You know those sci-fi teleporters like in Star Trek where you disappear from one location then instantaneously reappear in another location? Do you trust that they are safe to use?
To fully understand my question, you need to understand the safety concerns regarding teleporters as explained in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQHBAdShgYI
spoiler
I wouldn’t, because the person that reappears aint me, its a fucking clone. Teleporters are murder machines. Star Trek is a silent massacre!
Sorry, no it’s not. When you introduce technobabble related to “buffers” and “caches” where the information is stored temporarily, the working must conform to the way files are handled. Yes, you can handwave whatever you like for narrative purposes, but this discussion is not supposed to have as a valid answer “a wizard did it”.
That is ridiculous. Please search the short stories “The phantom of Kansas” by John Varley and “Think like a dinosaur” by James Patrick Kelly to see the implications of this kind of transport. Neither posits the existence of a soul, and the scenario of “the original dies, a copy keeps living” is very clearly shown as the only valid explanation, and how the assumption that the person is the same after the transport (or the cloning, in the first story, but the effect are the same) is merely a legal fiction for convenience.
In any transport there’s a copy, and any copy takes a non-zero time and an instant where the copied person must exist in two places at the time. Unless the spacetime is curved and poked and you transit through the hole, there is no other viable model.
The situation and plot of The Phantom of Kansas doesn’t seem to have much to do with teleportation though? It doesn’t look like Phantom of Kansas features a world with teleportation as a means of transportation, so I’m not sure what relevance it has to the discussion of teleporter technology since no one actually teleports in that story. Also, it makes it clear that there’s a break of consciousness between one body to the next, but most people view teleportation as an instant thing that you’re aware of the whole time. I accept that the premise in Kansas is similar, but people seem to use it to change their sex and appearance but keep their memory, or use it to restore backups of themselves if they can afford it, not get from point a to point b. When the question of “would you step into a transporter, like the one in Star Trek” is brought up, then it feels like moving the goal posts to bring up all these other examples of things that aren’t technically teleporters, or to talk about what a “real” transporter would “have” to do.
The transporter, as shown in Star Trek, and the more generic teleporter, doesn’t kill you and create a clone in your place unless something goes wrong. To believe it does says more about what one thinks of the metaphysical and spirituality than it does about science.