Thought Experiment

[sasguru]

Or as the French call it, la petite mort. Or le, if you're a bloke.

Nice one

[VectraMan]

I remember a short story, I think it was called "The Jaunt" and I think it was by Stephen King, but I may well have both those facts wrong. In the story mankind had invented the teleport, which worked except the people that went through would come out screaming lunatics. Eventually they realised this was because whilst in transit, the traveller would experience thousands of years of nothingness whilst only a few milliseconds would pass on the outside.

They solved the problem by ensuring people were unconscious on the way through. I think the story was based around somebody pretending to be unconscious so they could see what it was like, and coming out a screaming lunatic.

[VectraMan]

If there is such a thing as a soul then I guess this device would create soulless people, maybe thats where agents come from.

Thinking in C++ terms, if your body has a soul then you could say the body object has a pointer to the soul object. Copying the body is a shallow copy, which means both bodies now point to the same soul. The original body is then deleted which deletes the soul, and as soon as the second body tries to access its soul you get an access violation and the universe causes an unexpected error and will be shut down.

This is assuming God doesn't know about reference counting.

[wendigo100]

I remember another short story where teleporters were used to go to a Mars station.

Nobody realised that when they used a teleporter they disappeared into oblivion and died, because their "copy" at the other end appeared with all the "original's" memories, and they believed they had come through unscathed.

Then some bloke worked it out, but kept it to himself.

One day, for some reason this Mars station was running out of air - there wasn't time to send a rescue ship from earth, and the only certain way to survive was the teleporter back to earth. But before everyone started leaving, this bloke decided to tell them what he knew.

Can't remember what happened next. It was in an old SF book I read as a lad, written well before Stephen King so it wasn't him.

[BlasterBates]

On conciousness I read an interesting article. Scientists measured brainwaves for people moving their limbs, and found the "me" bit of the brain was activated after the limb had actually started to move. They therefore concluded that concious movement was actually an illusion. The conciousness experienced the movement and presumed it was controlling it. In other words the "me" is more of an observer than an actor.

...It also got me wondering as to how much free will we actually have, and whether this is all an illusion. I mean when we're hungry and there's a chinese takeway we go in an order a takeway without thinking. So maybe we really are "programmed" machines, complicated but still machines.

[realityhack]

I remember another short story where teleporters were used to go to a Mars station.

Nobody realised that when they used a teleporter they disappeared into oblivion and died, because their "copy" at the other end appeared with all the "original's" memories, and they believed they had come through unscathed.

Then some bloke worked it out, but kept it to himself.

One day, for some reason this Mars station was running out of air - there wasn't time to send a rescue ship from earth, and the only certain way to survive was the teleporter back to earth. But before everyone started leaving, this bloke decided to tell them what he knew.

Can't remember what happened next. It was in an old SF book I read as a lad, written well before Stephen King so it wasn't him.

I'd really like to read that... if you remember, let me know.

[DS23]

john wyndham short story maybe?

[wendigo100]

john wyndham short story maybe?

No I'm pretty sure it was one of those less well known ones like Heinlien or Poul Anderson. I can't even remember the names now.

[realityhack]

No I'm pretty sure it was one of those less well known ones like Heinlien or Poul Anderson. I can't even remember the names now.

The story wasn't called What Makes Us Human was it?

[wendigo100]

I'd really like to read that... if you remember, let me know.

I'd like to read it again too!

I was reminded of it about 10 years ago when a mate of mine said that teleporters would be the answer to all our travel problems.