I think the answers to 1 and 2 are as reasonably close to 0 as calculated probabilities can be. That may be independent with the question of how reasonable it is to step into the teleporters, however.
It looks like confused thinking to me when people associate their own conscious existence with the clone that comes out of the teleporter. Sure, you could believe that your consciousness gets teleported along with the information needed to construct a copy of your body, but that is just an assumption that isn’t needed as part of the explanation of the physical process. From that, also, stems the problems of needing to explain which copy your consciousness would “prefer”, if there are multiples; or whether consciousness would be somehow split or combined.
The troubling issues that follow from the teleporter problem are the questions it raises about the actual makeup of the phenomenon we identify as our own consciousness. It seems to me that it may well be that our conception of a persistent personal consciousness is fully illusory, in which case it may be said that the original questions are all ambiguous in terms of the referent of “you”. In this conception, an instance of “you” may have qualia, but this qualia is not connected to any actually persistent identity.
If the idea that we have an actually persistent conscious experience is an illusion, then the question of whether we should use the teleporter, cloning or otherwise, is mostly about how comfortable we are with it, and how desirable the outcome of using it is likely to be as a practical matter. If you bite that bullet then using the teleporter should have no more impact than going under anesthesia or even a deep dreamless sleep. If the illusion model is true, then selfishness with regard to experience is simply a mark of not being able to personally accept the falseness of your own identity, in which case you are likely to not choose to use the teleporter for that reason.
For the record, I feel very uncomfortable with the idea of using the teleporter. Currently, the idea “feels” like suicide. But I don’t know that there’s any rational basis for that.
I think the answers to 1 and 2 are as reasonably close to 0 as calculated probabilities can be. That may be independent with the question of how reasonable it is to step into the teleporters, however.
It looks like confused thinking to me when people associate their own conscious existence with the clone that comes out of the teleporter. Sure, you could believe that your consciousness gets teleported along with the information needed to construct a copy of your body, but that is just an assumption that isn’t needed as part of the explanation of the physical process. From that, also, stems the problems of needing to explain which copy your consciousness would “prefer”, if there are multiples; or whether consciousness would be somehow split or combined.
The troubling issues that follow from the teleporter problem are the questions it raises about the actual makeup of the phenomenon we identify as our own consciousness. It seems to me that it may well be that our conception of a persistent personal consciousness is fully illusory, in which case it may be said that the original questions are all ambiguous in terms of the referent of “you”. In this conception, an instance of “you” may have qualia, but this qualia is not connected to any actually persistent identity.
If the idea that we have an actually persistent conscious experience is an illusion, then the question of whether we should use the teleporter, cloning or otherwise, is mostly about how comfortable we are with it, and how desirable the outcome of using it is likely to be as a practical matter. If you bite that bullet then using the teleporter should have no more impact than going under anesthesia or even a deep dreamless sleep. If the illusion model is true, then selfishness with regard to experience is simply a mark of not being able to personally accept the falseness of your own identity, in which case you are likely to not choose to use the teleporter for that reason.
For the record, I feel very uncomfortable with the idea of using the teleporter. Currently, the idea “feels” like suicide. But I don’t know that there’s any rational basis for that.