My only counterpoint to the “suicide booth” argument is that people have some semblance of consciousness during transport.
It was a TNG episode where we learn that Barkley is able to see an energy monster during transport. If he was totally ripped apart and “dead” then I’d expect there to be a blank part of his memory during the moments the body is turned to energy.
Assuming it’s a particle transfer instead of data transmission, what the transporter does is disassemble things at an atomic scale. But it doesn’t disperse you, that’s what the confinement beam is for.
(This is grizzly, but hear me out.) there’s a 2cm hole. You obviously can’t fit through. But if you were chopped into 1cm cubes you would. What if that chopping didn’t upset you or cause pain, what if those pieces were held inside a stasis field to prevent them from falling apart or leaking? What if they were put back together perfectly in a matter of seconds. Would your body react like it was chopped into pieces? Would it even understand that that’s what happened? If you chop someone’s head off clean enough and fast enough it takes the brain several seconds to realize it’s not connected to the body anymore.
Transporters take this to the nth degree. It cuts you up into pieces so small that you can pass through solid matter as long as you stay within that (stupid strong) confinement beam. Apparently, if you are carefully disassembled without trauma and those pieces are kept in the general vicinity of each other, you don’t die AND you remain aware. And before your body can declare that something is wrong and react, you’re back in one piece.
Maybe your (carefully spaced apart) brain is confused and thinks you’re dreaming so it doesn’t get upset.
Even when you stay within the conservative rules of how a transporter behaves they are still tremendous hacks on a fundamental level.
The problem with appealing to episode details is that the transporter is presented very differently in different episodes depending on the needs of the story. That’s fine for storytelling, but it means we can’t pin down a fixed set of rules for how transporters work. To ponder philosophical questions we have to invent rules by picking and choosing presentations of the transporter that seem most interesting, and filling in gaps with our imaginations.
Yes, there’s the episode where Barclay is conscious during transport. But there are contradictory presentations where Scotty puts himself in stasis in the ship that crashed on the Dyson’s sphere, and M’Benga putting his daughter in stasis. In those cases neither has memories of time during transport.
There is the episode where Picard uses the transporter to convert himself into an energy being to try to live in a space cloud. The story is the transporter converts matter to energy, and energy in Star Trek is another possible state of living existence. Thus continuity. But there is a contradictory episode of DS9 where crew members’ physical and neural patterns have to be stored in computer memory, not “pure energy”, and we see holosuite character versions of them.
So there’s either no suicide booth problem, or there is. You get to pick depending on which scenario you feel like talking about.
Since both have been depicted, both must be true. There is no need to pick or choose:
You are conscious during transport. “You” are actually transported from A to B. This is true because the series shows it to be true. You can overthink it as much as you want, but transporter technology is normal and well understood in Star Trek, and if it would kill you in any way it would not be considered “the safest mode of transport” in-universe. We are looking at transporter technology the same way a neanderthal would look at an aircraft.
The transporter has an element of technology called a “Heisenberg compensator”. It’s easy to extrapolate that storing a person’s energy pattern into the transport computer is a function of this. The person is still alive, consciously, as energy. But the computer needs a stored reference (or more likely; scanning the in transit energy pattern, store it as data, and then use that data for reassembly) to turn them back into solid matter.
The above is how humans can be stuck as energy eels. Or how Picard can have a gay merry vacation in a cloud of gas.
We can infer that directly transporting from point A to point B is very different from sticking yourself into a pattern buffer, because the series treats it as such. That’s not an inconsistency. Scotty is also the first one to have tried this, as Geordi reacted like nobody has ever tried this before, so there are a lot of unknowns involved (let’s leave NuTrek entirely out of this discussion, as it fucks continuity harder than Enterprise ever did).
Scanning your brain pattern and using it in a hologram is nothing new. This is done a lot in Star Trek, and it doesn’t even involve transporter technology in most instances. The holodeck can create completely accurate personalities based on what is available of those that are still alive, and it’s even how the first EMH was created.
If that were the case, Scotty being stuck in the transporter buffer for 100 years would be a nightmare on his subconscious.there has to be a demarcation point where the consciousness can’t function without the brain structures in place. That’d be the death point.
My only counterpoint to the “suicide booth” argument is that people have some semblance of consciousness during transport.
It was a TNG episode where we learn that Barkley is able to see an energy monster during transport. If he was totally ripped apart and “dead” then I’d expect there to be a blank part of his memory during the moments the body is turned to energy.
Assuming it’s a particle transfer instead of data transmission, what the transporter does is disassemble things at an atomic scale. But it doesn’t disperse you, that’s what the confinement beam is for.
(This is grizzly, but hear me out.) there’s a 2cm hole. You obviously can’t fit through. But if you were chopped into 1cm cubes you would. What if that chopping didn’t upset you or cause pain, what if those pieces were held inside a stasis field to prevent them from falling apart or leaking? What if they were put back together perfectly in a matter of seconds. Would your body react like it was chopped into pieces? Would it even understand that that’s what happened? If you chop someone’s head off clean enough and fast enough it takes the brain several seconds to realize it’s not connected to the body anymore.
Transporters take this to the nth degree. It cuts you up into pieces so small that you can pass through solid matter as long as you stay within that (stupid strong) confinement beam. Apparently, if you are carefully disassembled without trauma and those pieces are kept in the general vicinity of each other, you don’t die AND you remain aware. And before your body can declare that something is wrong and react, you’re back in one piece.
Maybe your (carefully spaced apart) brain is confused and thinks you’re dreaming so it doesn’t get upset.
Even when you stay within the conservative rules of how a transporter behaves they are still tremendous hacks on a fundamental level.
Then there is Scotty who was caught up in a pattern buffer for almost a century crashed on a Dyson sphere.
yeah i bleed that fast. unless the transporter’s got a pink slime generator…
The problem with appealing to episode details is that the transporter is presented very differently in different episodes depending on the needs of the story. That’s fine for storytelling, but it means we can’t pin down a fixed set of rules for how transporters work. To ponder philosophical questions we have to invent rules by picking and choosing presentations of the transporter that seem most interesting, and filling in gaps with our imaginations.
Yes, there’s the episode where Barclay is conscious during transport. But there are contradictory presentations where Scotty puts himself in stasis in the ship that crashed on the Dyson’s sphere, and M’Benga putting his daughter in stasis. In those cases neither has memories of time during transport.
There is the episode where Picard uses the transporter to convert himself into an energy being to try to live in a space cloud. The story is the transporter converts matter to energy, and energy in Star Trek is another possible state of living existence. Thus continuity. But there is a contradictory episode of DS9 where crew members’ physical and neural patterns have to be stored in computer memory, not “pure energy”, and we see holosuite character versions of them.
So there’s either no suicide booth problem, or there is. You get to pick depending on which scenario you feel like talking about.
Since both have been depicted, both must be true. There is no need to pick or choose:
If that were the case, Scotty being stuck in the transporter buffer for 100 years would be a nightmare on his subconscious.there has to be a demarcation point where the consciousness can’t function without the brain structures in place. That’d be the death point.
I suppose it could freeze each piece in time so that for it nothing happens
But then how would Barclay have seen the transporter monsters?
Hmmm good point
they just put the consciousness on a loop until it gets back. it’s what the buffer’s for