It's a Clone, Baby
Community Comments: The Teletransportation Paradox
Before I begin, I’d like to apologize to all of you. We haven’t done one of these posts in a while.
It’s been a disservice to everybody. Your thought-provoking comments haven’t stopped just because I haven’t taken the time to compile them, and we’ve all missed out on some excellent discussion by not giving them the attention they deserve.
John and I don’t know everything. In fact, we don’t know most things. That’s why I’m resuming this series with a question that no one knows the answer to, but which a lot of us (and I mean a lot) really like to think about.
For our Thinking Man Book Club pick this week, we tackled Michael Crichton’s Timeline, a speculative, mind bend-y science fiction kind of book that features a form of time travel accomplished via disassembling one’s body at an atomic level and creating a copy in another, nearly identical universe.
It reminded John of the ‘teletransportation paradox,’ which, as I described in our book club post on the subject, goes something like this:
Imagine a machine that allows you to ‘teleport’ by putting you to sleep, breaking you apart into atoms, and then making a copy of you, which another machine recreates somewhere else. The copy that comes out of the machine looks just like you, with your same memories and same brain, but the actual cells and atoms that make you up are different. Is the copy actually ‘you,’ or have you actually been killed and replaced with an exact replica?
As it turns out, this is a concept that has been explored over and over again in fiction. For example,
mentioned that this type of teleportation was used in Star Trek:
She’s right. Timeline is a good book. It’s not one of the greatest books of all time and it probably doesn’t even warrant a reread, but it’s a fun, nicely written thriller.
That being said, I’ll never say no to a book that will pose some mind-bending questions.
Now for the answers.
After some discussion and a lot of going back and forth, John and I came to the conclusion that you would not die, because your soul would simply jump from the first body to the second.
Most people disagreed with us.
elaborated on Star Trek’s transporter, and noted that Dr. McCoy believed it would leave the soul behind (i.e. the exact opposite conclusion to ours).Completely independently of Scott’s comment (don’t you love when that happens?)
agreed with McCoy’s thoughts on the subject.(He also presented an alternative that I like the sound of):
The point of view of the community can probably best be summed up by this comment from
.
The community has spoken—with a near-unanimous answer to the teletransportation paradox, no less. Teleportation via disassembling one’s body and replicating it somewhere else is not actually transportation at all, but a very sophisticated form of cloning.
But then how do we account for the fact that the person has the same personality and the same memories? If this clone wakes up in the new place with the exact same memories, feeling as though they are the same person who was just teleported, how could they not be the same person?
This is when things start to get really weird. What makes you ‘you’? Is it your memories? Is it your body?
provided the clearest explanation I think I’ve ever seen.
I don’t even know where to start. I absolutely love this.
First of all, I’m absolutely floored that
has come up with his own philosophy that has articulated answers the questions I’ve grappled with incessantly with unsatisfying results. The term ‘Koa’ is his, and he explains how he conceptualizes it, what he thinks it is, and where he thinks it goes after the body dies.Read his post on the subject. It’s fantastic:
After spending a lot of time grappling with all of this, I think I have to agree with Stone. ‘You’ are the Koa—that strange blend of body and energy that merged together to form your life.
It’s completely unique. You’re more than the sum of your parts. If you start playing God and disassembling things and copying them somewhere else, you’ll get just that: a copy.
All this clone stuff is starting to make my brain hurt, so I’m going to end here. Thank you all for chiming in on this one. If you have any other ideas, share them in the comments.
And read
’s post. Seriously.Thank you for reading. Doing another one of these is like a breath of fresh air—learning from you all is the absolute best part of writing on Substack.
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You can also buy me a coffee. Or a clone of a coffee.
Michael Crichton was always my favorite airport-thriller writer. I read every single one of his books while flying, Lol. I can say this about him. His exploration seemed to hit a lot of international nerves. I can't recall which of his books the topic of patenting DNA was discussed, but I remember it was in one of his latest books before he died, and touched on this futurist controversial subject. Can a government own your DNA? Maybe the book was Timeline? I have an autographed copy of his book.
. If, instead of being killed, your atoms were mapped and then reproduced elsewhere, there would be two yous. They would rapidly diverge as each you had different experiences and created new memories.