There are a lot inconsistencies and impossibilities in these thought
experiments. First, human consciousness is not a quantum phenomenon.
The brain is too hot and wet to maintain quantum coherence, Max Tegmark
wrote a paper about this years ago. Second, the brain is not isolated,
it's part of a system which it depends on and it is subject to.
Brent
On 4/3/2025 9:09 AM, '[email protected]' via Everything List wrote:
Lifted....
"
/How do we know that an entirely new piece of matter, having the same
quantum state, would be identical to the person before teleportation?
Well, we do and we don’t. We don’t because we haven’t done the
teleportation experiment with humans. But we do, in the sense that –
as far as we know at present – the quantum state fully captures all
the aspects of a physical system. When we teleport individual atoms,
they behave the same before and after the teleportation 😊./
/For instance, whatever test we perform on the teleported human, the
result should be indistinguishable from their unteleported version.
For starters, the teleported version would look and behave exactly as
the original. But, if there is nothing more to it than the quantum
state, their feelings, memories, and so on would be identical too.
Their introspection after the teleportation would not reveal anything
out of the ordinary (“I went into the teleporter, and here I am now on
the other side of the galaxy”)./
/Derek Parfit
<https://substack.com/redirect/4b7f2dbf-a13a-4ad6-9568-c43799db43dc?j=eyJ1IjoiczMwZGYifQ.b5rsEYtyk0sGkeMPhilHd7a8dI99e2SoNGlX0SZXkY8> was
an Oxford philosopher who became famous for using sci-fi scenarios
like teleportation (albeit non-quantum) to illustrate various apparent
paradoxes related to the notion of personal identity. His book
“Reasons and Persons
<https://substack.com/redirect/4866c13f-c371-408c-9ef9-a5337afb82cc?j=eyJ1IjoiczMwZGYifQ.b5rsEYtyk0sGkeMPhilHd7a8dI99e2SoNGlX0SZXkY8>”
explores it at great length./
/For instance, Parfit envisages a scenario in which your brain is
sliced into two and the two hemispheres are then put into two other
human bodies. Since each feels like you, remembers things like you,
acts like you, and so on, does it mean that there are now two of you?
Parfit also considered the opposite process. Rather than splitting you
into two, you can take the two copies of you and fuse them into one.
Would that now still be you even though the two copies could have led
separate lives before the fusion?/
/This leads to an interesting question: could two different persons
occupy one and the same body? Parfit says “yes” (and the directors
Alfred Hitchcock
<https://substack.com/redirect/ea2f9c30-caab-4c69-8742-4099289bc3e7?j=eyJ1IjoiczMwZGYifQ.b5rsEYtyk0sGkeMPhilHd7a8dI99e2SoNGlX0SZXkY8> and
Brian de Palma
<https://substack.com/redirect/fa9c74c0-835c-44e8-abac-c7a3da47d792?j=eyJ1IjoiczMwZGYifQ.b5rsEYtyk0sGkeMPhilHd7a8dI99e2SoNGlX0SZXkY8> surely
agree with him). Parfit thought that personal identity is not
fundamental. All we require is some kind of continuity of memories,
perceptions, and general feelings that it is still us, not much
different from the person we remember existed last year or twenty
years ago or as a child./
/But Parfit was a philosopher largely unaware of quantum physics and
he wrote about all these ideas in the sixties and seventies well
before quantum teleportation was discovered. So, it would be
interesting to add a quantum twist to his scenarios./
/Enter Schrödinger
<https://substack.com/redirect/7874686f-2810-4cbe-8d9b-757a47d265e0?j=eyJ1IjoiczMwZGYifQ.b5rsEYtyk0sGkeMPhilHd7a8dI99e2SoNGlX0SZXkY8>.
Imagine a person (not a cat) witnessing an atom spontaneously emitting
a photon. Since this is a quantum process, this person sees the atom
emit in one branch of the superposition and not emit in the other
branch. And quantum physics says both branches are real and exist in a
quantum superposition./
/Now, is the person in each branch the same as the person before the
observation? If you talked to them they would definitely confirm this.
Each remembers the times before observing the atom and all the past
memories are identical for both copies. The only difference is that
they now see two different things, one sees a photon and the other
doesn’t. But surely a small event like this cannot really change their
identity (we know this because we observe things all the time that
could have been otherwise and we ourselves always feel the same; no
discontinuities here, unless you suffer from a psychological disorder)./
/In each branch the person continues in the usual fashion and does
different things. They could end up living very different lives simply
as a result of one quantum event of the kind described./
/So far so good. But we also know that in quantum mechanics we can
interfere the two branches. This would be the quantum equivalent of
Parfit’s fusion thought experiment. One way of doing this is to
reverse the observation of the atomic emission. In other words, the
person would undergo a time-reversal transformation in which case,
their end state would be the same as at the beginning of the experiment!/
/In this case, the person would not remember any observation of
anything else that happened to either of their copies in the two
branches. It’s as though the experiment never took place (other than,
of course, the person performing the experiment who could tell you all
about it at the end). The funny thing is (and I always found this
fascinating) there is nothing problematic with any of this. No
paradoxes, inconsistencies, and such, despite the fact that all these
possibilities sound fantastical./
/I sure would love to see a psychologist, psychiatrist, or
neuro-scientist study the quantum notion of self. If you are curious
about it yourself, many more of these and related issues are discussed
in my upcoming book “Portals to A New Reality”./
/Take care of yourselves,/
/Vlatko/
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