The coin toss revisited

[Abion47]

Sarang's point isn't exactly a counterargument because the situation he describes and the situation that happens aren't the same. For example, in the teleporter scenario, you are getting physically destroyed and recreated somewhere else. First of all, this isn't an original and copy scenario, because for the process to occur, the original must be destroyed in order to gain the information necessary to create the copy as opposed to some arbitrary circumstance that just happens to make the original end up dead. Second, teleporters deal with the physical, and while in the physical sense humans are constantly regenerating with new cells, we don't become entirely new elements of consciousness every so often. This might actually be because it's a physical process, and because it's a gradual change that happens over time.

The ARK, on the other hand, is not recreating us from a soup of atoms. It is simulating our consciousness in a digital state, so that while our brain functions are entirely active, the matter that represents us is completely different. Also, the original is not deconstructed during the scanning process, but is instead harmlessly(ish) recorded by mechanical sensors. The person on the ARK is not even remotely similar on a basic level to the person who was sitting in the Pilot Seat, so the atom and cell comparisons are fundamentally flawed in that regard.

And personally, I think that the existence of Robin Bass' Mockingbird outside of Theta is living proof that Sarang was a quack.

(Interestingly enough, MinutePhysics has a video on the physics of cloning machines and teleporters, although he speaks in high science language so much in that video that even though I consider myself fairly scientifically literate, most of his explanation went over my head. If my understanding of the science is correct, though, it would mean that your first teleporter scenario is actually fundamentally impossible - you cannot create an exact copy of yourself without utterly obliterating the original, and the copy must be made from the same matter that came from the original [even below atoms, like on a quark and gluon level].)