There’s a thought experiment about teleportation, sometimes called the Star Trek Problem: if there’s no continuity between the source and destination, you’re not moving someone from one place to the other. You’re destroying the source and creating an exact copy at the destination. If you didn’t create a copy at the destination, you’d be killing the person.

So the obvious extension: what if you create two copies?

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To reference an event
you must use coordinates in both space and time
But how do we measure “now”?
If I change your clock, is it tomorrow?
Should constellations shift—following standard expectations—no years have passed.
Were our universe stopping
.
.
.
then restarting,
over millennia or eye-blinks,
would that be noticed?

A stateful world can manifest as functions on objects, plus “t”
“At 1:00 today, he was eating lunch”
What tells us “when”?
My watch?
Some…sundial?
Star positions?
…
The current configuration of each atom, everywhere
This encodes “present”.

For all things happen only once, from single start.
Within…

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Philosophical question of the day: if a building has marks on it, say some kind of painting or designs, and it is painted over, do the marks still exist?

(Of course there are arguments to be made for both yes and no answers.)

Separately, via Slashdot: Understanding art for geeks

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