The Teletransportation Paradox

Michael Crichton's "Timeline" - "Black Rock"

Melissa’s Comments:

This book is really starting to get good. This week, we read the third part of the book, “Black Rock,” and we have a feeling that things are only going to get more intense from here.

The graduate students who we’ve been following throughout the book have now been disassembled on a quantum level and transported into the past—or, rather, another universe that is almost identical to this one.

By all intents and purposes, this means that their bodies, which exist in their universe, have ceased to exist. The people that have taken over in their place are near-perfect clones of the people they once were. Are these new clones the same people? Or are the original graduate students gone, disintegrated into nothingness?

The first conclusion John and I came to was that they were dead. How could they not be? Their original body was destroyed. But then we thought about it some more. Their consciousness didn’t skip a beat. It merely traveled from the first body to the second.

John was reminded of the ‘teletransportation paradox’ (which I promptly Googled because I had never heard of it before). Here’s its Wikipedia page, which, incidentally, has a link to Timeline in its “See Also” section.

The teletransportation paradox is a thought experiment (accredited to the philosopher David Parfit, although other people have posed similar questions) that 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?

You might say that as long as the person has the same memories—the same ‘consciousness’—then they are the same person.

The thought experiment goes further, though. Imagine that the machine does not have to kill you—it simply makes a replica of you in the new place, with the same memories and the same ‘consciousness’ at the time of replication. You and the new replica of you diverge and go your separate paths creating new experiences, but at the time of replication, you were exactly the same. Are these people both ‘you’?

Well, now that there’s two people, the answer becomes more complicated. It’s hard to stomach the idea that the new clone is just as much ‘you’ as your real self. But then doesn’t this mean that the replica isn’t actually you in the case where your original self was disintegrated?

What if the original disintegration happens, but infinite copies can still be generated? Are these copies all you?

Suddenly, this concept has become incredibly complex. Why?

Could it be because ‘personal identity’ itself is an illusion. It’s a longshot, but it’s not too radical of a claim. The Wikipedia page for the teletransportation paradox also linked to the concept of “Anattā”: a Buddhist term for the non-existence of the self.

If everything is all connected, and our consciousness is, in fact, merely a case of ‘the universe experiencing itself,’ playing at being human and immersing itself completely in one blip of the wide expanse of experiences that it has to offer, than when we get into minutiae like this, the question of where one ‘self’ ends and another begins is arbitrary.

I touched on this concept when the Thinking Man Book Club tackled Watchmen. Give it a read if you’re interested.

All Infinities Are Small

My conclusion at this point in Timeline is that no, the scientists aren’t dead (although their physical bodies are). As far as the cloning stuff goes, I don’t really know what to make of that (any of your thoughts would be greatly appreciated).

That being said, my head is spinning, so I’ll let John take the reigns for this one.

John’s Comments:

Hello. My name is John. Perhaps you’ve seen some of my writing on Substack before. Regardless, let’s dive right in.

Alright, let’s get to it. As Melissa said earlier, this portion of the book reminded me of the teletransportation paradox. After the conclusion of John Gibson and David Stern’s conversation just as the graduate students made the jump, Stern forced Gibson to admit that the versions of Kate, Chris, and Marek they had just seen were completely destroyed. I was devastated, jumping off the couch and running up to Melissa screaming “Oh the humanity!” or something like it.

Our conversation went something like this:

“So they died!” I screamed.

“Huh?” Melissa responded.

“The characters died. Look at what Gibson said here,” I said, shoving the book into her hands.

“Hm, I guess you’re right,” Melissa said. “Well, actually. That may not be the case.”

I scoffed and began explaining the teletransportation paradox to her. I had been familiar with the concept since high school. Any time the idea had been brought to my attention I usually felt unease thinking about the heaps of dead bodies of the same clone, all who had just a few hours of life before being eviscerated into oblivion. Ugh. It’s a concept that John Dies at the End explores at a much smaller, but still just as mind-fucking level.

“So, they died,” I said triumphantly, while still mourning the loss of our dearly departed fictional friends.

“Not exactly,” Melissa said. As she is smarter than me, she tends to show me the things I’m missing. In this case, it was the idea of their consciousness. If the world is black and white, and people are born and then they die and that’s all there is to it, then yes, the characters died. BUT, if there is more to life than this meatsack I occupy and use to type these awful posts, then why wouldn’t my soul/consciousness just teleport into the newly formed version of my body that materialized at Point B?

“Holy shit,” I screamed. “You’re right. I’ve had this wrong the whole time.”

Sure, some people will say that I’m an idiot for thinking that’s a possibility. Let’s go through WHY I might be an idiot (according to this theory alone mind you).

#1 - Souls don’t exist and once you die that’s it. OK BOOMER.

#2 - IF souls existed and the multiverse is real, then there’s trillions of souls of everyone on this planet. Including hundreds or thousands of John souls flying all around multiverse heaven.

Now wait, we’re getting crazy, so let’s get crazier. Have you heard of NPC’s? The acronym stands for non-playable character. Have you ever gotten a speeding ticket while going the speed limit and no matter how much you begged and pleaded with the state trooper he still gave you a ticket? Not that I would know, but imagine that. When that douchebag gets into his car and drives off the highway and blasts home without a second thought, you may turn to your significant other named Melissa in the passenger seat and say, “That guy was a fucking robot.”

It’s another theory. Some people are there, some people aren’t. Maybe some of the characters in our world are empty vessels, with their soul occupying a different version of them in a different universe. Maybe if the vessel the soul is in dies, it would transport itself and its consciousness into the next closest version of itself in another universe, promptly not skipping a beat. It could be why the Mandela Effect is a thing.

Come on, I’m not saying it’s true. I’m not exactly saying it isn’t true, either. What I can say is that I’ve been in a few situations where looking back I feel like I could have died, maybe I even have a slight memory of something close like the rush of oxygen out of my lungs, the slight pulse of death before my soul woke up in the body I’m occupying now, and all the hint I have that that happened is the cornucopia on the Fruit of the Loom logo is missing.

Alright alright, I’ll stop. All I’m saying is that this book is pretty sweet. I’m glad we picked it and I look forward to you telling me that I’m nuts.

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