This is a bit long, but it's just fun to think about these sort of things. Mind you, this is a hypothetical situation and is only meant for a discussion. It is possible that there is no right answer here. Just an opinion.
For Stelios, the teletransporter is the only way to travel. Previously it took months to get from Earth to Mars, confined to a cramped spacecraft with a far from perfect safety record. Stelios' TeletransportExpress changed all that. Now the trip takes just minutes, and so far it has been 100% safe.
However, now he is facing a lawsuit from a disgruntled customer who is claiming the company actually killed him. His argument is simple: the teletransporter works by scanning your brain and body cell by cell, destroying them, beaming the information to Mars and reconstructing you there. Although the person on Mars looks, feels and thinks just like a person who has been sent to sleep and zapped across space,the claimant argues that what actually happens is that you are murdered and replaced by a clone.
To Stelios, this sounds absurd. After all, he has taken the teletransporter trip dozens of times, and he doesn't feel dead. Indeed, how can the claimant seriously believe that he has been killed by the process when he is clearly able to take the case to court?
Still, as Stelios entered the teletransporter booth once again and prepared to press the button that would begin to dismantle him, he did, for a second, wonder whether he was about to commit suicide.
Before I read this, I merely thought that a teleporter-ish thing sent you through particles, I never would've thought about it like this, lol 8D and now that I think about it, is it even possible to send organic material through 'articles' or waves???
Errm yes. I think particles are just the element or something similar, and organic material is made of elements, so yeah it would be able to transport us as long as it places the elements in the correct spots.
okay, for some reason when I was thinking about it, I started thinking that the particles transferred were like computerized things, so I didn't get how they could transfer organic stuff through, thanx for clearing that up though
That is quite true. Would it be suicide to take the teleporter? The actual consciousness is not transmitted, just the data. That does not constitute the soul itself, thus it would be dying each time. When you wake up in the new location, it is actually another person with the experience of the person that left.
Thus, I believe, it would be death every time you took it.
Well, that seems like the only practical way for teleportation to work, so if that was a problem, you could just take the spaceship. Or, rather than destroy the original, just put it into a sort of hibernation and temporarily tap their conscience into a reusable robot of some type on mars, and send them back into their original body when they're done.
Well, this really brings up an as-of-now unanswerable question. Where is the mind, soul, or whatever you want to call it actually located?
If it is simply encoded in the brain, as it seems to be, then taking the teleporter would technically be suicide, I suppose, but not really.
As was said, essentially, the cells in our body die out and are replaced constantly. I recently read in a book, the God Delusion, I beelive, that we are not who we were, physically speaking, 7 years ago. Not a single cell is the same.
Think about that for a sec.
That, to me, seems to dictate that the teleporter would for all intents and purposes not be suicide, but rather simply movement, or acceleration of our body's natural processes, at the most.
I do, but I would not call it a soul. If I'm correct in the way they are using soul then it is a religious belief that is only the spirit, otherwise a ghost almost, that is really only used to take the person to heaven, or hell. And since I am ignorant of all religions, a soul is some pointless thing made up to make people behave and not sin.
I wouldn't care if I died, as long as there were no aftereffects. Soul to me is a result of mind. Once you have conciousness, you will get your soul. It is supposed to live on after death, so it will come back, right. btw raptor, the soul is an image of your physical self that contains your body, and is shaped by your actions. Death is only the loss of the physical self. I believe that we can refill the soul with physical matter.
