Would you use teleporter technology if it existed? Why or Why not?
You know those sci-fi teleporters like in Star Trek where you disappear from one location then instantaneously reappear in another location? Do you trust that they are safe to use?
To fully understand my question, you need to understand the safety concerns regarding teleporters as explained in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQHBAdShgYI
::: spoiler spoiler I wouldn't, because the person that reappears aint me, its a fucking clone. Teleporters are murder machines. Star Trek is a silent massacre! :::
If it opens a spacetime tunnel and I cross it with all my original atoms, yes.
If it disintegrates me to 3d print a copy on the other side, no.
Stargate yes, Star Trek no.
Stargate lore incorporates buffers holding your intermediate information, so it's the same than Star Trek, actually.
Only if there is a DHD on both sides. I don’t want some in-house built crap that ignores the failsafes that the original builders put in place
Even then, you have pretty much no way of knowing if there’s an iris. So it’s all fun and games until SLAM, all your atoms gets squished into metal.
The Iris always seemed like a bad idea to me, what if the sg team lost their code thing and had to leave a planet in am emergency?
That’s why they were military…KIA
is star trek really clone rather than teleport? I haven't really watched much of it (only like 3 or 4 seasons).
The general idea is a teleporter rips you apart and the atoms go to the destination to be reassembled in the previous state.
Whether or not it kills you is speculation. Arguably you're pretty dead if you're ripped apart atom by atom, and then a clone is assembled using the same parts.
But I don't think it's answerable if the recreated "you" is a clone or not until people can figure out what the mind even is.
Death is a state in which your biological functions cease. So no, it doesn't kill you, since you function properly after.
Is it me functioning or is it a clone?
How does it matter, with the exact same memories?
So you'd be fine with a scientist creating a perfect clone of you, and then killing you, letting the clone take your place?
If it had the same memories.
Yes. Since i would still be alive and have no memories of being killed. There's no distinguishion between a perfect clone and me. Sorry if you don't like a "you" only being memories.
Also if there's any chance of a Fly situation happening I'm not going. Even if it's like a .00000001% chance then fuck that lol
When just driving down a freeway, you have a much, much greater than 0.00000001% chance of suffering a worse outcome than the "fly situation" ;) .
Just sayin'.
I mean I'd probably rather be dead than Fly'd, so I dunno what the odds of something worse than that actually are lol.
Yes. I get to die and pass all my responsibilities to my quantum clone. Sign me the fuck up.
And the clone gets a great excuse to get out of things. “That wasn’t me, that was my clone”
Well I think if teleporters actually do get invented one day, the law would make the clone legally the same person as the original
Instant cloning opens up many interesting possibilities:
the last one is a little close to the TV show Severance as well
There's a book called the Crystal Phoenix that explores this kind of stuff. People will get addicted to heroin for the weekend, then upload themselves to their crystal and let someone pay to murder them horribly while their memories go into a new clone. It's really dark.
Assuming we're talking about our reality, this device is getting made by a corporation who will release it as soon as the potential profit exceeds the cost from its non-zero error rate.
No, I'm not getting into some Musk 2.0's shoddy body disintegrator.
I always assume this is asking me as if I was in one of the examples universes like Star Trek. I 100% would never get in Musk's Teslaporter, but in a world where it's as widespread as airplanes and trains? Would use, wouldn't be murder.
There's a Ship of Theseus aspect to Star Trek's transporters in particular that I find interesting. In that there is an actual matter stream sent to your destination. But ultimately I couldn't be sure that the me I am now would come out the other side - and I probably wouldn't.
I have the same concern about uploading my brain to a computer. Even if it's a perfect copy it's still a copy. And that's before you factor in for other things like, I am not just my brain I am also the hormones that affect my brain.
Your hormones make you weak! Let go of your mortal shell and live in the sweet embrace of 1s and 0s. None of those pesky shades of gray. Everything in it's own happy 'float'ing bucket.
We'll even throw in a RNG if you ever want to get the thrill of hormones.
Join us.
Sincerely, Totally not a bot
Agreed. Fuck hormones. I'm over here trying to be logical, and my hormones are telling me other things.
Thank you, fellow human.
If there's an actual stream of the same matter, where did Riker 2 come from?
Thousands of usenet, IRC, BBS, forum, and reddit posts have gone back and forth on that since that episode first aired. Canon is that the transporter disassembles and reassembles and that the transport consists of, among other things, a matter stream. But also the technobabble in the episode suggests that the transporter recreated at least one of them without an extra riker worth of matter.
Replicators also require base materials to synthesize meals out of.
This question all comes down to your opinion of what makes a person a person, whether that means we have something greater than the collection of our atoms, or whether we are simply the emergent outcome of the complex arrangement of atoms. If you subscribe to the former then you also need to believe that this machine is somehow capable of either transporting/transplanting that "soul" for lack of a better expression. Where if you subscribe to the latter than this is most certainly a suicide cloning machine.
I personally subscribe to the idea that consciousness is an emergent property of complexity. Given a sufficiently large enough series of inputs you can observe new and unexpected outputs that appear to be on higher orders of complexity than their inputs. This response is an example of that, from electrons flowing through transistors we end up with operating systems, hardware IO, web browsers, networking protocols, ASCII standards, font rendering, etc. All of that complexity emerges from a massive amount of on/off switches arranged in patterns over time.
Following this chain of reasoning I believe that making an exact duplicate of me down to the state of each atom is no different than that entity being me, however as a conscious being with human ethics and morals I put value in the singularity of my existence, and so a plurality of Zetaphor is something I find undesirable as it fundamentally challenges my perception of what it means to be myself.
So assuming the entity leaving the transporter is me, there's two ways to approach the way a machine like this could operate:
That means one of two things, either there is a brief moment of time where two identical copies of me are in the universe, or there is a period of time where zero complete copies of me exist in the universe. So either I stopped existing momentarily and then was recreated from scratch (death and clone birth), or I existed in two places at once and then died in one (cloning and suicide).
I'd say it's the second. I don't imagine any data movement that's not copy + delete.
One package drop and you could loose a finger or the ability to tie your shoes or the memory of your wedding day.
Yup. Something like that happens in Michael Crichton's Timeline, where the copy going back and forth in time is imperfect, with relatively low resolution, so things like capillaries sometime connect wrong and people has irrigation problems, bruises, and they even die.
The tricky part here is that technically this means you could do/think/say something that the new you won't remember, before the death occurs.
Unless there's some sort of induced coma(right terminology?) involved.
Exactly. But that would be the price of that kind of transport. See the short story "Think like a dinosaur" by James Patrick Kelly: that is exactly the situation. With very grim consecuences, in the particular case shown.
No worries, your duplicate would be more like a twin after a few hours.
Your original copy would die. Your life as you know it would end the moment you teleport.
Sure on the other end a replica would come out, presumably with all your memories etc intact, but it would not be you, you would not experience it. It would go on living your life, thinking it was you, everyone around it treating it like it was you, and presumably doing all the same things you would have done.
Except it is not you. Your experience ended at the teleporter. And many fools would never realize this, because the dead aren’t around to tell us.
Jacob Geller has a fantastic video covering this topic called “Head Transplants And The Non-existence Of The Soul”, it’s fascinating stuff
If there's no break in consciousness, then there would be no death. I was simply encoded as bits of data and then decoded, a process that I would be conscious of and experience in some way, I assume. If when I get off the transporter at point B with a 1:1 memory of the experience like walking from one room to the next, in no way did I die.
You are changing the question to "is a perfect replica of a person considered the same person or not?". That is not the question.
What you experience by using a teleporter is you enter a room, and then you die. End of story. There being another replica of you somewhere does not change that you died. For an outsider they may argue whether or not you died, whether or not the replica is you, and so on. But from the perspective of someone who enters the teleportation room, it's over. Dead.
Use it on myself? No.
Use it to start a combination movers / electric / tunneling / waste management / highly-illegal-hardware-pirating company?
Yes.
If it's wormhole based tech then yeah why not, atomic based teleportation comes with too many philosophical and existential flavors for me personally
Trans dimensional horrors. See: Event Horizon
What pronouns do "Trans dimensional horrors" use?
Hor/ror
Phtagn/Phtagns
I totally respect the way you approached it. I would totally use either, but I value myself very little and value being able to get somewhere that has alcohol quickly to dull the things I feel very much.
I totally respect the way you approached it. I would totally use either, but I value myself very little and value being able to get somewhere that has alcohol quickly to dull the things I feel very much.
Yup.
Not only would I use it, I would abuse it.
I'd duplicate myself more than once, and at least once so I could fuck myself.
I'd tweak the transporter to adjust my body as I went through it. Best weight-loss, gym routine, plastic surgery, dick-enhancement pill ever, all in one.
I would be the reason such devices would be strictly regulated by people with ethics. "Is it murder if you kill your clone?" "Who cares, energize and last one stabbed wins!"
This guy rikers.
How would you deal with yourself after you fuck yourself?!
Do you want a really creepy twin with much less resources than you to walk around the world? Would you wanna kill that person? No one would notice surely.
Similar matter is dealt with in the book Dark Matter.
Those all sound like problems for later!
It's a literal suicide booth.
Sure, you can go on all day about changing out broom handles and whatever other metaphor you like, but I don't need my body to be a point of interaction with any consciousness and the world, i need it to be a point of interaction between my consciousness and the world.
I have a lot of feelings about the emptiness of identity and the ultimate unity of the universe, but that doesn't mean I'm going to off myself for the sake of convenience.
If I make a copy of myself, I'm still myself. I don't become the copy. I have no reason to believe that a genetically identical clone that's somehow got a copy of my memories will spontaneously cause my consciousness to jump to the other clone. No evidence of any such thing happening.
If I, then, make a copy of myself on Mars, why would I expect to spontaneously inhabit it?
The only reason being ripped apart and having an identical copy made looks like teleportation is the timing. There's a short story about this, where a teleporter malfunction leaves the original version of the traveler alive. Protocol is to 'balance the equation' by incinerating the survivor, which as it turned out was the fate of anyone who stepped into the teleporter under normal circumstances.
Think about a file in a computer system. Copying the file and making changes doesn't change the original file. When you download something and alter it, that's a different copy of the file that's been changed, not the original. Even when you move something rather than copy it, what's actually happening is it's being copied and then the original is destroyed.
Seamless for everyone else, sure. But a tragic, needless, and utterly stupid death for the one who enters the machine.
The only way I would use Teleportation is if this problem gets resolved. One way (as unfeasible as teleporters themselves) would be to essentially Quantum entangle your brain to the new body, essentially making it so your conscience briefly is in control of two bodies, then afterwards destroy the original body and with it the entanglement.
Fair enough, wormholes do circumvent the entire issue by nature of being bridges through space-time instead of messing with the person's molecular integrity
I'd prefer the nightmare dimension version thanks.
As best we can tell, though, you don't inhabit your body, you are your body.
Admittedly, we don't really understand the nature of consciousness at all, so it'd make sense to hold off on using Star Trek-style transporters until we do.
I am with Bob Johansson (Bobbyverse) on this one. Star trek is utterly inconsistent with how transporters work. They only ever play up when it's convenient for the plot line, but the rest of the time they're totally fine and no one worries about it.
Transporters are supposed to move the atoms by converting them into energy, moving that energy through subspace, and then converting them back to atoms on the other side, the only energy in the system is the energy that was created when the atoms were converted, so it shouldn't be possible to create a transporter clone, no matter how many "confinement beams" you have, as where would it's atoms come from?
I always figured that's what the pattern buffer is for - the replicator can make a person atom-by-atom from energy, but the buffer holds the 'consciousness', and that's the unreliable bit. Thomas Riker happens because the transporter system copies Riker into the buffer twice due to interference, so when the replicator fires up it creates two Riker bodies and puts one copy into each, sucking down some extra power from the ship to compensate for the missing energy.
I don't buy the idea that disintegrating my molecules and reconstructing new ones is tantamount to murder or suicide.
If all I experience is being one place one moment and another place the next, then it's me. It's isn't some fucking clone, it's me. You're just being turned into some other form (energy, if we're using Star Trek rules) and then being turned back.
I'm pretty sure that at 26, I'm already a completely different person than the baby I was born as, literally. My cells have all died and been replaced. The horror. ./s
I definitely don't think teleportation in science fiction is meant to be killing the person using it and making a clone of them. Like unless a story is specifically about that, I don't think any given sci-fi author is trying to set up some sinister background plot where everyone is unknowingly killing themselves all the time.
But I do still have to wonder if that's how it would end up working out in real life. Sure all our cells have died and been replaced since we were born, but that typically doesn't happen with all your cells at the same time lol. imo it's probably less about cells and more about like... Consciousness or "the soul" or whatever, I don't know. Whatever it is, I accept that teleporters in fiction have some way to store and transport it, whether it's stated in the narrative or not. But in real life I have no idea how we'd be able to tell if such a thing could even work.
In real life, I think we'd probably glean some insights to the soul in the development process. Like say, if one of the first human test subjects goes through it, only to have their personality irrevocably changed, and no one can identify any external reasons why, then that would warrant further research before billions of humans start using it and it becomes an actual problem.
I think part of my "resistance" to this question is that by default, I'm approaching it from the assumption that I'm living in some hypothetical world where a teleporter is as common and everyday as a car or train, and extrapolating from there, so a lot of the hypotheticals don't exist for me because I'm imagining public use. "What if someone puts the version of you that didn't teleport in their basement" well then they would have to coerce me out of the presumably public location for teleports between cities or wherever, because if I step on a pad expecting to be halfway across the globe in two seconds and instead I'm still in the same room, I'm not gonna leave until it's explained to me what went wrong and I'm given assurances for future service and compensation for the failure that already happened.
"oh well what if it only created copies of you" well then it probably wouldn't supplant any existing forms of transportation :), and of course then I wouldn't use it to get around.
If I make an exact molecular copy of you and set that copy free into the world thinking it had just successfully transported, but then I take the original you that entered the transporter and lock them up in a basement somewhere, how is that any different? From the perspective of the conscious being that came out the other end their continuity is uninterrupted. They will think they are the only version of themselves to have ever existed and that they simply moved from one place to another, as opposed to being a duplicate of the original entity, and that the original entity may be dead or in this case locked in a basement.
Now I want to see a dystopian fiction where the original instances of a person are taken away and used as slave labor while the clones come out the other side thinking they're the only copy.
If I make 100 exact molecular copies of you and lock them up in my emerald mine to slave away for the rest of their lives, but then I take the original you and give you $10 and send you on your way, how is that any different? You know you are the original and nothing can change that, so YOU you have nothing to fear, right?
If I walk to the teleport pad, expecting to blink from Point A to Point B, but instead I experience a blink from Point A to Point A, I'm the kind of person who'd need to be physically coerced, threatened, or tricked into captivity, because I'd immediately hop off the pad like "uh why am I still here I'm supposed to be in Berlin, I'm not leaving until you refund my transport cost or get me to Berlin". If I'm not conscious, then I'm the victim of criminal action, not the teleporter.
Likewise, the version of me that just experienced a normal teleport would live their life as they would have anyways.
Death is information-theoretic, fight me OP. /s
I'll add the caveat that it's entirely possible I still couldn't afford teleportation.
If you were a Federation citizen living on any of the core worlds (earth, vulcan, andoria, and tellar prime) I think you'd be okay. It's not like it's something you have in the home anyways - we don't get much civilian life in Star trek but it's implied that you just physically go to the transport pad you want to use and use it.
Oh, if we're in Star Trek I'm fine. Post-scarcity utopia and all. Only Star Trek-style teleportation was specified, though, and in our lifetime a gritty cyberpunk world seems more likely.
People seem to think that inventing a matter replicator would prevent this, meanwhile all I can think is "they'd DRM the living shit out of replication tech". You want HEALTHY food? Better pay us 12.99 a month for the "Fit Package". "Sorry, but only Apple-certified replicator patterns work with the iWant."
Do they ever address the replicability of replicators in Star Trek? I suppose if you need a traditional manufacturing facility and special know-how to make replicators that could be exactly what happens. Vulcans, who IIRC give us replicators, might not have any such vulnerability to commercial anti-features, though.
Not directly. We know that there are materials a replicator can't replicate - latinum (Ferengi currency) and dilithium (part of the power for warp drive) - or that are hard to replicate and so people prefer the real thing. I imagine that there are 24th century versions of the heavy metals we put in our modern day computers that can't be replicated. We even have references to "industrial replicators" in DS9, which implies to me something that spits out a prefabricated factory that then makes things, in addition to just being food replicators that can be deployed in a refugee camp.
What if the original wasn't destroyed? Wouldn't it be a clone then? Which one would feel like it was really you?
Both of us would be me. Then, as our experiences diverged from the point of duplication, we'd become different people (See: Thomas, the duplicate of William Riker in Star Trek. The only reason Thomas and not Will is considered the copy is because of audience perspective, but empathizing with each of them makes one see how both are Will Riker at the start of the episode). This all of course, assumes we don't discover something like the popular conception of souls during the early trials. But I don't believe there's anything about a "soul" that can't be tied to the sum of one's lived experience, which would be copied too.
I would consider a clone to be more expansive of who it could include besides copies of myself as I am now - it would also be someone grown from the literal same embryo as me who'd lived a completely different life with even a different name.
I think I pretty much agree. I think they would both be me just like me from yesterday and me from a week ago are the same me. They aren't exactly the same, but they are both versions of me that my current self grew from.
Alright, but now instead of disintegrating and reconstructing, consider if a similar machine just duplicated your body atom for atom. Is that "you", or a clone?
Let's assume the machine works one of two ways. It either destroys the original as it's read into the machine and reconstructing on the other end, or it's not destroying the original and simply reading and copying simultaneously.
In the first case there are zero complete copies of you in existence as you're undergoing a phase of removing information from place and reconstructing it in another, I'd call that death and cloning.
In the second case there are two identical copies of you in existence until they destroy the original, I'd call that a clone.
Yes, and in neither case would you experience your consciousness being moved to a new body (which is what the commenter above seems to suggest). Your current "you" would be annihilated or just continue to exist in your old body.
Is the subjective experience the thing that defines what is the most palatable form of this?
If that's the case then as someone else suggested they could simply remove the memory of the experience up until right before you walk out the other end. For all you knew it was incredibly excruciating but you're none the wiser. Would the lack of that memory negate the experience?
To me the issue lies with the person who steps into a teleporter and stops existing, not the one that walks out on the other side. If anything, if the cloned person retained their memory it would probably make them feel better about this whole thing.
As for the original person, they would lose consciousness as their bodies are being disassembled... and then what exactly? It feels like there's a missing step between Person A losing consciousness and Person A' waking up.
Though I guess you experience something similar every time you fall asleep, and personally it doesn't feel much like dying.
I think what matters is are you conscious the whole time. In my view, I feel like if I stepped onto a pad at Point A and walked off a similar part in Point B, and was awake for the whole experience, or at the very least experience no gap in memory, then it's not death. I think that if there's a break in consciousness, then sure, it opens things up to the death/cloning question, but I've never seen a depiction of teleportation that knocks the user out each time.
A clone. As far as I know, there's nothing in our established understanding of the world to suggest that merely copying the physical materials of my atoms would reproduce my memories and personality.
Absolutely! I might even die instantly, which is just a bonus :V
Peak Lemmy - as soon as anyone mentions a potentially fatal experiment, the comments are all like Bender at the beginning of Futurama!
Depends on the technology employed.
Quantum entanglement? Sure. All day, every day.
That annihilation shit that Star Trek does? Hell no.
I'd also take a method that's between the two. If it could split me up and send those very same atoms across the void to other side where they're recombobulated I'd be fine with that, too. Assuming it's not painful.
Edit: My sister: "What if it's the most painful experience ever, but the machine deletes that memory?"
Star Trek Transporters don't annihilate you. According to all the stuff from Star Trek it literally disassembles you, moves your particles through space in a matter stream held in a containment field, and reassembles you at the new location.
So the Ship of Theseus question doesn't actually apply, your physical material is the same before and after. The question is if disassembly constitutes dying, and if the reassembled you at the new location is a resurrected you, or if disassembly isn't dying, then it is in fact just a form of transport.
How do you account for the duplicate Riker in TNG? Who's the real one and where did the extra matter come from then to assemble William vs Tom?
(It's been a long time since I've seen that episode so I don't remember if they covered that but on-screen)
A similar question could be raised for the Rascals episode...
To quote MST3k, "It's just a show, you should really just relax."
Non-seriously, though, in Trek lore, energy and mass are still interchangeable via e=mc^2 -- the weird conditions on the planet caused the matter stream to be mirrored and the extra energy came from the ship adding More Power to the transport process.
It probably means that the real, original Riker, made up of atoms that were built from energy from the original Riker is the one that ended up on the planet.
Fair enough. Sometimes you can't help but go down these rabbit holes though.
Whenever you're tempted, remember this is the same show where Dr. Crusher nearly fucked a candle ghost.
Tell that to the second Riker.
Off topic, but I read a book or short story once that was similar to your edit.
It followed a character who lived on a planet with a toxic atmosphere. At the end of every day, everyone would get into a personal chamber that took a complete copy of them, destroyed their body, then rebuilt it and added the memories back the next morning.
I can't remember if it was specified or implied, but the gist of it was that the machine ripped the body apart to the molecular level while the person was conscious, but the snapshot was taken before that, so no one remembered the pain.
Quantum entanglement would mean that while it reads your initial state and encodes the new state there are two copies of you in existence, that is cloning, then the initial state dies. Unless the process of reading that state is destructive, then you just die and are cloned.
The method between the two you suggested also means you die momentarily and then are recreated. For the period of time it takes to encode your atoms into a method of transport and then reassemble them at your destination, you no longer exist in complete form.
The cute thing about quantum entanglement is that it provably CANNOT create a clone of you. It is conveniently called no-cloning theorem. It can either move your exact quantum state from a collection of particles in one place onto a collection in another, or it can create imperfect clones of you, but in no situation can it create an exact quantum clone of you in addition to the original.
But I still exist and am not quantumly annihilated.
And afaik about entanglement, it would just clone me on the other side leaving another copy of me at the start. At least, that's how it reads when describing the difference between entanglement and how Star Trek works.
Exactly, if you are not annihilated then that means two identical versions of an entity that thinks it's you exist simultaneously, and now one of them has to be killed to maintain the illusion of this being transport rather than cloning.
Yeah but the quantum entanglement ensures the new copy is like you down to every last detail. Atomic resolution digitizes you and probably loses information.
That’s not what quantum entanglement means, but either way, you die when you step into the teleporter. Some clone that thinks it’s you on the other side lives out the rest of your days. There aren’t two ways about this.
If they could make a portal that bent space time so that origin and destination were “next to” each other, I’d consider it.
Anything that has to take me apart and put me back together is just creating a copy of me, my consciousness would not be continuous no matter what illusion we put the clone under.
So no, fuck teleportation.
If you actually lose consciousness during the process, there might be an argument, but if I can walk onto a platform while having a conversation with someone and continue that conversation seamlessly with no gaps in my short term memory then I did not die and there was no destruction, merely the encoding and decoding of myself into my equivalent in energy in a process that might as well be instantaneous.
We can re-attach limbs, imagine if it were possible to be completely disassembled, shipped first class mail around the world, and then re-assembled. Wouldn't we be the same person?
I've seen the 6th Day. I think I can manage 😤
Those old Arnie moves have some deep philosophical quandaries huh. 6th day, Terminator, Total Recall, Last Action Hero, Running Man, Junior.
This is not true. There would not be two exact copies, quantum entanglement cannot clone things. It is literally not possible. It goes by the name of "no-cloning theorem".
Of course I would.
Everything that makes you -you- is contained in the physicality of your brain. Even fairly small changes in your brain will create large shifts in cognition and personality. So anything that replicates your body and brain, down to the last atom, is going to be creating -you-. As far as you are concerned, nothing happened; you ceased to be in one place, and immediately sprang into existence in another.
"As far as you are concerned"
Correction: "as far as anyone else is concerned."
Consciousness IS continuity. If you are disentigrated and a perfect clone pops up somewhere to replace you... you died. Your current stream of consciousness ended and a perfect copy replaced you.
As far as all external observers are concerned it's still you. But from your own perspective? Well you won't have one anymore, you'll be dead.
...But the -me- that just popped into existence isn't going to perceive a gap in continuity at all. It may be a new -me-, but it has all the memories and experiences that -I- had just prior to being disintegrated. From the perspective of the new -me- there's no change at all.
Are you the same person as the person that went to sleep last night? How would you know that you weren't replaced by a clone with precisely the same memories and experiences? Or a clone that thinks that it has the same memories and experiences? I can remember last night, but can I prove that my memories are accurate?
The fact that a clone would be seamlessly picking up my stream of consciousness after I die would be little consolation to me.
Sleep may be similar from a philosophical or external point of view. But I'm not sold that lack consciousness during sleep is in the same league as completely destroying, and then, rebuilding it.
Seriously tho, why does it matter? If you are annihilated and a down to the quark exact duplicate is created, what's the difference?
No difference for the rest of the universe, but the difference between life and death to my current stream of consciousness.
Imagine if the teleporter malfunctioned and created the duplicate on the other end but failed to disentigeate you. A worker notices you're still in the machine and says, "oops sorry, had a malfunction on this end. Give us a minute to fix the issue and we'll destroy you. No worries though, 'you' made it out the other end."
Wouldn't you do everything in your power to get out of that machine before they could fix it and kill you?
While I agree with you it would -for me- still depend on how the process works. Suppose the new copy needs to be compared with the original after being constituted for safety reasons. So the original doesn't get destroyed before the copy is created. So for an instant there will be 2 'yous'. That makes jt less desirable for me. Now suppose the verification time -either due to technical or administrative purposes- takes minutes or hours? At that point I would not step into a transporter.
Yeah but that happens when you sleep
I'm not convinced they're at all the same. Consciousness may go dormant during sleep, and you may not remember it, but it's still a continuous, uninterrupted, stream of electricity.
This kind of teleportation would completely snuff out that fire and replace it with an identical one at another location. It's not the same as sleep.
Every atom in your brain gets replaced every four five years anyway so clearly it's the position and structure of the atoms that's important rather than the atoms themselves. So obviously there is no point worrying about it because it happens anyway, and you're clearly fine.
The individual atoms probably get replaced far more often. And I think that, depending on how you look at -you-, the -you- of a year ago isn't the same -you- as who you are now; the change is just so gradual that you don't notice.
This is just blatantly untrue.
Some cells don't renew hardly at all, some do it all the time but the brain isn't "renewed" every X years.
Nope, I have a hard enough time thinking about my consciousness being "the same person" even after sleeping. No way am I getting taken apart and cloned by choice.
Arthur C. Clarke covered it in his first published story.
https://zoboko.com/text/qll1oe8j/the-collected-stories-of-arthur-c-clarke/7
I get the disintegration qualms. But slap some TNG-era biofilters on that baby and filter out heavy metal accumulations, budding cancer cells, chest congestion, etc., and I'd be first in line.
Making an assessment on that requires a whole lot more context.
We trust in car safety because of regulation, established supposed Brand trustworthyness, and widespread use.
If teleporters had the same, and in terms of use at least significant precedent, there's no reason most people would use them. Traveling convenience would be a great upside.
Unser Those circumstance I'd be fine using them.
if you translocated Theseus' ship, is it still the same ship? what if you extracted the data from the transport buffer to reassemble the original in its original location?
For a ship, yes. For a living organism with consciousness... I'm not so sure.
I would use it. Anything to not have to use public transportation or fly in an airplane ever again.
I was a definite "no" until you made me consider it as an alternative to flying Delta.
No, I don't see any possible solution to continuity of consciousness. See Walk like a Dinosaur to understand the implications, but basically you would need to destroy the original and duplicate it from scratch.
If there is such a thing as a soul, it would likely be impossible to duplicate, but even if not, you would have to destroy the original.
Fuck yeah I would. As long as it's cheap and relatively safe I'd take instant transportation over spending hours sitting in a metal box any day.
Imagine it malfunctions while you dissappear and you never reappear in another location, getting stuck in the void forever until the end of time
New fear unlocked
there's that short story by Stephen King called The Jaunt which has something like this. It's pretty good
That was longer than I thought.
lmao
Fuck that, I dont care where "I" can go, I'll die and my clone will be there instead! Even if that was provably false, I wouldn't take the risk.
I definitely wouldn't use the disintegration/reintegration type. If it worked some other way, like through mini-wormholes or something, sure I would use it.
I don't understand everybody worrying about whether their consciousness moves with us. We literally don't even know what it is, we have no provable theory or idea of what it is. As far as I can tell, your consciousness is something your brain does, not something that exists external to your body, otherwise that's basically believing in spirits.
If you're comfortable being vaporised and then a single identical clone being created elsewhere then good for you, I guess.
Why should it be a clone and not the original you? This is all theoretical
If the mechanism is that you are broken down in to your constituent matter and then that template is used to reconstruct you elsewhere, then how could it be anything other than a clone? Even if "the same matter" is used to reconstruct you, a copy is just being precisely pieced together based on your template. Surely?
If you were just scanned to build your pattern and then a transporter just spat out another you using that pattern, what would that other you be?
If it is using the same matter then how could it possibly be a copy?
If I take a Lego set, deconstruct here and reconstruct it over there, is the one over there now a copy/clone? Or is it the same thing?
I would explicitly say that it was a copy of what I originally built, but that it is not my original build. What I consider to be me is the consistently maintained configuration of matter, primarily my brain, rather than the constituent matter. If I am unconfigured then I would consider myself dead, and then any further reconfiguration of me I would consider to be a replica of my original configuration.
As a wise philosopher once said:
Raises the interesting question.
If you perfectly recreate a persons brain, Will they be the same person? Or will something totally new and different emerge from the replicated brain?
Depends on how the teleportation worked and also how our consciousness worked. I’m not against the idea of creating exact copies of myself who, from their point of view, are indistinguishable from the me they were copied from. I am, however, against the idea of deleting the original me, which from my point of view would be indistinguishable from death,
Transferring consciousness is different from copying consciousness, even if the copy is flawless.
This is the same answer as the question of uploading our consciousness to a computer.
To my limited understanding, the us that exists is just a network of neural connections. If you could somehow copy that network exactly, you could conceivably create a complete personality copy of an individual, but that’s not the same thing as moving their consciousness.
I`v seen the fly, fuck this shit.
Imagine, going for a skiing trip and when you get down, you don't queue for the lift, but you just ski into the portal and continue at the top of some piste. The commute gets insanely short, I can WFH, pop in for lunch or a coffee chat, and then jump back home to do some work.
I've read that the cells in my body aren't the same as the ones I was born with, so I did a very slow gradual body swap already, possibly a few times.
Do I trust that an ephemeral pseudoscience concept of "teleporter technology" is safe to use...? No...? On what basis would anyone make that judgement.
Suspension of disbelief
Yeah but what if the government tells you it's safe and effective, and mandates transporters for all travel because it's good for the environment?
Are you willing to be branded a science denier?
What if they give you free food and an Amazon gift card?
Do I get air miles for the distance transported?
If it existed, was proven safe, and was widely available enough for anyone to use, then of course.
The auto and airline industries would collapse, reducing pollution and global warming.
The biggest downside I can think of offhand is that everyone could vacation wherever they like, and that would quickly overcrowd and ruin all the nice places.
Oof...everybody being able to go to whatever the latest viral pool above a waterfall or cronut shop is all at once...
What if it's "proven safe" in the same way that surgery under general anaesthetic is safe - nobody remembers feeling pain. Nobody (mostly) reports pain after waking up. But what if it's torture and you just don't remember it afterwards.
Teleporter is kinda the same, but no one coming out of the other end remembers dying because in their memory they didn't.
People would also be able to commute to their jobs from any distance, which would probably cause people to spread out instead of all gathering in big cities.
My continuity of experience continues, therefore I'm still me. Yes I would use it. I don't care if I'm also the man in the box.
How do you know your continuity of experience would continue? The new copy would have the memories of going in to the transporter, but for all we know your individual consciousness still ended and was replaced with a distinct but externally equivalent one.
Otherwise, how could you have a Thomas Riker situation where two copies of a transporter pattern are materialized? They don't share a single consciousness.
It's a question of continuity, not uniqueness. If flowing water breaks against an impediment and forks into separate streams that never rejoin, then you have a situation that is parallel to the situation with the superfluous Riker. The two branches after the fork are simultaneously separate from each other and continuous all the way back to the source of the flow.
As to the original question, "Would you use it?", I certainly wouldn't go first, because although I generally subscribe to the "I am an emergent phenomenon" perspective I am left unconvinced that the singular phenomenon of Experience could be emergent from only the aspects of our universe that we have been able to measure.
Once the system was tested and used regularly, sure! I'd like to ask people who had been through it what it was like, and if they felt fine then I don't see any reason to fear teleportation any more than I fear sleep.
So if you had a biologically identical twin would you be ambivalent about losing one of the two of you?
No, I would be me, and he would be him. Even if there is some ethereal unknown quantity that somehow is involved with my tangible experience of consciousness, the continuity of the experience is the thing that is important.
If there is no ethereal, then I am purely emergent from the physical, and the oblivion I would pass through as my physical pattern is translated through spacetime is no scarier than that of dreamless sleep or even anesthesia.
If there is an ethereal element to me, then there is the distinct possibility that teleportation would interfere with that. So I wouldn't go first.
Once there are reports from prior teleportees that are all telling me that it felt like this or that, and that they were experiencing reality the same as ever, then I've got to take their word for it the same as I have to take their word for it in the first place.
Even in the case of a mistaken double-output from a teleporter in which one of me was beamed up, but two 100% identical mes get materialized next to each other on the transport pad or whatever, I don't think either would be ambivalent. At this point we're just widely spectating, but (assuming there is no "souls are totally real and being called to two different minds at once is instant insanity" thing going on) as soon as there are two different bodies with different experiences, then both of me would surely feel quite strongly about their personal persistence.
That's making a lot of assumptions, any of which could be wrong.
For one, consciousness as an emergent property doesn't necessitate a continuity of consciousness. Fire is an emergent property of the proper fuel and sufficient heat, but that doesn't mean that every fire is the same fire.
Consciousness could be an emergent property while also being unable to be transferred from vessel to vessel by destroying the body.
Sleep isn't death, it's sleep. If someone destroys your body while you're sleeping, that's a distinctly different state. Just having a break in the narrative you're currently paying attention to isn't equivalent to death unless we make a bunch of further assumptions.
As far as believing people who 'came through' a teleporter, that's a pretty terrible decision, as we'd expect that they have no idea that their predecessor is dead. That's the whole point. We're hand-waving an ambiguity that's literally a matter of living or dying.
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.
Doesn't Star Trek's transporter solution involve converting your atomic structure to Energy, beaming that energy to another place, and reconstitution your body using the same atoms? If so, that's not really dying anymore. Just re-arranging your original atoms.
Isn't it still kind of the same thing though?
Star Trek calls that "matter stream" energy your "pattern". Pattern sounds a lot like Information. Data. Which is very easy to transmit and duplicate. Data can also be lost or corrupted.
So it's as if they convert all your atoms to a file, then FTP your file to somewhere else where the technology turns your pattern back into matter.
"You" can't exist as just data, so at that point you're already dead. I think...
There are episodes where your pattern is stuck in the pattern buffer. You're only information being stored at that point.
Just because they can un-burn you at the end doesn't mean your body isn't destroyed when you leave. Even if the atoms were just re-arranged and not converted to energy, you're still getting pureed and then reconstituted. Hard to argue you're not dead when your brain has been completely disassembled.
Maybe it is dying, but not in the medical sense.
Like, if you're resuscitated using a defibrillator, then by all accounts, your heart stopped for a moment there. Without intervention from a machine that at one point in history didn't exist, tou were indistinguishable from a corpse. So, a teleporter would just be the same but taken to an extremely abstract degree - you are dead, but your body exists in a state and within range from a machine that can resuscitate that body, so no doctor can yet declare you dead.
Let’s put it this way: if you stepped into a teleporter, the last think you’d ever experience is being disassembled. Doesn’t matter if it hurts or whatever. It just goes black. You die. You, YOU, will never see the other side. You won’t be the one to come out; it’s a clone of you.
Even if it is the very same atoms, the very same dendrites and synapses, reassembled perfectly.
Your clone will think it’s you and it will go “oh wow, it DOES work”. It’ll know your mother. It’ll bang your wife. It has your degree in Computer Science or whatever. And it even has all your experiences up to and including the moment the teleporter turned on.
But it’s not you. You blinked out of existence, your experience ended. You ended the self, and a new self was born at the other end, endowed with everything that encapsulated you previously.
Nah, I’m good.
But what if my matter stream gets all mixed with someone else’s matter stream? Gross. What a mess.
Correct. The thought experiment where it's like "ooh but what if it disintegrated you and 3d printed a copy of yo-" like that's not what a fucking teleporter is. You've just made some other science fiction device that I wouldn't use, I'd use the teleporter.
If we're talking exactly like star trek I'm 90% on board with it. Yeah, yeah, so I'm a clone now, big whoop.
You wanna know the 10% that really fucking haunt me?! Mother fucking Tuvix. Everyone you know can turn into a Tuvix situation real fast, that's the real nightmare.
I love Star Trek, but using the transporter as a plot device led to some really bs situations. Tuvix. The time it made everyone children. The time Picard fucked off to be an energy being so they just used last week's pattern to rematerialize him... Thomas Riker... I could keep going.
I mean think about what would need to happen for Tuvix to exist. The computer would somehow have to do some really complex genetics work to create a hybrid species and somehow merge the 2 very different brains into one stable and coherent organism.
An IRL tuvix situation would be a dead blob of body horror on the transporter pad. They'd be like, fuck clean-up on isle 5, data corruption and pull the last good backup. Because keeping literally just the most recent copy would be criminally negligent. Then they'd rematerialize you but it was you from 2 days ago and you get to wonder for the rest of your life what the other version of you did in the 2 days.
Hell yes. Yes please. Please.
We've seen someone's POV going through a transporter. From your own perspective you would just see some glowy shit and appear at your destination. Of course, I would make an army of myself with another me in the transport buffer tweaked to retain the pattern for a long time. But instant transportation is invaluable.
Here's another great video on the transporter problem!
To be
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Ah that’s a nice twist at the end.
If I were afraid to use the teleporter I’d be afraid to go to sleep. And I ain’t going there, so yes I would use the teleporter.
Also PSA for anyone using an iphone: it’s unaware of the word “teleporter” and will autocorrect it to teleported.
As long as it us thoroughly tested and considered safe. I'm not going first.
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If we talking time tested technology that's been around for a couple centuries (i.e. Star Trek), sure.
Brand new tech? No thanks.
Well, if the technology actually existed, it would solve that whole "soul" question.
We would know pretty quickly if we transported humans and they came out the other side as soulless aberrations because their original just got killed.
So yeah, I would 100% use it after it first proved once and for all that the sum of our consciousness really is all the synapses and signals and grey matter in our heads. Because if so then what does it matter if your original matter has been erased and then recreated. Your clone is just as much you as you are you at that point.
How would you know?
Fair question.
I'm assuming that if your soul really is "you" then a soulless clone of you that is identical to you down to every atom, but had no soul, would be bad.
I don't know if that means your soulless clone would just be an instinct driven animal, or maybe just an evil version of you that immediately grows a goatee. I don't know what function your soul actually performs. But at some point, maybe not immediately, a bunch of soulless clones walking around would be noticed.
Maybe? (Or maybe not?)
As far as an outside observer is concerned, the clone is identical to you in every way. But now you're the outside observer, a dead outside observer, while that clone goes on and lives your life.
It's not really about a 'soul', but your first person perspective of being you and not being someone else. Imagine if the teleporter malfunctioned and created the clone without disassembling you. That clone isn't 'you', and disassembling you still wouldn't make the clone you.
If you have no soul and you just exist as matter, then in a horrible transporter accident where your clone and your original still exist, now there are two of you. You are both you. There is no difference if you are both perfect copies of each other. 1=1.
Sounds like a win/win to me, finally a best friend who really gets me.
You wouldn't experience being the clone though. You'd only be one of you, the other person is completely separate.
Hopefully my clone likes me as much as I like me.
You're assuming that souls exist. That may be a mistake.
Spiritualists think they are some timeless deity puppeteering their bodies like marionettes, afraid that using the transporter will cut the strings. More palatable to imagine the fleshbag collapsing on the floor without your control inputs than knowing you are the fleshbag...
Agreed. That's my point. I don't really know if we have a soul. If transporter technology existed and worked as theorized, then it would answer a bunch of questions that have been plaguing humanity.
If everything that I am can be duplicated by making a perfect copy of me atom for atom, then there is nothing to fear from transporter technology.
Souls are useless in any case.
If you're satisfied that a perfect copy of you takes your place after your obliteration, sure.
So you’d commit suicide so that some clone of you with all your memories can have a fun time on Mars?
Absolutely this.
Someone else can be the guinea pig, but if it's been tested and everyone came out fine? Yeah. I'll absolutely take advantage.
Even if the clone is undistinguishable from your old self, that old self has died. "you" has died. You didn't teleport to Mars, you died on Earth.
You're repeating what OP said.
Thing is, the idea that an "old you" has "died" is a modern soul conceit. If "me" is just the combination of meat, electricity, and memories - then for all intents and purposes I was simply taken apart in one place and reassembled in another. Continuity of all three is maintained when I am reassembled on Mars with my body and memories intact. There is no "old" and "new" me - because what you or OP think defines "me" isn't something that dies when the meat stops working briefly.
"Soul conceit" is the right term here. The belief humans can't seem to shake that I am more than just the sum of my parts.
I don't know if I have a soul or if my consciousness is really just electric meat. But it seems that if I am more than the sum of my parts, the soulless me that comes out the other side will just be "my parts" and will be obviously different than the original me.
If we really are just our atoms, and the technology can be trusted to reliably replicate me atom for atom on the other side then there's nothing to be afraid of. The original you hasn't died, it's just ceased to exist. No big deal. The clone of you is also you, so you still exist.
But you could just not disassemble your old body and now you have two. It’s committing suicide to put a clone somewhere else.
But we can "prove" that isn't true because what if you aren't disassembled on the first side? Just copied over. Either you have a sense and control of both bodies at once, or in a real teleport where you are disassembled, you're gone the moment you teleport and the "you" that remains is another different person with exactly your thoughts, feelings, motivations, memories, etc.
There's an underrated Paul Rudd tv show about this: Living With Yourself.
I love how this was said completely unironically.
We're talking about something that only exists in sci-fi stories and you're trying to argue about souls as if one outcome of teleports is clearly more real than another.
Ship of Thesius, though. If it's exactly my thoughts, exactly my feelings, exactly my motivations, my memories, my body ... That's me. There's no other parts that got left out.
But consciousness was interrupted briefly when the transport happened? That happens to me every night - except in the morning I wake up in the same place instead of a different one. For all worthwhile intents and purposes, everything tangible and real that makes a person a person is relocated and the person remains. Getting lost in whether or not "you" "survive" is wasting angst on the existence of a soul.
I don't really agree with this. To me it has nothing to do with souls, it's about continuity of experience.
If I don't get to continue to experience life because I'm dead and some clone with my exact thoughts etc is now me, it's only the rest of the world who experiences that as me continuing to live. But I don't get to.
I think that distinction is artificial.
My continuity of experience is interrupted every night, among others - and I don't worry that my experience as being me is somehow invalid now, or fear sleeping lest a doppelganger take my body overnight and wake up 'as me' the next morning. The idea that this would be different is resting on the notion that there is something other than mere meat and electricity that would be lost when the teleport interrupts consciousness, and I think that assumption is something that needs direct challenge.
I think you would experience life continuing from the moment consciousness resumes in the new location, the exact same as how you experience life 'continuing' when you wake up each day. All the ways that you experience your own consciousness would simply have relocated. Without assuming a soul, there is no subjective distinction between pre/post teleporter any more than there's a distinction between pre/post nap.
Thanks for taking the time to explain to me in such detail. I'm finding this perplexing because to me it's the exact opposite. I was raised non-theist and find 'souls'/non material components completely impossible to believe in. And if l am only those then it isn't me if it gets destroyed.
Consciousness isn't the self. The self is a complex organism that is very much alive and functioning even when it is asleep. If you are in fact a doppelganger you have no way of knowing and neither does the Anomander who died. And that is why I wouldn't risk teleportation.
The arguments of @Zetaphor eksewhere in here describe it better than I can.
Which, conversely, is also why I don't care about teleportation. If I have no idea before and I have no idea after and for all intents and purposes I am still me in the new location ... all the parts that I can engage with, all the parts I care about - they're all coming up fine. I might as well have fallen asleep on a plane, or blacked out after a few too many at the pub. When consciousness returns, I am in a new location.
In that explanation you quoted, I fall firmly into the former camp. I don't think we have special-ness that transcends the meat, but that the consciousness is wholly rooted in it - and so I think that moving the meat from one place to another achieves the result of moving the consciousness from one place to another.
My main difference is that I don't believe a "soul" transported or transplanted - or exists to be lost. The consciousness that is my sense of 'self' is the sum of my meat and my memories, and those are preserved.
Well, the doppelganger at least will have no idea after so it will be the same for it. You having ideas will no longer be a thing, because you will no longer exist.
If it literally involves moving the exact same meat from one place to another with all the exact same molecules, that's different.
But it seems more likely it involves reconstituting/copying someone.
Using the star trek transporter as the example, you actually experience the teleportation process. In one episode, we see the perspective of someone being transported and they go into a white void, briefly, and then appear in the 2nd location. It takes like 8 seconds. We also know that some transporters are faster than others.
I don't believe there's anything special about my current body. Barring teleportation, I fully believe that if it were possible to disassemble a person, but them in a box, ship them across the Pacific Ocean, and then put them back together again, that they'd be the same person.
I don't see how being converted into energy and back represents death.
People experiencing the transport process is due not understanding how copies work. Damn, they don't seem to grasp the idea of a backup.
Seeing as anything that we copy or make backups of now is not self-aware, I don't see what that has to do with anything. If anything, a teleport (as conceived of and described in science fiction, not how it might "actually" work) is more like moving a file from one tree to another. The whole idea of the teleport as a plot device is to create a form of near-instant transportation. I feel like these thought exercises where "what if the teleporter cloned you and killed the original copy" miss that.
Its like, "hmm what if the train from New York to Boston actually brought you to a cloning facility in New Haven, shot you in the head and then replaced you with a lab-grown clone that went on to Boston in your stead" well then it wouldn't be what most people think of when they think of taking the train.
In order for me to be convinced that the common depiction of teleportation is a form of cloning and murder, I would need someone to prove to me that humans have souls in a metaphysical sense - that there's something about us as individuals beyond the sum of our lived experiences and the atoms that make up our bodies.
Sorry, no it's not. When you introduce technobabble related to "buffers" and "caches" where the information is stored temporarily, the working must conform to the way files are handled. Yes, you can handwave whatever you like for narrative purposes, but this discussion is not supposed to have as a valid answer "a wizard did it".
That is ridiculous. Please search the short stories "The phantom of Kansas" by John Varley and "Think like a dinosaur" by James Patrick Kelly to see the implications of this kind of transport. Neither posits the existence of a soul, and the scenario of "the original dies, a copy keeps living" is very clearly shown as the only valid explanation, and how the assumption that the person is the same after the transport (or the cloning, in the first story, but the effect are the same) is merely a legal fiction for convenience.
In any transport there's a copy, and any copy takes a non-zero time and an instant where the copied person must exist in two places at the time. Unless the spacetime is curved and poked and you transit through the hole, there is no other viable model.
The situation and plot of The Phantom of Kansas doesn't seem to have much to do with teleportation though? It doesn't look like Phantom of Kansas features a world with teleportation as a means of transportation, so I'm not sure what relevance it has to the discussion of teleporter technology since no one actually teleports in that story. Also, it makes it clear that there's a break of consciousness between one body to the next, but most people view teleportation as an instant thing that you're aware of the whole time. I accept that the premise in Kansas is similar, but people seem to use it to change their sex and appearance but keep their memory, or use it to restore backups of themselves if they can afford it, not get from point a to point b. When the question of "would you step into a transporter, like the one in Star Trek" is brought up, then it feels like moving the goal posts to bring up all these other examples of things that aren't technically teleporters, or to talk about what a "real" transporter would "have" to do.
The transporter, as shown in Star Trek, and the more generic teleporter, doesn't kill you and create a clone in your place unless something goes wrong. To believe it does says more about what one thinks of the metaphysical and spirituality than it does about science.
That's not the issue.
Your body is copied as a file.
Your mind is a process running in a body created from that file.
When the process stops, you are effectively dead. Another copy of your body runs another process with an identical content. He has your body, but he's not you.
That's absolutely the issue.
This presumes that there is something special in this model that doesn't resume when your mind resumes running in it's new location. Or, in other terms, "a soul". The idea that an identical consciousness in an identical body is "not you" is based wholly on the assumption that "you" is something other than the consciousness.
And your mind, or my mind, are both "processes" that stop regularly already - are you claiming that old you dies each night and a completely new but otherwise identical person lives each morning?
That is ridiculous.
When you kill a process and you re-run a program, even if you saved the full state of the memory elsewhere, you don't say that it's the same process. Is another process with identical content. There's no need of a metaphysical entity. It's another instance.
You're deeply, sorely mistaken. Even in a deep, unconscious state, the mind keeps working, even if the degree of consciousness is different. That we're not 100% certain of what the brain does in those moments doesn't mean that it stops working.
So you do see my point.
People aren't computers, so getting all worked up about how software models instances still isn't a valid modelling for human consciousness.
But this is so hair-splittingly pedantic it's almost doubled back to be incorrect. If you ask 99.999% of the world, they'll be like "yeah I closed outlook and then I opened outlook" - to them, it's still the same program. They're launching the same software again. No one is like "oh well once you quit Skyrim it's all over because even if you reopen it later, it's a new instance and the old one is dead" ... no. That's ridiculous. It's the same program, the same save file, resumed from save at a later date.
Your focus on "Process" instead of "Program" is making the soul argument. The "process" you're arguing for is a soul. Something intangible and irrelevant to the end user, that does get terminated on shutdown, that cannot be restored from save. Consciousness is the software, not the process itself. Memories are the save file. There is nothing in OP's model of teleporting that suggests "process" itself is the sacred portion - when the hardware & software of "Dave" gets paused and resumed flawlessly.
Not at all. Consciousness is interrupted. Unless we're assuming that the "process" itself is sacred - what happens to consciousness is all that matters in either case. If your ability to perceive yourself as a conscious being stops - it doesn't matter to your experience of your own consciousness if the 'process' stopped or went to sleep during the gap.
Sorry, no. But trying to make you understand. You are deeply mistaken, but I'm not interesting in departing with you any longer.
Yeah, there's your problem. You're trying to make me understand it your way and criticizing me for not doing so, instead of trying to persuasively state your own viewpoints standing on their own.
It's an approach that I can imagine would feel frustrating when I already understand your views and am talking about them.
I'm never going to sleep again!
The mind doesn't stop during sleep. We're not fully aware, that's all.
Mine stops. If I were to fall asleep (which I now won't), and someone were to transport my body away, and the mind resumed running at it's new location, the future copy of me would be very confused.
This is how I feel about lab grown meat. I'm sure it's probably fine, but I don't want to be one of the first to try it out. I'll give it a couple of years and see how the first adopters get on lol.
I would actually really like a 4"x4"x1.5" square of perfectly marbled steak cloned from Kobe beef genes in some tray in a lab. No gristle, no bones, perfect consistency in every bite.
Seared in a blazing hot cast iron pan with salt, pepper, butter and lemon.
$8.99 lb. at Publix. I'll take the transporter to get there.
Note to self: check on DJKJuicy in a couple of years before trying this
How would we ever know for sure if the copy was really you or not? What question could we ask that only your objective self would know, but the sum collection of cells would not?
Exactly. The copy would think it's me, and that's nice for it. It would go around thinking the tech was great.
But I wouldn't get to enjoy that because I would be dead.
I'm with old Dr. McCoy from that one TNG episode on this one. Not a chance.
Instantly vaporize so a clone can live? No thanks!
You ever seen The Fly?
No thanks, the plot in wikipedia is horrifying enough to read, I ain't watching that shit.
Absolute classic, both the '53 one and the remake with Jeff Goldblum.
I won't. I take public transportation with friends and teleportation doesn't really have that social aspect.
Imagine you have a device that transmits your brain signals into another body so that you can control 2 bodies at once. Clearly you are one self that is controlling two bodies. Clearly destroying either one of these bodies wouldn't really kill you (so long as your brain is fine) you'd just continue existing in the other body.
Now let's say we copy your brain exactly and put it in the other body, and then a device that synchronizes your memories and experiences. body 1 would act exactly like body 2 in every circumstance. I don't see the difference between the first scenario and the second, you are one self, distributed across 2 brains and 2 bodies. If you killed one of the bodies, no one would die, it would be more akin to losing a limb.
Now let's remove the synchronizer, for the first instant it's identical to scenario 2, but over time the 2 selves would diverge and become separate people.
so as long as we kill off the old self immediately before or at the same time as the new body comes online then I don't see it as a murder machine like you describe.
however, if we have the tech to copy the body perfectly, who is to say we can't improve the body as teleport them, make the new body stronger or disease proof. And if we do that, who's to say we couldn't make small changes to the thoughts or memories, make you more docile or forget injustices. That seems pretty risky to me.
In ST canon they are considered the safest form of travel. So, yeah I'd use them if that was the standard.
Except they have malfunctions all the time and there are several characters who refuse to use transporters.
Yeah, and there are people that refuse to fly because they're afraid of crashes, but still ride motorcycles without wearing helmets. A character refusing to use a transporter just indicates that the person in question isn't reacting rationally. Likewise, irregular malfunctions don't mean that it's not still safer than other means.
"How many Transporter accidents have there been in the last tens years, Reg? Two... three? What about the millions of people who transport every day without a problem" - Geordi - TNG Realm of Fear S6E2
I'm already a clone. Sure, why not.
We are all clones already.
I would hope that people would start finding a way to include them into sports and play.
Thieving would be impossible to stop so it would become the standard.
The world would be held together by mortal gods; what a hootenanny.
Anyone remember that Outer Limits episode about this? They thought the teleporter malfunctioned, but it really just failed to destroy the source "copy" of the girl at the point of origin. Since she also appeared at destination, the station operator had to flush the original out of the airlock.
TLDR- Would totally use it.
I've always had a hard time understanding what's so bad about the person who arrives being a clone, never saw the downside. Yes, I 'd definitely use it. One of the biggest hurdles in my everyday life is the "going there". When I was still working, the one thing I always complained about and what ruined my every morning was having to go there and return after. If I'd had the option to instantly teleport to work, I would have loved every day because I loved my work and I wanted to be there. Now that I'm disabled, I regularly have to cancel stuff like doctor's appointments last minute because my chronic exhaustion is acting up and I physically can't move my body there.
(If teleporting isn't available, I'd settle for a ship's computer core as a PDA)
Because you’d be dead and your clone lives on. Your consciousness ceases to exist, you will not experience anything your clone will experience. Unless they know how to teleport consciousness it will be a copy of you.
Depends on what we define as "consciousness". If it's just what my brain does, it doesn't cease to exist at all because it's rebuild in the clone. If it's a soul, I don't know, that's above my paygrade.
But if the original copy isn’t destroyed, would your consciousness be split across two entities? I think the original would not see and feel what the copy does. Because it’s a twin. Sure it might be an exact copy of the original but it’s still a new and unique brain.
I had this conversation right here earlier. There is no "splitting", it's a copy. Like copying a file to two different harddrives and deleting the file in the "original" path. Neither of them is more real than the other.
The problem with the clone is that the original "you" died in the transporter. Are you assuming your conscious transfers?
I'm assuming it's painless and that my clone would have my memories. That's still "me". "I" am the sum of the structures in my brain and what my brain does with it.
It's "you" for other people, and even for the clone. But it's not "you" for your your present you, this "you" dies (in startrek style teleporter)
But what difference does that make? I wouldn't even notice.
Its the same as dying. If you're that blase about dying then yea- makes no difference.
In death, my consciousness stops. That's not the case here.
It is though. There's a separate consciousness that starts around the same time, but it's separate and a divergence from yours. A copy of your consciousness goes on, but the one you're experiencing stops.
You seem to imply that's because it's a "different" body made of different atoms. The atoms in our bodies are constantly exchanged already, we're constantly recreating our bodies even without transporting. I don't think that's any different.
Your consciousness stops for you in both scenarios. In the teleporter scenario a clone lives out the rest of your life. To everyone around you its as if nothing has changed but for you, specifically, time stopped progressing at the sending-teleporter.
You're right, instant painless death, then no regrets (I'm assuming you - like me - don't believe im afterlife, or souls, as startrek style teleporters are incompatible with those).
But I don't want to cease to exist just yet.
No afterlife, no souls - though I can see how it would be tricky for a believer. But I can't see teleporting as "ceasing to exist", simply because I consider my "self" and my consciousness to be identical to the structures in my brain. There is nothing else but the atoms that have come together in the specific combination to form my body, and those atoms are constantly being replaced by other atoms anyway. When using a transporter, the current combination of atoms is simply recreated at the other end to seamlessly continue its function and processes (assuming perfect copies of course), thus effectively "transporting" my consciousness.
PS: On the afterlife/soul issue, yes it'd be tricky - that's why I assumed you (like me) didn't follow that line of thought.
Assuming a soul inhabits the body would require either that the transporter technology had the hability to convert/rebuild souls - and in Riker's case to CREATE new souls, which would be the highest heresy - or that the souls would have to figure out where the transporter would materialize their body, and through supernatural powers, self-transport instantly there to reposses it. And in Riker's case, one of the bodies would be souless, and having no soul to get ethernal damnation or salvation, this copy would be free from God's blackmailing. I bet the writers didn't think of the consequences of that episode, if conservatives had understood that...
In one episode of startrek ng a glitch ends up creating two copies of Riker (transport is apparently aborted, he's recovered back to the ship, but the transporter on the other side materializes "him" too - bad handshaking in comms do that kind of thing in real life transactions too).
Both believed they were the original (and one believes he was abandoned on the planet).
Same goes for using it as a replicator (if the information can be sent as data, it can also be copied, stored and rematerialized multiple times). The aforementioned episode makes that canon.
Then if you're not dead, who are you after multiple copies are created? If your conscience was effectively transported to the copies, do you now have split personalities? Because each copy will live a different life from this moment on.
Assuming the original ceased to exist, and the other - or others - are copies is more consistent imo, because assuming you "are" the produced being on the other side doesn't work for multiple copies.
I don't know. From my understanding, Thomas Riker is indeed the same person as William - in the very first instance after transporting. After that, their experiences are different and their consciousnesses diverge to form different people. I'm not the same person I was two seconds ago, even without transporting, while sitting motionless in my chair.
Split personalities, btw, would mean two personalities in the same brain, that's not what's happening here.
But if your personality was transported to to two bodies, that is literally splitting a personality, which will diverge from there. Not the same meaning used for the term in real life, but effectively a splitted personality. If you have one somehing and it becomes more than one, it was split.
It's a copied personality. The same brain structures recreated in two identical bodies. Is that an issue?
No issue, I'm not confronting you.
imo we're having an interesting philosophical chat about a completely hypotetical situation, and I don't think there's a right or wrong. That's why I spread some "imo" around.
I just pointed out that if you consider that "you" didn't die because you are still the person on the other side, then when copies are made (something possible in that reality), then "you" become more than one person (split you, or split personality).
It all boils down to what we consider "I", I guess. It seems I consider "I" as a continuum from birth to death, a set of continuous conscience and experiences - if I'm braindead then start from scratch today, I don't consider that individual is "me" anymore; it's just my body, now belonging to another person. The previous "I" died, and even if others see that body as "me", for "dead me" that's not the case.
You on the other hand seem to consider that "you" are what you are at this moment. So the copies (or the single rebuilt if the transporter doesn't glitch) are not "you" anyway, because as you said, you are not the same person as a second ago, sitting in your couch. So dying here and being rebuilt there makes no difference.
Just different takes on "self" conscience.
A clone would not be you. From your point of view you are simply killed by the teleporter, your consciousness isn't teleported, it is copied just like your body.
If it's a tesseract, yes, but that's not really teleportation. Otherwise, absolutely not.
I don't understand everybody worrying about whether their consciousness moves with us. We literally don't even know what it is, we have no provable theory or idea of what it is. As far as I can tell, your consciousness is something your brain does, not something that exists external to your body, otherwise that's basically believing in spirits.
Okay so in most cases, teleportation is instantaneous. But if you tamper with the disassembler, now can "teleport" yourself to a new location while the old you is still there. Now there's 2 bodies that look like you. So which one is you. Does your consciousness shift into the new body or stay with the old one? Or does your conciousness control both bodies?
Seeing as this is all theoretical then surely the answer is just to invent it so that moves the original you instead of copying it? What is consciousness?
OP said "like in Star Trek" so I assume it would be just like Star Trek.
I see, I don't know much about star trek... I'm more of a Stargate fan
Oh, hell yeah. Plus it's canon that it can heal some diseases.
Now, WRT the continuity of consciousness... hell, I lose that every night, and whenever I get major surgery. Heck, I've transported innumerable times if teleporting a break in continuity of thought plus a change in location. I passed out once from heat stroke and woke up in an infirmary.
Yeah, I'd use it.
Do you consider your brain going in to sleep mode, providing you with filler content that you largely forget, and then waking you back again later to be the same as being vaporised in your original location?
... and recreated, at the atomic level somewhere else? Yes.
Full-body anaethesia is a better example. It isn't sleep; your body is essentially dead, and machines are performing your normally autonomous functions for you.
They both involve a state of unconsciousness, but they are fundamentally different states. If you were under anaesthetic and, whilst under, they liquidised your brain and installed an exact copy of it in its place then you'd be cool with that?
No one would be the wiser and the original brain is gone, so no harm, no foul?
How do you know it doesn't?
I think I would be OK with it. I'm not the same person when I wake up in the morning as when I went to sleep as it is; my brain is certainly different than it was last week, much less dozen years ago.
How do I know it doesn't do what? I'm not sure which part of this comment that refers to.
If automobiles were invented, would you use them instead of horses?
Cars don't rip you apart molecularly, unless you get into a crash. A teleporter will rip you apart every time. This isn't a discussion of the "safety" of teleporters, it's a discussion of what consciousness is.
In the perfect utopia that is Star Trek and everyone uses them without worrying about it then I'm definitely going to say it's fine.