Source Page. Credit is to SMBC-Comics and even more credit to @aperson@beehaw.org who noticed it was missing and found the credit in this comment. Sorry about that and thanks, you’re awesome aperson <3
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I’m taking shuttlecrafts.
Star Trek The Motion Picture’s transporter accident gave me nightmares.
Galaxy Quest’s transporter accident made me laugh so hard I almost pissed myself.
Anything that ever includes Galaxy Quest is an immediate win from me. Doesn’t help I’ve seen the movie so many times (it’s a movie version of my weighted blanket) that I can vividly hear that ‘exploded’ line in my head.
Fuck you I’ve gotta turn the damn movie on again now.
I like the “Gay” folder lol
Gay just looked a little nicer than “Porn” lol
That makes it 10 times funnier lol
What can I say, I’m a polite degenerate.
I’m a grown ass man who secures his devices and still use private tabs for porn and don’t keep anything in storage.
Stamets by name. Stamets by nature.
FYI your bottom image crashes Jerboa client 100% of the time lol
I’m still floored that Sigourney Weaver was 50 when she played that role. I’ve got 10 years before I hit that mark, and I already look like targ droppings.
She really hasn’t aged either since that role. That woman is stuck permanently at a drop-dead-gorgeous 40.
Wow… I wonder why. Maybe the dimensions are too big or something? You’re not missing anything to be fair. It’s just a screenshot of my dual monitor set up showing your comment and then Galaxy Quest playing on the second monitor.
Yeah it’s weird and never happened before. I wouldn’t worry too much about it.
In my experience, Jerboa crashes Jerboa 100% of the time. Can’t make that app stay open for more than ten seconds. It’s why I use Liftoff on mobile.
By Grabthar’s hammer…what savings.
Alan Rickman played the “proper actor surrounded by scene-stealing hacks” so well in that movie, I wouldn’t be surprised if he wasn’t really acting in those scenes, merely letting his emotions flow.
Enterprise… what we got back didn’t live long… fortunately. The fortunately was always the worst part of the line.
I’m terrified of transporters
You and a significant amount of individuals in Starfleet apparently. I can’t say I blame them too much. After all the shit that’s gone horribly wrong? They have a point.
His head is on… backwards!
Why didn’t anybody tell me my ass was this big?
We ain’t found shit!
Tuvok: “We have been unsuccessful in locating fecal matter.”
Oh shit, I forgot he’s in that! So good.
Or that pig that turned inside out and exploded.
Or that Vulcan science officer that turned inside out.
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You just know there is a software engineer in Starfleet who was repeatedly reminding their superiors that leaving the “safety protocol” feature as a user option would end in disaster.
They probably eventually got word of Picard’s debrief from First Contact too, and subsequently shut up about the matter. Innocents were one thing, the borg another, apparently.
“Fucking holodecks” is redundant.
Choo Choo time.
Old McCoy in his TNG cameo was right.
Youthe infinite molecular clones of you die every time.What a Barclay.
Proudly so, ha
Yup, I’m taking the stairs
From orbit to the planet? That’s at least a dozen flights of stairs.
Geordi: Reg, transporting really is the safest way to travel.
Barclay: Maybe you’re…wait a second. Didn’t it turn you and Ro into fucking ghosts like…2 weeks ago?
consider how often the enterprise threatens to explode, compared with how often they encounter issues with the transporter, and Geordie isn’t exaggerating. he just isn’t telling the whole story.
Tbf Ro thought they were dead, Geordi never accepted that.
Reg can be hyperbolic.
Reg also caught transporter monsters with his bare hands, just to prove everyone he wasn’t that crazy.
It’s funny that when it’s transporter people freak out at this idea, but technically every single person goes to sleep not knowing if the ‘them’ that wakes up was the same as the one that went to sleep.
We could effectively have individual consciousnesses dying each night and new ones picking back up the next morning.
Something to think about as you lie drifting off to sleep tonight.
Well…if that’s true then I have died over 14,000 times so I must be used to it.
G’night
I mean… video recording kind of shoots that theory in the foot, doesn’t it?
How so?
Do you think I’m taking about something related to the entire physical body like Dark City?
No - I mean the continuity of consciousness inside your brain.
That potentially the part of you that IS you, your subjective experience of existing, might in fact die each night never to return and simply be replaced by a different new one spun up with access to the hippocampus and a sense of having lived a whole continuous life, none the wiser to the many past yous that came before and will never be again nor its own impending doom in just a few short hours.
No, I mean if you record daily videos of who you are in your day-to-day, like, talking about what happened and your thoughts and feelings, vlog-style, then you went to sleep and woke up with a completely different consciousness, wouldn’t you know, by looking at the videos, that it was someone else seaking, not the conscious you are today.
Does that make sense. I’m having trouble explaining it well, I think.
This is the concept of external validation of internal processes, which is part of the problem with the inherent solipsism of the question.
There’s no way to externally validate that the you inside is the same.
Just as if you were copied in the teleporter with one destroyed and the other created, your friends and family and videos of you would match the before teleporter and after teleporter versions, even though the old one was dead and the other hadn’t existed.
You just kind of have to just go on belief that the you inside is continuous. There is no way to measure it to validate, as there’s currently no agreed upon measurement of consciousness in neuroscience even.
Then does it even matter? What’s the point of even considering the question if the end result has no detectable difference either way?
Exactly. Duplicating a person and destroying the original or truly transferring every atom from one location to another by teleportation results in the same level of continuity of consciousness as just going to sleep and waking up later.
So why does the cloning version seem so, so much worse?
Because of the difference is that there’s a hard cut in continuity with the teleporter. The body is destroyed. In normal life, our body does get replaced, but the continuity remains equal through that time. With the teleporter, everything gets replaced at once, which is a hard continuity cut.
For this reason, sleep doesn’t affect continuity, just its potency and what can be accessed during sleep. If we turn a microwave off by unplugging it, whatever continuity it has ceases, this is in no way equal to sleeping. The functions, information, and mind are still present and functional.
“Personality drift” while you sleep probably does happen, but in small degrees. You don’t think exactly the same as you did 10 years ago. People have been knocked unconscious and woken up with different personalities, so it’s not like people always wake up with conscious continuity.
Sleep and unconsciousness are more accessible means of exploring these thought experiments than fantasy teleportation devices, but many of the considerations apply. If you’re a strong materialist, then the notion that “consciousness” is special is silly: any body that has your thoughts is “you” and multiple “yous” is fine, they should diverge as each copy has unique experiences.
On the other hand, many people are not materialists at all. Many believe either explicitly in a supernatural soul, or in a more ineffable “higher consciousness” that science has yet to reliably demonstrate. For these people, continuity of consciousness has severe implications.
If a person has a brain injury and wakes up as a totally different person, what happens to their soul? (I’m a materialist, so I dunno. Just pointing out that the question does have meaning to people.)
I guess my question is more directed at those people who are not materialists. To distill it into a philosophical question: why worry about something you cannot know?
The original comic page mentions the sleep thing in the alt text
Great, I needed more existential dread. Thanks!
I gotchu fam. Anytime - happy to help.
Moar
Ok, here’s a fun one:
When people have their corpus callosum split, the part that connects the two brain hemispheres, there’s often different personality traits that will emerge for each hemisphere, such as one being religious and the other atheistic.
So the question is - where do the emergent personality traits come from?
When the brain is connected, do you effectively have psyches that are simply sitting there suppressed waiting to come out? Or is the you right now a mixture of personality aspects located in both sides?
What about extending this to the concept of the soul?
Is it still one soul in the body split into two, such that the one hemisphere could doom the other with its disbelief, or is there now two souls in one body - and if so where did the other one come from?
Are we actually individuals, or just a hodgepodge of different subconscious identities that’s fooled themselves into thinking they are a single mind, just an accident away from being thrust into their own isolated lobes to define themselves anew separate from the others?
And if that split were to happen, which side would the ‘you’ experiencing this moment right now end up on?
I subscribe to the emergent properties theory, that our consciousness is an emergent property, same with our intelligence and the two different personality traits that appear on the brain being split into two hemispheres are on that path.
I do wonder though if being split introduces any differences from being born with a split, as in does being part of a whole create those traits or if those would’ve happened regardless of when the split happened and being whole works like you described with some personality traits suppressing the others.
Easy… Everyone is a mix of personalities acquired from people you spend time with and interact. It’s way more than just 2. Each side might hold a huge chunk of partial information.
When they split, it’s maybe two combination of personalities fighting each other. And each subconscious would create a different individual
But the real you can only be the complete mind where all emerges come from. I’m no expert but sounds like the soul would be a confused one and not a broken one.
This thought has prevented my sleep for years now.
I wake up in the body of someone else with the same residue of Cheetos in my mouth as the other person ate before bed? Seems like a lot of effort
The solution that clears up all of these issues and results in a fully consistent view of the self is the one people like the least. There is no “you” or “me”, the self is an illusion the brain creates to make sense of things.
The Illusionist theory of Consciousness is pretty solidly refuted. The emergent theory of consciousness is vaguely similar, and argued by some to be stronger, others to be weaker, than illusionism. I think it’s the most popular view among physicalist philosophers. For the arguments against emergentism, the most common seems to be the required presupposition of physicalism plus some handwaving to make it work. It’s noted, however, there are a vast number of permutations of the emergentism argument or what emergent mental states actually mean, which each one of those permutations a bit different.
Upon analysis, neither has demonstrated being “a fully consistent view of the self” with any success. Ultimately, both are just unsubstantiated attempts to fill the gaps in our understanding.
That’s about consciousness, which is a much larger claim than the self being an illusion. You can have consciousness without a self, that’s what we call ego death. In theory, a conscious being could exist that’s always in a state of ego death, and have no understanding of the self and be utterly confused by why people find anything unintuitive about the teleporter paradox.
That’s about consciousness, which is a much larger claim than the self being an illusion
I don’t agree. Care you defend this claim? Your assertion that you can have consciousness without a self (ego death) seems more personal spiritualism than argument.
In theory, a conscious being could exist that’s always in a state of ego death, and have no understanding of the self and be utterly confused by why people find anything unintuitive about the teleporter paradox.
In theory like modal possibilities, or in theory like you genuinely believe such a person can exist? I’d love to hear why.
There’s a great They Might Be Giants song about exactly this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSbEOZY7k20
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/teleporter-3
Source to give credit and so you can read the title text, the panel that was cropped off, and the bonus panel.
Didn’t even realize that it was cropped out. I saved this from elsewhere, I wouldn’t intentionally deprive credit to the artist. I’ll edit it into the description and give you the credit for that too. Sorry!
Weird, there’s a bonus panel? I don’t see anything except the cropped intro
The title text (click comic to reveal)
The good news is this is the same thing that happens whenever you fall asleep, even for a second.
The bonus panel (click the red button to reveal)
That’s some well hidden stuff
XKCD, Oglaf and other webcomics have title text on mouseover (perhaps because that’s the easiest implementation, not even requiring CSS or JS) but this does not work well on mobile (at best, long press reveals some of the title text), which is why some implement the clicking.
Also, the red button is in an obvious spot in landscape mode but too far down for most mobile users to scroll (and they might think it’s some kind of promo).
Yeah, alt text / clicking as bonus content in comics needs to die, majority of mobile users will miss it. Just make it clearly visible. And the red button just seemed like a link to something else.
I don’t subscribe to the Star Trek teleporters killing you. They turn you into energy on one side, shoot that energy across subspace to the other end, and recombine you back into matter.
Why do I believe this? Because of several episodes where transported crew members, including Barclay, describe the sensation and what they see as they stream through the energy/matter conversion field. If they can describe the feeling and visual stimuli from end to end, I don’t see how it’s 2 different entities. It’s the same one, converted from matter to energy and back again.
This also explains how Tuvix was created because of some plant getting mixed in with them. The weirder, harder to explain things, are the straight up transporter clones.
The problem is that transporters don’t actually exist, so there isn’t a “real” way in which they work. The show presented several different descriptions for how they worked, and the functionality had whatever feature the plot demanded.
So you get the ship’s doctor who avoids it because she thinks it’s basically as described in this cartoon, you get the copy of Riker from the time he Schrodinger escaped from that planet, you’ve got the autosaved DNA sequences that helped them reset after a virus was about to kill everyone, and you get teleported people perceiving their trip. All of that can coexist in just one of the mamy shows because it isn’t consistent. Star Trek has some excellent detail, and explores some interesting hard scifi topics, but it’s still just fiction.
Not to poo poo on your theory because this is all fake anyways but to your point brains are weird and we make shit up all the time when we can’t or just don’t understand how something works.
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Well consciousness is just chemical and electrical impulses. If you manage to re-create everything down to the molecule in the right area then you could completely rebuild the consciousness. Also means you’d be able to completely manipulate memories, experiences, basically anything held in the brain. Provided you had an intense enough neural mapping and deep enough understanding of the human brain to accomplish that. Luckily in the Trek universe, at least at the time of the 24th/25th century, that isn’t possible.
Your current consciousness, the one you are thinking with right now, would end.
A clone of you would go on at the transport site, fully believing that it is you, and that everything was fine.
Reconstructive teleportation is just remote replicators with mind control.
Feel free to prove the discontinuation of consciousness scientifically while satisfying all philosophic schools of thought on the matter.
If you make a perfectly exact replica of yourself do you suddenly perceive the universe from two perspectives?
Presumably not without some means of information transfer, but that doesn’t mean that a replica isn’t you, because it could also mean that there are now two of you, both of which have an equally valid claim to the original identity, but which immediately diverge into identities distinct from eachother by virtue of having slightly different experiences after the split.
That doesn’t answer the question. It’s obvious that the clone of you isn’t you, it’s literally just a copy. Unless there is some magic technology that keeps your brain alive and moves it.
You are most likely vaporized. Although, faster-than-light travel literally breaks causation, and that’s possible in the Star Trek universe. I think that’s a bigger issue than transporters.
That depends on what “you” are. If you are just your brain or nervous system, as in the specific atoms and such that make up that brain, then sure, obviously those atoms can’t be in two places at once, so you are wherever they are. On the other hand, if you are the structure of those atoms and particles, the way they are arranged, the patterns of movement they form as they go about their work, the information they contain by all this; then it stands to reason that a sufficiently perfect copy is the same as you, because if whatever makes you “you” is part that structure, whatever makes it “your” consciousness instead of someone else’s, and the copy has exactly the same structure, then the copy must also contain whatever that part is that makes it “you” and not someone else, and therefore has to be you as well.
This isn’t a settled question, so one sort of has to decide what answer one thinks is more likely, I personally think the second.
Consider a hypothetical for a moment. Suppose there are two people, I’ll call them Bob and Bill for the purposes of distinguishing them. Suppose they get captured by some sort of mad scientist, who runs an experiment on them both. They wipe the brains of both people in such a way as to not completely kill them, but such as to remove every trace of their memories, personality, etc, essentially rendering them braindead, but without the physical damage that usually entails. Then, they painstakingly re-create those same neural pathways, same memories, personality, etc, but they recreate Bob’s persona in what is originally Bill’s body, and likewise, recreate Bill’s memory and personality in Bob’s. Which of these two people is now Bob (or if one thinks neither really are and that Bob is just dead, who at least has the better claim)? The one that has the physical brain, nervous system etc of the original Bob, but remembers and thinks exactly like Bill? Or the one that acts like Bob, and remembers being Bob, and probably thinks he is Bob and would insist on his being such, but does not have the same material in his brain as the original? If one of Bob’s friends raids the lab trying to rescue him, which should he take back home?
Is this the point where we start talking about Theseus and his ship?
I mean, is there a scientific consensus on what constitutes consciousness? I thought that was a stumbling point on trying to pin down the various parts of the study of it. I wouldn’t say brain activity ceases while sleeping like that other comment but I’m in the camp that thinks the break in consciousness/awareness-of-being in a ST transporter is not really different than the break when sleeping.
Easy, build the clone without destroying the original, then test if they share perceptions and memories. Show one a playing card and ask the other what card it was or something. Proving that two people don’t have the same consciousness is pretty trivial, and I don’t know of any philosophical schools that would dispute that.
It seems a silly question to ask, but interesting to think about because I can’t think of a way to prove the intuitively obvious answer: how does one know that the duplicate doesn’t somehow inherit the original consciousness, and some new one with the memories and personality of it doesn’t get immediately generated in the original body?
My point is meant to be, that proving that two duplicates are not the same people as eachother, is not quite the same thing as proving that a duplicate is not the original person.
how does one know that the duplicate doesn’t somehow inherit the original consciousness, and some new one with the memories and personality of it doesn’t get immediately generated in the original body?
Consciousness is brain activity. New brain = new activity = new consciousness.
The activity of something is essentially information (consider how computer programs are ultimately just the activity of the components of a computer). If I copy information from one substrate to another, and do so with no changes, I don’t have any new information. Applying that back to brains, assuming that consciousness really is only brain activity (which seems highly likely, but since we don’t really understand the nature of consciousness, isn’t completely proven), then I’d disagree with the new brain= new activity step
I think you’re just talking about Thomas Riker
Yup, pretty much. It’s a shame Star Trek recognizes and points out this problem but then chickens out of it actually having any consequences.
Same as sleeping. You could have been replaced by a clone every night while sleeping and never know it.
That sounds like a form of last Thursdayism. The entire universe could’ve been created last Thursday with everything made to seem older, including everyone’s memories. These philosophies are usually shot down by occam’s razor.
Agree for Occam’s if someone is actually suggesting they are replaced nightly or your last Thursdayism, but as for conceiving of parallels to a made up teleportation technology and its philosophical implications, is the break in consciousness/self awareness for sleep not a reasonable comparison?
Occam’s razor is choosing the simplest answer. There is no simple answer when it comes to teleportation. I’m not sure there is a full break in consciousness when we sleep. Consciousness may not even be the right word…
In this case I’m not defining consciousness as simply being awake, but instead defining it as the perspective from which each individual perceives the universe.
then we get to really specifically define individual, perspective, and perception (can you perceive while unconscious? I guess?), all sorts of fun knots to tie oneself into. I always thought the difference in sense vs. perception was the thinking about it, but if it’s processed at all by the “unconscious” I guess it’s still perception? I mean, I’m gettting twisted up thinking if my individual consciousness has a perspective from which it perceives the world
Occam’s razor is just one tool though, not an end all be all answer. Complicated things happen.
I’m not sure it’s really the same thing, because it’s already pretty clear that something happens to consciousness when one is asleep, since that period is experienced differently than when awake, positing something like that about the nature of what happens to it doesn’t add a bunch of unnecessary complexity the way that assuming the universe just randomly assembled to look far older than it is does.
Cloning isn’t necessary. Every night your stream of consciousness could actually and permanently end and a new one is created upon dreaming/waking but you would never know it. This could be how it really works though we can’t know that. You could continuously lose and create new consciousnesses every firing of a neuron.
True. This could be the first and only day of your life so far!
Your current consciousness, the one you are thinking with right now, would end.
Same thing happens every time you go to sleep. If your consciousness exists you exist, right down to you worrying about continuity of consciousness.
Brain activity does not cease when you sleep.
Are you sure?
Pretty sure we would know by now if people became braindead on a nightly basis.
I’d buy this argument if brain death happened every time you went to sleep. Being in maintenance mode doesn’t count.
The thing is, we don’t actually know that continuity is required for it to be the same consciousness. It might work that way, or it might be that sufficiently recreating the right brain patterns restarts the same consciousness in a new location, or something else entirely
Occam’s razor would dictate that I would not chance it.
Also means you’d be able to completely manipulate memories, experiences, basically anything held in the brain.
That’s assuming you know which exact parts do exactly what. Kinda like an encrypted zip file versus an unencrypted one.
You edit whatever set of bits/bytes you want in both, but only in one of them will you actually know whats going on.
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It’s just a more complicated example of the ship of Theseus, and honestly it comes down to if you believe in the concept of a soul.
To illustrate mechanically is a computer with the same model of hard drive with a copy of the data the same?
If you take the drive apart, ship its parts somewhere, and reassemble it, is it the same drive?
Yes. But that’s not what’s happening in teleportation. It doesn’t use the same parts, but different ones arranged in the exact same way.
Depends on the teleportation system. In star trek you are comprised of the same physical material, just converted to energy and back. I could be wrong though, I’m no expert. I think a more interesting question is, would you be more ok being killed in one place, having your body be transported mundanely and being revived at your destination, or being cloned perfectly and then having the original killed? Theoretically the same to you either way
Not the same to you. As soon as the same tech can be used to clone, it feels fundamentally different.
You die in one place, and a consciousness that thinks it’s you starts in another place. Does the order really matter?
Yes. Doing it in a different order means there’s a version of me with different experiences. But even if you do it in the same order, that it can be used to clone means there is a me that dies and doesn’t come back to life. Whereas if it can’t be cloning, then it’s just me.
I believe there have been numerous times where it’s confirmed that you are conscious and perceiving things while in the transport stream
Barclay got sweet tentacle hugs a few times during transport.
Play the game SOMA
We don’t understand just how this works just yet. But I’m confident that some day we will.
Daniel Dennet: “Only a theory that explained conscious events in terms of unconscious events, could explain consciousness at all.”
Transporter accidents prove transporters work this way and are murder machines. To an outside observer a perfect clone is the same person, impossible to differentiate. But to the individual’s experience, they die every time they are disintegrated in a transporter. It’s a new consciousness being created when reassembled that thinks it’s continuous. It’s hand-waved away because it’s how it’s always been and transporters are a key part of the Star Trek setting.
There was that one episode with Barclay that showed he was conscious during transport and also showed that people could exist inside the matter stream (or whatever the technobabble is).
Yeah that whole episode had strange ideas. He grabbed a fish person from the matter stream and it became a human person when he integrated. That just makes no sense with how the transporter works! Even O’Brien couldn’t figure that one out
I haven’t seen that episode. But it kind of defeats the traditional explanation of how transporters work. Unless we go with the “we can exist as beings made of energy” which is always a popular type of alien or alternate being in Star Trek. And the classic transporter accidents don’t make sense, then. When a transporter clones someone, who is the real one and how would you figure it out? Most of the accidents only make sense if you treat a transporter as a digital device that moves data.
Transporters are inconsistent in how they work in Star Trek. The transporters work however the writers of the episode need it to work for the plot. Sometimes it’s a clone machine and sometimes it’s something else.
The Barclay episode I was referring to was Realm of Fear.
People get way too worked up about this.
Be less “Guy Fleegman afraid he was a redshirt” and more “Guy Fleegman once he’s realized he’s comic relief”.If a consciousness thinks it’s continuous that consciousness is continuous.
The substrate your consciousness dances on also changes all the time. Molecules arranged around the galaxy or cells dying and being replaced pose the exact same quandary, and the solution to both would seem to be “who cares”?The arrangement of cells and neurons known as “You” goes in, the arrangement of cells and neurons known as “You” comes out.
If a consciousness thinks it’s continuous that consciousness is continuous.
No, it’s simply mistaken.
The substrate your consciousness dances on also changes all the time. Molecules arranged around the galaxy or cells dying and being replaced pose the exact same quandary, and the solution to both would seem to be “who cares”?
The difference is that molecules and cells don’t all disappear at once. Consciousness is brain activity, and the brain has redundancy that allows that activity to continue uninterrupted even while small parts are being swapped out. When you destroy the whole thing, though, the activity stops.
The arrangement of cells and neurons known as “You” goes in, the arrangement of cells and neurons known as “You” comes out.
Would you be okay with your child (or some other loved one) being forcibly taken away and replaced with a perfect clone? If what you’re saying is true, you should be, since according to you they’re not just a copy, they’re literally the same person.
The difference is that molecules and cells don’t all disappear at once. Consciousness is brain activity, and the brain has redundancy that allows that activity to continue uninterrupted even when small parts are swapped out. When you destroy the whole thing, though, the activity stops.
The pattern buffer serves the same function of redundancy.
If you’re ok with the ATP that makes your brain ebbing and flowing while asserting a continuation of self, you shouldn’t theoretically mind if that change over happens all at once.
If it’s still “you” happening all at once, then it doesn’t matter either when that once is.
The pattern of synapse connections firing is what thinks it’s “you” and the transport duly preserves that pattern.Would you be okay with your child (or some other loved one) being forcibly taken away and replaced with a perfect clone? If what you’re saying is true, you should be, since according to you they’re not just a copy, they’re literally the same person.
Thinking “Any ‘you’ 'll do” doesn’t mean I want loved ones forced to do anything. People don’t tend to be forced onto transporter pads.
No, I wouldn’t want a loved one forcibly taken anywhere. If a loved one took a transporter trip I’d love them just the same when they got back though.
The pattern buffer serves the same function of redundancy.
No, because people are not conscious in the pattern buffer.
The pattern of synapse connections firing is what thinks it’s “you” and the transport duly preserves that pattern.
Yes, but consciousness is not a pattern, it’s an activity, and that activity gets interrupted. Saying that the consciousness continues is like saying that an aircraft that made a flight, landed, and then made another flight really only made one continuous flight. It’s the activity that we’re talking about, and the interruption divides that activity into two distinct instances, even though it’s the same object performing them.
If a loved one took a transporter trip I’d love them just the same when they got back though.
That’s not what I asked. The transporter destroys the original person, which makes it easy to pretend that the clone is that person. The point of my question is that you know that the original is still around somewhere out there. So I ask again: Would you be okay with your loved one being replaced by a perfect clone that looks and acts exactly the same, identical down to the last atom, while knowing that the original still exists elsewhere? Or would you consider that new version to be an impostor?
No, because people are not conscious in the pattern buffer.
I could dispute that, but I won’t as I don’t feel that even matters to my position that my consciousness is my consciousness no matter where or how it’s arranged.
Yes, but consciousness is not a pattern, it’s an activity, and that activity gets interrupted.
And then starts up again, indistinguishable from before and with every right to call itself “me”.
Would you be okay with your loved one being replaced by a perfect clone that looks and acts exactly the same, identical down to the last atom, while the original remains at large elsewhere? Or would you consider that new version to be an impostor?
I would love my child if they went on an away mission and came back via transport. I would love my children if they suddenly were twins.
I could dispute that
Yeah, well, in Strange New Worlds the doctor’s daughter isn’t even aware she’s being put through a transporter until he tells her, so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (also, spoiler warning)
starts up again, indistinguishable from before
It is distinguishable by its history, which is known. Understanding that two things that are identical are still two different things and not the same thing seems like a very basic cognitive ability developed pretty early in childhood, and I should probably remember what the technical term for it is, I’m sure there is one. It’s also universally understood and accepted that genuine things are more valuable than their replicas, even if the replicas are so good that their lack of documented history is the only thing that distinguishes them from their genuine models. (This is why genuine antiques with known provenance are far more expensive than even perfect fakes.) As such, I find it very difficult to believe you’re arguing in good faith here.
with every right to call itself “me”.
Oh really? Okay, another thought experiment: Let’s say someone creates a perfect clone of you. Does that clone now have rights to your property? Is it okay if he/she sleeps with your spouse?
I would love my children if they suddenly were twins.
But would you be okay with your child being taken away and replaced with a duplicate? If you’re being honest, you should be. Nothing’s changed from your point of view, it’s the same person. Right?
It is distinguishable by its history, which is known. Understanding that two things that are identical are still two different things and not the same thing seems like a very basic cognitive ability developed pretty early in childhood, and I should probably remember what the technical term for it is, I’m sure it has one. It’s also universally understood and accepted that genuine things are more valuable than their replicas, even if the replicas are so good that their lack of documented history is the only thing that distinguishes them from their genuine models.
If you and I each have 2006’s SMASH action film Crank on DVD, we both have the film Crank. There exist more than one of those. If a person is cloned by a transporter there are two of that person, but they diverge by virtue of unique experience.
(This is why genuine antiques with known provenance are far more expensive than even perfect fakes.) As such, I find it very difficult to believe you’ve arguing in good faith here.
Well you can fuck yourself if it pleases. It’s one thing to disagree with me, it’s another to impugn the earnestnest with which I state my position.
Oh really? Okay, another thought experiment: Let’s say someone creates a perfect clone of you. Does that clone now have rights to your property? Is it okay if he/she sleeps with your spouse?
I can see an argument for the property, and if a clone slept with my spouse would be between the clone and my spouse.
But would you be okay with your child being taken away and replaced with a duplicate? If you’re being honest, you should be. Nothing’s changed from your point of view, it’s the same person. Right?
Irrelevant as people are not dragged away to the teleporter, Tuvix notwithstanding.
If a loved one took a transporter trip I’d love them just the same when they got back though.
No, you’d love a copy of them just the same…
You could say the same of a 7 year old in relation the the baby you previously loved.
With all the cell-division this creature before you is just a modified copy.
Well, no. It’s an evolution of the original one.
Not a newly created copy.
It’s constantly copying itself through cell division and gene replication.
That last one isn’t really fair, we’re animals and have attachments that can’t be logically reasoned away. Our brains aren’t entirely controlled by our conscious thoughts. You can believe 100% that the patterns of matter, not the matter itself, make the person but still not “feel” good about it.
Not quite. You’re describing our brains as a ship of Theseus, which is fairly accurate. But our consciousness is always on while alive. Even asleep and in near-death or temporarily dead our brains don’t fully stop or die. Though our brains don’t actually replace neurons quite like they replace all other cells. When neurons are damaged, those pathways are lost. Our brain is redundant enough that rarely manifests as a total loss of ability. And when it does, our brains can eventually route new pathways. If enough of these are damaged at once, it can totally change a person’s personality.
But transporters turn matter into energy, those patterns are transmitted elsewhere, and energy (or different energy if stored in a pattern buffer) is reassembled very much like replicators. In this case the entire brain and body is stopped, destroyed and re-created. This is, for all intents and purposes, death and cloning. People have trouble with this because to anyone NOT transported, it looks identical. But the person absolutely stopped being alive and a new one was borne that thinks it has always existed.
And Star Trek backs it up. The classic transporter accident that makes a clone of someone? If the transported person is still the same consciousness, what is the clone? Clearly that person isn’t controlling 2 bodies with 1 consciousness. Which is the “real” McCoy? The answer is whichever wasn’t disintegrated, or neither if they both were as part of the transporter process.
When neurons are damaged, those pathways are lost.
But we aren’t our neurons. We are the pathways which get dutifully recreated by the transporter. Even if the electron bounce that thinks it’s you briefly pauses pulsing, if that same pattern starts up again that’s still you
And Star Trek backs it up. The classic transporter accident that makes a clone of someone? If the transported person is still the same consciousness, what is the clone?
Both “clones” are equally valid iterations of the same person with equal claim on the identity, although they would functionally from that point be like twins as they would begin developing distinct memories as soon as they each open their eyes.
But our consciousness is always on while alive.
Not all the time. Sleeping is the obvious exception. You may quibble about whether REM sleep counts as “consciousness”, but there are a couple of deeper types of sleep you cycle through that go way down into inactivity.
There’s also total anaesthesia, which (depending on the particular type) can shut your brain right down deeper than sleep does.
Then there’s people who have clinically died and then recovered, including some record-holders with Lazarus syndrome and who drowned in cold water - the record there is a 2-year-old who was submerged for 66 minutes and had a core body temperature of 19 degrees C when she was pulled out.
Within Star Trek itself there’s also Cryogenics (Khan and company were frozen while traveling in the Botany Bay) and Cryonics (the frozen people who were revived in TNG’s “The Neutral Zone”). Were those people still the same people as they were when they were frozen?
Is there a clear cut distinction between consciousness and self awareness? I think based on common usage, most folks wouldn’t say you were conscious when sleeping, as usually it’s said when sleeping you are unconscious. Sure your brain is still doing stuff and it’s not just “keep the heart beating” stuff, but you’re not aware of it.
We don’t really understand consciousness well. Current theory is that it’s the weird self-awareness that comes from a human brain. Even sleeping our brains don’t really stop. It just stops conscious thought. Which is a confusion of terms, really. So we don’t really know.
Here’s a more terrifying question: every time you lose and regain consciousness, is it you coming back? Or is it a new version of you with the same memories? What if every time you went to sleep, you effectively died but you’d never know it because the only version of you that you can actually be certain exists is the one right now?
To put the lie to the transporter-consciousness debate: a clone in the transporter either works one of two ways: 1. it creates a new consciousness with the exact same memories and there is no way to tell the 2 apart from the outside but they are clearly different consciousnesses i.e. different people, or 2. transporters kill and remake people constantly birthing new consciousnesses every time and a clone is not that remarkable as it’s just creating 2 instead of 1 this time.
I think it’s more they are murdering the current instance of a pattern of matter and with it the biological implementation of the pattern of consciousness. Another instance of the same pattern is created near simultaneously. To flip it, aren’t they life creating machines as much as murder machines?
To flip it, aren’t they life creating machines as much as murder machines?
Yes, but having a baby doesn’t exculpate you of murder. It doesn’t cancel out.
There is a chapter or two from a book by philosopher Derek Parfit that tackles the transporter issue pretty head-on. It draws what I feel to be a pretty compelling distinction between the continuity of your conscious mind, referred to as Relation R, and the personal identity that is lost when using the transporter. He then asks which is more important. Worth a read if this stuff interests you.
I look forward to reading it, and I will be able to enjoy certain kinds of scifi much more if it convinces me nothing is lost. Your phrasing makes me think it’s just going to reinforce my general worry about that sort of tech though.
(I recognize that it’s fictional, it just breaks stories with similar tech a bit for me.)
Nothing of value is lost.
Dunno, I value my continued existence pretty highly. Maybe I’ll change my mind when I read the PDF.
Your continued existence isn’t in question. Continuity of consciousness is an illusion. If you would put your brain state in stasis and resume it later, you wouldn’t feel any different. Neither would a copied version of you. That feeling of continuity is all there is to consciousness.
The copy wouldn’t feel any different, but I’d be dead. The process as described in OP (and most fiction) is inherently destructive, IMO.
No you wouldn’t be any deader than you will be a fraction of a second from now. You only live in the moment. In the next you are replaced by someone who is almost, but not exactly you. Continuous consciousness is an illusion, or a concept. There’s no magic piece that makes you you.
It’s a trick of perspective.
Ok, thanks for your input!
There was an episode of The Outer Limits (7x08 Think Like a Dinosaur) that dealt with this exact question.
In that episode, humans are maybe-given a teleportation tech that creates a perfect copy somewhere else, but the aliens need to trust that we will ‘balance the equation’ (destroy the original) every time. That’s easy when the human in question is immobilized for transfer. Only one transfer goes wrong- the person being transferred is woken up before the transfer is confirmed, and then the transfer gets confirmed. So now you have the original human, who’s already been copied, and the transfer operator still has to ‘balance the equation’…
Not surprised Outer Limits has an episode on it. Definitely gonna try and watch it later. Sounds fascinating.
How have I not heard of this series? Looks twilight zone-ish? Is it worth a watch?
Yeah Twilight Zone is an apt comparison. It’s been a long time since I saw it but I remember there were a few pretty good ones. I’d give it a watch…
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Uhhh, excuse me? My takes are totally original. T’Pol told me so.
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The “magic law” is just the consequence of what it means to be the “same” person. To be the same person, you have to, among other similarities, take up the same spatial-temporal space. This is why if we ask “is Bruce Wayne the same person as Batman” one of the first thoughts is “you know, I’ve never seen them in the same room before.”
Maybe what you’re getting hung up on here is the split. Let’s imagine there is one river (river A) which goes for a bit before it forks and becomes river b and river c. In some sense, we could say that both river b and river c are river a. But if you’re river b, then river c is not the same as you, and vice versa.
In the moment of copying, they’re the same, after that, they’re diverging through different experience. The difference in atoms/location is irrelevant from the perspective of that person’s consciousness. They both are the original in any sense that counts for them or others.
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The same is true for two Rikers. That’s the entire point of the episode; that despite them diverging at the point of the cloning into two different people, they are still the same person and need to live with that.
I don’t think that as the point of the episode. As their lives diverged their interests and desires did so as well. They were similar, yes, but still different people. Will was promoted after successfully evacuating the people of Nervala IV and he became focused on his career. Thomas was stuck on Nervala IV thinking of the woman he left behind, and when he’s rescued he wants to rekindle that relationship whereas Will let it fizzle.
To say nothing of Thomas eventually choosing to join the Maquis. That is not something we’d ever see from Will.
Will: Good luck, Will.
Thomas: I actually thought I might go with the name Thomas.
Troi: Your middle name.
Will: I guess we really are different. I never really cared for that name.
Thomas: Well, I sort of like it. I guess I’d better get going.
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There’s actually a book series I enjoy, the Bobiverse series, that does an interesting take on it. In it a human, the eponymous Bob, gets digitized and becomes the AI of a Von Neumann probe. He’s given the mission to make copies of himself, explore the galaxy, and build colonies for humanity.
Later on in the series...
As he makes more copies of himself, it’s found that the personality of the copies diverge more and more the farther from the original that they descend, and they eventually devise a statistical way to measure this divergence. No two extant Bobs are ever the same person, even though they’re identical copies.
However, it’s also discovered that if a Bob makes copy of himself, shuts down his original AI matrix, and only then the copy is turned on, that Bob will have no measurable divergence from the one he was cloned from. It’s measurably the exact same individual, and it implies that in-universe there’s some fundamental, tranferable property of identy. Arguably some kind of “soul”.
Not only that, if the original AI matrix is turned back on then that one starts displaying the divergence that was expected of the copy. This is used in one case to transmit the data of a Bob to a waiting, empty AI matrix around another star to avoid physical travel and side step the teleporter problem.
There’s a lot of sci-fi hand waving in it, but I thought it was a fun way to approach the question.
Does that mean transporter clones are when the transporter ACTUALLY worked?
What’s that? I was right? Time to go talk to FNN then
Sidenote, love the FNN reference. Picard had some rough spots but it did some amazing world building.
runs faster
Thanks tho
I’ve got the Section 31 power walk, you’ll never catch me!
I’m still just impressed his hips and spine could actually do that.
OK I’m not even a Trekkie but I was doing some elecromag homework and I have a really cool theory on this:
The teleporter thingy actually acts more like a guitar pickup, in a more E=mc^2 type of way, entirely perfectly converting the person into energy - not matter. (This would require an analog encoding from matter to energy). The biggest difference is the pickup totally uses up the entire person, so like if you strum a guitar and it converts to a perfect electrical wave (but the guitar goes mute).
This energy is a lot easier to transfer than just matter, but the person encoded within it still only exists once in that energy. (for the guitar analogy a speaker at the other end that picks up the guitar wave, and turns it back into sound)
Its then entirely used up to power the ‘person builder’ in an analog way, much more accurately than were able to recreate digitally (aka why tape record are the truest form of music recording we have, it accutate to a way smaller scale than we can capture digitally.)
This would then mean that we can’t just duplicate the creation process, cause the energy only flowed into the machine one time in that exact fashion, and duplicating it would require knowledge of every single atom in a person; then a way to accurately recreate that energy waveform to power the machine.
This also opens the possibility of the transporter ‘missing’ if somehow they moved faster than the speed of light, while the person was still being transported, and them being just a flash of light endlessly propagating throughout the void.
Idk if the things have range in the series, but it could also be that the angle a transporter can accurately capture that energy is limited, and so really far away things are too large to be able to accurately capture (unless you have a massive radar dish or something alike)
That’s a really cool theory, probably the best I’ve heard! It’s established that there is a limited range, and that transporting during warp is possible, but extremely difficult, have to match the other ships exact speed etc., though they technically aren’t traveling faster than light but existing within a warp bubble.
Yeah, that really depends on how they define warp bubbles in the universe then, cause it’d imply the transmission occurs between ships faster than light
Maybe something like the receiving ship trails behind the sending, exact same course just at a distance where light leaving the warp bubble would ‘fall’ that exact y distance over the time it takes to travel the distance between them in the x distance. It’d also still limit their distance even within their own space bubble
Then it’d make sense cause any course deviation would cause them to ‘miss’ and again travel through the infinite cosmos as energy.
Thinking about it it also describes those thematic sparkles that happen when they teleport, cause what were seeing is essentially the existence of that person as light.
edit: forgot to say thanks for the comliment! I definitely am gonna have to watch the show(s) soon!
I’d definitely recommend them, though sometimes you’ll need to power through some dry bits. All the 90’s trek started out rough and only got better.
It’s not hard sci-fi, so the technology sometimes works the way the story needs it to work, but generally it’s pretty consistent.
and duplicating it would require knowledge of every single atom in a person
I think that’s how a replicator works when you ask it for a dish.
I was also thinking about that, maybe they can do some simple proteins and such enough to trick our taste buds, but something as complicated as a conscious human would be out of their control.
So IG it also describes replicators?
They addressed this in startrekng, it was called the 'Hisunberg compensator ’
As far as I know that’s pretty much on point on how transporters work. There is an episode of TNG where someone was stuck in the energy state and conscious and saw energy beings living there. Of course then there is also the case of the two Rikers which seems to show that copying a person is indeed possible under very specific circumstances (I think there was some interference with exotic energy or something).
Okaaaay, just because you’ve brought it up…
Transporters in Star Trek are shown to definitely not be duplication machines. “Our Man Bashir” (DS9) is probably the most definitive proof of that.
Personally, I think transporter technology explains the staunch atheist (but still open-minded and sometimes spiritualist) Federation mindset: they know that their entire being can be reduced to a matter/energy stream. The transporter makes a devastating philosophical challenge to the idea of a “soul.” Which is, ironically, why so many Federation officers refuse to accept anything that challenges that assumption (VOY “Sacred Ground”).
Adding to your examples in the cannon of Star Trek the teleporter is not a murder machine, except for all those transporter accidents. In “Daedalus” (ENT) the creator of the teleporter somehow proved it, even if not every officer believes that yet.
Real life though, I’d never set foot in a transporter. A real life, Star Trek like transporter would definitely be a murder machine though.
The real life version wouldn’t even make a copy somewhere else, it would just be that phone booth from Futurama.
Transporters are death machines!
