I remember Noam Chomsky mentioning this when talking to his kids or grandkids when talking about psychic continuity. I believe the question was surrounding what would happen if you weren’t “teleported”, but instead you remained on the ship as well as the remote location.
Let’s say you’re given two ways to travel faster than light:
Star Trek Teleporter/Matter Reassembler
And
Shuttle through the Wormhole to the Gamma Quadrant
Which would you prefer and why?
the wormhole seems safer, since its the prophets artificial wormhole and its stable, made more stable later in the series, not so for other wormholes, they seem to have the same dangers as random transporter malfunctions . The transporter seems fickle , numerous incidents where it had cloned, killed, merged 2 people into one, depending on the plot of the episode, or it cant transport fast enough when someone is shooting a disruptor weapon at you, ends up killing the person, or the transporter picks up some wierd pathogen/lifeforms. plus the wormhole doesnt require energy to use, so no problems activating it.
honorable mentions, is other than the ICONIAN gateways which is probably the best ftl type of instananeous rift travel, subspace catapults, or even the caretakers intergalatic ftl dimensional rift generator/teleporter, other forms of transporters/rift/interdimensional teleporters are pretty complicated and somewhat dangerous.
Send a postcard. I’ll keep my ass on the couch at home.
Y’all thought Picard’a brother was the bad guy.
Man just wanted to live and drink wine. C’est la vida loca
For book explorations on this theme see :
and
Though the latter doesn’t focus on it as much as the former.
Mhm. US centric 3.6. I will skip the first. Have listened to and enjoyed Bobiverse. :)
It’s less US centric than it is catered to US sensibilities of narrative, but it’s a valid criticism.
The reason i mentioned it is because it deals with the exact situation outlined in the original post.
Who the hell are any of us?
You. Me. Us.
My favorite take on this question comes from Existential Comics
i love that one. sometimes it’s a giggle, sometimes it’s a gutpunch, always worth reading.
Oof.
Damn, that’s really good.
That’s a solid one
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.
What if they were put back together perfectly in a matter of seconds. Would your body react like it was chopped into pieces?
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:
- 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.
how Picard can have a gay merry vacation
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
Star Trek science has always been for non scientists. if you could move a pattern and save a pattern, then everyone would backup to the last healthy copy of themselves.
there is ethics about body modification and especially about enhancing your self artificially, it’s seen as a dead end because people who are artificially “perfected” end up being stagnant and pointless. experiencing aging and illness is a part of ethical behavior, or is ultimately preferable to the alternative.
But they do. On several occasions a ship’s doctor has managed to completely restore a mutated crewmate back to how they were before based on data stored in the medical computers. This is only possible if the medical computer contains a full biological backup, in the form of data.
Episodes like Threshold and that one where the Enterprise crew turn into children come to mind. The latter actually involves transporters.
Episodes like Threshold and that one where the Enterprise crew turn into children come to mind. The latter actually involves transporters.
They don’t usually revert the crew using the backup data, though. They just program it to make changes to their bodies, like removing things. It wouldn’t be any stranger than removing an alien pathogen.
The backup data, I think was only used for Pulaski when she got the ageing disease (where it might have been a reference pattern to correct errors, and they had to actually compare with a known good genome), and for Tuvix.
We do also know that a bad transport can’t just be retried either. The Motion Picture had a transport go wrong, and Starbase One couldn’t just restart the transport with backup data, or repair what they got back. Similarly, Scotty couldn’t just load up Franklin’s backup from the Jenolan’s computers and transport him in either.
Failed transports generally seem to stem from not having quality data to reconstruct with. Not getting a good enough sensor lock, damage to the buffer corrupting the data, etc.
The entire point of a backup is to overwrite and replace bad data, though. If a backup was kept, it would logically follow that it would be possible to overwrite the damaged parts of the pattern, since we know that transports can succeed even if a portion if the pattern is lost.
Geordi specigically brings up it being impossible to materialise Franklin because his pattern had degraded too much, not that it was degraded at all, and would suggest that there’s a threshold before repairs are no longer possible.
Not always they use the healthy backup. Check out dr. M’Benga’s daughter.
As previously stated, I’m leaving NuTrek out of this discussion entirely as NuTrek doesn’t care about continuity in the slightest.
I’d also lose all my memories since the backup. With those memories goes the way I make decisions. Not the most desirable way of maintaining youth and health. Kirk made that point in ST:V:
"Damn it, Bones, you’re a doctor. You know that pain and guilt can’t be taken away with a wave of a magic wand. They’re the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves.
I don’t want my pain taken away!
I need my pain!"
But you could still save a copy of yourself each morning and then if you die, recreate your last save point, no? Then you only lose a day.
Maybe a yearly save point too incase theres any long term thing you don’t catch fast enough like cancer…
What if my pain made me a worse version of myself?
The you are a worse version of yourself.
What if my pain made me a worse version of myself?
Then we would restore from backup, right?
Star Trek can’t decide whether it wants to be hand-wavey, “whatever moves the plot along” science or super-serious explained-in-detail science and ends up being the worst of both worlds.
FWIW, you’ve made this, in a thread about scifi transience:
Star Trek… ends up being the worst…
Just sayin’.
They make consciousness transfer via transporter canon in the episode where Picard’s consciousness gets lost in a gas cloud for part of the episode due to a transporter accident. Thomas Riker is a replicated clone with a new consciousness created by a freak accident.
It’s not like the concept of a soul isn’t canonically a thing in Star Trek. It’s outside the realm of the federations science, but clearly still a thing the enterprise encounters on multiple occasions.
The dark mountain…
Why is he always smiling?!
Transporters ar le weird. The way Dr. M’Benga keeps people in the transport buffer until there is a cure for their disease (Rukiya) or until medical facilities are no longer overrun (Battle of J’Gal) is presented as a hack. How is it not standard procedure?
Also he has to materialize them from time to time because their pattern degrades. So is it not a digital image of sorts? How can it degrade?
What would happen to the people if the buffer were to lose power or malfunction in any way? Even a small risk of anything adverse plus the degradation while being stored would make this not acceptable from medical viewpoint.
but really though, they have time stopper technology for people with incurable diseases. that’s absolutely something that people would take a risk on in the face of certain death. put up a few redundant fusion reactors and battery backups and people would take up the offer.
I have to wonder why the pattern must be lost in the process of materialization. I’m not saying they should keep them forever, but if they can just not delete the patterns when sending people on a dangerous away mission, they’d leave open the option of restoring them to a back up state if they get killed (or worse).
Of course, while that would raise a lot of questions to be explored in a single episode, it would lower stakes and fundamentally changes the stories they can tell, so I’m not surprised they writers don’t do it.
The pattern is clearly meant to be more than just data too, because they have used previous transporter logs when they need a healthy snapshot to compare to a crewmate who is ill. It seems to be some kind of superstitious energy reserve that is that person, and no you can’t just siphon some juice out of the reactor and use previous scan data for reasons that are generally presented as technical ones, but could really only logically be ethical ones.
I can imagine the Klingons having a kind of special forces unit where they do copies like this and if the copy makes it back, the two versions fight to the death to see who the “real” one is.
No DNA fixes either, I guess to not break the universe, but still wtf.
I’d imagine the eugenics wars have something to do with why they don’t except in extenuating circumstances.
There are loads of examples where they edit the image before rematerializing. Like removing an illness or fixing age or splitting Tuvix.
Kinda implies it’s an analogue process. More like an AM radio than a digital image.
I’d guess that’s not exactly in the manual. And given the inherent danger and any legality issues, that’s something people don’t often share if they figure out how to do it.
I’m an identical twin none of this scares me. Ive been a duplicate my entire life.
The scary part isn’t being a duplicate, it’s more like if someone killed you and then said “but you have a twin so it’s fine”
Do you have that intoxicating ditto scent?
(Oof, there’s a good chance you’re too young to remember that smell, whereas I’m so old I not only huffed it as a child, I ran off dittos for my pupils as an adult)
Edit for the youths: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MdOjjZK0INM
so you were the kid huffing the mimeo too huh
Until the end I thought you were talking about a Pokémon reference I didn’t get, and I’m old enough that Pokémon wasn’t a thing until I was an adult.
Is there a way to make text indigo on Lemmy? 🤔
My question is, what if say, Wolverine went through it.
Would his healing factor overcome the molecule destruction and leave a copy?
Oo nice!
Here’s what I don’t get.
Okay. All that is true. Yet they clearly still retain a certain sense of self. The same memories, experiences, personalities and such.
Remember reading about a guy who cloned several generations of cats, all the same stock. Each cat was clearly unique.
Maybe the distinction is that the experiences are basically the same going though it.
In any case. Why can’t they keep generic information on hand and and clone up a fresh body and plant the bits relevant to memory and experience and stuff?
Cloning is very different though. In cloning you aren’t exactly copying the neurons and their connections. That means the cloned cat will learn different things, be different, just from that very fact. All it takes is one or two small daily differences in routine as the kitten grows and bam, different personality.
It’s the classic struggle of how much is nature (genetics) and how much is nurture.
With teleportation the neutral pathways are copied. It becomes more of a question of what makes you “you”. Is there some spirit that gets left behind? Is it the memories that do get copied? Is it merely enough that you believe you’re you?
The issue is with the conscience and the soul. Essentially the question is: “If your whole body is taken apart atom by atom, does the soul get taken along with it?”
In this case, the soul can just mean ‘you’. The ‘you’ that is seeing through your eyes right now, and is giving you the current experience you are now experiencing. To give an easier example, let’s say you are copied exactly four feet to your right. Your copy will look exactly like you, have all your memories, yadda yadda yadda. It seems pretty obvious that ‘you’ won’t all of a sudden be seeing through your copy’s eyes, no? If you get vaporised, then, your conscience is not going to just teleport into your clone, right? At least there’s nothing to suggest that would happen.
Teleportation is just a fancy version of this in a different order. You are vaporised first, then your atoms are moved real fast to the new location, then your copy uses those atoms. There’s zero reason to think that the ‘you’ which was vaporised is ever coming back. Once it’s gone, it’s gone, or at least that’s the idea.
Whether you believe in the spiritual concept of a soul, or that your experience of the world is just a specific instance of electrical charges in some fancy meat, both seem to suggest that once the anima departs, it will never return. A new anima must instead be made.
Except, in your final statement that’s kinda false? The “Anima” is just the electrical signals of the meat suit. That’s it, that’s the “you”. There is 0 evidence that’s ever been produced of any kind that there is any existence of a soul or spirit beyond “trust me bro.”
In this case you have 2 exact copies of “you” and milliseconds later those two copies diverge as new neurons are formed. As soon as they start forming their own experience at that point each one is different, their own “me” (from their points of view). No need to make up some higher level of meaning such as a soul.
We are all just brains riding around in an electrical meat suit, listening to chemical signals from the bacteria in our guts and some how finding meaning and purpose in an uncaring universe. That’s a helluva a lot more amazing and meaningful then a cosmic space daddy giving us “us”
I’ve been trying to be faith-agnostic about it, as in the signals in your brain, some weird angel possession a meat mech, whatever. There is a clear phenomena where ‘you’ come into existance and get to look through your eyes. ‘You’ get to experience the world through these signals, and the full explanation of how that becomes a first person perspective observing the world is still not cleanly explained. That’s the anima, the soul, ‘you’.
Teleportation both, destroys your body completely and so when the copy gets made on the other side it’s not going to be the same you even if you use all the same atoms, and only interacts with the physical world so no spiritual soul would be brought along with it.
Basically, you will go into the teleporter, they’ll fire it up, and then you’ll stop being able to see, think, feel, or do anything relating to existence because you stopped existing. A new anima will be created when the copy of your physiology is constructed on the other end. ‘You’ never come back.
You say there is zero evidence, but there are, just use introspection, you are you. Cogito ergo sum.
Make 2 “copies” it’s obvioys they aren not both you. Maybe neither.
I’ll walk 😁
Cogito ergo sum. Latin for the internal “trust me bro”
They are each themselves perfectly “you” until the first neuron forms independently.
There isn’t some nebulous soul they are sharing, no “I have a soul and those two don’t”.
They are all the same “Chemical impulse”machines until their split experience causes different neurons to form.
Well let’s turn the table, you can’t prove the opposite either.
There’s no evidence that continuous consciousness isn’t an illusion due to memory being good enough.
Sure, and if ot is so, then teleport is ok. But if it isn’t, which can’t be disproven, teleport is nono.
You can’t prove a negative. But we know how neurons work -
What does it matter if there’s new “anima”. I am me. It doesn’t matter if it’s my original body or another body. It’s whatever is my current frame of reference for the corresponding meat bag that I inhabit.
I really don’t understand the whole “well I died, and this isn’t me”… are you conscious? Lucid? Retain your memories? Then what does it matter?
“Well what if the original is still around or there are two copies?” Again, it doesn’t matter, because at that point they are two physically distinct entities. You only inhabit one of them and the moment you start experiencing different stimuli, you’re two separate people. Granted at that point there are some legal and logistical issues, but it’s not a metaphysical one.
You don’t seem to get my point. We’re talking about the instance of you reading this comment right now. As in ‘you’. That’s the anima.
If that anima is destroyed you cease to exist, because you are that anima. The reassembled you will not be ‘you’, because ‘you’ were destroyed when you were vaporized. You’re not just gonna come back from that. So whether that anima is obliterated or not should matter to you.
Your ability to observe the world is based on the current instance of your whole self in its current configuration, and if that configuration is completely obliterated, you’re gone. It doesn’t matter if they make a copy of you after - even with the same atoms.
Then by that logic, you die every time you lose consciousness or go to sleep. If I’m in one body, lose consciousness and awaken in another body, it’s really no different because I’m still me.
It doesn’t matter if it’s the same atoms or not, I am me.
Maybe you do, and your existence only lasts a day, and you’re just oblivious that you’ll disappear when you lay down tonight. Or maybe we can acknowledge that you never fully lose all brain activity when asleep and that that matters.
You are a current instance of you only, held together by temperal and spacial coherence. If either of those then you cease to exist. Ergo, teleportation and time travel both kill you.
I understand your view, I just think i fundamentally disagree with what makes “you” “you”. Good thought problem to chat about
It’s one of my favorites to argue on.
The transporter only works due to a magic box called the Heisenberg Compensator. It does some kind of end run around the fact that you can’t precisely know both the position and momentum of a particle. The question of “how does it work?” is answered with “very well, thank you”.
Anyway, neurons are known to rely on quantum mechanics for part of their signalling. You do have to copy them very exactly or you won’t have the same person on the other side. The Heisenberg Compensator seems to be a tech that only works with transporters and nothing else. Whatever magic is happening inside there, you wouldn’t be able to use it to copy a neural pattern, store it away for an extended time, and stick it in another body.
Except when it happens, like in strange new world, or the next generation.
They store living beings for extended periods in the pattern buffer.
In Strange new worlds it was a hyper advanced thing, in TNG it was Scotty.
The cat thing is basically the difference between reinstalling the same application on a different computer vs doing a RAM dump save state and moving all the data to another computer and running it there.
If you duplicate all the existing neural pathways, they behave the same even if it’s a copy. If you allow new pathways to form from the same exact genetic codebase, it still ends up slightly different due to random chance and the experience of the copy compared to the experience of the original.
Transporters are save state backups. Even if it exclusively rebuilt you from different molecules, everything would still behave the same as the original would have. Ergo, Thomas Riker, who is exactly the same (memories, preferences, desires, etc.) up until the transporter accident - where the vastly different experiences resulted in vastly different personal growth.
Your question pretty much answers the other. If they were destroying and making a copy at the destination, then there could be 20 Piccards, or they could always bring the dead right back to life at any age they’d want. They could just re-maie a person any time.
Since that never happens, it means they must be converting them into energy or something like that, and then reassembling, and not making a copy
My favourite take on this (and my introductory to the transporter problem)
By the Law of Theseus, does it matter?
It’s less Theseus and more Humpty Dumpty.
By Grabthar’s Hammer, by the Suns of Warvan
By the beard of Zeus!
Great Knights of Columbus!
Sweet llamas of the Bahamas!
Sweet guinea pig of Winnipeg!
It’s barbados slim!
By Jaal’s infected arsehole!
Thomas Riker wasn’t the one at the destination, so he’s not the original.
Gotem.
Thomas Riker is: …The Prestige!
💨🫲🏻🧔🏻♂️ 🫱🏻💨
