By what sensible causal rule could a person's brain spontaneously become a horse's? You're trying to argue that a catastrophic failure is somehow equivalent.
That's an irrelevant point. From the get go, we have been having engineering liberties. Indulge me, if you will, on this "liberty" as well, for philosophically these difficulties are equivalent. What matters is that there is a
delta, and you have accepted a
delta. If deltas are acceptable, and no other reason than "It seems it must be so" is given for some arbitrary "red line" similitude to the original, then it follows that there is no "red line" and we can posit the weirdest things imaginable.
The teleporter is safe because it allows your brain state to propagate forward by its ordinary causal rules. It does not change or distort the information present. It is wholly unlike the examples you're floating.
This is bad reasoning, and I see many other commenters making, sorry to say, the same mistake. The problem here is that you are presuming that Consciousness = Brain State, or C = "Information Present". But my point is precisely that you have failed to prove this point. This is just a hypothesis, a guess, your metaphor of what might be going on. A guess made by someone who knows his neuroscience ****, no doubt, but this is still 2015 and I don't think anyone has yet sussed what C is, and since you're just a mammal like me, I will infer that God hasn't spoken to you either about the "True Nature of The Universe".
You become some other you by the introduction of stimuli which are processed according to the brain's logic.
My brain paralyses with these magical uses of the word "You", wherein the "Me" Me "becomes" someone "Other [Me]" by the introduction of etc. Clearly we are dealing with a confusing semantical problem related to a mess between Aristotelian ways to use words like "identity" and "essences" and so on with Platonic ideas "It's just information that matters", with (anti) Cartesian, etc. IOW, the whole sentences are a complete mess, and might sound good, but ultimately they are meaningless.
Death is trivially defined: irrecoverable loss of information. If the brain state isn't lost and can keep firing itself forward on its own power, you're not dead.
This is what I mean by "edgelording", redefining words to mean something entirely different. When I lose a notebook, I never say it "died" or that the information within "died". That's absurd. Death is not something confinable to such definitions, it is related to "Life", which is more than information. I do see that this "Brains = Computers" metaphor is so ingrained in your mind that it is gruesomely hard to get you to see how limited in scope and meaning it is. It's like saying the ninth of Beethoven is "contained" or "bound" by the knowledge (or idea) that it's "all just soundwaves". Yeah, you won't get very far with that approach.
Luis it's important to realize that the end product Battuta refers to isn't "the consciousness of a human being". It's "You". You yourself. An arbitrary human being that undergoes the process and remains the same arbitrary human being, not another human being. If the end result was not identical in all ways including thought and memory, it is not a real teleportation. And if it is identical in all ways including thought and memory, then "You" are still alive, and arguably safer than any single other instance of your entire life.
The redefinition of the word "YOU" into an object that is interchangeable in algebraic terms just like any other scientific object might well be what is meant, but it's an incorrect take on the word,
given the question posed. The question is directed at the SUBJECTIVE YOU, not this "OBJECTIVE YOU-ness", that scientifically we can determine to be just about the same / equal to any other instance of itself.
If I were to use the latter, then yes, of course, the "Me" that would be alive after teleportation would be alive, and in "some way", I'd be alive through "Him". Everyone else would regard "him" as "me" and from their point of view, we are one and the same. And yet, from
my point of view, it might as well just happen that my life ends
right there and some other Consciousness is suddenly born with my memories and continues "my life". From the point of the universe, nothing really changed. A guy named Luis was at spot 1, then he teleported his information to spot 2 and a guy named Luis appeared from that spot. Everyone else acted normally as if it's the same Luis. For all purposes and forever, it
is the same.
What we cannot ever possibly postulate is if whether this new person is the continuation of
your own subjective experience, or if your life
ended at that point, period.
Now you can be just like zookeeper and say "That's irrelevant, everything else keeps working, who cares if I die if I'm substituted by a perfect replica?", to which I'll just open my eyes in terror. It's like watching people go willingly to gas chambers because they want their replicas to go to Tokyo faster.
Lastly, I just want to reiterate that I know some people here believe that Consciousness is "just a pattern". I can be facile here and merely ask "Oh yeah, your proof?" and wait for the next hundred years for it. Instead, I'll just point out that irrespectively of your beliefs, you should acknowledge those are merely beliefs, that these metaphors you are using are most probably unable to capture the actual things that are going on in C, and that perhaps you shouldn't risk your life and your consciousness with a pre-22nd century analysis of what it's all really about.