These guys are going to have a tough row to hoe. The idea of teleportation moving from science fiction to fact, an idea that caught the imagination of many with the phrase "beam me up Scotty", is getting some serious focus as outlined in this linked article.
They've got a few problems centered around the question, Am I my body? That is, is everything about me a physical thing. All my desires, hopes, dreams, memories, or thoughts and beliefs, are these things part of my body? The prevailing message coming across from the scientific community in the popular media and press is yes. We are our bodies. To put it bluntly, we are computers made of meat with some extra meat in the right places to move the computer around. If this is true, then I don't see any problem for the potential of some future super computer having the ability to keep the relations of "a trillion trillion atoms" all sorted out once they are broken apart and then being able to put them back together again. Given the exponential rate of processing speed and memory storage advancing the way it is (remember your old 8088 or 286 - it wasn't that long ago) that time will probably not be too far off. If everything about me is my body, a physical thing, then all my memories, emotions, states of mind, etc. are just combinations of atoms or electrical charges in my brain. We can take them apart and we can put them back together. Well, maybe we can't but I'm sure the Dr. McCoy of the future can (Bones. Star Trek. Get it).
The problem is that we are not our bodies. We have bodies. But we, the things that make us us, our ego, self-consciousness, beliefs, memories, states of mind, all these things are not physical. They are part of our souls, the souls that animate our bodies. Now don't think that I remotely believe the idea of - soul good, body bad. Not so, flesh and blood is an essential part of who we are, but it is not the only part. Flesh and blood is so valuable that God decided to put it on to relate to us. He made it, he wore it, its good. We're even going to get to wear a glorified version of it forever in the coming Kingdom (sorry, we're not going to float around as spirits in the clouds of "heaven" forever; there will be work to do in the Kingdom, and bodies are needed to do it - that's you and me).
So back to bodies and souls. The guys in white lab coats, as smart as they are (which is good by the way, science is a good thing), they may be able to disassemble our bodies and move them; but they can't disassemble what is not physical and move it. Stripping the body from the soul will kill it. Sorry guys, teleportation is not going to work.
Now granted we don't hear much about the nature of bodies and souls much in church, so how are we sure that we really have a soul, and that it is immaterial. We can start by a process of elimination. Ask yourself, how much does the memory of my childhood weigh? What is the electrical charge of my discarded belief in evolution? What is the chemical composition of my desire to change my desire about lustful things? These questions don't make sense. Desires, memories, emotions don't fit those categories. Its like asking whether blue is faster than Wednesday.
Another way to look at it is that if all these things that make us us are physical, then they can eventually be isolated, captured and potentially put into someone else and make them us. Sounds relatively impossible. Think about your experiences, your entire life story. It just can't be reproduced or understood completely by someone else. I can watch the same movie, or hear the same song, or be party to the same experience as someone else and come away with a completely different sense of it than the other person. There is an ineffable quality to individuality. No one can possibly understand what it is like to be me except for me.
When I think of individuality, I end up thinking of the experiences that we have. The type of things that I have written about previously, like movies and music, and how we can find touch points within them. They can help define for us who we are by putting our thoughts and feelings in a different light. I guess its just a different way to recognize what we already believe, by hearing it set to music or seeing it portrayed on the big screen. Or obviously its a way to find an opposite point of view which can help define ours as well.
A few weeks ago when my alarm clock went off in the morning, the radio station that it was set to was playing "Silent Lucidity" (if you have dial up try it here, lyrics here) by Queensryche. Now, this isn't a song from my childhood, but it definitely sent me back there. All day long I couldn't get that song out of my head. For a guy that has always felt like his childhood was more of a movie that I watched than actual experiences that I had, this song brought up, over the next few days, memories that I thought were gone. The whole experience of this experience reminds me of something C.S. Lewis wrote.
As I stood beside a flowering currant bush on a summer day there suddenly arose in me without warning, and as if from a depth not of years but of centuries, the memory of that earlier morning at the Old House when my brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery. It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me; Milton's "enormous bliss" of Eden comes somewhere near it. It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what? not, certainly, for a biscuit tin filled with moss, nor even for my own past. And before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. It had taken only a moment of time; and in a certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison.
Now as much as I can relate to Lewis' experience, I have no idea what it was actually like for him. Nor can any of these other fans of "Silent Lucidity" (here and here) possibly understand what was going on with me. That song sent me to my past, and brought up present pain and joy and growth with it. Pain from a devastating experience in a business venture and the joy in the midst of it with the birth of my third child (who's middle name by the way is Joy). Now with a new baby and a new job I'm back on track, like this guy. And again, as much as we can relate to each others experiences (I grew up in Texas listening to the stuff he's talking about) there is no way for me to know how those things feel to him. Nor for him to completely understand what was going on inside me the few times that I was reduced to weeping thinking about all that was and all that is, even if he was brought to tears as well by listening to the song with me.
So, getting back to the point, if these things that shape us and make us who we are, are not physical, they must be non-physical. And they are definitely part of us. So we must have a part of us that is non-physical. Sounds like the soul, doesn't it?
Another way of looking at it is the example of identical twins. They are identical in every way down to the genes, but they are not the same people. They can have different points of view, different beliefs and different dreams and desires. Given the same experience they can take away a different sense of that experience. If everything about them is physically the same, yet they are different people with differing emotions, desires, etc., then those things that make them different people cannot be physical.
One last way of looking at this thing and realizing that there is something more to us than physical things is an example of a scientist. Imagine that there is a scientist who is the foremost expert on sight. He can explain in exhaustive detail every single physical step in the process of sight. Every chemical reaction, photon reaction, nerve cell reaction, he can explain all these things down to the sub-atomic level. There is nothing about the physical process of sight that he does not understand or that he can not explain. The problem is that this scientist is blind. Now, does he know what it is like to experience the sunset over the ocean? He should if he knows every physical phenomenon in the process of seeing. He can understand the size, distance, and luminescence of the sun. He can understand the refraction of the rays through the atmosphere and their reflection and luminescence in the clouds and how all that is picked up by the eye and transmitted into the brain. But, does he know what the sunset looks like? The answer is obviously no. Our experiences are not physical and cannot be explained in the language of science.
So we are not our bodies. We have bodies. We are the combination of soul and body. If we want to get nit-picky, I think our souls are more us than our bodies are. If our bodies are taken away from our souls we will die. Its kind of like Stephen King's "The Jaunt" (from Skeleton Crew). In that story someone figured out how to make teleportation work. Every inanimate object went through fine, but living things would come out dead on the other side. Some people would live for a few moments in a state of utter confusion and distress before dying. Through research they were able to discover that the reason that people were dying is that the body would go through the teleportation process instantaneously, but for the mind, it seemed like an eternity spent completely alone after being artificially separated from the body. The mind couldn't handle the stress and death quickly followed.
Not a bad way of looking at it. God can separate our bodies and souls for a time, knowing that they will be reunited in the resurrection. But if we do it... well, let's just say I won't be standing in line for my chance to have another human beam me up. I'll wait for God.
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