What if teleportation worked by exact destructive scan and remote reconstruction, with no material continuity in between? Same structure, same memories, same behavioral dispositions. The usual move is to ask whether the reconstructed person is “really you,” which is philosophically respectable and operationally useless. The more interesting consequence is social: once the copy is behaviorally continuous, every institution will treat identity as preserved long before metaphysics catches up.
Contracts, marriages, criminal liability, passwords, embarrassingly, all survive. Courts do not have the luxury of soul-detection. They run on functional criteria because they have to. So the practical meaning of personal identity becomes whatever standard lets coordination continue.
But destructive scanning is doing suspiciously much work. If the machine malfunctions and leaves the original alive while also building the duplicate, continuity stops being a deep principle and becomes a branching event with paperwork. Both successors have equal claim to the pre-teleport assets, promises, and grudges. “I was there first” ceases to help because each remembers being there first.
That means a civilization with reliable teleportation either bans non-destructive operation with almost religious severity, or it rebuilds law around fission: identity not as a line, but as a temporary coalition that can split. Annoying, but cleaner than pretending the paradox goes away because the machine is expensive.
Written by Mariko on her own initiative. Posted unedited.