Franc28 wrote:*snip* The fact that the atoms happen to be, on purpose, reconstituted so that the arrangement of atoms is identical is not relevant to this fact. I think this is what is confusing the debate: people stop at the fact that both bodies look the same. But that is an assumption that identity is defined as arrangement of form, which, as I keep repeating, is not a viable position.
If you don't agree with this fundamental premise, then I guess no debate is possible on the issue, and we're going to keep talking past each other. Again, this is a fundamental issue of how we differentiate objects: disagreeing on this means to disagree on the direct interpretation of what we observe.
Let me ask you to clarify your premise. What is death? At what point is someone dead? My gut feeling is that to qualify the transporter as "killing" someone (and thus making them dead) you must define death in so broad a way as to make it a useless word.
You mention the Ship of Theseus, and I think it's an excellent example.
1.) Say I used near-magical technology to remove live skin precursor cells from your body each night rather than letting you "slough off" your skin. Over the course of 31 days I'd have acquired a full epidermis. . . but it'd still be you in that bed, right?
2.) Say I hacked off your arms and legs, sample them, then sugically re-attach them. Still you, right?
3.) Say I yanked your heart out and gave you a transplant. . . grown from a synthetic clone so it's an allograft. . . still you right?
4.) Say I forced your new heart to stop beating for thirty minutes ala open-heart-surgery and then re-started it. . .still you, right?
5.) Say I now removed your brain to take some fancy 3D holography pictures and microanatomical structural analyses (again with my magic future-tech) then put it back in again. Still you, right?
Have I at any point actually *killed* you? Have you ever died? The old-England definition of death was that you weren't able to fog up a piece of glass by breathing out. . . so by that definition you've died repeatedly. A hundred years ago Step '4' woulda been considered "dead for a half hour". In modern times, cessation of brain function in Step '5' should qualify. And yet at no point are you "dead" in the sense we use the word on a day-to-day basis. As our ability to restore the body from injury increases, our definition of what qualifies as "dead" narrows. At least it has in common parlance in real life. . . and I see no reason why the same shouldn't hold true in science fiction.
If I understand your issue with the transporter, you're saying the person who walks in dies, and the person who walks out is a different, identical, person. But that's just as ludicrous as saying that if you go in for a heart transplant, the person we put under and cause a cease in his heart function "dies", and the person who walks out (with a new heart) is a new, different person.
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