Deborah Fisher: Teleportation

I've been listening to a lot of podcasts lately. So I've gotten two separate chances to hear Michio Kaku argue that we will be teleporting humans before the 23rd century.

In case you are not up to speed on this, scientists can now teleport (or "beam") a particle as far as 600 meters. Kind of. You don't get the actual particle on the other side. The original, as far as I can tell, is annihilated. You get an exact replica. Travel is to teleportation, then, as snail mail is to fax.

The physicists working on this (in Switzerland?) say that they are finally conquering this problem of matter, and that is where my ears perk up. I have a deep gut sympathy for the words problem of matter, but I have organized my whole life around the idea that it's the one thing that I can't really conquer. It's the one truth that's larger than I am, that I can't make up, slide around or vault over. Matter sits outside of me, telling me exactly what I want from it by obstinately refusing to assume my desires on its own. And when I work with matter, my desires necessarily fall away and become compromises. Anyone can collaborate with matter to astounding effect, but there are limits.

You can't uncut a piece of wood.

The problematic nature of matter is a powerful check on human ego. It certainly keeps me much more modest than I am naturally disposed to being, and not just because loving matter means wearing rather dumpy work pants most of the time. I had a bad studio day yesterday. I spent fourteen hours making a very heavy turd, and it was because I fell into the trap of thinking that I have more than a vote. I was working from the inside of my head and trying to get what's inside out--trying to stick with the plan instead of listening to what's actually happening.

That's why I am so curious about what's going to happen with this teleportation thing. The idea came to the producers of Star Trek for very practical, problem-of-matter reasons. They didn't want to incur the extra set-building costs that shots of the Enterprise landing on all these planets entailed. It made financial sense to make the teleportation set and be done with it.

(That's the matter I know and love, creating obstacles that become brilliant ideas you never could have thought up on your own!)

And perhaps I am taking Kaku too literally when I conflate the Star Trek idea and what these Swiss scientists are imagining. I'm imagining them taking this patently silly TV show idea that is all about overcoming an infinite number of sets, and holding on to the idea inside the mind and working to make it real. I'm imagining this because that would be so human--because that's the direction we like to imagine our ideas flowing. Not from TV show to particle accelerator necessarily, but from the inside of the mind to the real world.

But bad shit tends to happen when we think that way. This is the vector (idea to reality) that creates craziness like The Final Solution. Our insane Middle East strategy. Bound feet and corsets. Donald Judd. I am no luddite and I am not anti-intellectual. But I do believe in matter, and I believe in emergence, and I believe strongly that we are not as smart as we think we are. All this leads me to believe that the best intellectual vector points in the opposite direction: from reality to idea.

So I feel pre-emptively sorry for the first teleported human, who will ignore the cautionary tale of Mike Teevee and put his matter in the hands of a machine that will annihilate him and attempt to reassemble him somewhere else. Based on my own, unscientific studies of matter, I have a hunch that he won't ever be quite right afterwards. That at least part of his consciousness is in his matter, and that it sits there in a way that is irreducible to information.