Teleportation and the soul

[Epyc]

Saw a post in the science section that got me thinking. Someone claims to have teleported some photons. The principle of teleportation is that you are broken down into component particles and "beamed" or what have you to another location, where your particles are reassembled.

They question is…. Would it be you? What happens when you are broken down into quarks? Are you dead? And, if it’s capable of reassembling you, why not just obliteration the “you” at the sending spot and make a new one of fresh particles at the new location, put together exactly the same? Say, a little taller, with better defined biceps ~insert suspicious eye-shift here~?

If it’s not ~you~ on the other end, would it be alive? Could it talk? Would it think? It would have a complete copy of your memory, at least at a chemical/cellular level. Identical, down to the last particle.

What if someone makes this a real possibility, and makes 10 identical copies of someone…. If all ten are thinking, cognizant entities…. Does that disprove the existence of the soul? If they just stand and drool, does it prove the soul exists? Does it mean anything?

Chew on this one. This could truly happen in our lifetimes. What would happen to society, to religion, in either case?

Epyc

[Myst]

Originally posted by Epyc
The principle of teleportation is that you are broken down into component particles and "beamed" or what have you to another location, where your particles are reassembled.

Who's to say your particles would be disassembled and reassembled?

I suppose the rest of it depends on what you think of souls or spirit; if they are just electrical impulses or energy within you then they would also be teleported..

[widukind]

What if someone makes this a real possibility, and makes 10 identical copies of someone…. If all ten are thinking, cognizant entities…. Does that disprove the existence of the soul? If they just stand and drool, does it prove the soul exists? Does it mean anything?

Now you're talking about cloning, because one body only contains a given amount of energy (in the form of matter). If you could manage to transport it, that would mean disassembling and assembling at a one-for-one basis.
Proving anything about the soul? We don't know what a soul is, really. it could be another you on another plane of existence, linked to your body through your brain. It could be a finer energy that runs through your body. It could be so many things. It might even be completely fictional. There's no such thing as an infalable statement on the nature if the soul for now.

[Epyc]

But here's the underlying idea; the principle of taking a living object apart, down to component particles, sending it somewhere else and putting it back together. Can you "beam" a soul? Is the soul part and parcel of the component particles which make up a living thing? If you are capable of reassembling something as complicated as a living thing from basic particles, why can't you alter or make additional copies of such?

My question is, if you are broken down to component particles and put back together, isn't that what we currently define as "dead"? I mean, turning someone to dust is big, clumsy pieces compared to this, and as a general rule someone reduced to dust is considered "dead".

I'm saying that we are creeping up on that hazy, crazy point where science and spirituality collide. Yes, there is the perspective that science is just another version of religion; trying to understand the universe, explain the who/what/when/where/why of existence.

When we are capable of, and that time is fast approaching, killing and re-creating people, or even just creating precise copies of people, down to the last memory engram, what will happen?

Would you experience a “near death experience” while your body is being sent somewhere?

If it’s decided to be simpler to just obliterate your physical form and create a new, identical copy somewhere else instead of that complicated “beaming” thing…. Is that you? Or do you have to use the same particles?

When you break something down to subatomic bits, is it still the same thing? Or could you just use new pieces?

The concept behind teleportation, or perhaps more precisely mapping things at the particle level, has the potential of being “evidence” of a soul, or lack of one, or at least studying the connection between the base chemistry, biology, physics of carbon-based life and the life-force which empowers it.

Epyc

[Illuminatus]

Well, for the record, Time and Space are basicly the same thing, according to Steven Hawking and Carl Sagan. And large amounts of dense matter with large gravity wells can bend time-space.

That's all been observed. What hasn't been observed is the possiblity that space/time could bend so far it would turn back upon itself. Imagine getting your eyebrow pierced.... except the needle is a huge gravity well, and your skin is space/time. You fold space time so far that it leaves a vacancy - which may be in the same physical place, but different times, or vice versa.

Anyway, you'd need some black holes to move around to properly test that theory :) until that happens, I'll just use my car for transportation.

As for the philosophical question? I believe that our "spirit" is a part and parcel of our physical form as humans. Break the form, and the "soul" breaks with it.

- Ill

[Ben Gruagach]

Other ways of thinking about the problem that occured to me a while back:

- if I get organ transplants (i.e. take out an old organ, put in a new one from a donor) is there a point where there is no "original me" left? What if I had a diseased part of my brain removed and replaced with a new bit which filled in for the old part, and then later had more of my original brain replaced as well?

- our bodies constantly lose old cells as they die off, and new cells are generated. That means that theoretically, there is a point in my life when there might not be any cells left in my body from when I was born. Am I still "me"? (I think this one leads to answers for the other other questions.)

[silverm00n]

as long as the transporter can convert that matter into energy and back again, keeping ever aspect of the pattern in tact, I think it's possible. I think the spirit is very nonlocalized but attatched to your body through the aura or some type of electromagnetic field eminating from the center (the heart) which is definable at some quantum level, so as long as the body is in tact I don't see why it would be any more dangerous than an OBE or something like that. Although if you're seeing it kind of like Tv where you're zapped into a million pieces and then reassembled, that's gotta be some jetlag!

[Melysande]

As far as Ben's post goes (about organ transplants...) I've heard stories from people that claim they have attributes of their donors, that their personality is altered in some small way by the implanting of the donor's organ inside their body. If this is true, I suppose it's possible that if you had enough transplants, you wouldn't be just you anymore.

But by the same token, if you have enough of you removed, and it were replaced by computers and stuff, would you become less and less human? (Even if you didn't become more and more Borg-like...)

The original question about teleportation and souls was interesting, too. Trek occasionally tried to hint at that question, too. They went so far as to have Picard and some crew members come back as children. Scotty was trapped for 70 years in the transporter buffer but didn't age a day. Many crew members were healed of diseases by running them through the transporter beam so that they could be incorporated into an old, disease free copy of their "pattern". And Riker got accidentally twinned in a transporter mishap. Now, Will T. Riker is on the Enterprise on TNG and W. Tom Riker is a Maquis rebel on DS9.

However, not one of them gets into the question of whether or not the person created is really the person who left, soul-wise.

I think your soul would understand that you are not dead and would travel as fast as it could to rejoin the soul-less body at its final desination. It's been said that people's souls travel regularly anyway. (Haven't you ever felt like there are days when you weren't quite "all there"?)

[Ben Gruagach]

There's also a long tradition in shamanism of healing people by "rescuing their soul" from where it was lost in the spirit world. The shaman would basically go searching for the lost soul and then bring it back to the body of the ill person.

So I guess by that philosophy, people who are sick are people who don't have their soul (in whole or in part) in their physical bodies.

I'm not sure how much I agree with that philosophy, though. There are plenty of illnesses which are caused by known organic things like germs. But I guess people could be "spiritually" ill.

[widukind]

I believe your soul isn't a result of your material body, but instead linked to your material body. I'm not really sure what would happen. I guess if your soul is fast enough it can reestablish the connection when you come back, otherwise you'd be severed. I don't know if that means you'd come back as a vegetable though, haven't been there to try it out.