Have you ever thought about how teleporters work? I know it's difficult to do so since they don't exist. But there are things that we know teleporters must be able to do to achieve their effect:
- They must be able to scan your material existence and capture the state of every molecule in your body
- They must be able to code that information in a secure and reliable way -They must be able to send that coded information over a transmission channel to a new location, hopefully with a fully functional teleportation receiver. -The receiver must decode that information, combined with sufficient energy, and reconstitute matter into an exact copy of your body. -Then they must destroy the original body.
That last step is a doozy. We can't have duplicate people existing everywhere. It wouldn't be teleportation if it left a copy behind. I can imagine in my mind's eye the process of total and complete annihilation. I bet it's painful. But the pain you might experience on this side of the teleportation event doesn't get coded in the body scan. You aren't dead yet. So the person who emerges on the other side will never remember the pain of total and complete annihilation. Good deal, right? But the other thing to consider is what happens if the process of coding my existence isn't complete, or the transmission is not complete, or the decoding gets a few things wrong. Who will the person on the other end be? Will it be me? Would I even know?
So here we have a technology featured in a lot of science fiction. I imagine there is some tech billionaire somewhere thinking he will be the first to realize this hypothetical wonder. And why not? A lot of things never thought of before Star Trek have actually been replicated in our real world: spaceships, communicators (cell phones), and artificial intelligence. It could happen.
And yet we all go through a very similar process every night. We get teleported from one day to another through a process called sleep. Why do we sleep? No one really knows for sure. But we do know what happens to our brains in the process. The brain goes through several 90-minute cycles alternating between deep and REM sleep. During REM sleep, our brain blocks most nerve signals to our body, except the eyes, so that we are paralyzed. We are then subjected to artificial hallucinations. Some are boring, some benign, some quite pleasurable, and others are terrifying. We have little to no control over which dreams we get, and the dreams are hardly ever remembered. During the deep sleep cycle, our brain's nerve cells are bathed in chemicals to remove waste products and destroy plaque that builds up on the dendrites. In the morning, our brains are refreshed and ready to go again. But all this process comes at a cost.
The cost is who we are. During the night, part of us is erased. Memories are pruned. Which ones? We hope they are the unimportant ones: waiting in line at the DMV, picking our nose when we hope no one's looking, doomscrolling our social media feed. But who gets to pick? We don't. And what happens when we wake up in the morning? We know for a fact that the process of sleep destroys memories. At what point are we a different person? If how we understand ourselves is the sum total of what we can remember about what we've done, then how do we know we are the same person the next morning? That's the problem with memory: you can't know what you can't remember.
And what happened to the person I was when I went to bed last night? My brain murdered him.
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