Damn, I was going to ship of Theseus you about the cells in your body replacing themselves constantly, but apparently our brain neurons last a lifetime.
Now I don’t think I would ever use a teleporter, either. Shit.
Just believe we’re inside a simulation and transporters won’t matter.
Will they anti matter then?
muscle cells too. the muscle cells you have now are the same cells you had as a kid (not entirely sure how far back it goes). they dont even divide when you gain muscle, the cells just get bigger and absorb nuclei from neighboring cells to support the extra mass. the cool thing is the nuclei stick around even if you let the muscles atrophy, so theyre forever changed by having once been big. thats probably part of why its easier to get back to muscle size youve been at before.
Yun Tianming: am I joke to you?
Yeah but we don’t know if consciousness lives in the meat or in the chemistry.
A distinction between a teleporter and a transporter…
To teleport implies the original matter is instantly moved from one place to another so there would be no destruction and reconstituted copy. A wormhole would seem to be the only realistic way that could be achieved.
A transporter, well that means copy then kill. No one knows if the kill part is painful because noone survives it. I find it funny Riker’s copy is actually the “original” and his lack of death is considered a transporter accident. Yet he is the one treated like the copy…
And all that said, barclay’s experience in the transporter beam is more suggestive of a wormhole style device.
I don’t know why I bothered to write all this out…
Someone needs to. At least you put thought into it.
To transport just means to move, so if anything the term “transporter” implies physically moving people rather than copying. The term “teleport” is the more ambiguous one…
In this case transporter is more ambiguous not because of the literal meaning, but the association with a particular technology.
The are other methods from Star Trek that could potentially be size as well.
Like “hey you actually travel through this other dimension where your physical form is undisturbed and no time passes in this dimension”
Which sounds ok, but “by the way it’s kinda a hell-dimension and your consciousness gets tortured for a distance-relative time there but won’t retain the memories after…”
his lack of death is considered a transporter accident
Must do wonders for his self worth! 😄
They both got converted into energy, Thomas is just as much a copy as Will. Also, apparently your experience is constant across the process, as seen by Barclay grabbing someone out of the matter stream. Presumably someone would notice if it hurt…
Isn’t Tom just another copy? He came out of the pattern buffer the same as Will iirc.
Now I understand why such and such movie about magicians calls the trick “the transported man”.
Well, no, “transporter” means the first one, because that’s how they’re explained to work where they’re called transporters.
A transporter is just Jason Statham in a suit. SCNR
My grandma won’t drive on the interstate. These are the same.
My mom wouldn’t drive on the freeway because she lacked confidence. It was too fast for her. She was fine riding with dad driving, though.
Everyone always focuses on the Ship of Theseus or the existential parts of this, but the societal impacts would be crazy.
Millions of people teleporting to the most beautiful places on earth and wrecking them, highways and boring parts of cities abandoned, mass death of people teleporting into a crush crowd at Mecca, landmarks toppled under the weight of teleporting tourists and bosses teleporting into your house for a “work from home” meeting, weapons and bombs being teleported into war zones…
Things would eventually find a new normal and teleporting food and resources around would remove the need for ships and trucks, you could explore the world much more easily and there would be lots of science to do in hard to reach places, marine biologists would have a field day exploring the deep ocean, doctors could teleport cancer cells out of patients, space agencies teleport probes, bases and astronauts to the moon and around the solar system…
Like it would be such a huge upheaval with so many implications. It’s interesting that people really fixate on the “would I die though? What does dying even mean if I’m still around?” part, even though I think that’s maybe the least interesting thing. I guess it taps into a very primal survival instinct?
Can I just teleport the poop out of my colon and the piss out of my balls, so I don’t have to get up to go to the bathroom?
Where are you storing your piss again?
Piss is stored in the balls
When you’re a little older you’ll learn about what actually comes from the balls.
Yeah it’s piss
Or you could eat whatever you want and then teleport it out of you. No more fatties – unless they like that shit.
But that would enable bioterrorism, where you teleport your waste into the body of someone you want to kill. We would all have to wear tinfoil suits.
There are a couple old sci fi stories that feature “time tourism”, where they have to stop sending people to popular events like the crucifixion of Jesus because they’re getting overcrowded. Robert Silverberg’s novel Up the Line and Garry Kilworth’s Let’s Go to Golgotha! In one of them the time travelers vastly outnumber the locals, and swing the vote to release one of the thieves instead of Jesus, because that’s what the travelers think they’re supposed to do.
There’s a book where people have figured out teleportation so they have to hide women to prevent kidnappings.
Warhammer 40k: Can I interest you in a trip through literal hell?
Also: what kind of immortality would you like?
I’d use a teleporter with no hesitation. What’s important is my memories and sense of self, not the actual meat it’s in. I could find out I’m a copy of myself right now and not be bothered.
Yeah but once you step in the teleporter you stop being. The copy is only useful for other people to keep interacting with your clone, but the actual you is dead.
So what? There would be persistent awareness. The new me would remember everything up to the old me’s death and keep living. I’m fine with that.
As far as you know. You wouldn’t know what they modified.
Id be more fine with not remembering but to each their own
If you don’t mind there’s no problem, of course, but quite a few people want to keep living. If you told a terminally ill person “so you’ll die, but don’t worry cause we can clone you and tell everybody you got better” I think “oh well then no problem” wouldn’t be a universal answer.
Would you be cool going into the execution chamber and getting shot to transport yourself? Would the memory of the death make a difference, or the ability to visit your previous remains? What happens if there is an accident and the new you wakes up, but the execution chamber fails and the old you is still alive?
A man cannot step into the same river twice
There’s no “actual” you. Your body creates a sense of an “I”. If you copy that body including the brain, the copy will have the same. You wouldn’t say that the copy’s sense of smell is somehow different, so why make a distinction for the sense of self?
Because I don’t really care about what the copy can do and think, because I’ll be dead. My self disappears, even if someone else has a copy of it.
What makes you think that “your self” exists as anything else but an emergent property of your brain existing?
You’re just describing a feeling that we all share, but there’s no indication that it’s more than that. Check out my writings about this topic (link to a scientific book coming to the same conclusion at the end)
What happens to “you” several years from now when every cell in your body has been replaced by mitosis?
It’s a “I think therefore I am” kind of thing. I know I’m the same person I was five years ago, just with some new memories, and some memories have faded. But I am still the same person.
I don’t know whether you are the same person you were five years ago.
The show “Earth 2” in the 90s had an interesting concept in the backstory where not every human had a soul, and they made a device that could detect whether people had souls. I sometimes wonder if that’s the case, not everyone is actually a sentient being and just a biological machine.
Of course there’s no way to know, so we have to assume that if someone is a human, they are sentient. Same logic as the TNG episode “Measure of a Man”, but it applies to humans just as it does to robots.
I think this idea and confidence hold extremely true until you think about Elon Musk.
I have no idea what you mean lol
His machine would not work very well.
Actually, now that I think about it, it’s far worse than that. If a company has a teleporter that can build a copy of you, they can also build an almost-copy of you. Say, a copy that is less rebellious. More obedient.
Yeah, the idea’s cool in fiction, but in reality I would never touch a machine like this. I will walk my ass over in analogue.
I’m a biologist. Perfectly recording something is very very far removed from understanding something enough to make targeted modifications.
Specific changes, maybe. But broad ones? “Uehhh, make the amygdala smaller. Squash it. … Well, find a mapping of a guy with a smaller one, then. Do like a copy paste.”
All I’m saying is they would try, and trying is enough for me to nope the fuck out of all of it.
I was thinking about IPoAC the other day and had a horrifying realisation of it’s implications: teleporting someone will involve moving enough data to reconstitute an identical human being from the sending to the recieving teleporter, and assuming storage technology grows in a similar way, there will be a point where it’s faster to be downloaded to a drive, strapped to a pigeon, and flown to your destination for reconstitution than it will be to wait for the data to transfer over.
You are somehow assuming
- the amount of data to reconstitute an identical human being would increase in meaningful quantities over time
- transfer bandwidths are not also growing to the point where finite amounts of data are transmitted between two points faster than a pidgeon can fly
Did you confuse this with the scenario of average bandwidth?
No, the assumptions are that it would be a static but massive amount of data and that transfer bandwidths grow slower than can keep up with storage volume, which is why there would be a point rather than multiple ones. At some point the bandwidth would outgrow the data and forever more be faster at the task than IPoAC.
You phrased that weirdly then. As if that point would be in the future, with an initial phase of transfer by radio.
Btw, that “IPoAC” could then easily be replaced by putting a human on a plane :p
It would be in the future, we haven’t invented the means to either scan or reconstitute a human yet.
And sure, but we’re talking about IPoAC, not sensible things.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:
In the TNG episode Lonely Among Us Captain Picard gets taken over by an alien energy being. It hijacks his body and he teleports himself into a cloud of dispersed particles in a nebula. They spend more than an hour trying to recover him, and are about to give up, when Troi senses his consciousness, and they are able to reconstitute him through the transporter. This, and other mentions of “mental energy” in the show indicate that there is a canonical, scientific proof of the existence of the soul independent from the body, and that it can be transported without damage.
Anything more involved than that gets into philosophical debates about whether or not you die every time you go to sleep, and is about as useful a conversation as whether or not you can “know” if you are or aren’t a brain in a jar.
This, and other mentions of “mental energy” in the show indicate that there is a canonical, scientific proof of the existence of the soul independent from the body, and that it can be transported without damage.
So what about the Riker duplicate? Which one is soulless? Or is the soul also copyable?
Thomas Riker isn’t a transporter duplicate, he’s a kidnap victim from a parallel dimension.
Thomas Riker supposedly proved that the transporter can be used to duplicate sentient living beings. So why aren’t there mass-produced transporter duplicates? There are plenty of unscrupulous powers that would love to exploit this existential loophole and create huge armies of Jem Hadar or some such. They would have no ethical limitations on making such things, and broadly speaking if a scientific / engineering problem CAN be solved then it WILL be solved, and doubly more so when someone proves that it definitely CAN be solved.
Because the theory of his creation is wrong. He wasn’t duplicated by the interference field, his transport beam was filtered through a parallel dimension and back, and captured Thomas from his home dimension and dropped him in ours. Thanks to the Mirror Universe, we know that transporter fuckery can cause trans-dimensional transporting. When they discovered Thomas, they got the interpretation of the phenomenon wrong, and set everyone on a drastically wrong path of research. His duplication hasn’t been duplicated, because he was never duplicated to begin with.
If your “soul” or “mental energy” is basically your brain programming, I would say it is copyable.
Also a valid theory, and less complicated than the parallel universe kidnap victim theory.
Yeah, but it doesn’t explain why less scrupulous factions don’t just copy their most valuable biological assets. Best captains, strongest warriors. Most cunning spies.
I mean… if there were 25,000 of me around, we definitely wouldn’t be following someone else’s orders to die in their war. I imagine that if you copy a person too many times, they tend to stop taking directions as well. Like, if a person can’t unionize with themself, then I don’t know how to help them.
jem hadar maybe not, but even they have a limit, and once they thought they were no longer dependent on ketracel white, they reached it really quickly.
So I guess the answer is to get your clone army hooked
What if you copied them without their knowing? Like, you have an operative heading out on a secret mission. Undisclosed location. Then, just save them in the buffer. Bring them out whenever you need, like the Winter Soldier. You could even have concurrent missions going. Then, just delete them or store their patterns again when the mission is complete.
Well, fuck
Isn’t that the plot of Gemini Man? And The 6th Day? And Blade Runner?
Star Trek teleporter: fax machine / shredder combination (remember that time the shredder bit malfunctioned and we got double Riker…?)
Wormhole: just a weird long gateway (with a chance of spaghettification). No problems there unless it somehow takes you through some sort of hell dimension or something.
Stargate: somehow both, because let’s be frank, the Ancients were kind of dicks. (Also, didn’t actually need the whole buffer thing, that one Orlin built in Carter’s basement with a box of scraps was completely analog, no computer bits, and it worked just fine until it didn’t.)
It’s not like that Riker episode was taken lightly. But, you would think that an event like that would have led to a lot more soul searching. For example, occasionally there were religious people in Star Trek – what does this say about transporters and souls?
From what I remember, they spent a lot more time on the mechanics of a dude getting duplicated: the bureaucracy of it (his rank, etc.) and how it affected his relationships with Troi etc.
But, no talk of how every time someone is transported the original body is killed? No talk about how this might be a means of creating an army of clones?
Same deal with people being stored for a long time in the pattern buffer. Does this mean you can create backups of people so that if they die they can simply be beamed from that data?
Schlock Mercenary (webcomic) had a couple of good takes on this concept. The “wormgates” in SM were more like teleporters, in that they disintegrated you, reduced you to data, and recreated you on the other side. As a side effect, the Gatekeepers could make copies of you in transit, which is how they kept their galactic dominance intact, by interrogating and shredding gate-clones. Arguably, they murdered trillions of sapients with their gates.
In-universe, it’s impossible to generate big wormholes, but the F’Sherl’Ganni “faked” it and everyone just kind of assumed there was some weird physics they’d figured out that nobody else knew.
The Teraport, in SM (or “tear-apart” as it was sometimes called derisively) at least had some continuity, by porting you through billions of microscopic wormholes. Whether that kills you or not, well, that’s between you and Carl.
The “wormgates” in SM were more like teleporters, in that they disintegrated you, reduced you to data, and recreated you on the other side.
That’s exactly how stargates work in the Stargate series (except for the bit where they could work like normal wormholes, but they’ve got a scanner/shredder/maker mechanism stuck in front of the wormhole for no apparent reason).
I don’t think they ever duplicated anyone (with a stargate), but Teal’c('s data) once got stuck in the buffer. Technically nothing would prevent the gate from duplicating travelers, as long as it had enough energy and it could be prevented from flushing the buffer.
remember that time the shredder bit malfunctioned and we got double Riker…
I member!
Was interesting to see people try to explain to him why he was left behind…
The ship of thesis is “the ship of thesis” because it is the ship that thesis is using. He could hop off a trireme and on to a “boston whaler” and it would be the ship of thesis.
Edit: you must live with me spelling sin. I will not alter time and reality to correct that which is.
How can you spell trireme correctly, but not Theseus
Did you refer some meme I never heard of, of is that really how you thought “Theseus” was spelled?
I have a little voice in my head that says words and I guess how they are spelled based only on my phonix education in elementary school and my vaguely western New England/ upstate New York accent.
But have you like… Never read the name before?
shakes head in polyglot disbelief
I may have, but, it was stored as a phonetic sound with in my mind. I could try and transliterate it in to the couple other languages I am familiar with the phonetics of, but I suspect the same error would occur.
interesting how differently we people store information…
You ever read “Blind sight” by Peter Watts?
Really interesting hard sci-fi book about minds.
Not yet. Noted.
Quick question: Do you pronounce it as “gif” or “gif?”
Yes
The universe is a hologram, and our physical brain is just an antenna tuned to the higher dimension of consciousness. Your consciousness exists separately to your body, so if the transporter builds an exact copy of your body (and brain) you will just tune back in to your same consciousness when you’re done transporting.
What drugs aren’t you on? And can I come along?
Dmt probably, and youll have to ask the entities in the waiting room for that
No drugs- just look into holographic universe
Yeah, it’s what’s known as a conspiracy theory with zero evidence
What if the transporter makes an exact copy without destroying the original?
Decoherence swiftly followed by complete cognitive collapse.
Interesting concept. There could be a sci fi story about the brains of two intelligent creatures on vastly distant planets whose brains happen to have the exact same tuning and are attached to the same consciousness, with full awareness of both lives. How they cope with this would be fascinating. On Earth they would probably be considered mentally ill. Or maybe the story is that this is fairly common and is what’s really going on behind a lot of people’s mental problems.
Well, Vulcans canonically have souls. Maybe everyone does?
Nope, that’s just the Vulcans. Q thought it would be funny to give a species who focuses on logic something so illogical.
This happens now to you every night. Your stream of consciousness ends forever and a new one is created upon waking.
Pleasant dreams
So the real dilemma here is if you believe in a spirit or after life. Essentially you wouldnt ever get where you were going. But you would.
Honestly, who’s to say that somewhere in the infinity between every second consciousness doesnt jump from one location to another breaking the continuation of persistent matter.
I used to think like that, but I have my doubts. Doesn’t “Realm of Fear” show that you are conscious during the transfer process? So it’s kinda like growing new brain synapses and starting to be conscious through them instead of old ones?
