You’ve got to understand that I’m approaching this from the perspective of, well, my literal perspective. I’m considering what I would experience as the only thing that I can really consider as valid evidence for decision making.

In responding above, I tried to avoid making assumptions, but I also tried to avoid overexplaining ever little thought I had in generalizing away from assumptions.

If there is no ethereal, no soul, no spirit, no woowoo of any kind, then the physical configuration is all that defines me. This scenario isn’t particularly interesting, so I’ll leave it at that.

If there is an ethereal element to me, then there arise all sorts of additional questions about how that works, exactly. Is my brain like a bucket that holds some special spirit juju from an otherwhere in which the ethereal element is not unique or special to me, but simply a catalyst for consciousness? Is there some discrete soul that is unique and mine alone, never to truly appear again even in a body with the exact same physical configuration? Is there an actual dimension of time or space in the physical I observe that matters for that ethereal element that we postulate, or is the orderly progression through time that I experience merely an artifact of my ethereal self experiencing through the filter of a physical body? Will I begin experiencing some sort of afterlife as soon as I am dematerialized, leaving my clone to yank some fresh occupant from the beforelife?

Any conclusions about whether or not teleportation really “counts” as dying is going to hinge on answering the questions about what we really are, and I don’t think we’ll get any firm answers in that regard any time soon. We still need to act, though, even with incomplete information.

My motivation in interrogating prior travelers isn’t to determine whether or not they are technically the same people as before they teleported, or to decide whether or not it technically counted as them dying. I am just guarding against the risk that teleportation has some immediate and noticable disruption to the normal conscious process. If there is a soul that gets stripped away when a person is dematerialized, but no new soul gets sucked in to the identical body that appears somewhere else? That sounds like a recipe for instant death, or a distinct mental illness, or something else unpleasant.

From the perspective of other people, my sleep is very different from my dying, but from my perspective it’s just a jump cut in a movie. I very rarely am conscious of any dreams, and I’ve even had the experience of becoming conscious in recovery from a surgery after my body had been awake and actively watching TV for awhile.

If the people feel fine coming out of the teleporter, then I’m all for it. Death is inevitable anyway, and if every piece of measurable evidence is telling me that I will feel fine afterwards, then I’ll decide based on that evidence. Perhaps I’ve made a tragic mistake, and I’ll not get to experience the after-teleporting part because it really does count as dying and my conscious soul is diverted into some otherwhere. 🤷

Risk is everywhere, and death is inevitable. I’m not suggesting I would just hop in a teleporter for gumdrops and giggles, but if I had a reason to, then why not? We’ve established in this scenario that it seems safe enough (no drop-deads or crazies coming out the other side), and I take a very real and measurable risk of death every time I drive to the grocery store.