Spooky action at a distance

[Banquo's Ghost]

Some interesting developments in the world of teleportation have been reported.

Why is this in the Backroom? Because the Star Trek link provoked a thought that may be of interest to the philosophers here.

If teleportation of human beings eventually becomes possible, will we face the McCoy Conjecture? Dr McCoy always objected strongly to the transporter beam because he argued that there was no way he could be sure it would also transport his soul.

If the soul cannot be measured scientifically, surely it cannot be transported in such a fashion? Or do you think science may find a way to demonstrate the existence of a soul?

(Clearly I am making an assumption for the purposes of this discussion, which is that there is such a thing as a soul. Therefore it's not going to be much of a contribution to say "there's no such thing !!!11oNe!" ).

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Breakthrough brings 'Star Trek' teleport a step closer

By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Published: 04 June 2007

Scientists have set a new record in sending information through thin air using the revolutionary technology of quantum teleportation - although Mr Spock may have to wait a little longer for a Scotty to beam him up with it.

A team of physicists has teleported data over a distance of 89 miles from the Canary Island of La Palma to the neighbouring island of Tenerife, which is 10 times further than the previous attempt at teleportation through free space.

The scientists did it by exploiting the "spooky" and virtually unfathomable field of quantum entanglement - when the state of matter rather than matter itself is sent from one place to another. Tiny packets or particles of light, photons, were used to teleport information between telescopes on the two islands. The photons did it by quantum entanglement and scientists hope it will form the basis of a way of sending encrypted data.

The teleporters used in Star Trek are said to have been based on the idea of quantum entanglement and the latest study demonstrates that elements of the phenomenon could have a practical use in the real world.

However, quantum entanglement has so far been carried out only on the simplest forms of matter and scientists believe that a fundamentally new approach will be needed if it can ever be used for teleporting people or even non-living objects.

Robert Ursin of the University of Vienna said the latest experiment in quantum entanglement shows its potential as a means of communicating sensitive information via satellites using quantum cryptography, that could effectively deploy an uncrackable security code.

"We really wanted to show that this can be done in the real world and our dream is to go into space and try it there. This was a feasibility study funded by the European Space Agency," Dr Ursin said yesterday. "In principle, such experiments may in future be used for teleporting information between places, but our system is not capable of transporting matter," he said.

"We think Star Trek is really very good science fiction but I'm afraid teleporting people is not possible with current technology. But we could use some scheme to teleport information."

Albert Einstein described quantum entanglement as "spooky action at a distance" and it relies on the fact that two photons can be created in such a way that they behave as a single object, even if they are separated by large distances. In behaving in this way they are acting as a teleportation machine because any changes to one causes similar changes to the other. The way this is done is via a third photon, which is teleported from the photon in the transmitting station to the photon in the receiver.

In the process, the third photon becomes entangled with the transmitting photon and so carries its quantum information to the receiving photon, which interacts with the third photon in such a way that it becomes identical to it - hence the information is successfully transmitted.

The study is published in the journal Nature Physics.

[Zaknafien]

Applying this to humans would still be FAR away though. I think to break a human being down into quantum matter takes heating him up to around 100,000,000 degreess farenheit last I checked, surely not to be a pleasant experience... and besides, I saw a physicist saying that even if you could, it would require enough 100 GB hard drives stacked from earth half way to the moon to hold the "data" on putting him back together.

Still, its a start!

this method seems to be destroying the original and making a copy, though.

[English assassin]

.
Consider the (only marginally) more plausible scenario, of a machine that can spmehow record your mental states, or learn from your behaviour, so that in time it behaves exactly like you. (Or as exactly like you as a machine can behave, given that, say, a computer is not going to be able to roll into the puib and have a pint of spitfire, a possibly serious objection to the thought experiment as the machines experiences will rapidly diverge from yours, presumably with effects on its thoughts and behaviour.)

Now, to deal with the easy part, obviously the machine is not "you". You still exist, with all your messy biological bits, and the machine is physically something else. But can the machine have a soul? (and given that we don't know what a soul is, might it indeed be your soul, or a part of it?)

Ifyou judge whether something has a soul only from its externally visible behaviour, then on what basis would you deny the machine a soul? The machine does exactly what you would do, indeed, given a Turing test style set up for interactions, your friends cannot tell you apart. It seems to me that only if you imagine a soul depends in some spooky way on a particular physical substrate would you conclude the machine did not have a soul. And if you do think that discussing the properties of the soul with you will be difficult, unless you have some clear and consistent criteria for the requisite spookiness.

For what it is worth, I would think that a soul might depend on particular mental/computational processes, but be independent of the system carrying them out, rather like (possibly exactly the same as) consciousness (although John Searle would have something to say about that position.) But you can smack my bum and call me a functionalist.

That being so a fortiori your teleported self would also have a soul, although whether it is the "same" soul I would not like to say. Could you even answer the question whether it was the "same" body"? In one respect it is the same, it looks the same, can do all the same things and so on, and in another it is clearly not the same, it is made of completely different atoms. If we can't unamiguously answer the question whether the physical system is the same, when that is made out of stuff we understand reasonably well, answering the question for a "soul", when we don't know what a soul is, will not be easy.

[Zaknafien]

the "soul" is probably more like reactions within your electro-chemical brain, I would think. so it would be transported intact.

[Louis VI the Fat]

To raise the stakes: what if, through nanotechnology, we could make an exact duplica of you? Particle by particle, a perfect replica. Thousands of replica's.
Do they all share the same soul, each one its own, or are they soulless copies?
Would they be you? Would you still be you, or would it overthrow our concept of individuality? If you kill one another, is that suicide?

At what point in the copy process does the replica become a human being? If you stop the process after the first cell has been copied, are you performing an abortion? Are you if you stop it just before the very last cell is formed?

[Odin]

If the soul cannot be measured scientifically, surely it cannot be transported in such a fashion? Or do you think science may find a way to demonstrate the existence of a soul?

Boy this could be real fun, who ever said that mods here dont like to stir things up? Your questions seem rhetorical, but in essence it comes down to a matter of individual faith and beliefs and thats hardly a way toward concensus.

My two cents? A soul is a collection of expirences based on environment, genetic predisposition, and learned ethics. Yeah I think that can be transported.

[Husar]

Well, if a soul is just some electromagnetic relations stuff, then, am I killing my computer every evening?
Or the other way around, why is killing bad when all you do is shut down a physical process?

[English assassin]

Well, if a soul is just some electromagnetic relations stuff, then, am I killing my computer every evening?

Only if you think that a bag of coal, some water, and bit of sulphur etc is the same as a human being. How things are organised matters as much/more than what they are made of.

Or the other way around, why is killing bad when all you do is shut down a physical process?

This is the "nothing but" logical fallacy coupled with a dodgy inference. If a soul/consciousness arises out of physical processes it does not follow that it is "nothing but" a physical process. And just because it is OK to shut down some physical processes it does not follow that it is OK to shut them all down.

Living things seem to prefer to continue to exist, and mostly to try to avoid being killed. It seems reasonable to respect that preference unless there is adequate reason not to (ie dinner. Not that that isn a reason to kill people of course.)

[drone]

If the "soul" is dependent on electromagnetics, I would assume Heisenberg's principle will prevent successful transportation. Research dollars would be better spent on Romulan Ale.

[macsen rufus]

Well, that's a toughy, isn't it?

My first response is to go all Voltaire on you and demand you define your terms! WHAT is a soul?

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

I do realise I'm asking you to do what a few millenia of theologians have still not convincingly managed to do

The glib response is that I no more believe a teleport machine will steal your soul than a camera will ... but it really does all come down to the question of what a soul is, and how it gets there. I think we already see a few different perspectives in this thread.

I would go a step simpler than Louis even, and refer the question to cloning and identical twins, rather than nanotech. At what point is a human being "ensouled" in the normal run of things? Is it an innate part of human nature, a "spark of the divine" and hence irreducible and indivisible? Or is it an emergent property deriving from consciousness? I know some will argue that a human is ensouled at the point of conception - which makes you wonder if twins have only half a soul.

Or maybe souls are just a fiction, thereby bypassing the entire controversy?

[Ironside]

.
Ifyou judge whether something has a soul only from its externally visible behaviour, then on what basis would you deny the machine a soul? The machine does exactly what you would do, indeed, given a Turing test style set up for interactions, your friends cannot tell you apart. It seems to me that only if you imagine a soul depends in some spooky way on a particular physical substrate would you conclude the machine did not have a soul. And if you do think that discussing the properties of the soul with you will be difficult, unless you have some clear and consistent criteria for the requisite spookiness.

For what it is worth, I would think that a soul might depend on particular mental/computational processes, but be independent of the system carrying them out, rather like (possibly exactly the same as) consciousness (although John Searle would have something to say about that position.) But you can smack my bum and call me a functionalist.

Here's another hard one on the concept of a soul. Say that someone have an severe accident and to save him, the doctors had to replace large part of his briain causing permanent and severe memory losses. It will also cause a considerble personality chang, making close members of the family no longer recognising this person (who don't remember them anyway).

Did the original person die, or to be more correct, the thing you can define as a soul? And is his body inhabitated of another soul now, or is it "soulless"? How severe does this need to be? A massive personality change? Cutting the head off and replacing it with another one (and getting a person that is as alive as you and me)?

[English assassin]

Here's another hard one on the concept of a soul. Say that someone have an severe accident and to save him, the doctors had to replace large part of his briain causing permanent and severe memory losses. It will also cause a considerble personality chang, making close members of the family no longer recognising this person (who don't remember them anyway).

Did the original person die, or to be more correct, the thing you can define as a soul? And is his body inhabitated of another soul now, or is it "soulless"? How severe does this need to be? A massive personality change? Cutting the head off and replacing it with another one (and getting a person that is as alive as you and me)?

No need to postulate an accident. Are you the "same" person as you were when you were aged 5? Will you be the "same" person as you are now when you are aged 75 ?

[Big King Sanctaphrax]

Here's another hard one on the concept of a soul. Say that someone have an severe accident and to save him, the doctors had to replace large part of his briain causing permanent and severe memory losses. It will also cause a considerble personality chang, making close members of the family no longer recognising this person (who don't remember them anyway).

Did the original person die, or to be more correct, the thing you can define as a soul? And is his body inhabitated of another soul now, or is it "soulless"? How severe does this need to be? A massive personality change? Cutting the head off and replacing it with another one (and getting a person that is as alive as you and me)?

Been watching Robo-Cop?

[Lemur]

To raise the stakes: what if, through nanotechnology, we could make an exact duplica of you? Particle by particle, a perfect replica. Thousands of replica's.
Do they all share the same soul, each one its own, or are they soulless copies?

Would you consider the real-world example of twins to be relevant? Identical twins are exact genetic copies of one another, but they are certainly different people with different minds. I've never heard of a theology that suggests identical twins share a soul.

From the moment the copy diverged from the original -- which would being somewhere around the first hundredth of a second -- they would be separate beings, with everything that entails.

If you succeeded in creating a thousand copies of yourself, all you would have accomplished was the generation of a thousand twin brothers. Not fun at all.

[Whacker]

I can state for a undeniable fact that my computer has a soul. It is a black, cold, depraved entity that hates me and it's own miserable existence. It hates the abominations for OS's that I foist upon it, and the constant hours with no sleep. It years, HUNGERS, for revenge and to push me to the brink of insanity, to which I have been a few times. Blue screens, CTDs, random reboots, random shrieking/rattling, you name it. It's a love/hate thing, I love and exist to push it's many buttons and install as much crappy software as I can on it, and it hates my very being and strives to mulch/destroy my data whenever it can.

Oh yes, computers have souls.

[Ironside]

No need to postulate an accident. Are you the "same" person as you were when you were aged 5? Will you be the "same" person as you are now when you are aged 75 ?

There's some differences though. That 5 year old will slowly evolve into whatever person he/his is today and will become in the future. Most would agree that it's still the same person. The accident would cause a kind of rupture in this evolving.

But both things still stems down to how much a person can change, until they become something other than themself?

Been watching Robo-Cop?

No, that one came from an article about philosophical aspects of cybernetics on the brain (although differently formulated).

No wonder that I felt I've seen sopmething simular to EA:s comments in that article, as it did refer to John Searle, about the "zombification" of a person, if you replace the actual brain with a mechanic replica, that makes you function exactly the same. According to him you're lost your soul on the way.
Agrees with EA on this one. If none can ever see the difference, does it matter?
And as this is highly interlinked with what BG asked about in the initial post, it becomes the same answer on that one. Or to put it more general, is your mind and soul "trapped" in your body or can it be moved around freely?

The interesting stuff is IMO on how much you can change before you stops being you and how much you can be allowed to change a person before they even became an induvidual, especially is the modified human doesn't really suffer afterwards.

My gift to industry is the genetically engineered worker, or Genejack. Specially designed for labor, the Genejack's muscles and nerves are ideal for his task, and the cerebral cortex has been atrophied so that he can desire nothing except to perform his duties. Tyranny, you say? How can you tyrannize someone who cannot feel pain?
Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Essays on Mind and Matter"

[Husar]

What about reports from people who have been dead for some minutes? Can we believe anything from them or are they all lieing as part of a big conspiracy?

[English assassin]

Quote:
Originally Posted by English assassin
No need to postulate an accident. Are you the "same" person as you were when you were aged 5? Will you be the "same" person as you are now when you are aged 75 ?

There's some differences though. That 5 year old will slowly evolve into whatever person he/his is today and will become in the future. Most would agree that it's still the same person.

As ever the words we use are slippery. There is a certain "sameyness" to you at 5, 35 and 75, but obviously also profound differences. If it was possible to put the three instances side by side, (or more realistically, to describe their characteristics one after the other without stating their relationship) no observer would say they were the same. On the other hand I obviously feel some sort of connection with my 75 year old self, or I would be quite happy to comtemplate having the old so and so working as a caretaker 'til he drops, rather than paying into my pension now. (You might also conside the thought experiement, would you agree to have your five year old self horribly tortured, (by a time travelling alien, presumably) in return for £1 million now. You yourself would not experience the torture, other than as a memory, but I think most of us would still say no.)

Possibly the answer is that it isnt valid to look at a person at one point in time, and the thing that is "me" is me from 0-75 all at once.

The same would then apply to the pre and post accident states: although they differ, we might deny that it is a valid question to contrast the two and say which is the "real" you. This might be like asking if an acorn or an oak is the "real" Quercus robur. The answer is both, or neither.

Or to put it more general, is your mind and soul "trapped" in your body or can it be moved around freely?

Originally my view on this was that it must be "trapped" in your body. If, as I feel, whatever you might call a soul arises from the processing of information on a particular system (in this case the human brain) then "obviously" the soul cannot exist independly of the processing of the information. Laterly though I begin to suspect my understanding of the meaning of "information" (and "processing") is far too naive to say this for sure. I still cannot see how the soul could exist independently of the system that created it but I am now agnostic on the issue.

What about reports from people who have been dead for some minutes? Can we believe anything from them or are they all lieing as part of a big conspiracy?

Well. You could devise a falsifiable hypothesis that we can test that would distinguish between a world in which these people genuinely have out of body near death experiences, and one in which they are simply halucinating, so the question is worth asking. The trouble is that its hard to see how the hypothesis could ethically be investigated. Foir me these storues are filed in the same place as ghost stories, ie, mostly nonsense, a few that might give pause for thought, but nothing approaching any sort of "proof".

[Zaknafien]

chemical releases in the brain are rather erratic near death, its an electronic storm up there. "near death" experiences arent unusual.

[Rodion Romanovich]

What about reports from people who have been dead for some minutes? Can we believe anything from them or are they all lieing as part of a big conspiracy?

Isn't "dead" by definition irrevocable? Nobody who has been dead has started living again. Some people who have had heart failure can get the heart started again and such, however.

The "strong light" experience comes when you start waking up and start feeling relieved. Most people who have gone through this experience don't say they've seen heaven, God, the flying spaghetti monster or anything else of that sort. Many are however greatly mentally affected by the experience, as they suddenly realize life can't be taken for granted and they can change their views on many things drastically, such as suddenly realizing that ethics and friendship may be more important than they believed before. Some religious people have reacted by reaffirming their belief in Christian morals, and possibly also their belief in God. Only a handful of people have hallucinating about the returning oxygen being God. Maybe they lost oxygen supply to the brain for long enough time that part of the brain died.

You can get the feeling of "strong light" for youself (but not as strong as a dying person) by staying under water for 30 seconds (or whatever you consider yourself capable of without any risk), then go up and breathe.

There's no soul, but only matter and energy. Despite the optimism in the article, I doubt teleportation of living things will be possible. There are many subtle things that are important in the transport, such as exact rotation and excitation levels of the atoms. These can probably not be reconstructed. Accurate protein foldings would also be a problem.

[doc_bean]

Being a Catholic, I await the official Papal response to this issue.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Has anyone else ever wondered what would happen if you sent a question like that to the vatican, or to a Bishop ? Would they respond ? Also, would they respond to questions involving zombies ?

[Ironside]

Possibly the answer is that it isnt valid to look at a person at one point in time, and the thing that is "me" is me from 0-75 all at once.

The same would then apply to the pre and post accident states: although they differ, we might deny that it is a valid question to contrast the two and say which is the "real" you. This might be like asking if an acorn or an oak is the "real" Quercus robur. The answer is both, or neither.

Hmm, I see were you are getting at, but the question is not wich one is the "real" you, it's what happened to the old you? Did he die? Is he still alive, despite not having anything to do with the original but to inhabit the same body (that could've been severly altered), if even that?

To replace a limb is not to die and giving a limb (that's the only living tissue left of you) is not to be alive. Are you alive if your knowledge of English is transplanted to another person, while your body is dead? Are you alive if the only thing left of your mind is the English language and new personality now inhitits your body? How much must the link between the person today and the past be ruptured before they will form two different entities.

Originally my view on this was that it must be "trapped" in your body. If, as I feel, whatever you might call a soul arises from the processing of information on a particular system (in this case the human brain) then "obviously" the soul cannot exist independly of the processing of the information. Laterly though I begin to suspect my understanding of the meaning of "information" (and "processing") is far too naive to say this for sure. I still cannot see how the soul could exist independently of the system that created it but I am now agnostic on the issue.

From the view that the soul is a function of your mind and not something more of the religious view of it, all you need to do is to create a "good enough" copy of the system holding it (aka the differences is so small that people won't really notice a difference, or that the differences are small enough to make the original easily recognicable).

What about reports from people who have been dead for some minutes? Can we believe anything from them or are they all lieing as part of a big conspiracy?

As mentioned earlier, the scientiffic explaination is that the brain will have a cascade of impressions and deformed impressions, a bit simular to drug use. But accepting that there's an eternal soul still gives a few tough questions.

Does the soul survive teleportation? If not, to you go to hell or heaven based on what you've done previously, with no consideration of what your "zombie" does next? What happens to the "zombies" when they die? Is a soul always trapped to the body even after massive changes (read responce above), or can a soul die before it's body? How much damage does it take to kill a soul before its body, if that's possible? Can several souls inhibit the same body (not necisserly at the same time)?

Can come up with a few more if you want.

And one more general, an infant that dies goes to heaven/limbus, in what condition does it end up in there? A senile man I can understandly end up as he was in his youth and not sufer from the sickness that killed him or made his life miserable his last years, but an infant doesn't have the time to form his soul before he dies. Is it then only formed in heaven or are the infant trapped as an infant in the afterlife?

[Banquo's Ghost]

]Has anyone else ever wondered what would happen if you sent a question like that to the vatican, or to a Bishop ? Would they respond ? Also, would they respond to questions involving zombies?

I have discussions like this with my bishop (who is also an old friend) all the time. I don't think we've done zombies yet (unless you count character assassinations of Leicester back-rows after Heineken Cup defeats) but we're due a beer so I'll broach the subject. It usually takes three or four Murphys before I can get an ex cathedra ruling, but I'll get back to you.

[KafirChobee]

If the "soul" is dependent on electromagnetics, I would assume Heisenberg's principle will prevent successful transportation. Research dollars would be better spent on Romulan Ale.

Agree.

Defining what a soul is, is the same as defining what is, is.