Looking Around

Happy New Year!

Time for reflection and so on.  Let’s just bring on those mirrors to find those reflections, shall we? (sorry, just kidding) Well, ain’t it one day too late for the usual "reflections on the year gone by" kind of thing?  Yes, now’s the time for resolutions.  I’m not going to post mine here for the world to see (how embarassing later when I fail to keep them; or so I’d like people to think.  the real reason is that I’ve been too lazy to come up with any yet; maybe I’ll blame my cousin for not yet responding when I SMS’ed him asking for suggested resolutions)

Ok, so reflect on this: imagine you have a teleporting machine, i.e., a machine that can purportedly transport a chunk of matter from one place to another place (that is, from one spatial location to another spatial location).  For star trek fans (I’m not one of them), this is basically "beam me up, Scotty".  Technically, it is not possible to move the actual molecules from the sending to receiving side in ways that violate physical laws.  Instead, through some kind of exotic long-range communication scheme (e.g., over a quantum channel exploiting concepts like entanglement), all the necessary information about the object is communicated from sending to receiving side.

In the interest of "furthering science", while at the same time helping grow your bank account, would you volunteer to be one of the first human volunteers to test the teleporting machine?

You are told that it has been tested on inanimate objects, which are indistinguishable from the originals.  It has been tested on monkeys, whose trainers cannot distinguish the pre-teleportation and post-teleportation monkey; they know and perform the tricks they have been thought with the same gusto as before, and respond as enthusiastically as before to bananas.  Would you volunteer?

So maybe you don’t want to be the first human to try it.  Who knows, maybe the body will be perfectly recreated at the receiving side, whereas, the soul someone doesn’t make it, so the person coming out of the experience will somehow be "different", in some hard-to-imagine way? (questions of whether the mind and body can be divided, whether there is a soul somehow different from the mind, etc., have been debated by philosophers, theologians and so on over the years, and we won’t get further into this at this time)  Alright, what if the teleporting machine has been tested on humans and has been successful in every way?  Nobody, not even themselves, can tell the difference.  Would you volunteer?

Would you volunteer to give the machine a try?  Why or why not?

(to be continued)