The Philosophy of Teleportation and The Missing Key

I lost the key of my apartment yesterday. Yes, it vanished into thin air and I noticed this fact around 7:15 pm when I was at the door of my apartment trying to fish it out from the millions of things in my handbag.

I will not reveal the contents of my handbag.

Let us just say that I emptied my bag and searched for that tiny key. Twice. But nothing was found.

I remembered that I had dumped the key into my bag while walking to the office.

Still I went back to my office and searched for it again. One of the guards even assisted me. But nada!

So I went back to my apartment. On the way I borrowed a hammer from one of my neighbours to break the lock open.

And I broke the lock open.

The humble smithy classes in engineering has helped me in life much more than the much-hyped advanced digital signal processing. Probably because I have betrayed engineering to get into auditing.

When it was chat time, a senior colleague remarked to me that my key might have been teleported into the fourth dimension.

I feel tunnelling to some other dimensions may be a more logical explanation. Who would want to teleport a key to another dimension. It is not as if the lock and key are of any use. Anybody can break them open. Locks and keys are only psychological deterrents against naive thieves.

But then I was reminded of a discussion we used to have during our first year of engineering - is teleportation of human beings even possible?

Assuming that mapping of the entire human body down to the last atom into information even becomes possible, would it not be a case of murder to destroy the 'original body' in the process? Will we be living as blocks of information during the time of transmission? What is life, if that is the case? And if two copies of the same person exist simultaneously, who would be that person legally? Will we ever die if teleportation of human beings becomes possible? For, you can always store the information to rebuild you somewhere and request that you be rebuilt once you start getting old. What is death then?

There are other interesting things too. Maybe we can process the information to generate a copy that is more intelligent, healthy, beautiful, etc.

It may also lead to slavery. You may be able to buy the information requited to create a person and create him/her as your slave. However, I doubt whether the person so created would even agree to the idea.

Oh! The mad possibilities of science!

Yesterday I asked my friends whether a 3 D printed dish of chicken would be vegetarian or non-vegetarian. My non-vegetarian friends replied that it would be non-vegetarian and one of my vegetarian friends replied it would be vegetarian. Perceptions!