It’s an old dream, the ability to move instantly from one place to another, far off. Only shamans were ever able to do it, though. But now, there’s a chance it might actually happen for all of us, in the not too ridiculously distant future.
Technically, there is no reason why we can’t eventually have teleporters – little booths you can walk into and walk out of thousands of miles away at the speed of light, providing there’s one at each end. Sort of.
You knew there was a catch, didn’t you? Using existing technology, the process involves reading all the information of which you are composed at one end, and reassembling you at the other end by dumping it. This does involve your complete destruction at the transmitting end, of course.
That’s the interesting part. The reassembled you at the destination would have all your cells, synapses, and nerve endings reproduced exactly as they were at the moment of your dismantling. This includes your brain, where everything you know is stored in the precise configuration of its parts. The original you may be destroyed, but the new you will remember going into the transmission booth, and coming out unscathed at the end. So, is that you, or isn’t it? What exactly do we mean by “you” anyway?
To an outside observer (scientist, friend, mother) it would be indistinguishable from you. Come to that, to an inside observer (the reassembled you), the same would be true, since it would contain all that defined the earlier you. But the original you was destroyed in the process. What we always knew as you is dead, my friend. It has been reduced to its constituent components, little electrons whizzing around little protons and neutrons, completely devoid of the patterning we came to love all those years before the experiment.
Here’s the weird part: because the teleportation involved reading all the information that constituted you, then transmitting it to a new location, it could presumably be saved. You could be stored on a disc and not reassembled until later. Much later. Multiple copies of you could be made, all of which would insist it was the real you. Each of them would be the real you, by any existing standards of evidence.
So, we end in a situation in which you are dead, because we killed you to get at your information, but you are still walking around in multiple iterations, perhaps having violent confrontations with each other over their authenticity.
Here’s the real question, which is so bizarre I’m having difficulty putting it into words: Would you, that entity which now lives in and looks out at the world from your body, which is the experiencer of your history, which debates with itself over the nature of the reality presented it by your senses, would you inhabit any or all of your new selves?