Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I remember some years ago either reading a short story, or seeing a short film - I forget which it was - about the "ethics" of transporter technology, the whole point of which was that it inevitably involves the "death" of the person being "transported", and the ethical implications of that.
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Could it be ... Paul Brok -"Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology"
In the book is a short story called "To Be Two or Not to Be". On Earth, a traveller is being teleported to Mars. The machine plots the co-ordinates of every atom in your body and transmits that information to the receiver on Mars where local atoms are used to construct a duplicate you. At the moment of teleportation, the Earth body is annihilated so that there is no duplication of yourself. In the story, the machine fouls up and the traveller on Earth is not annihilated. So he still exists and now has a duplicate on Mars.
The machine operator and the traveller discuss the material, psychological and philisophical problems duplicates cause. A committee must now rule on the ethics of destroying or not destroying the Earth traveller, (or the Mars version of the traveller).
I don't think the mechanics of teleportation was Brok's real interest. I think the story was his way of illustrating a psychologist's dilemma in deciding which of a number of personalities within one patient should be considered the authentic one and which personalities should be destroyed.