🔗 Teletransportation Paradox

🔗 Philosophy

The teletransportation paradox or teletransport paradox (also known in alternative forms as the duplicates paradox) is a thought experiment on the philosophy of identity that challenges common intuitions on the nature of self and consciousness. It first appeared under this name in full published form presumably in Derek Parfit's 1984 book Reasons and Persons.

The Polish science-fiction writer Stanisław Lem described the same problem in the mid-twentieth century. He put it in writing in his philosophical text "Dialogs", 1957. Similarly, in Lem's Star Diaries ("Fourteenth Voyage") of 1957 the hero visits a planet and he finds himself recreated from a backup record, after his death from a meteorite strike, which on this planet is a very commonplace procedure.

Similar questions of identity have been raised as early as 1775.

I would be glad to know your Lordship's opinion whether when my brain has lost its original structure, and when some hundred years after the same materials are fabricated so curiously as to become an intelligent being, whether, I say that being will be me; or, if, two or three such beings should be formed out of my brain; whether they will all be me, and consequently one and the same intelligent being.