Originally posted by lord krondor
Allow me to try and make this topic more interesting.Imagine you were in the shitty Star Trek universe and you need to teleport to some location. Now would the teleportation result in your death? If you believe in a "soul" or "self" then you would in fact die, however, your replication would believe that you didn't die. You could never prove that the teleporter kills the original because the replication would say that everything went fine.
If you believe that we are just a bundle of perceptions, then the teleporter wouldn't kill you. You would be the same person after you teleported.
Now, would you step into the teleporter?
What's interesting about this thought experiment is that it highlights this fact: we still really don't know what makes something "alive," ie, is there a spirit or soul which animates the material body or are we just complex biochemical machines?
I used to think that a dematerializing teleporter would solve this problem. If there is no soul, we can safely be reconstructed at destination point. If there is a soul, then the teleporter kills us, since, after all, the body is being destroyed.
Now I'm not so sure. Since we don't even know if spirit exists, let alone its inherent characteristics/qualities, one could argue this: a body is dematerialized at point A; the soul is temporarily freed but lingers (kinda like a ghost), since it is still attached to the "data blueprint" being beamed to point B. At point B, the body is rematerialized and the soul redons the "garment" of the physical self.
Discovering whether or not there is a spiritual dimension to the universe may not be so much a Next Step for science as a First Step into, truly, the Final Frontier.