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Scientists Want to Teleport a Whole Human. A Quantum Breakthrough Could Make It Reality.
(www.popularmechanics.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2024
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Technology
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Even if they manage this, I'll bet "you" die each time something 'effectively ... destroy[s]" you down to a quantum level.
That depends on the nature of what "you" ultimately turn out to be. I tend to suspect (though with only a suspicion to go on and not proof, I probably wouldn't be volunteering) that what "you" ultimately are is the pattern of information stored in the structure of your brain, and thus, any sufficiently perfect copy of that information is the "same" person regardless of continuity of the body. Though creating a second copy before destroying the original would have the caveat that as soon as the second you exists, the different perspective and experience will lead them to diverge into two different people who both have equal claim to the original identity, so that I think to do this, you'd want to destroy the original slightly before, making the process more like resurrection in a new location.
We are easily thousands of years away from genuinely understanding this stuff. Right now we have absolutely no clue.
I believe current understanding is that quantum shenanigans mean you can't truly make a perfect quantum duplicate of something without destroying the original at the same time, so what you're describing (destroying the original after making the copy) would only be possible for imperfect duplication - e.g. manufacturing a clone and syncing its memory with the original.
There really should be a way around that part of things, maybe if the distance is short enough you could move particles instead of recreating them