Soul Trek

I picked up a few good books for the holiday. 5 books on philosophy and meta physics, a bit of light reading. Flicking through one of them, a book which tests your consistency of rational thought, I came across an old problem which I have not covered in my blog before.

It goes like this. You have a choice, you are off on a trip to Mars and you can either travel by teleporter or by spaceship. The spaceship takes a long time (a couple of years), is very risky and as such you have a 50% chance of not making it there alive. The alternative is the teleporter. It is 100% reliable and (speed of light to Mars) takes a few hours. It scans you, deconstructs you into energy, transmits the patterns to the other end and reconstructs you from energy. You will be an exact copy, exact down to the last brainwave. The traveller feels nothing as the scanning and deconstruction is instantaneous.

So which would you choose?

This was something I had very clear thoughts on when I first considered the problem while watching Star Trek. While it is not the subject of the quiz in the book I have just bought, it does provide an interesting test of someone’s belief in either a soul and perhaps their religious beliefs.

Many people would select the teleporter because at first glance it appears risk free. But is it? Let’s take a look at the teleporter process in a different light, one step at a time and play a little game at the same time.

You step into the teleporter and it scans you. Arguably it now has all the information it needs to reconstruct you at the other end. Now let’s assume that to do a teleportation it is not sending your physical matter from A to B but simply your pattern, as the moving of the matter would be impossible and potentially unreliable and very slow (cannot move matter at the speed of light). So what is being moved is data at the speed of light. At the other end this data is then played into the reconstruction machine which recreates you from energy. So what is the problem? The dilemma for me comes in the timing. Let’s say that the scanner scans you, collects all the data and then sends it to the reconstruction machine. It then converts energy into a new exact copy of you. However, the original you is still at the starting point. The only difference is that the scanner has not zapped the original yet.

So there you are, standing in the scanner, it scans you and sends the data and just before it deconstructs you there is a malfunction. The new you has appeared at the other end. Would you be happy for the engineer to fix the machine and for you to be zapped? Not me!

And yes, there is an argument that says it has to deconstruct you to get the data but that does not change the argument. That’s just a timing issue.

If the answer is no you would not allow yourself to get zapped then check your earlier answer to see if you are consistent with your thinking. Which is the riskiest now, spacecraft or teleporter?

Against the odds

I encountered a coincidence this weekend of such apparent astronomic odds that I cannot get my head around it. I was staying at a friend's house with my wife at the weekend. To understand this whole story we have to go back a few years. My wife is from Finland. 18 years ago she visited England on a course. I was working at the time. 4 years later I decided to go to Essex University. During my first summer break I interviewed for a job with the EFL department and got the job as a social organiser. It was my job to take the foreign students our, lay on visits, sports events and cultural activities for the 6 weeks they were there. A great job. Then, during the following March I was invited to work another week, during term time to do the same job for a group of visiting Fins. Of all the Fins that arrived I fell for the girl who is now my wife. We have been together for 14 years now and during that time I have had many jobs (IT contractor). Move forward 10 years from this point. I was doing some sales work for my company to HMRC. I met this guy, who I was trying to sell to, and over the course of the next year or so became good friends. We mostly lunch. It was he who invited over to his place this weekend. We met his girlfriend for the (actually) 2nd time. We were discussing where my wife and I had met and my wife pointed out that she first came to England on a course to Aldeburgh. At which point my friend’s girlfriend asked if my wife stayed at such and such a bed and breakfast.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, they were on that course together all those years ago and stayed in the same bed and breakfast. The odds of me getting together with my wife, my friend meeting his girlfriend, and my befriending this guy are so mind boggling as to be quiet unbelievable.

And yet, have I ever won a penny on the lottery. Have I bollocks!