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.
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: