Comment Re:My concern with teleporting a living person (Score 1) 348
You would actually die; in the destination pod, what is essentially a perfect clone is born with your memories.
You are assuming that consciousness is a byproduct of matter and that the presence of the same exact configuration of it will be enough to recreate an identical consciousness at the other end of the teleportation.
So far, it can't be considered as anything else than an hypothesis : it could be but it might not be, evidence is currently not conclusive in any way.
I always hear a lot of my scientifically knowledgeable (which I consider myself to be as well) friends infer that the former is obviously true and that Occam's razor dictates we should prefer it to the later, but I disagree : it makes as much sense to consider that the brain can just be a very precise receiver for an extremely tenuous kind of non-electromagnetic kind of wave which does interact with other matter only in infinitesimal proportions (sort of "static" neutrinos).
What we call consciousness would actually be a (very) complex waveform of this particular "radiation" (in the electromagnetic meaning of that term). It can't be electromagnetic otherwise we would have detected it, and consciousness would be disrupted by all electromagnetic fields surrounding us all the time.
That would fit pretty well with string theory which postulates that more dimensions than space and time exist : the consciousness waveform would evolve mainly in the tiny and not-easily-perceivable dimensions : only an instrument as extremely precise and complex as the brain would be able to interact with it.
This hypothesis has a lot of explicative power in a lot of areas (even spiritual ones) and opens the way for a whole field of experimentations but its exploration belongs to another thread I guess so I'll stick to the current subject :
Quantum teleportation as we are able to implement it nowadays, assuming it can be scaled up to move a whole body of atoms would not transfer that consciousness waveform along with with the rest of the quantum data (I say "quantum data" because as was said by other posters above, no atoms or matter of any kind gets moved : we only replicate quantum state), and what you'd get at the other end would be a lifeless body collapsing to the ground as soon as it gets there.
But anyway, when we'll arrive at the point where replicating the quantum state of a complete human organism is possible we'll be actually testing the hypothesis that consciousness derives from matter. Those are going to be interesting and fruitful times.
That is, if climate warming doesn't destroyed civilization before we get there