I love the "teleporter paradox". Its a phillosophical paradox that goes thusly:
"The year is 2500, and teleportation technology has been perfected for use on humans in interstellar travels. This is how the human teleporter works: instead of actually sending you (with all of your atoms) through space-time, it simply scans your body, capturing all the information on every subatomic particle in your body at an instant (assume that they got around Heisenberg's uncertainty principle), at which point your body is destroyed (don't worry, you are put under anaesthetic for the procedure), while the information of those atoms gets transmitted to the destination, where a machine will synthesise an exact replica of you (exactly the same down to the subatomic level) using new atoms. You then wake up in a different galaxy (after the anaesthetics wear off - and the anaesthetics would also be 'teleported' by the way), with all your memory before the teleportation intact, convinced that you have survived the procedure. Of course the atoms are all new, but isn't the new body still the same 'you'? (In real life, every atom in our body eventually gets replaced anyway.)
Now let's add a twist. Instead of destroying your original body, it is preserved during the scanning process. So now we have TWO copies of you: the original one, and the replica. Both of them are identical down to the last atom, and should be behaviourally indistinguishable (because they have the same physical makeup, materialism states that they must be identical in every way.) But surely you can't be in two places at once! If 'you' survived at all, isn't it obvious that you survive as your original self, not the clone? But what's the difference between your original self and the clone anyway? Both of you would behave in exactly the same way, and both would have the same thoughts (at least initially, when there has been no divergence in the environment). So did you really survive the procedure afterall? If you didn't, doesn't that point to the existence of something other than your physical body including the information contained within the arrangement of the atoms? Is there a difference between the scenario with one original body and one clone, and the scenario where I destroy your original body, and create two(or more!) clones instead? In each case, is it so clear that 'you' will survive, and survive in one of the individuals/clones?"
One thing to keep in mind when thinking over this paradox is the fact that you have very, very few of the atoms in your body that you where born with.
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