Would you use a Star Trek transporter if you were sure it functions correctly according to spec? So, it magically scans your body down to the last detail, deconstructs it and then reconstructs a perfect copy elsewhere.

It's a classic philosophical question about identity and continuity of consciousness. Will you actually die during the process? Or will the emerging copy actually be you? And then of course there are fun questions like: what if there are multiple identical copies? Or a computational model emulating the brain/body perfectly?

I was a proponent of the "transporter is a death trap" theory before. It feels right: how can you still exist after such discontinuity? It's someone else who's experiences start to diverge from you the moment after reconstruction. But this idea falls apart the moment you start to scrutinize it.

I'm a materialist: I believe human body and brain is all there is. There is no soul, spirit or some other kind of metaphysical essence. If you believe the world can be explained by physics, that's the only logical conclusion. So, our consciousness must be the result of physical processes in the brain. What logically follows is: if you have an identical brain, it must produce an identical consciousness. I guess a caveat here is chaos theory and the fact that wildly non-linear systems like brains simply can't evolve identically in time even if their starting conditions are near-identical, but let's put that tangent aside for now.

You lose your consciousness every day when you sleep. You lose it even more if you go under general anesthesia. Do you die then? Is someone else waking up? We don't feel this way, but why? How does this differ from waking up after being transported?

I came to the conclusion that consciousness must be an illusion. There is no real you. This seems to be the only logical explanation for the transporter paradoxes and similar thought experiments. If I accept materialism, then the copy exiting the transporter must be functionally the same as the me that was disassembled. I think the tipping point for me was thinking about identical copies that coexist. Such things seem to invalidate any theories that posit existence of any hard "self identity" that has to be somehow transferred to keep a person you. Unless copies and simulations are for some reason impossible, but at least the latter don't seem forbidden by the known laws of physics...

I'm not formally educated in philosophy. I've recently learned that this view is called illusionism. One sentence I've read somewhere (can't remember where) was especially striking to me: consciousness is like an operating system for the brain. When you use a computer, you type on a keyboard, use a mouse and see things on a monitor. But what really happens underneath is just complex digital circuits switching ones and zeroes. You see files and directories on a disk, but in reality there are only bits and sectors and error correction codes.

The big question is, of course, why do I feel like me? I think the operating system analogy is correct. Experiments of Libet and Haynes show that conscious thoughts about decisions may be created by the brain after the decision was already made. This is not clear-cut of course but supports the illusionist ideas.

I now think that if I don't fear falling asleep, I should not fear using the transporter. This is, in a sense, liberating: it lessens the fear of death if you really accept the implications. If there is no real you, then what you are afraid of?