The copy-paste teleporter problem

  • 🐕 I am attempting to get the site runnning as fast as possible. If you are experiencing slow page load times, please report it.
ok but hear me out, what if there was this alien, and this alien was capable of predicting human behavior with 100% accuracy 100% of the time, and he had two boxes, and one box had $1000 and one box was either empty or contained $1000000, and the boxes are also tied to separate train tracks, and if the alien predicts you're going to pull the lever you get fucked in the ass by a seven foot tall nigger with a 100% chance of getting AIDS, and if the alien predicts you won't pull the lever he puts $1000000 in the second box but also kills six gorillion jews for each dollar in the box, and an AI from the future is watching all of this, and if the AI determines you're gay he summons Goku and forces you to watch him kill your waifu over and over again for eternity. I call this "Retard's Dilemma"
 
Last edited:
  • Winner
  • Thunk-Provoking
  • Informative
Reactions: SIMIΔN, Wright, Incorrigible Bigotry and 2 others
Welcome to early 00's talking topics, did you write this in your livejournal too?
CoolFool said:
But "you" have already died, at this point countless of times. The other thing is that in this fictional world where teleporters exist, I assume other horrifying dystopian things also exist, so I'm sure this wouldn't even be the worst thing on the list.
Click to expand...
But back then you didn't know every time you walked into a teleporter it was lights out forever, now that you know why the hell would you keep doing it when you know that whatever emerges on the other side isn't you but another instance and you will cease to exist forever?.
 
  • Like
  • Thunk-Provoking
Reactions: Wright, The Internet Dick and CoolFool
cybertoaster said:
Welcome to early 00's talking topics, did you write this in your livejournal too?

But back then you didn't know every time you walked into a teleporter it was lights out forever, now that you know why the hell would you keep doing it when you know that whatever emerges on the other side isn't you but another instance and you will cease to exist forever?.
Click to expand...
This is true, but I assume if we're living in a world where we need teleporters to get around, then it will be hard or impossible to get around without them, so it wouldn't be easy to simply quit using them.

And like I said, assuming we're at the point that we're using teleporters, we're probably doing other awful shit like having ads broadcasted in our brains while we dream, extreme surveillance, social credit scores, etc., so I'd probably feel like "well at least one of us gets to escape" when I use the teleporter again.
 
  • Thunk-Provoking
  • Optimistic
Reactions: SIMIΔN and I'm Retarded?
So you're saying there's a cheap, prolific, affordable cloning technology AND a cheap, prolific, affordable brain uploading technology, and these are not being used independently for all kinds of wacky shit? I call bullshit

cybertoaster said:
But back then you didn't know every time you walked into a teleporter it was lights out forever, now that you know why the hell would you keep doing it when you know that whatever emerges on the other side isn't you but another instance and you will cease to exist forever?.
Click to expand...
The new instance is the same guy though. It's not lights out forever, it's lights out for a few moments. Honestly I'd be a bit more wary of using it since what if there's a failure and the teleporter just fucking kills me, but I would also assume that the teleporter checks the other end for success before vaporizing you and according to the hypothetical it's a mature and safe technology. It's more comparable to something like getting to put your brain in another body but with a lot of extra fluff.

This reminds me a bit of the ending of that one adventure game where you're a robot underwater, and at the end you beam your consciousness up to a utopian space station elsewhere but it "doesn't work". Every player is like "we just went over how this works for like 8 hours of gameplay what did you expect there's a new you drinking champagne and banging concubines in space now", even a support character is like "THATS HOW BRAIN UPLOAD WORKS; YOU NEED TO KILL YOUR SELF NOW".
(There is a post-credits scene of you and that support character meeting in the jazzy space station to drink champagne and bang concubines after reflecting on the trauma to get off of cyber-hell earth)


In fact, that's a more interesting "dilemma" since then you would ask if it would be worth it to try to escape torment by making a hacked quicksave someone else gets to load? Is it really an "escape" from one place if it's just a copy paste and the "you" that did all the work still has to live in hell and doesn't get to experience escaping? Or the other way around, would it be ethical to subject "myself" to torment by uploading myself to a new body that I know is going to have a bad time wherever it's going, even if the current "me" just gets to go home?
 
Last edited:
  • Thunk-Provoking
  • Agree
Reactions: Cnidarian and CoolFool
At that point, the teleporter is just a suicide box. The copy that would be skinwalking as you is irrelevant because you'd die the same time it’s created and all previous "you's" that used it before are just people who similarly committed suicide.
No matter how low your opinion of "normies" is, it's just stupid to think anyone who isn't suicidal would use it with that knowledge.

The question does get more interesting if there's an element of uncertainty though. Like if this was some sort of conspiracy theory floating around and all you saw were videos posted online of these stacks of dead clones or whatever, then it's a real question how many people would be open to convincing that this hugely important tech was hiding a secret like this.
But at that point this whole thought experiment would just be a metaphor for the Covid vax.
 
I'm terrified enough of my own mortality. No way would I use a device that removes me from existence forever so that I never get to experience consciousness again. I'll walk to my destination.
 
  • Like
  • Agree
Reactions: Wright and The Internet Dick
Ah. The Alias problem. Personally, if it makes duplicates, I'd just go the Hardspace Shipbreaker and use it as a duplicator instead of a teleporter. Now if I have to use to get from point a to point b? I'll take a hard pass.
 
  • Like
Reactions: SIMIΔN
VIPPER? said:
it's lights out for a few moments.
Click to expand...
No, for you its lights out forever, whatever comes out the other side its not you, its only "a few moments" from its POV, but its not you, you're dead.
VIPPER? said:
Or the other way around, would it be ethical to subject "myself" to torment by uploading myself to a new body that I know is going to have a bad time wherever it's going, even if the current "me" just gets to go home?
Click to expand...
That was the premise of that dumb movie MOON where discount edward norton is just a clone of a guy who let a bunch of koreans clone him to work on the moon while he stays on earth jacking off to furry porn and calling people stalker childs online.
 
  • Agree
Reactions: Marc
Calandrino said:
Sorry but this is a ridiculous nonsense scenario that's so absurd it's not worth entertaining even hypothetically
Click to expand...
Such ridiculous nonsense scenarios can be entertained as thought experiments. Schrodinger's Cat, for example, was intended as a critique of the Copenhagen interpretation and a more absurd scenario is hard to imagine. The teleporter problem opens up discussion about the nature of identity, among other things. I don't see that as a bad thing, a nonsensical waste of time. For my part, I do know the me who gets on the bus is the same me who gets off it, with none of that messy murder by disintegration going on between.
 
AbyssGazer said:
One day, top secret information is revealed to you that the teleporters are copy and paste, not cut and paste. The person stepping in to the teleporter is killed a millisecond after the newly created copy is created at the intended destination. The killing is not some unavoidable side effect but a deliberate feature secretly installed to avoid the problems that would otherwise arise.
Click to expand...
This was the exact plot of an episode of the outer limits called think like a dinosaur. The episode basically goes that transporters between planets works by scanning the person then sending the data to the destination where an identical copy is generated that doesn't know they're a copy and then the operator pushes a button to kill the original, referred to as 'balancing the equation' but basically something fucks up during a particular transport and they can't verify that the person made it to their destination so in the meantime they let the original out of the machine and she fucks around on the station while they try to figure out what went wrong. They realize she did make it ok and tell the guy who was in charge of pushing the button that he has to now go and essentially murder her to balance the equation. The weird thing is the guy knew all this and still flat out states that he intended to transport to some other planet with his kid at some point to get away from earth cause it was a shithole a that point
 
  • Like
Reactions: Wright
The Internet Dick said:
Such ridiculous nonsense scenarios can be entertained as thought experiments. Schrodinger's Cat, for example, was intended as a critique of the Copenhagen interpretation and a more absurd scenario is hard to imagine. The teleporter problem opens up discussion about the nature of identity, among other things. I don't see that as a bad thing, a nonsensical waste of time. For my part, I do know the me who gets on the bus is the same me who gets off it, with none of that messy murder by disintegration going on between.
Click to expand...
Except Schrodinger’s Cat is actually based on a scientific hypothesis and not some contrived scenario that sounds straight out of a Philip K. Dick novel.

The lack of boundary conditions and clear definitions means every is going to interpret the scenario differently. There are much more intelligent ways to discuss Holism without relying on this stupid scenario that doesn’t reflect reality or any kind of plausible future.
 
  • Thunk-Provoking
Reactions: The Internet Dick
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back