Is your continuity of consciousness broken by the teleporter?
this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2025
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what even is consciousness?
As far as I can tell an emergent characteristic of the nervous system that evolved as an advantage over instinct/intuition/heuristics arrived at subconsciously
Plot twist: The lever was set for the train to move to the sidetrack. Who caused the train to squish the people, you or theseus' you? O.o
Oh shit
I double down and transport over regardless of the dilemma, and don't pull the lever. Is that immoral of me? I don't know... it is me?
I transport back and presume that all these choices were done by two other people, not me.
Will you even have free will once you are ported over?
Well, you never had free will to begin with, so...
Y'know, the more I think about free will as a religous concept, the more I'm convinced it's supposed to be an allegory for how to treat others, like a more convoluted Golden Rule. The source was shifted to "God" simply to make the garbage people that don't normally care about others hesitate before they just ignore others' advice on how to treat people.
The reasoning is pretty simple: Nobody can actually do anything they want because others will interfere. Individuals restrict others' freedom all the time. If you're restricting others freedoms, you're doing an even worse version of judging others. The Bible pretty clearly says to leave such critical stuff that idiots can screw up in God's hands, because idiots can and will screw it up.
Same with free will. Peoples' freedom is, according to religous teachings, a gift from God. They describe such things as "from God" solely because idiots respect their flavor of Sky Daddy over other human beings.
If it's actually a gift from God, then it makes little sense that humans can simply remove a gift an all-powerful diety bestows. So... either historic humans are insanely stupid and bad at logic ... or it's actually an allegory for not trying to control others so much.
So Andy Weir's "The Egg". It's a good philosophy.
My concept of free will and determinism is that there are both in a way. What we see manifest at our level as free will is at its core determinism, driven by how the environment has evolved our personality to react and think about things. When asked to think of a color we quickly come up with a choice, made by either a preference for or a recent memory of, yet if asked when we actually chose that color at the thinking level we can't find a single point where there were others to pick from, we just "came up with it". Our free will is a conglomeration of things beyond our control.
If you are quick enough, you can even come back with five extra wallets. Guilt free credit cards.
I get to die and save a bunch of people? I'm in!
Aren’t we largely ships of Theseus regardless? Are the carbon atoms I was born with still in me or have they been slowly cycled out? I guess your teeth and bones prob don’t change much. Welp, time to go do some reading
Even though your teeth and bones don't change much, your skin is part of you, and that's constantly shedding and growing new cells.
Well, you aren't born with teeth, and also you lose your baby teeth and get a new set, so those at least certainly aren't original.
Umm… you’re born with those in your skull.
Just rattling around loose like Skittles in a bucket
That's why the late showers are "wisdom" teeth. Your brain is finally getting big enough to shove 'em out of there.
It really depends on how the teleportation works. If it's folding spacetime to make it so that I can step instantaneously through the gap, that's definitely still me. If it's just like a portal cutting temporarily through Hell ala WH40k or Event Horizon, it's probably still me, but I might be suffering from demonic posession. If I'm being completely atomized, converted to electricity, and transmitted to the other tube to be reconstituted as an exact copy, then I am a copy.
IMO, even the digitally sent person could be the original, depending on the philosophical concepts being applied (same ship of theseus style questions). If it's just the process of reading your atoms to that level of detail that makes you disappear, and the only information that is literally 'you' is being transferred over and reconstituted in a similarly one-way-by-function process, it's almost more of a phase shift to digital and back than a copy. Pretty much just side-stepping matter's inability to travel without acceleration.
If the machine is basically 'digesting' the person only to send over the results for reproduction, though... that's definitely a copy. Pretty sure Trek describes their transporters as the latter? They're definitely killing a bunch of people in that show. ha Though to answer it with any kind of conclusive result, I'd think we'd need a technical description for how it works, and it cannot exist, so... lol
the thing is though, everyone older than like a year is already a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy... Our bodies are the ship of theseus, it's only by pure statistical inevitability that some handfull of atoms inside us are the exact same ones we were born with.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It wouldnt matter since the person pulling the level would be an exact copy of me and there would be no remaining original... Unless.
:checks to see if side burns are real:
It’ll be Brundle-Fly.
I love this
I mean, does it really matter? For all intents and purposes, the person coming out of the teleporter is me. They'll have continuity of consciousness. You can argue about "oh it just kills you and makes a person exactly like you" like maybe so, but does it matter?
Now imagine it malfunctions and doesn't vaporize you before creating the copy, but just creates the copy at the end point leaving you still standing in the transporter. Still you? If not, what's changed?
then there's two mes which immediately start to diverge into different people due to their different experiences, and the one left behind eventually joins the Maquis.
I mean, I can just kill myself the normal way
For the question posed it doesn't really matter no. Assuming it works the way we expect it to in sci-fi and it's an exact copy, for all intents and purposes it is you. There is nothing ethereal about the human consciousness—if everything is exactly as it should be, then you have all the pieces of "you" that are needed.
The teleporter dilemma only matters to the being using the device initially. If you're vaporized, you die. You don't have continuity of consciousness with a different set of atoms perfectly arranged to be you, even if they perceive that to be the case on the other side. Still you, just not the you that gets to continue to exist.
My sense of self is inherent to the material it inhabits, but is able to transcend it for microseconds at a time.
rose tyler be like
SOMA be like
Eh, I also go to sleep occasionally (every day) and have no assurance my conscience transfers over to the next morning (or noon).
Sleep isn't the same as unconsciousness, at least as far as this dilemma goes. Sleep is a state of reduced consciousness, but there is continuity and awareness of your surroundings. If there weren't, you alarm clock wouldn't have woken you up this morning
I'm neither a sleep nor brain expert (or amateur even), still, I know that the "you" part of your brain occurs largely in the prefrontal cortex while more basic stuff occurs at the back, like the brainstem.
That's why lobotomies "worked" – no more "you", no more mental health issues!
For waking up, I don't think any "you" part is needed. Audio processing and some consciousness starter are probably all that's needed.
I don't consider myself to be the entirety of my brain. I am the abstraction of abstractions of ... that has emerged for some reason. Shutting those abstractions down for sleeping is, in my opinion, no different from this scenario. I wouldn't consider brainstem continuity to be a relevant factor.
The answer to this is quite simple.
But first, we have to talk about parallel universes...
Just set up Riker/Boimler situation so I stay here and my transporter clone pulls the lever. Easy-peasy.
No.
It will be your inni
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