The Impossible Leap (Pt I)

"Where am I to go now that I've gone too far?"

Perhaps it was the fact that the rising cost of everything is cutting into my coffee money... :(

Perhaps it was my fortuitous encounter with this book...

Perhaps, while thinking about all the coffee I was missing out on, I remembered all the crap I took about teleportation from the guy who used to give me coffee... (long story)

Anyway, I'm halfway through the book, and I got to thinking (which is harder to do when one has no coffee.) The word 'teleportation' conjures up images of scientists in a lab using a standard entanglement paradigm to teleport a particle from Point A to Point B. According to popular wisdom, this paradigm will eventually allow larger and larger objects to be teleported, up to and including human beings. For what we are about to discuss, let's call this Observable Teleportation (OT), meaning that the process is independent of the effects of any observers who happen to be watching it.

Because I am skeptical about how consciousness would survive this process given our limited understanding of what exactly consciousness is, I'm not optimistic about this process being successful for human teleportation. But perhaps human teleportation of a sort is already possible, to a certain degree. We'll call this type of teleportation Seamless-Transition Teleportation (STT), or, if you want something flashier - Walking Between the Worlds. ;)

We'll define STT as an observer whose continuous conscious experience produces an observable discontinuity in the environment. A change in environment is experienced, to the degree that the observer specifies, and in the absence of local 4-dimensional causes. The change may be very minor - for example, the presence of something that wasn't there before. Although I've done this type of thing many times, I've never thought of this at 'teleportation' before, until I realized that the discontinuity was the critical factor.

In my experience, this type of 'teleportation' is easier when one does not have to contend with other observers who will simultaneously experience the discontinuity. The need to deal with any effects from multiple observers of the same event would give rise to entirely different protocols for achieving teleportation, hence the distinction between OT and STT.

In theory, it should be possible to extend STT to higher and higher levels of discontinuity, until one reaches the practical limits of what the mechanisms of a stable (read: recognizably sane) human consciousness will tolerate. (Perhaps it might even be possible to achieve a complete discontinuity in surroundings, such as one might experience in conventional OT between distant locations.) I'm sure that there are practical limits to how often one can create these kinds of discontinuities (or UNDOings, as I have previously called them), as well as how much discontinuity one can create within a given span of time.

But perhaps those practical limits can be expanded by cognitive training paradigms or neurochemical assistance...

Then I could have coffee all the time. ;)