this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2025
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Hokay, here we go again.
In philosopher Derek Parfit’s teletransporter thought experiment, he differentiates between two major concepts: personal identity and “relation R.”
Personal identity is an individual person as that specific individual. If the teletransporter copies a person to one place while destroying the original, then a new personal identity is created.
Relation R is the stream of consciousness that connects a person’s mind from one moment to another. Parfit compares this to a billiard ball rolling along a pool table, as you can track the path the ball travels without the path breaking. It’s the memories, hopes, values, and goals a person carries with them.
He argues that as long as this relation R is maintained, that is more important than maintaining a personal identity. So he would argue that it is not you pulling the lever, but it would be you in all the ways that matter.
Except for the only way that matters to me
No, you (the new you) wouldn't even know the difference.
It'd be like when you fall asleep on the couch and sleep for two minutes, but the dream seems like it lasted several days, because you dreamt of having memories of things. The brain simply doesn't know the difference between memories of a long dream or a short dream of long memories.
Preface: I'm talking about Star Trek's transporters specifically. Teleportation via destruction and reconstruction. Any kind of space folding wormhole nonsense obviously doesn't apply here.
There is no new me, there's someone else with my memories. Why would I care whether he knows the difference? This is equivocation. There is only one you, and that's the physical entity reading this comment right now. If a perfect copy of you were made over there, you could consider them a you, but they aren't you.
If you step onto a transporter pad to teleport to the Starship Enterprise, then you never live to see the inside of it. You can philosophize all you want about what "you" actually means, but at the end of the day, the you that you are dies. What that copy does or does not experience has no bearing on that fact.
I always get like 15 comments deep in these threads reiterating the same point over and over, so I'll just get ahead of that and reiterate it now: unless you believe you have a soul, your existence ends the moment your body is destroyed. A transporter kills you, and there is no way to philosophize your way around that. The fact that someone else who shares all of your memories doesn't remember any lapse in consciousness doesn't change the fact that the only you that meaningfully exists fucking dies.
I won't be responding to any replies that don't acknowledge my validity as an independent entity. Anyone who asserts that someone else who shares my memories has any claim over being me is getting blocked. I hate this argument and I hate that so many people are so frequently wrong about it.
Dead people don't care either, so neither would you if you chose to enter a teleporter. The real question is where they put all the remains of the old versions.
I don't think the Star Trek transporter works like that though. They do pass the material through worn holey warp space or something. There are episodes about them getting stuck there and such.
But what if it's just a copy of that relation R? Is it the same mind in a new body? Or a new body that's so utterly similar that it will merely continue on believing it's the same person?
I don't like that philosophy, because it pretends the mind exists outside of the brain.
Does the difference of the literally unobservable matter? Yes absolutely to the person stepping in to the machine! Sure, everyone else doesn't have to care, but the teleported person sure probably should care, so that philosophy does less than nothing for answering the question.
He's basically saying, 'I don't care if you die if I cannot tell if the new guy is different.". Saying, "I don't care" is not an answer.
Okay, but actually solving the thought experiment requires understanding of what it is to be conscious. It could appear continuous and identical to all outside observers and all external tests but it could still be a new conscious identity and you, the observer might no longer exist. It's not called "the hard problem" for nothing.
it could also be that all of this is made up by us humans because we feel a need for things to have deep meaning, but in fact everything is just atoms doing stuff and so long as it's the same kind of atoms doing the same thing then for all intents and purposes it is the same thing.
That's not mutually exclusive at all. The question is what the experience of consciousness is. Why am "I" watching these atoms do their thing and experiencing that, rather than a similar set of atoms.
What you are saying sounds like two concepts/problems closely related but distinct to the teletransporter thought experiment, the hard problem of consciousness and the problem other minds.
In terms of the hard problem of consciousness, I think Parfit assumes a level of consciousness in his arguments or he wouldn’t be talking about it. It’s been too long since I read his works to say how he views that consciousness arising, but the setup of a person’s body being destroyed and recreated lends itself toward the constitution view, although I also think that would conflict with his point on personal identity. I think some level of dualistic/idealist separation of body and mind would be required for the continuation of consciousness across bodies.
Your actual argument of whether we as outside observers could know that the teletransported’s consciousness is continuous, we can’t. At least I don’t think there’s a foolproof way of knowing the minds of others. I think the best we could do is watch the person. If they step out of the teletransporter, stick their thumb pointing at the first and say “Boy, I’d hate to be that guy,” there was probably a break in consciousness. If they pull the lever, point at the first teletransporter station and say “I came from there to pull this lever,” I’ll believe the relation R is conserved. And if they do both, I’ll chuckle and buy them a beer.
Oh, I don't think the one experiencing it would know either. Gaps in consciousness and memory can be pretty concrete. Every moment of existence could be your only one and all your past experiences could be implanted or false memories and there would be no real way of knowing.