# Teletransportation Paradox **Domain:** Philosophy / Personal Identity / Substrate Transition **Doc Type:** Thought-Experiment Node **Classification:** Adversarial Identity Test **Maturity:** Foundational **Related:** [[wiki/Derek Parfit|Derek Parfit]], [[wiki/Personal Identity|Personal Identity]], [[wiki/Migration Right|Migration Right]], [[wiki/Substrate Transition|Substrate Transition]] --- ## The Test The **Teletransportation Paradox** asks whether a person survives when a device records the source body's complete relevant state, destroys or abandons that body and constructs a functionally and psychologically continuous person elsewhere. Variants separate variables that ordinary migration bundles together: - whether the source is destroyed; - whether reconstruction is immediate or delayed; - whether one destination or several are produced; - whether causal transmission preserves state or merely matches it; - whether the reconstructed subject remembers choosing the procedure. ## What It Exposes Behavioral fidelity and autobiographical memory do not by themselves settle numerical identity. If the source remains alive, a destination cannot establish sole identity merely by matching it. If two destinations exist, both may have equal lineage while identity remains non-branching. Destructive scanning removes the competing source but does not logically prove transfer. ## Governance Consequence A migration protocol must state what it warrants: reconstruction, causal descent, psychological continuity, legal succession or literal survival. Consent must cover destruction and branching separately. Uncertainty favors preserving source state, preventing premature inheritance transfer and granting provisional standing to plausible continuants. ## Sources - Derek Parfit, *Reasons and Persons*, Part III (1984). - [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Personal Identity](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-personal/) ## See Also [[wiki/Fission and Fusion of Persons|Fission and Fusion of Persons]] · [[wiki/Boot Success Is Not Identity Proof|Boot Success Is Not Identity Proof]] · [[wiki/Continuity Evidence Ladder|Continuity Evidence Ladder]]