Sorry about that ridiculous watermark.
Not to mention, if we have the technology to construct human bodies and minds on the other side of that teleporter, what is to stop them from modifying the machines to change your brain (or body). I have lost any trust I once had in any government or company to believe them if, hypothetically, they tell me they have the know-how to change my opinion of Coca Cola upon reconstruction.
Cory Doctorow vibes.
Personally, as long as it’s provably safe, I’m fine with it.
As far as I’m concerned, if my consciousness is intact, and my body is a carbon copy, that’s me. I place more weight on my consciousness being me than those specific atoms being me.
Besides, we all shed all of our atoms and replace them with new ones dozens of times throughout our lives. So we’ve already died in that way, I guess? But then again, it doesn’t happen all at once, it’s more of a
ShipBody of Theseus type of thing.99.9% of the time you’d be right. But what if it accidentally made a copy of you. You can argue that you’re still you and rhe other is an independent person, but who gets the rights as the “real” you? All your possessions, bank accounts, debts, job, etc. ?
The thing about transporters is that if we had them right now, people would use them for everything. Transport me to the toilet. Transport the TV remote into my hand. Transport a fork into my hand. People would never get out of bed.
My kid and I have discussed this at length. It’s true, Bones and a few others live in a universe where they’re the only soulful humanoids, surrounded by digital facsimiles. It must be depressing.
I’m firmly on the anti-transporter side, but I’m also super into the concept of artificial personhood. The people that step out of those transporters have just as much of a soul as the people who stepped in, even if they are separate people
The best take on transporters was in a ‘Buzz Lightyear’ cartoon.
Buzz tells his team that a scientist has developed a transporter. The farm boy says that it sounds like a great invention; with a transporter the ship can stay up in orbit and the crew can teleport to the surface.
Everyone just looks at him like he’s an idiot.
Explain.
If you don’t know by now, don’t mess with it.
I’d like to know or see a Star Trek series about the development of Star Trek technology.
Like the history of flight or the first ancient sea captains, … when it comes to the history of the humble teleporter, how many freakin people did they have to reconstitute, recombine, turn into a puddle of goo, teleport into a wall, remove their brains, reconfigure their organs, teleport into a bulk head or reanimate into empty space before they perfected the technology.
Someone had to be the first Porthos.
Maybe that’s why there are so few Indians and Pakistanis in the Trek universe.
*“…I teleported home one night, With Ron and Sid and Meg. Ron stole Meggie’s heart away, And I got Sidney’s leg.” *
Teleportation Blues, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
Not only that, but they‘re also literal bombs. Remember E=mc^2? With a technology capable of converting 100% of matter into usable energy, you‘d have a pretty scary bomb bomb.
And yet, on the list of bomb bombs Star Trek has given us, it’s pretty far down there. I mean, wanna talk about WMDs? Look up Genesis or Generations. Those fuckers are un-nuking stars and collapsing nebulae because why not.
I think I’ve explained this too many times to do it again, but: teleportation doesn’t have to be “destroy and reconstitute” any more than going through a door necessitates killing you and reconstituting you on the other side of the door. The key is establishing continuity of your mind across the intervening space, which is mostly an engineering problem.
Star Trek transporters are “destroy and reconstitute” though. They are explicitly described as such. The whole Thomas Riker situation even requires it to be the case.
Star Trek just throws all its rules out from one episode to the next. The Star Trek franchise is the McDonalds of sci-fi; you don’t choose it because it’s good, you choose it because it’s available.
But the mind does not have continuity. You mind ends and a new copy starts and thinks it has continuity.
Have you ever gone slept?
Yes? How does that break continuity in your mind? You go “unconscious,” but the chemical reactions that make up your mind are still going
Does it matter? If so, why?
I’m confused here. No, it doesn’t matter that I’ve gone to sleep. I don’t have a new mind when I wake up.
How can you tell if it is the old mind of a new mind with the memories of the old one?
Because the process of chemical reactions in my brain never stopped. I suppose if, without my knowledge, I was killed and replaced with a clone that has all my memories, there would be no way for me to tell, but the sleeping isn’t what kills me there
Right so why does a gap matter?
I would be hesitant to get on a teleporter even if they were proven “safe”. It could be possible that from my point of view, that’ll be the last thing I ever see. But from everyone else’s point of view Im alive and I walked out the other end without breaking a sweat. But this is a different instance of “me”. From my point of view, would I be “dead” forever or would I be able to witness myself going out for drinks later that day?
Maybe it turns out that if you make an exact backup of a brain, reconstruct and restore the biologic equivalent of ram and system registers back to their original state (sort of how operating systems do multitasking), then it all works out. But maybe turning the brain completely off or whatever is enough to put the “system” in an “off” state and when it restarts, it’ll be a new instance. Maybe you don’t remember the part where you stopped existing so it doesn’t matter.
Really makes you wonder if humans had a soul and an afterlife what exactly happens when the last copy of you finally dies naturally.
Like you go to heaven and meet some version of you that lived for a fifteen minute coffee run, and boy is he missed that from his perspective he died at 19 years old because you just had to beam down and try the new Starbucks drink. All the other teleported yous are there.
Shit what about your spouse? There could be like 900 of you but only 400 of her. Now you all have to spend eternity together.
The real problem with all of this is that people can’t get away from the idea of a soul. Something intangible unmeasurable that is really “us” riding around in a meat-robot. It’s hard for people (me included) to realize that the meat packaging is all that we are. If you destroy My body and recreate it, nothing will have been lost. The continuity within the meat computer in my head is all that I am. There is no “me” outside of that… And that’s a really hard concept to accept and internalize.
I dunno even if there is no you in a metaphysical sense the deconstruction method still ends your personal subjective experience of being you which sucks. Sure the next you might be just as much you as the first one but you don’t get to be around to enjoy that.
I dunno even if there is no you in a metaphysical sense the deconstruction method still ends your personal subjective experience of being you which sucks. Sure the next you might be just as much you as the first one but you don’t get to be around to enjoy that.
But it doesn’t and that’s the point. You are not the collection of atoms that make up your body, YOU are the software program that is running on your brain-computer. The software program can be transferred (or copied) and you are still you. There is no “you” outside of that software.
Your idea of what constitutes “you” Is wrong. Your subjective experience ends when you get dismantled. We can say this definitively, because when the transporter fails to dismantle the original, they don’t get to see through their copy’s eyes. If they don’t get to see what the transporter clone sees when both are alive, then it stands to reason that if they get dismantled, they still don’t get to see what their clone sees. Their subjective experience ends.
I disagree with you, but I don’t know that I can explain it anymore clearly than I already have. There is no metaphysical “you” that exists outside of the software running in your head. You would experience perfect continuity if your body was dismantled and reconstructed. There is no real “you” except the software program that is running on your meat CPU.
Like I said, this is a hard thing to wrap your head around.
There is no metaphysical “you” that exists outside of the software running in your head.
100% agreed.
You would experience perfect continuity if your body was dismantled and reconstructed.
I’m going to explain it a different way.
This is Bill.
🕺⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
I’m going to transport Bill over here.
☁️⬜⬜⬜⬜🕺
That’s still the same Bill, right? There’s continuity?
Now I’m going to do a Tom Riker, and unsuccessfully transport Bill.
🕺⬜⬜⬜⬜🕺
Which one is the real Bill?
If I’m understanding your argument right, you seem to think both of these are Bill. Which they are, but they’re not the same Bill. Despite both of them subjectively feeling a sense of continuity, only Left Bill has existed for more than a few seconds. If I correct my mistake by shooting Left Bill in the head, his subjective experience of being Bill is over. If I never made the mistake, and successfully dismantled him, the same would occur. For him, continuity is not maintained through the transporter.
I was never concerned with whether the me that steps out of the transporter experiences continuity. I’m only concerned with whether the me that exists right now does.
If you destroy My body and recreate it, nothing will have been lost. The continuity within the meat computer in my head is all that I am.
If you perfectly recreate your body without destroying the original, the original doesn’t start seeing and hearing through the clone. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, there’s no difference between the you that steps into the transporter and the you that steps out of it, but you do actually die when you’re “transported.” You don’t get to see what’s on the other side of the transporter, another being that shares your exact memories does.
I think we are still in the realm of a physics problem for teleportation lol
Fusion is an engineering problem. the sun does it. We’ve done it. We just suck at it.
Teleporting is not possible as far as we know …unless I missed something huge in science news
It’s not all that different to a fax machine, the way it’s described in st.
You just need to be able to accurately scan and place atoms to achieve the ‘teleportation’ being discussed here.
Thinking about it even that is probably not possible, as you’d need to know both the position and momentum and state of every sub atomic particle in the body.
It’s definitely not because the more you know about an electrons position, the less you know about it’s speed and vice versa.
Heisenberg compensators are Star Trek’s answer to that. It’s physically impossible to do that in the real world, but in Star Trek they’ve figured it out
For sure. I wish they would’ve given that to us instead of the molecule in that movie about the whale. (Sorry I’m not well versed on star trek
I felt like they hinted in some episodes that there was some rule of nature they were exploiting to get it to work. Like imagine trying to tell someone in the 11th century that humans made machines that can fly, they imagine some mechanical thing flapping wings. They imagine it because they don’t know what air does when it passes over a fast moving surface. It isn’t like the transporter really stores your pattern down to every particle, there was something that they found that made it a lot easier problem to solve.
Yeah someone mentioned the Heisenberg compensators to me in a different comment and I’m betting that’s what you are referring to.
Does quantum entanglement count? Probably depends on your definition of “teleportation”, I’d assume.
No, unfortunately. the closest we’ve come with that is proving that the universe isn’t locally real. Three physicists just won the nobel prize for proving it. Which is mind boggling in it’s own right
Putting aside the whole problems with maintaining continuity in a civilization that laughs at all the problems of FTL and relativity why is continuity important?
Because I want to see where I’m going, and if my consciousness ends, I don’t get to see it
I just don’t understand why a gap matters. I had to get knocked out for surgery once and I woke up the same person, sans appendix.
This is why I hate using the word consciousness in these debates. It’s too ill defined, and isn’t really what I mean anyway. The process of chemical reactions in my brain is my mind, regardless of whether it’s aware of any external stimuli.
It’s also irrelevant to the discussion about teleportation. Whether or not you’re the same person after you’ve gone to sleep and woken up is debatable, but whether or not the person who steps into the transporter is the person that steps out of a transporter isn’t. Like I’ve said too many times in this thread, if you step into the transporter and it fails to dismantle you when it creates your copy, you and your copy are two distinct individuals. You don’t get to see through your copy’s eyes. So when the one who stepped into the transporter dies, that individual’s subjective experience ends. This is the same whether they die before the copy is made, as the copy is made, or after the copy is made. They never get to see the other side of the transporter.
For the iteration who came out the other side of the transporter, this is a meaningless distinction. But for the iteration who stepped into the transporter, the distinction is quite literally life and death.
and woken up is debatable,
Tell my creditors that
I never understood the problem people seem to complain about here.
A perfect copy, is perfect. There’s no detectable, no measurable, no identifiable difference.
So what are you talking about? Unless you don’t think perfect is actually perfect.A copy isn’t you, it’s someone else, a clone. It means you die when you step into the teleporter and someone else takes over your life.
But a perfect copy is more like the you who stepped onto the pad, then then you are like the you who went to sleep last night.
All sorts of changes happened, while you were sleeping.
All sorts of changes happened while you were typing your last comment.
The you of now is a very different person then the you of 5min ago.But I have the same consciousness
So does the copy
Fundamentally, no. It doesn’t matter if the copy is identical in every way, it’s physically separate.
The fact that one is the “original” and one is the “copy” doesn’t matter. The fidelity of the copy doesn’t matter. It’s literally just the fact that it’s different meat.
The copy will believe it’s me, and will for any outside observer be identical to me, but I will still exist as a separate entity. Up until the next instant, where the clone-and-kill machine enters the next phase, kills me, and I’m gone, and there’s a new copy of me out there with a new consciousness, living my life. But the version of me who was me is dead.
What happens if it doesn’t kill me instantly? What happens if I get to look my transporter clone in the eyes? We won’t have the same consciousness, we’ll have two separate copies of the same consciousness. And then it kills me. And I watch myself die.
Yes. You watch yourself die, and you continue being you.
You’re always doing exactly that already.
Every moment of every day. You replace yourself, with a new self.Except the person who died is dead, and they stay dead. The person who died’s final moments will be seeing their clone standing over them, and their memories will diverge.
They’re clearly different meat, different consciousnesses in that moment. They won’t know what the other is thinking, they will have to speak to communicate.
How are they not separate people in that moment?
Imagine the machine makes one such perfect copy of you without successfully dismantling you. That person stands in front of you. Do you see through their eyes? No. If you die, do they die too? Of course not. It doesn’t matter how perfect the copy they are, they are not the same person as you. If the biological processes in your body end, you die. The you that steps into these teleportation machines never gets to see what happens on the other side of them.
Because it’s still a copy, so you still die. Imagine if there was a delay between the copy being produced and the original being destroyed, long enough for them to see each other if transported within the same room.
You are a different person than you were yesterday.
You have all sorts of new and different experiences from that person.
You’re even a different person reading the last word in this sentence, than you were when reading the first.But you’re no less you, are you?
Have you seen The Prestige?
Yes! Great movie!
spoiler
That machine was much more than a transporter. It didn’t have to destroy the matter to duplicate it.
Angier was stupid to keep killing the other versions of himself. He could have created a much better trick, being in several places at once.
And they each would have felt they were the original Angier. Who could say they were wrong? They all were, and are still, the original. Just different versions of him, with different experiences. No different than you, being the same person who was different yesterday than you are today.
See to me, it’s ambiguous whether or not those are copies in the water or he is just the latest copy from the balcony. That’s kind of the terror he identifies - when he steps in, he doesn’t know if he’s the one on the balcony or the one in the water. That’s why I brought it up!
You are a different person than you were yesterday.
In some senses, yes. In other senses, no. Since my birth, there has been an uninterrupted set of reactions between neurons in my brain. Individual neurons may be added or removed, various inputs and chemicals may change this reaction, but this ongoing reaction between them has never stopped. If you show me another person with the exact same pattern of neurons in their brain, with the exact same pattern of reactions happening within it, then they are for all intents and purposes a perfect copy of my mind. But if you shoot the me that’s typing right now in the head, then the me that’s typing right now doesn’t get to see what happens tomorrow, even though for all intents and purposes there is still a starman2112 in the world.
But the Starman typing today, doesn’t get to see tomorrow any way. They get replaced by the next Starman.
I fundamentally disagree. As I said, my mind is a continuous ongoing process of reactions between neurons in my brain. Even while I’m asleep, this process continues. Even as neurons die and are replaced, this process continues. I am the same starman that I was yesterday, and that I will be tomorrow.
But is the copy me from my conscious point of view? I don’t care that it looks the same externally. Will I still be inside the ship?
Yes. The copy is you as far as it can tell.
And the original you doesn’t exist anymore to be able to tell anything.So “you” continue, from your point of view.
no… that’s not sufficient. There’s a new me that was not me that is now me, yes, but the original me is gone. Story ended from my point of view, from the new me’s point of view it was all fine but they will end in the next transport.
If it can be undeniably proven exactly the same as sleeping or anesthesia, fine. If consciousness provably persists all the way from de-materialization, transport, and re-materialization, like Lt. Barkley. fine. But if there is any doubt that consciousness ends, and a new consciousness is created, that is where the problem lies, and why many, like McCoy, won’t use one willingly.
But consciousness doesn’t persist through sleeping or anesthesia. It stops, then starts again some time later. The continuity of memory seems persistent to the consciousness, so it can’t really tell the difference. Because it would be impossible for a consciousness to perceive it’s own down time.
And it’s not really accurate to say a new consciousness is created. It would be more accurate to say the same consciousness is recreated.
I’m not trying to be combative, just to illustrate the point: “cite your sources.”
Definitive research is needed.
ITT people who think they’re only themselves only if they’re completely continuous. Any number of them could have been replaced with a clone while sleeping and not know the difference. I am me, and that’s all the matters to me.
Of course I wouldn’t know. But the former me who got dragged off is dead. That’s the whole point, the clone has no way of knowing and simply continues on life while the original dies.
And because we only exist in the present, we rely on our memories of the past to tell who we are. Our memories tell me I’m me, so I think I’m me.
Maybe it doesn’t matter to you, but the reason I don’t want to die is because I want to be aware. If I am never conscious again, but a copy of me is, good for them I guess, I wish them the best, but it’s not what I want. I’m not conscious of waking up in the morning, even if they’re me. I’m dead.
And you would have known you’d been swapped how? What if someone came up to you and said that they have irrefutable proof that you were replaced with a clone of yourself a few years ago. How would you know the difference unless told. And even once told, what does it matter if you can’t pinpoint the exact day?
If it already happened, there’s nothing to be done. But if I find out that there’s a thing that I’m doing every single day that’s killing me and making a copy, I’ll simply stop doing that thing
I guess that’s where I’m confused like OP is. What difference does it make at that point? You’ve been going through it countless times, nothing has changed, you were no different, so what does it matter?
It’s like the people that are anti-vaxxers, they’re freaked out with no basis that “it’s changing who I am!” even though there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary (I would assume general transporter tech wouldn’t be available to the masses if it wasn’t in this scenario)
Strictly speaking, I’ve never used a transporter before. It’s important to nail down specific definitions and concepts here. What do I mean when I say I? I’m referring to the human using the alias starman2112; the individual entity typing right now. I’ve gone more in-depth in other comments, but essentially I am the ongoing chemical reactions between the neurons in my brain. This reaction has been perturbed, interfered with, but never stopped.
In what way am I still “me” after being transported? I’m precisely the same person, right? But I’m not. I’m a perfect copy of the last person. Say the transporter failed to dismantle him when he stepped into it. Does he see what I see? Hear what I hear? No. We are separate people. So if it had dismantled him, would he see what I see, hear what I hear? Still no, of course. He’s gone. He doesn’t see or hear anything anymore.
Now that I understand that, despite having countless memories of stepping into and out of transporters, how could I possibly bring myself to step into one “again?” In reality, it would be the first time for me, and I would be dooming myself to never see or hear again, unless it malfunctions and fails to dismantle me.
I don’t appreciate the comparison with anti-vaxxers. The problems with transporters are not based on lies or incorrect assumptions, it’s based on the fact that it kills you and creates a copy.
Because you won’t be the copy, the copy will be the copy.
From the copies point of view, it is you.
But I’m not looking from my copy’s point of view, am I? And if you posit that I may be the copy in the first place, then the original isn’t looking from my point of view.
“But what if it kills you, but no one can tell?”
this is pascal’s wager for nerds
Pascal’s wager argues that if there are 2 different and non provable outcomes to a belief, you should believe the one that has better consequences for you.
In this case there are no divine consequences of being destroyed and reassembled in another location.
This is probably more of a ship of Theseus question.
-A man can’t step into the same teleporter twice.
Proverbs for the 24th century
Me with brain chip implants, especially those with non-libre software
The fact that two Rikers existed is all the proof I need to be full Luddite. Save your death machines for the next person, thanks!
And they treat the one on the planet like he’s a copy when he’d logically be the original with the one on the Enterprise being the duplicate.
They are both copies. They explain that the guy operating the transporter was losing him, so he used a second beam to try to compensate. On beam made it through, the other bounced off the st uff in the atmosphere that was causing the problem and rematerialized him on the planet. I’m pretty sure this explanation was in the episode in order to establish that both Rikers are equally real.
Except that that explanation means Tom was made with the original Riker materials and Will was made from matter reserves on the ship using the original Riker as a template.
Ship of Theseus
No, USS Enterprise NCC 1701-D. But I can see why that would be confusing.
I think that makes both Rikers equally fake, not real.
Equally fake and equally real are the same thing.
This one Trinitys
Equally fake and equally real are equal?
Beg to differ.
The Queen gives birth to twin boys. It’s a stormy night and the midwife isn’t sure which is older. They are equally the ‘real’ king.
Two counterfeit dollar bills are equally fake.
Ever wonder if that transporter tech was used to rebuild you better, stronger, smarter, faster?
Can’t remember the exact story, but Larry Niven used that idea. Basically, you teleported from one side of the room to the other, but left all the poisons your cells had built up behind. The hero does this accidentally, then notices himself growing healthier over time.
In another universe, Relg phased Silk through stone and found the cure for the common cold as the illness couldnt pass through with them…for some reason
No idea what series/game you are talking about.
Enlighten us
The Belgariad books by David Eddings
Thanks.
Might want to check out this series. Jackie Chan meets the Godfather meets the Green Lantern. One a planet that’s reached 1950s level technology, one small nation has a monopoly on a substance called ‘jade.’ It enables a few people to perform extraordinary feats.
Thanks ill look it up!
Enjoy
I think McCoy was more afraid of accidents than existential factors.
I still can’t believe we are this many years out from ebaumsworld and still people are putting fucking watermarks on memes.
