Conference noted::sf

There's been some discussion already in the MOVIES notesfile
down on SSDEVO -- I forget the note number but its close to the
end!

		Nigel

Press KP7 (or SELECT) etc etc etc

    	See BISON::MOVIES Note 460 for some comments on THE FLY.
    
    	Though SF Notes might be a good place to discuss the
    practicality/impracticality of Brundle's teletransporter.
    
    	Larry
    

    *** Possible Spoiler ***
    One problem I have always had with the numerous instantaneous/
    semi-instantaneous teleportation devices is the loss of personal
    identity.  In THE FLY Brundle actually comments that the contents
    of Telepod One are disintegrated and then re-integrated in Telepod
    Two.  I'm not sure I would feel secure that the re-integrated person
    was me.  If anyone has ever taken an introductory course in Philosophy
    then you probably discussed personal identity.  I wouldn't be satisfied
    to know that an identical duplicate of me is going to be re-integrated
    at the other end.  After all disintegration might be very painful.
    No one could ever know for sure...
                
    Also why couldn't we have the computer running the Telepod/Transporter
    send a copy of me to more than one place!  Think about it...
    
    This applies to Star Trek's transporters, Brundle's Telepod, and
    many other stories I am sure.
    
    Any other comments?
    
    Steve McAfee
                                                                

    	Steve, you might really be interested in checking out Star Trek
    Notes 3, 87, and 93 discussing the transporter.  THEBAY::STAR_TREK
    
    	This is just a helpful hint, NOT a message saying take your
    questions elsewhere.  Perhaps those SF Noters who do NOT check out
    ST (is that possible?!) could come up with some concepts on the
    transporter in both ST and THE FLY.
    
    	Larry
    

    re .3:
    
    Actually, I hope you would check out note 87 in Star_Trek. 
    I started the note expressing the same misgivings as you, and boy
    am I taking a beating! I could use some help.
                                                   
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    $ SET TOPIC = ON

    Re .3
    
    Larry Niven wrote an excellent essay entitled "Theory and Practice
    of Teleportation" in which he addresses this and many other amusing
    conundrums of teleportation.
    
    I can think of a couple of reasons for NOT being worried, one based
    on dualism, one based on physicalism.
    
    Suppose, dualistically, that you have a mind, ego, soul, or spirit
    that is not part of your material body.  Now, your soul obviously
    has no difficulty keeping track of your body as it moves about,
    shedding bits of matter and taking on new ones.  It is at least
    plausible that the soul would not have any more difficulty keeping
    track of its body through disintegration and reintegration.
    
    Suppose, physicalistically, that your material body is all there
    is to you.  Once more, we have no trouble believing that identity
    is maintained despite bits of matter coming and going.  Now, in
    the case of this kind of teleportation, ALL the matter gets changed
    at once, but the pattern is completely unaltered, in theory.  Since
    the particular bits of matter don't matter, the perfect duplication
    of pattern should be enough for continued identity.  At least I
    don't see anything to stand in its way.
    
    Now, about duplication -- If pattern is all there is to identity,
    then both copies are equally the person.  So, for instance, if X
    commits a crime and then gets duplicated, I think both copies of
    X should be punished.  It gets trickier with property: I suppose
    X1 and X2 would have to split it between them. And marriage?! Augh!
    Instant polygamy.
    
    Duplication on a dualist model might not be possible.  It would
    depend on the nature of the soul.  You might get a viable version
    and a soulless version.  An idiot? A psychopath? A catatonic?  Or
    maybe it would suck a soul in from wherever souls come from.  It
    might be someone else, with physical identity and maybe identical
    memories, who has a markedly different character and no feeling
    of identity with or responsibility for actions prior to the duplication.
          
    Earl Wajenberg

Interesting.

However, I must take exception to the bit about punishing both people in the
case that one of the duplicates commits a crime.  It all depends upon the
characteristics of the soul.

If both duplicates have different souls, or none, then you should logically
only punish the duplicate that did wrong. I assume you believe that
differences in experiences create different people?  After all, one
duplicate's memories will recall being there, and then suddenly being here,
while the other duplicate will recall being there, and ending up somewhere
different...  While that's only a minor difference, sooner or later you would
have two different people. 
                         
Of course, since we're off the deep end already, suppose that a soul can open
"channels" to multiple "devices".  A soul-server, if you will... In that case,
punishing one of the duplicates should be sufficient.  You wouldn't even care
which duplicate took the punishment - it's all the same "person"! 

- Chris

    re .6:
    
    > Now, in
    > the case of this kind of teleportation, ALL the matter gets changed
    > at once, but the pattern is completely unaltered, in theory.  Since
    > the particular bits of matter don't matter, the perfect duplication
    > of pattern should be enough for continued identity.  At least I
    > don't see anything to stand in its way.
                                                            
      The thing I see that might stand in the way is that moment of
    total non-existance between the disintigration and the re-integration.
    You can't really call it a "continued" identity because of that
    DIS-continuity. All you've done is created a new identity after
    destroying the original. 
    	No, I don't think the physicalist argument can be used to ensure
    the continuity of the self.
                                                   
                  /
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                 /
    
    P.S. This is great :-( I get to argue the the same point in two
    	files now.

Oops.  I read your first essay too fast, I guess, Earl.  I'd have to agree, in
the case that the crime was committed before the duplication, both duplicates
should pay.  Again, though, if you can only catch one of them, that may
be enough, depending upon how many "people" there actually are in those
bodies...

- Chris

    re .3, .6:
    
    There was an excellent story appearing in _Startling Stories_ in
    the late 1950s confronting just such a problem.  A couple was going
    to honeymoon on the moon, where they were going by teleportation,
    and the signal was lost; a backup/duplicate signal was sent, so
    that one spouse was the "original" and the other a "duplicate."
     Were they married?  What was their actual relationship, etc.? 
    Good, moody story.  The author "solved" the problem by having the
    "original" also replaced by a "duplicate" in a subsequent
    teleportation.   Not a good ending (a cop-out, in fact) but the
    story didn't suffer too much by that.
    
    The same problem is masticated almost to death in _Rogue Moon_ by
    Budrys, where there was more than one "duplicate."
    
    On the soul business: there's yet a third alternative: the soul
    is released at the moment of disintegration but cannot get backk
    into the body because of the relatively instantaneous nature of
    the disintegration/transport.  Then there'd be a soulless _something_
    at the destination and a loose soul ...
    
    Steve Kallis, Jr.
    

re .10                                                      

In which case, I hope there's a bottle and a cat handy!  ;-)

    Re .7 & .9
    
    Notice that I advocated punishing both copies only if the crime
    was (a) committed before duplication, as you noticed, and (b) if
    identity of physical pattern is all that matters.  If we have
    immaterial souls in the picture, I agree that things may be different.
    Awkward, too, if there is no good way to tell which body, if either,
    got the original soul.  Meta-awkward if everyone concerned is not
    agreed about the existence of non-physical souls.
    
    Re .8
    
    I grant that the physical discontinuity  is strange, but I'm not
    sure it is grounds for denying identity.  Why don't we start by
    asking how we establish identity in the first place?  For an inanimate
    object, physical continuity may be necessary.  But a mind in an
    organic body is a very different system.  As I remarked before,
    the particular pieces of matter in it keep changing anyway, like
    the air in a sound or the water in a wave.  Also, the mental activity,
    if not the physical persistence, is not continuous.
    
    We accept persistence of identity despite the gaps of sleep, or
    the worse gaps of coma.  You would probably accept persistence of
    identity if the person were frozen, so that there was no biological
    activity at all, much less mentation, then revived.
    
    This is a great thought-experiment, if nothing else.
    
    Earl Wajenberg

    re .12:
    
    yes, but I speak not only of the physical discontinuity but also
    the discontinuity of the process, wave, whatever.
    In every other example, there is some sort of continuity, in
    teleportation, there is none at all. 
    	
    -	Sleep is not a discontinuity at all, sleep and dreams are a vital 
    	part of the functioning of the brain. 
    	(remember, we're talking purely physicalist)
    
    - 	Coma, well at least the body is still there, and the brain is
    	generating some sort of busy signal.
    
    -	Frozen, again, at least the body is still there, and I might
    	argue about the revivability of someone who is frozen to the
    	point of zero brain activity.
                                                   
                  /
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    Re .13:
    
    The discontinuity is only something we see; if the body is recreated in
    the same configuration it was in when it was taken apart, there is no
    discontinuity in its operation. 
    
    
    				-- edp 

    re .12, .14:
    
    Let's argue this strictly from the "materialist" viewpoint, for
    a second (leave souls, etc., out of it):
    
    We take a body, dematerialize it, and somehow recreate it exactly
    the same, twice [it could be n times, but let's not throw too many
    curves).  So now we have two of what we had one of before.  Now
    a team, of people comes in and leads one of him or her out the South
    door of the room and puts him or her on a bus.  The other is led
    out of the North end of the room and is put in a taxi to the airport.
    No matter what happens next, the two "persons" are having different
    experiences, which lead to differences in them.  They will interact
    with different people, do different things, etc., before they meet
    again.
    
    Which is the "original?"  One?  Both?  Neither?
    
    Now that's a good thought experiment.
    
    Steve Kallis, Jr.
    
    P.S.:  The nonmaterialist answer is easier: whichever (if either)
    has the soul.  The problem here is detecting the soul. :-0
    

re: .14 
>    The discontinuity is only something we see; if the body is recreated in
>    the same configuration it was in when it was taken apart, there is no
>    discontinuity in its operation. 

Um, I'm not sure of this. My uninformed opinion is that the "self" is the
process, the operation of the brain. "Self-awareness", which is what I
recognize as "me", is a process- not the physical brain, though that's
where it takes place, and not some separate entity, a "soul".

The method of saving this process would be astonishingly subtle- it would
not be satisfactory to save the physical atoms, even in excruciating
detail. You would also have to save what each atom was doing- that is,
transferring an electrical charge, participating in a chemical reaction,
etc. Also, you would have to save all of it all at once- the transfer
from "running" to "saved" would have to occur faster than any of the
micro-processes could recognize that other micro-processes are "missing"
becaused they've been "saved". (I say "saved" to mean "put in a form
for transmission"- whether it's mailed in a box to Oskosh or sent by
hyperwave to the galactic core.)

Anything less subtle than that, and I suspect that it is equivalent to
disassembling a computer down to component transistors, while it's running,
reassembling it somewhere else, and assuming there will be no loss of
data.

One way to get around this might be to "trick" the process into moving
from where it is normally running (the brain) into the storage media.
This could be done by providing a "moving interface"- the brain and the
storage are interconnected at the boundery where the process has/hasn't
been moved, and the process moves over the boundery. This is something
like changing memory chips in a computer by substituting them during
the cpu cycles that aren't addressing that memory- remembering, of 
course, to copy the contents of the memory from one to the other outside
of the cpu- so it doesn't know what's happening.

John Varley examines the social and psychological implications of this
kind of "mind transfer" in a number of stories, such as "Overdrawn at
the Memory Bank", "The Phantom of Kansas", and "The Ophiuchi Hotline".
For my money, some of the best stories dealing with this "who's got the
soul?" problem.

As for teleportation, L. Niven sums it up for me: "I don't know. I wouldn't
ride in the damn thing."

John O.

	Ok, let's take this discussion down to the basic level:  How many
	of you would be willing to be disintegrated so that an IDENTICAL
	CLONE could be created some where else?  I wouldn't trust the thing
	even if they could capture all the elements, their position, velocity,
	acceleration, etc., too much to hope they get all the noise out of
	the signal.  I'd rather stay living than save the time of traveling.
	And if its too far to travel then I'll just stay home.

	Another piece of the discussion revolves around the bit about
	transmitting the original person.  Multiple receivers could make
	multiple copies but what if one of those receivers were not
	`authorized'?  Would the first receiver to reconstruct the person
	produce the official version?  I can picture a new crime - a
	combination of wire taping and bodysnatching (anyone want to buy
	their favorite movie star... cheep :-)

	Or how about if the recording facilities were separate from the
	transmission station... would the person exist during the delay
	between obliteration and reconstruction?  What if it were years or
	centuries?  Would you retain property rights?  Obligations?  At
	what point in time did that status change?

	About the soul bit, I like the way P.J. Farmer explained it in his
	Riverworld series.  The soul would be attracted to the (first?)
	body that met its exacting requirements.  This solves the issue
	of duplicates but doesn't help with the bodysnatching bit.

		Bob L.

    
    FYI - Having started this identity business, I took someone's advice and
    looked through note 87 of the THEBAY::STAR_TREK notes file.  That
    discussion contains over seventy notes on basically the same topic.
    
    Steve McAfee
    

    Re .13
    
    The gap between disintegration and reintegration cannot be totally
    discontinuous, or there could be no reintegration.  Minimally, the
    pattern of the body, in some encoding or another, must continue.
    
    Re .16 (or thereabouts)
    
    Nice point about recording the state of motion of the particles,
    but I doubt that it is necessary.  Friction and Brownian motion
    dominate activity at the molecular level in the human body, so all
    your cells would come out alive and in the same relative positions.
    
    By the way, with or without recording the state of motion, the total
    amount of information necessary to specify a living thing is
    astronomical.  I doubt that the medium could be significantly smaller
    than the "message" (=cargo).  The space-warp and mass tunnel-effect
    teleports have always seemed more plausible to me than the
    dis/re-integrate models.  Of course, they don't give rise to such
    neat conundrums.
    
    Earl Wajenberg

    re:.17
    
    As Spock was supposed to have said at some point, "A difference
    that makes no difference *is* no difference." In other words, if
    the "identical clone" has all of the memories, feelings, etc. of
    mine, and *is* (for all practical purposes) me in thought and
    deed, then sure, no prob, I'd step into the teleporter.
    
    Any other comments I have to make on this issue, I already made
    in the STAR_TREK Conference topic.
    
    --- jerry

	RE: .20

	It may make no difference to the other people (if it walks like,
	smells like, talks like, looks like...) but its only an identical
	clone.  The original person is gone, even if the `replacement'
	is identical for everyone else the clone meets.

	You can step into that teleporter but, I submit, it will be someone
	else that looks and acts like you stepping out the other end.

	(I follow enough notes files now... do I really have to add STAR_TREK
	just to enter this discussion?)

		Bob L.

    	Our bodies undergo complete physical changes all the time -
    we have ALL new cells since our births - does that make us any less
    different than when we were born?
    
    	Larry
    

    When you get up in the morning, how do you verify that you are the
    same person who went to sleep the night before?  In practical terms,
    surely it is a matter of memory.  You match your memory to the body
    you can see and feel, what you see in the mirror, the way you now
    think and feel compared to the way you used to think and feel. 
    Theoretically, none of that changes with the teleporter.
    
    In a James Blish Star Trek novel, Scotty and Kirk give this argument
    to McCoy (who hates the transporter) and suggest that he have Spock
    give his subconscious memories a telepathic check before and after
    transportation, if it really worries him.  McCoy replies that that
    would be a satisfactory test if he weren't really worried about
    souls, which he doesn't know how to test for.
    
    (The novel was "Spock Must Die" and was so-so in quality.  The Spock
    who must die is a duplicate produced by the transporter, but a perfect
    mirror image of the original.  With a lot of hand-waving, Blish
    asserts that the mirror image would have a personality of opposite
    orientation, i.e. Evil.  Given this hokey premise, he works it out
    fairly well.)
    
    Earl Wajenberg

	The resulting clone would have all the memories and could even
	think of him/her/its self as the real person.  No problem there.
	As a matter of fact, the clone can't even tell that the whole
	universe hasn't shifted under then and that they wweren't the
	one to stay in the same place.

	So the victim can't tell the difference and the people around them
	can't tell the difference and the original can't tell the difference
	(cause they don't exist anymore)... right?

	What it takes is an external observer to point to the cloud of
	dust from the exhaust fans on the transmitter to say `there goes
	Earl the first'...  ;-)

		Bob L.

    But what if the original is NOT destroyed in the process? 
    Do you suddenly start to see out of two pair of eyes? 
    	I don't think so.
    I think that "my" consciousness would stay in this body, and a new one 
    	is created in the duplicate body. 
    Now destroy the original. 
    Now open both boxes, the transmitter is empty, and I' (I prime) 
    	steps out of the receiver.
    There is no test you can perform (including psychic) that will be
    	able to say that I' is not the I you knew before the process.
        
                                                   
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	RE: .22

	I'm not convinced that all of a person's components are replaced
	regularly (teeth, bones, etc.) but, in either case, the package is
	not the whole person.  I am specifically thinking of the life-
	force/energy-field/whatever that surrounds each living being.
	With the body removed, the energy dissipates.  At the other end
	you are only re-creating the package.  Exit one android.  (;->)

	Also, how can you say you aren't different than when you were born...
	I sure am. :-)

	RE: .25

	Ok, then I'll try it (but I'll not be the first).  If there is such
	a thing as global consciousness (and you can prove it) you may have
	a market for this contraption.  But the real problem is IF the same
	consciousness can be in two places at once.

	> There is no test you can perform (including psychic) that will be
    	> able to say that I' is not the I you knew before the process.
        
	Yes, but did the original Die?

		Bob L.

    re .25:
    
    When you added "(including psychic)" you opened a can of worms.
    It goes back to the soul question.  If there is a soul and it is
    detectable by psychic means and it doesn't transfer in the transporter,
    then there would be a legitimate way of testing the "original" from
    one or more copies: check to see whether it contains a soul.
    
    Steve Kallis, Jr.
    

    	If there is NO soul, then obviously the problem of what happens
    to a human's soul in the transporting process no longer exists.
    
    	If there IS a soul, in the sense of a soul which is supernatural
    (eminating from another dimension of reality), then anything which
    happens in this reality would not affect the soul, as it resides
    in another dimension.  One could imagine the soul "skipping" the
    transporter process, to return to the body when the transporting
    is done and the body is reconstructed.
    
    	Larry
    

This discussion reminds me of Gilbert Gosseyn in "The
World of Null-A", who would get killed only to wake up
in a new version of his body.  Because the bodies were
being "grown" and sent out into the world on a preset
schedule, he was even conditioned with an urge for self-
destructive behavior when his "time was up" in the
currently active body (for some reason that I forget
there couldn't be two of him running around at once).

	Gibson kinda hits the same issue in "Neuromancer"
with the software construct of the "Dixie Flatliner".  He
reacts just like the person until questions of his true
nature are put to "him", at which point there's enough
characteristics of humanity in the software to make "it"
get very uncomfortable and distressed.

	So it boils down to the question: Who are you?
The four answers that different people seem to give are:
		o  Brain (i.e., the physical matter, so
	if you reconstitute another brain based	on a
	recording of all information about this one,
	that's a different person--and you die if you're
	dematerialized as part of the process)
		o  Energy-fields (I'm a little vague on
	what the ramifications of this are, but assuming
	energy such as light takes a finite amount of time
	to get somewhere, you're also dead in instantaneous
	transmission mode)
		o  Soul (or some intangible manifestation
	of Being that experiences your body for however
	long it's able to maintain some minimal functions
	--you could argue this either way for whether your
	old soul gets the reconstituted body or whether
	some new spirit from Beyond jumps in and grabs it)
		o  Information (this looks like the only
	option that makes survival in the new body sound
	like a pretty good shot, especially since the Bell
	test seems to indicate that information can travel
	instantaneously via some unknown mechanism--but do
	you then split into two "yous" if it's just a
	straight COPY instead of a COPY/DELETE?)
		

    -the soul
    
    	I've been assuming that the soul does not exist. I think that
    	if the soul DID exist, there would be no problem (until you
    	tried to make duplicates).
    
    - "psychic" tests
    
    	I included this for the benefit of _Spock_Must_Die_
    
    - "but did the original die?"
    
    	the original is destroyed, atomized, converted to an amount
    	of energy = Mc^2. I don't know, is that death?
    
                                                   
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    re .27:
    
    As I recall, the reason there could be no more than one Gilbert
    Gossyn runnuing around in _World of Null-A_ was because ...
    
    Well, in the words of (I think Gosseyn I or the taxicab [and if
    you don't believe me, read the book]), "I..I'm not sure exactly
    how it works.  Some sort of automatic triggering process," as best
    I can remember.
    
    Which was good except for:
    
    1) Gosseyn I was "brought to life" by a previous version (still
    alive during the story) and given false memories.
    
    2) Gosseyn III (in _Null-A Three_) was simultaneously alive with
    Gossyn II, with no real difficulties.
    
    Steve Kallis, Jr.
    

The only line I remember from "Spock Must Die!" is:

"A difference that makes no difference is no difference."

which was not original with Blish.  The point was that if the 
transporter is so good that no difference between the copy and the 
original can be detected, then it doesn't matter.  Now, the question 
comes up about souls - does the transporter duplicate them or not?  Well,
the statement above still applies.  Having a soul must cause some kind
of difference in the entity that possesses it.  This usually means 
that something of the person persists after the destruction of the body.
How can you tell?  It used to be easy - people communicated with 
ghosts and spirits all the time.  The test would then be to duplicate 
someone, kill the duplicate, and then try to get in touch with the 
duplicate's spirit through a medium.  Nowadays, though, we don't 
accept the evidence of mediums.   The only way to check is to die yourself,
which makes it difficult to publish.
/jlr

    <$ SET TOPIC/LATERAL>
    
    Along another line of thought on teleportation, as it applies in
    The Fly in particular.  The computer in The Fly 'found' 2 organisms
    in the 'source' telepod, (remember the divided screen displaying
    things such as 'plasma volume' for Brundle and the fly?)  I wondered
    at that point: why didn't the computer decide that there were many
    (many!) organisms with separate and different genomes: we all know
    that we are 'host' to myriad bacteria, viruses, who knows what else.
    How did the computer not consider them?  Physical proximity to Brundle,
    whereas the fly was a large (inches?) distance from Brundle?  And,
    the fly itself is probably host to other microorganisms.  And, now
    that I think of it, couldn't there be other microorganisms in the
    air within the pod?!
    
                                          -Jim

    YECCCHHHHH!
     
    You're quite right- before we got Brundlefly we should have gotten
    Brundlebacterium.
    

    	I just had to throw this in -
    
    	In the leatest BLOOM COUNTY comic strip, Oliver Wendell Jones
    tried a "FLY"-type teleportation experiment, and Bill the Cat got
    caught in the process; now the two are becoming like each other!
    
    	If you know the strip, you know it's a riot!
    
    	Larry
    

    
    
    	Isn't Oliver Wendell Jones the little black computer hacker?
    

    Yes Oliver Wendell Jones is the hacker. Although I wouldn't limit
    him to computers. Remember the Star Wars Defense system he cooked
    up for Opus? 
    Yes, Oliver has all sorts of problems with his teleporter, "My Jaguar?
    in orbit? around pluto?"
    
                                                   
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    P.S. But anyway, <spoiler>
    
    it's all a dream