Does Captain Kirk die when he goes through the transporter?

However… there’s another problem. The receiving side of the transporter is basically a machine that builds humans out of information. Now, if you don’t have the information that makes up a particular person, it’s incredibly unlikely you will correctly assemble them. But it’s not impossible. Indeed, if such machines are possible at all and the universe is infinitely large, or if there are other universes, then somewhere there will be a machine that will coincidentally assemble you. Even though the information was never beamed there in the first place. Indeed, this would happen infinitely often.

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So you can ask what happens with Kirk in this case. He goes into the transporter, disappears. But copies of him appear elsewhere, coincidentally, even though the information of the original was never read out. You can conclude from this that it doesn’t really matter whether you actually read out the information in the first place. The No-Copy argument fails and it looks again like that the Kirk which we care about dies.

There are various ways people have tried to make sense of this conundrum. The most common one is abandoning our intuitive idea of what it means to be yourself. We have this idea that our experience is continuous and if you go into the transporter there has to be an answer to what you experience next. Do you find yourself elsewhere? Or is that the end of your story and someone else finds themselves elsewhere? It seems that there has to be a difference between these two cases. But if there is no observable difference, then this just means we’re wrong in thinking that being yourself is continuous to begin with.

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