As poetic as all that sounds
I take it that 'poetic' is meant as a euphemism.
(hmm, a euphemism? an euphemism? Strange, a euphemism sounds better).
Let us suppose that a teleporter device like in the first example really does exist and that it can recreate a perfect duplicate of all the particles in your body (including relative positions and velocities of every atom). Now suppose that you use it, but it malfunctions, and it creates a perfect duplicate of you at the arrival teleporter while leaving your original body also intact at the departure teleporter. Which one would be you? Would you have the experience of being at the departing teleporter, or at the arriving teleporter? Would you experience being both at once? Neither? I have no idea how I could possibly answer this question, and it is a serious problem for me.
That's a quote from way back, but I'll offer a take on it.
There is no problem here - not even a semantic or even an apparent one.
Suppose you volunteer for an experiment. YOu don't know what the experiment is, only that they are offering voluntreers $25. You turn up, there is a flash of light and you are sent home with $25 dollars in your pocket, having never having made an easier 25 bucks. And that's it as far as you are concerned.
Now the flash of light was the operation of a scanner that was used to produce a duplicate of you. That duplicate is produced in a room somewhere. When he pops into existence he will find it a bit strange because just a moment ago he was standing in a different place waiting for the experiment (what ever it was) to start.
Now the duplicate isn't 'you'. You have gone to the pub to spend some of your easy $25, completely unaware of the existence of the duplicate. The duplicate is entirely new person, without any actual history. He has memories of things he did in the past, but they didn't happen to him. They happened to the bloke in the pub.
So after a minute or so, the experimenter comes into the duplicates room and explains what has happened. No doubt the duplicate will have difficulty believing it, and really the duplicate is in a bit of an awkward position. But there is no physical or logical paradox about it. It is all very straightforward from a logical point of view. The only problem - if it is a problem - is that the duplicate might not want to accept how he came into existence. He might not want - might not be able - to accept it psychologically, but that's just tough. He isn't 'you'. He is a completely newly created entity with the false belief that what he remembers happening happened to him.
That way of looking it at is intended to show one thing - there is nothing logically or physically anomalous going on. There is no splitting of identity, no sharing or mixing of identity. Without a doubt there are practical problems (and probablty psychologica problems) for the duplicate, but the situation is not physically or logically anomalous.
A more positive way of looking it is that the duplicate would be a perfectly good replacement for you if you had been destroyed by the scanner rather than copied. The duplicate could have been let out of the room, been given $25 and sent home (or to the pub) and never know he was a duplicate, although he might occasionally wonder how he had suddenly found himself in another room. 'I must have blacked out or something', he will say to himself.
Of course that is the case where teleporting happens unbeknownst to the teleportee. If you know you are teleporting you will know before hand what will happen. For example, I am currently kp3. If I teleport I will become kp3.1. I am aware of the relationship between kp3 and kp3.1. I am prepared to accept that relationship as good enough to treat teleporting as a super-convenient form of transport - probably because I associate my identity with my mental life, which the teleporter preserves, not with my physical body or my atoms which the teleporter does not. Other people do not feel that way, and reject teleporting outright. One person said if teleporters were invented he'd make its his life work to destroy them as murder machines.
Other debates on teleporting has told me one thing - anti-teleporters are seldom converted, but sometimes pro-teleporters are. I think people are sentimentally attached to their bodies even if they are intellectually advanced enough to feel they shouldn't be.