Could this kind of Teleporter teach us if we have a soul?

[Gate]

Surely the soul only leaves a dead body and never, no matter what happened could it be pulled, repelled or shifted out of the living. Since as the soul isn’t physical then it is not bound by physics anyway.

 

[Linusthe2nd]

On the howstuffworks website, this is a theory on how a teleporter device could work:*The laws of physics may even make it impossible to create a transporter that enables a person to be sent instantaneously to another location, which would require travel at the speed of light.

For a person to be transported, a machine would have to be built that can p(name removed by moderator)oint and analyze all of the 10(28)atoms that make up the human body. That’s more than a trillion trillion atoms. This machine would then have to send this information to another location, where the person’s body would be reconstructed with exact precision*. Molecules couldn’t be even a millimeter out of place, lest the person arrive with some severe neurological or physiological defect.Walk with me through a thought exercise.

If this machine ever existed, and the person was reconstructed elsewhere in space, would it mean the person didn’t have a soul if he was still “animate” after reconstruction? (i.e. because the machine can only transport that which is physical)

Or would an “animate” reconstructed person tell us nothing about the soul because either A) the person could be reconstructed as a soul-less biological living animal; B) the soul, being incorporeal, could simply remain with the reconstructed “body” that is “him/her” because the soul remains “attached” to the molecules being duplicated; C) God, being the one who provides the soul, could facilitate transference of the soul to the reconstructed body; D) something else.

I certainly wouldn’t want to be the first one to try it!!! I’m afraid the result would be that you would have a dead body at the end, since the soul is meant for the body not for some type of machine. The soul I fear would just say good-by.

 

[MarcoPolo]

I think the general consensus is that the original person is killed, thus his soul is separated from his body. And then the “reconstructed” person is essentially a clone who would probably have a soul as well (correct me if I’m wrong, but God infuses a soul into any human whether or not that human’s conception is illicit or not), but it is a new person and new soul, even if that person is born under the ignorant pretense that he remains the original person and soul.

Now if we could just get a teleporter that can create wormholes or wrinkles in the fabric of space-time that we can just step through, this wouldn’t be a problem.

 

[wmw]

Since Scientist have found physical memory storage capability in the brain then I’d conclude that memory is not part of the soul, but part of the brain. This goes to show how necessary both physical and spiritual parts are required for us to recognize ourselves.

There are two methods of teleportation that are important to distinguish and are mixed throughout the discussion so far. One, the original atoms are left behind and new atoms are recombined to make a copy. Two, The originals atoms are moved to the new location and resembled with the same atoms to put together to the same locations.

In one, I’d conclude we have a dead body of atoms and a new body of atoms of the exact form. If the body lives then I’d conclude that God decided to move the original soul or create a new one and we’d have no means to determine which he has done. My guess is that God would not reward such attempts of artificial resurrection and not infuse a soul to the new body leaving it lifeless. I think in any case this is an extreme case of putting God to the test and would be a Mortal Sin even if God choose to save and move the original soul to the new body.

In two, there is the same material and the same form. God may still choose to say your efforts are in vain in moving the body and us not knowing how to move a soul. Or he may move the soul or His creation may be such that the soul would stay with the atoms of body as it is moved. The act of destruction in this scenario is still a likely point of death and the reconstruction a likely point of a new soul; so, again the possibility remains that God is having a choice forced upon Him and we have no measure to know what he has chosen. All we are again fairly curtain of is that this is again a Mortal Sin to toy with someone’s life in this experiment and God’s choices would not likely be apparent except maybe to some extent in the case of a lifeless, but otherwise perfect copy. This would only more fully show our folly of pursuing these actions.

This idea may be very tempting in the far future and may appear to some as another instance of moral implications getting in the way of scientific inquiry, but I hope most would see this as an example of a thing that if scientifically possible should not be done similarly as IVF, abortion, contraception, etc. should not be done today.

It’s amazing how much belief we are asked to suspend to enjoy sci-fi; yet, it seems to me very worth it to continue to suspend these problematic consequences for the sake of a story, but never for the sake of a real life.

 

[Taestron]

I wonder if God would attach the original soul to the reconstructed body. I know Aquinas said that the resurrected body would be the “self-same body” but frankly, I don’t know what that means. If we destroy a car except for one part, and rebuild a car using that one part, we wouldn’t say we reconstructed the car. We would consider them two different cars. So how can our resurrected bodies be considered in anyway, the “self-same body?” Anyway, it is possible that God would merely reunite the new body with the same soul. We know that He has done this in the past when He brought people back from the dead. So why would this teleporter be essentially different?

 

[Taestron]

Since Scientist have found physical memory storage capability in the brain then I’d conclude that memory is not part of the soul, but part of the brain. This goes to show how necessary both physical and spiritual parts are required for us to recognize ourselves.

I wonder, if the new body does have a new soul, would it be able to access its memories? How would the new soul instantaneously be able to direct the specific physical pathways that the old soul forged over a lifetime? This would leave something akin to the ghola of Frank Herbert’s Dune series, an exact physical clone that is unable to access the memories of the original.

 

[farpinho]

For a person to be transported, a machine would have to be built that can p(name removed by moderator)oint and analyze all of the 10(28)atoms that make up the human body. That’s more than a trillion trillion atoms. This machine would then have to send this information to another location, where the person’s body would be reconstructed with exact precision. Molecules couldn’t be even a millimeter out of place, lest the person arrive with some severe neurological or physiological defect.[/INDENT]

Walk with me through a thought exercise.

I think we will actually never know, because I believe such machine could never be built, because any attempt to locate all the particles in one’s body will interfere in the particles position and behavior, making it impossible to map all the particles (Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle).
Supposing it could be possible, I believe it still can’t prove/disprove a soul, because we don’t know how binds to our body (maybe it’s beyond time and space?)

 

[wmw]

I wonder, if the new body does have a new soul, would it be able to access its memories? How would the new soul instantaneously be able to direct the specific physical pathways that the old soul forged over a lifetime? This would leave something akin to the ghola of Frank Herbert’s Dune series, an exact physical clone that is unable to access the memories of the original.

I was assuming God would either do it well (perfectly) or not at all. The possibility that the Soul would stay with the body as it is transported, but our not reconnecting it because of our ignorance could do something like what you are suggesting. Or maybe a New animal like soul (one that is not immortal) could take over the body also. All sorts of options are possible and what God would choose or allow us to mistakenly end up with is up for grabs!

 

[colmywaykurtz]

Surely the soul only leaves a dead body and never, no matter what happened could it be pulled, repelled or shifted out of the living. Since as the soul isn’t physical then it is not bound by physics anyway.

I don’t know, but it reminds me of the Tibetan Buddhist practice of phowa, in which the mind (visualized as a blue sphere, residing near the heart “chakra”) is visualized forcefully and rapidly leaving the body through an aperture that supposedly exists on the crown of the head, and this is believed to be made to actually happen by a forceful exhalation and a loud exclamation at the moment one visualizes the “blue sphere” exiting the head. This was supposed to help the mind to awaken into its own true nature, and enable the mind to find its way to the enlightened, or “heavenly” state after the body’s death—sort of like a “trial run.”

Devotees of this practice were emphatic that the consciousness would always return to the person, and that performing the practice upon another person would help THEM prepare for death, and that it couldn’t be misused, that one couldn’t use it to separate consciousness from a body before it was ready to.

I have always had misgivings about such a thing, and if the transporter ever became a reality, I’d probably have the same misgivings about it.