness by itself. Your claims about how you are able to make a boundary around Consciousness is overly optimistic.
Internalizing the world-view that consciousnesses are 'interchangeable and material' is hardly a formula for suicide. It's not a disturbing attitude! It loses you nothing. You are a subprocess of the universe, computing yourself forward. Your own behavior is contingent on your past experiences, your knowledge, and beliefs. If anything it's humanizing.
Yeah that might be true, people might be at peace with that. I'd submit that this comes with a different understanding of what those ideas imply, but at that point I'd also have to admit that I am equally in an unknown territory so I might be totally wrong.
The fact that my statements seem controversial or misanthropic is, I think, evidence of how deeply our society is still predicated on illusions about what we are. The notion that we are only a pattern of information, stored in meat and endlessly mutable, is somehow radical and depressing. Yet it requires only that we give up things we never actually had at all!
It's not that it's "radical and depressing", it's incomplete. People in the 19th century equated people to steam engines. "They are just like steam engines!", and ... sigh, it's like, "Oh look people are just atoms". Well, that's
true in some sense, but it's just an incredibly ignorant sense. It ignores everything else that might be at play here and that is perhaps orders of magnitude more important than "atoms". Likewise, I feel you are merely happy to equate consciousness to some sorts of metaphors: "patterns of information", "thing that can be stored in meat", "endlessly mutable", etc., while the grander truth is that you actually don't know what consciousness really is!
Engineeringly speaking.
It's akin to hear from someone in the 17th century that emotions are "bounded" in the regions of the heart. "We know this to be a fact", he would say. Well of course he would.
Which is not to say that I know. I just feel that I'm at least having more respect? for the big gap between what is actually true and our knowledge.
The misanthropic note is a purely philosophical critique. The idea that you shouldn't care if you are about to die or not is necessarily predicated in a disregard for human subjective experience, which is all we have. Do I believe zookeeper is a misanthrope? No, I don't know enough about him to say that, but his idea clearly was.
Nonono. The idea that you shouldn't care if you live or not has nothing to do with how one values the contents of subjective experience; it's precisely because only subjective experience matters that the concern becomes irrelevant.
The question of whether you live or not is a question of whether your subjective experience exists at all. I hold that it would be paradoxical to care about it ending, because the only way you can make a value/preference judgement is from within that subjective viewpoint. To prefer existence over non-existence would require being able to compare them from some kind of objective viewpoint, which you cannot do, making "I prefer to exist" something of an oxymoron.
So, there is a disregard for existence of subjective experience, but not for what subjective experience is like. You can call that misanthropic (although the word is obviously unnecessarily antropocentric) if you want, but it seems like a simplistic and misleading characterization.
I do see the problem here better, your answer clarifies a lot. You see, you're analysing this in an "objective" standpoint, while the original question was placed for your own
subjectivity. This is your mistake. The question was, and I quote,
How willingly would you use each transporter? Now, we can be all scientists all day and discuss this very objectively, but at the end of the day, the decision is not from the "universe" point of view, but from
yours. You are about to enter the teleportation device.
Will you say "energise" or not? You even complain that these words are too "anthropocentric", but I failed to see that this was a problem for the bees or horses. This is a dillema for a human, and a question directly posed to one, not as a scientist, but as a human being with a
will.
So yes, you do deny that your analysis is misanthropic, but it ends up being apathetic. Again, that's fine. You can do Hamlet all day and decide like some people do that there is no real difference between being alive or dead (is there any objective difference anyway?), but that is
not responding to the question at hand.
I am a human being and I stand for my initial answer: I would NOT enter those teleporters, not in a million years.