“Intertemporal solidarity is just as much a choice today as it will be should teleporters arrive.”
I should clarify that I see no special philosophical problem with teleportation that necessarily destroys the original copy, as quantum teleportation would (see the end of Section 3.2). As you suggest, that strikes me as hardly more perplexing than someone’s boarding a plane at Newark and getting off at LAX.
For me, all the difficulties arise when we imagine that the teleportation would leave the original copy intact, so that the “new” and “original” copies could then interact with each other, and you’d face conundrums like whether “you” will experience pain if you shoot your teleported doppelganger. This sort of issue simply doesn’t arise with the traditional problem of intertemporal identity, unless of course we posit closed timelike curves.
Sometimes you don’t need copying to get a tricky decision problem, amnesia or invisible coinflips are enough. For example, we have the Sleeping Beauty problem, the Absent-Minded Driver which is a good test case for LW ideas, or Psy-Kosh’s problem which doesn’t even need amnesia.
“Intertemporal solidarity is just as much a choice today as it will be should teleporters arrive.”
I should clarify that I see no special philosophical problem with teleportation that necessarily destroys the original copy, as quantum teleportation would (see the end of Section 3.2). As you suggest, that strikes me as hardly more perplexing than someone’s boarding a plane at Newark and getting off at LAX.
For me, all the difficulties arise when we imagine that the teleportation would leave the original copy intact, so that the “new” and “original” copies could then interact with each other, and you’d face conundrums like whether “you” will experience pain if you shoot your teleported doppelganger. This sort of issue simply doesn’t arise with the traditional problem of intertemporal identity, unless of course we posit closed timelike curves.
Sometimes you don’t need copying to get a tricky decision problem, amnesia or invisible coinflips are enough. For example, we have the Sleeping Beauty problem, the Absent-Minded Driver which is a good test case for LW ideas, or Psy-Kosh’s problem which doesn’t even need amnesia.