If teleportation is simply cloning, aren't you actually dying when you teleport?

This is an interesting philosophical question called the problem of Personal identity. Certainly the general feeling in medical circles is that our identity is a function of our brains, and when our brain is damaged so is our identity. It follows that if our brain is destroyed, so is our identity as well, for those who don't believe in supernatural souls.

So yes, if teleportation consists of disassembling a person in one place and creating an exact duplicate in another place, Star Trek transporter style, then the person disassembled will cease to exist, even if the new person is apparently indistinguishable from the original.

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