Merlijn, (welcome, btw!)
Well, this seems to be an equivalent question to whether or not one's consciousness is unified through time. My experiences of the last 5 seconds (not to mention the juices flowing in and out of my brain) make the 5-second-ago me entirely different from the one typing these words (because I wrote this whole message in one atomic splurge ).
If it were possible to save the 5-second-ago me and compare him to my current self, we would undoubtedly react differently to identical stimuli. But for some reason, we are defined as a single unit.
But anyways, teleportation (for some reason my spell-checker is telling me 'teleporation'!?) would probably involve killing the original, for sake of the lawyers who would need to sort things out in the end (insert lawyer joke here).
Well, this may be true. But, I'm not convinced that the self is at all defined by quantum effects, or even effects at the level of the particle. It seems that the human brain is functioning at a level of abstraction above these -- at the level of cellular biology (case in point - the human brain runs at a very slow speed (absolute max ~ 500 Hz, but in reality closer to ~ 50) which is indicative of the slowdown one finds with an abstraction layer)).
More simply put, cells (and neurons) have implicit error buffering, just in the nature of their construction. Chemical concentrations are error buffered (you generally need an order of magnitude difference in concentration for an event to be triggered), so I think that uncertainty at the particle level isn't ever going to be noticed.
If it were possible to make an exact copy of a sentient being... hmm... however... those beings will have the same consciousness only for like a few microseconds (educated guess).
Well, this seems to be an equivalent question to whether or not one's consciousness is unified through time. My experiences of the last 5 seconds (not to mention the juices flowing in and out of my brain) make the 5-second-ago me entirely different from the one typing these words (because I wrote this whole message in one atomic splurge ).
If it were possible to save the 5-second-ago me and compare him to my current self, we would undoubtedly react differently to identical stimuli. But for some reason, we are defined as a single unit.
But anyways, teleportation (for some reason my spell-checker is telling me 'teleporation'!?) would probably involve killing the original, for sake of the lawyers who would need to sort things out in the end (insert lawyer joke here).
The problem remains that we will never be able to make such a copy, since we cannot know both the momentum and the position of a particle (Heisenberg's principle). Without that information it will be quite a hard job to duplicate.
Well, this may be true. But, I'm not convinced that the self is at all defined by quantum effects, or even effects at the level of the particle. It seems that the human brain is functioning at a level of abstraction above these -- at the level of cellular biology (case in point - the human brain runs at a very slow speed (absolute max ~ 500 Hz, but in reality closer to ~ 50) which is indicative of the slowdown one finds with an abstraction layer)).
More simply put, cells (and neurons) have implicit error buffering, just in the nature of their construction. Chemical concentrations are error buffered (you generally need an order of magnitude difference in concentration for an event to be triggered), so I think that uncertainty at the particle level isn't ever going to be noticed.