Do Not Use Teleportation Machines!
Dear fellow travelers,
Do not use teleportation machines! While these devices are perfectly suitable for the transport of inanimate objects and livestock, careful consideration demonstrates that they should be used to transport people and cherished pets only in the rarest cases.
All teleportation services use one of three types of teleportation technologies; Magic, Duplicative, and Dis/Re-integrative. Of the first, there really isn’t much to say, as by definition it is beyond comprehension. If you feel comfortable subjecting your reality to the whims of witches, you are within your right, but out of your mind!
The two other methods of teleportation, Duplicative and Dis/Re-integrative, can be discussed more seriously and their unique faults can be identified, though it is their common feature that makes them equally repugnant. In Dups, the teleportee’s atomic state is recreated using distinct new substances in a distinct new location. In DisRe, the original material disintegrated in order to be moved through Speeds Of Lights™ cables to some destination, where it is reintegrated. In either case, before being duplicated or reintegrated, the original teleportee is entirely dismantled, de-atomized, and destroyed. It is this initial total destruction that makes teleportation unacceptable.
Theoretical models predict only the slightest fraction of a chance of duplicates or reconstitutes turning out as anything less than perfect recreations, down to the quark. Their reliability and faithfulness are completely irrelevant, because it does not matter whether the person on the other side of the teleport is literally the same person that went in.
To whom does it not matter? Well, to everyone, since the person who initially went in was destroyed, the copy or reconstitute simply carries on with its new consciousness, and everyone else can’t tell any difference. The horror of teleportation, in its complete disregard for the value of a life and the individual living it, is demonstrated precisely by that indifference, and by the industry’s lie equating the pre and post teleportees.
The promise of safe, hassle-free, and fast travel is blindingly compelling. Who doesn’t want to be spared their daily commutes, go visit a friend on another continent for lunch, or get someone to the hospital in seconds for emergency care? How horrible that we are offered such enticing wonders for so unbearable a price. Even worse, for many the price is so obscured by the offer that it is simply ignored.
Would you kill your brother in order to see him sooner?
Would you kill your sister in order to get her to a doctor?
Would you kill your self so that your duplicate can take a trip?
If you say yes to the first two questions, consider the value you place on your siblings’ inner life, their sense of self, and their internal monologue. If you are willing to, quite strangely, destroy them in order to have access to them, are you not showing more concern for your experience of them than their experience of themselves?
If you say yes to that third question, then perhaps you think that what you are is some sum of memories and thoughts and behaviors, and that the duplicate or reintegrated body is a sufficient substitute, even when your original body and the mind embodied within are vanished. I urge you to reflect on the fact that in theory your duplicate is definitionally not you and in practice your reintegrated body demands your destruction. In either case, you aren’t there on the other side.
You aren’t there on the other side because teleportation is not a journey.
The concern here is not reliant on a concept of soul or some other magical glue that would dissipate at the moment of the teleportee’s dissolution. Rather, it respects the simple fact that we simply do not know the meaning of that break in consciousness caused by teleportation. We do know that it is a break, and we know that both duplication and reintegration methods take some amount of time that is greater than zero. As much as I must admit that the break might be trivial, Big Tele must admit that perhaps it is ultimate.
It is true that each of us face many challenges to the continuity of our perception of self. Sleep, dreams, daydreams, thinking, hallucinating, memory, and memory loss are just a few of the obstacles that we all regularly face. The break in mind caused by teleportation is qualitatively different as it is artificially rendered, hardly understood, and completely optional.
Please do not use teleportation machines. If you already have, your reasons to never do so again are just as strong now as they were before you were generated. Just because someone died in order to make you doesn’t mean you must do the same to make someone else.
Safe travels,
Emmet Zelo
