They are both copies. They explain that the guy operating the transporter was losing him, so he used a second beam to try to compensate. On beam made it through, the other bounced off the st uff in the atmosphere that was causing the problem and rematerialized him on the planet. I'm pretty sure this explanation was in the episode in order to establish that both Rikers are equally real.
I am neither an emergent property nor atoms, I simply am.....
I personally never took much seriousness in the whole "What if your bed is a death machine!?!" idea
There's too much continuity for that to make sense, I mean, I remember most of my dreams, so I can basically account for everything... And many of my dreams are effected by outside stimuli...
Yeah, the comic's story and message are beautiful, but the "sleep kills you" argument is poorly thought out, and based on a shallow understanding of what continuity actually means. It's not about consciousness, it's about continuity. The processes in the brain that make up your mind don't stop as soon as you fall asleep.
There's an argument to be made about how you're never the same person that you were even just a moment ago, because you're constantly changing. That's also shallow and lazy, and ignores the continuity we're talking about.
There's an argument to be made that from your perspective, continuity isn't broken. That's also shallow and lazy, because it treats the perception of continuity as if it's the same thing as real continuity. As far as your clone is concerned, continuity wasn't broken. But I was never worried about whether my clone will die when I go in the teleporter, you know?
Everyone remembers his irascibility in the film but ignores that, for the three original years, he transported without complaint in nearly every episode. And it was a reliable, proven technology that apparently only got worse and more twitchy a couple of decades later.
Plenty of folks become more irascible as they age. It's one thing to do something under orders when you're young, and quite another thing to do them when you're retired.
Also, he would have seen more and more incidents as time went on
I'm going through another cycle of binging EVERYTHING. Yes he did transport regularly, but he also certainly complained about it multiple times. Orders are orders in the end. Sometimes the hardest part of keeping a job is bottling up and repressing all those little existential horrors.
I think I've explained this too many times to do it again, but: teleportation doesn't have to be "destroy and reconstitute" any more than going through a door necessitates killing you and reconstituting you on the other side of the door. The key is establishing continuity of your mind across the intervening space, which is mostly an engineering problem.
Star Trek transporters are "destroy and reconstitute" though. They are explicitly described as such. The whole Thomas Riker situation even requires it to be the case.
Star Trek just throws all its rules out from one episode to the next. The Star Trek franchise is the McDonalds of sci-fi; you don't choose it because it's good, you choose it because it's available.
It's not all that different to a fax machine, the way it's described in st.
You just need to be able to accurately scan and place atoms to achieve the 'teleportation' being discussed here.
Thinking about it even that is probably not possible, as you'd need to know both the position and momentum and state of every sub atomic particle in the body.
I felt like they hinted in some episodes that there was some rule of nature they were exploiting to get it to work. Like imagine trying to tell someone in the 11th century that humans made machines that can fly, they imagine some mechanical thing flapping wings. They imagine it because they don't know what air does when it passes over a fast moving surface. It isn't like the transporter really stores your pattern down to every particle, there was something that they found that made it a lot easier problem to solve.
The real problem with all of this is that people can't get away from the idea of a soul. Something intangible unmeasurable that is really "us" riding around in a meat-robot. It's hard for people (me included) to realize that the meat packaging is all that we are. If you destroy My body and recreate it, nothing will have been lost. The continuity within the meat computer in my head is all that I am. There is no "me" outside of that... And that's a really hard concept to accept and internalize.
If you destroy My body and recreate it, nothing will have been lost. The continuity within the meat computer in my head is all that I am.
If you perfectly recreate your body without destroying the original, the original doesn't start seeing and hearing through the clone. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, there's no difference between the you that steps into the transporter and the you that steps out of it, but you do actually die when you're "transported." You don't get to see what's on the other side of the transporter, another being that shares your exact memories does.
I dunno even if there is no you in a metaphysical sense the deconstruction method still ends your personal subjective experience of being you which sucks. Sure the next you might be just as much you as the first one but you don't get to be around to enjoy that.
I would be hesitant to get on a teleporter even if they were proven "safe". It could be possible that from my point of view, that'll be the last thing I ever see. But from everyone else's point of view Im alive and I walked out the other end without breaking a sweat. But this is a different instance of "me". From my point of view, would I be "dead" forever or would I be able to witness myself going out for drinks later that day?
Maybe it turns out that if you make an exact backup of a brain, reconstruct and restore the biologic equivalent of ram and system registers back to their original state (sort of how operating systems do multitasking), then it all works out. But maybe turning the brain completely off or whatever is enough to put the "system" in an "off" state and when it restarts, it'll be a new instance. Maybe you don't remember the part where you stopped existing so it doesn't matter.
Really makes you wonder if humans had a soul and an afterlife what exactly happens when the last copy of you finally dies naturally.
Like you go to heaven and meet some version of you that lived for a fifteen minute coffee run, and boy is he missed that from his perspective he died at 19 years old because you just had to beam down and try the new Starbucks drink. All the other teleported yous are there.
Shit what about your spouse? There could be like 900 of you but only 400 of her. Now you all have to spend eternity together.
Putting aside the whole problems with maintaining continuity in a civilization that laughs at all the problems of FTL and relativity why is continuity important?
Hyperion suggests that you do not think about the fact that this is only a digital reconstruction of your original body, which died the first time you respawned. Do NOT think about this!
Not only that, but they‘re also literal bombs. Remember E=mc^2? With a technology capable of converting 100% of matter into usable energy, you‘d have a pretty scary bomb bomb.
And yet, on the list of bomb bombs Star Trek has given us, it's pretty far down there. I mean, wanna talk about WMDs? Look up Genesis or Generations. Those fuckers are un-nuking stars and collapsing nebulae because why not.
...takes the you matter and dissolves it into a stream of particles which are reassembled in a different location, so when transport is 50% done, you're in two places at once (whilst the "plan" for you is in the pattern buffer, don't know where the matter is exactly)... i mean, it forms you into a beam of molecules right? Beams you up.
At one point there's a Barkley episode and he seems conscious for most of the process, just in a kind of super position.
After the half way point, there's more "you" in the destination than in the original location...so who are you? Where are you?
Then again, we know that accidents and reflections can be produced... So maybe I'm wrong and new matter/particles are being introduced otherwise how would Tom Riker exist...
...I mean, after all, Tuvix wasn't twice as dense as your average crew member.
Anyways, Dr. Polaski supposedly has McCoy's attitude towards transporters. However I think even she gave in here and there, as did McCoy.
Some wild-card ideas to think about here are this:
What we're afraid of is losing continuity of conscious experience, so a transporter brings to mind the concept of just making a copy who has your memories and thus does not share your qualia or experience of life. But we don't even know what retains that continuity to begin with. We have no idea why you seem to be the same person you were last year when most of your atoms have changed. We don't know why you're the same person when you're put under anesthesia... and in fact, you might not be. It may very well be that every time you are put under general anesthesia, a new consciousness emerges inside your brain, with the feeling like they've always lived in that brain with those memories.
Now step that back again. What about sleep? Can you prove you're the same consciousness that existed yesterday or before your last nap when consciousness was turned off and back on again?
Basically, we don't know what happens when consciousness turns off for any reason and why it comes back seeming to pick right up where it left off, but there are also a lot of people who say maybe it doesn't turn back on. And in fact, it can even be scaled up again... can you prove you're the same continuous entity that was aware of the universe a moment ago? What even IS a continual experience? Can it exist without memory?
If the brain just creates a story for our consciousness to make sense of the universe and can create and invent stories and filter things from your senses, how sure are we that there even IS a continual conscious experience? Your brain could be tricking you at every moment, there might not even BE such thing as consciousness ending, maybe when you "die" you immediately occupy the next most-probable configuration. And maybe this also can be tied to the new research that says if you could scan every particle that makes up a human body and recreate it, it would necessarily destroy the old copy, because the more you know about one property of a particle, the less you know about the other. The more you know where they are, the less you know about where they're going.
A lot of maybes here for a technology that may never exist in any capacity, but it's a great insight into how inexplicable the universe and our experience of it really is.
Good use of the Heisenberg Uncertainty principal of quantum mechanics near the end of your comment (the more we can know about speed, the less we can know about position)... And of course it's always fun to see the word qualia being used.
Personally I think we're a meat glitch. That is to say, the survival of our biology is aided by having predictive models of threats, pattern seeking and problem solving capacities (what to do about such threats), and some sense of mappable logic/reason (which solutions are best), all of which requires coordination (a story to help make choices)... But we're essentially a meat glitch.
This internal illusion of possessing consciousness may have evolved in order to aid long term survival, and perhaps to reproduce and do the other things life forms do... I think Data and Dr. Crusher discuss the definition of life at some point, detailing the requisite processes.... Having an identity isn't listed as one.
I believe it's been theorised that some species seem to act more as hives, there have even been some examples of humans being able to act in hive like ways. The technologist Kevin Kelly wrote about some of this in the 90s giving an example where a crowd could hold up a red or green sided paddle to play a game of ping pong on a big screen... One side of the room vs the other... Green paddles being a way to beckon the on-screen paddle to that location. The game was playable and seemingly coordinated just by having the feedback loop of the screen and the crowd, that was enough to create an overwhelming sense of shared willful and purposeful behaviour.
Most of us place our identity within ourselves as individuals, some learn to place it within their families. Richard Dawkins seems to believe it's actually at the level of the genes (makes that case in his book the selfish gene)... But the fact that we can to some degree place identity in different ways and locations suggests something of its unreality... Of course whose in control of that, and whether shifting it can be willful and comfortable, let alone controlled by a transporter chief is another question.
can you prove you're the same continuous entity that was aware of the universe a moment ago?
I certainly don't feel like the person from 20 years ago whose memories I hold. It seems like a completely different person lived those experiences. I know him, but I do not feel like him. Too much has changed about my personality, my body, and my life.
My hot take of the day is that sleep is not truly unconsciousness, because you're still to some extent aware of your surroundings. If you weren't, then you wouldn't react to light, or alarm clocks, or cold water on your face, or any number of other external stimuli
My second hot take of the day is that Last Thursdayism is a fun idea, but is disruptive to actual conversations about reality
But if that's how it works, how can we account for the duplication scenarios? The matter for the duplicate would have to come from somewhere. I think it's more likely to be that the information for construction is trasmitted, especially with how often they use the concept of the tranportation buffer. But they dont ever specify I dont think so it's all speculation
Pascal's wager argues that if there are 2 different and non provable outcomes to a belief, you should believe the one that has better consequences for you.
In this case there are no divine consequences of being destroyed and reassembled in another location.
This is probably more of a ship of Theseus question.
The point of Pascal's wager is how non provable beliefs can't be logically reasoned one way or the other. Like how there is no objective original and duplicate ship of theseus.
People arguing over the danger of the transporter is a lot like trying to reason any unsolvable paradox, and especially like arguing over having faith. Better than roko's basilisk, though, that's pascal's wager for scuzzy tools.
All that could have been avoided by having a drop pod launched to the surface containing a mechanical avatar. The crew member just sits down in a chair to remotely control the avatar using an FTL link for instant control. Of course the avatar has a hologram projector so it looks exactly like the crew member. But that would be too safe and not dramatic enough.
That would make for an interesting story concept. It'd be cool to see the avatar, after exposure to various people occupying their body, begin to form it's own consciousness with shared traits.
Something went really wrong with computers after humans for warp. That's why you can break any evil one by acting crazy or telling it to calculate pi. Also why Data doesn't just wifi.
I'd like to know or see a Star Trek series about the development of Star Trek technology.
Like the history of flight or the first ancient sea captains, .... when it comes to the history of the humble teleporter, how many freakin people did they have to reconstitute, recombine, turn into a puddle of goo, teleport into a wall, remove their brains, reconfigure their organs, teleport into a bulk head or reanimate into empty space before they perfected the technology.
The thing about transporters is that if we had them right now, people would use them for everything. Transport me to the toilet. Transport the TV remote into my hand. Transport a fork into my hand. People would never get out of bed.
Transport the nutrient and vitamin mix into my stomach.
I'm kinda with you, but pizza. Gyros. Tacos. Street food. I really don't see people giving up deliciousness for convenience. For necessity? Yes. Not for convenience.
Tbh the same logic can be applied to sleeping. If our consciousness is akin to computer ram and sleep is the brain cleaning up that ram, how can you know that when you wake up you're still the same person that went to sleep last night?
This is a cool thought because it's not about being copied but more about the Ship of Theseus.
Why do we sleep?
"The body needs sleep."
No, the body needs rest. Our physical self just needs down time and relaxation and then it's good to go again. Our BRAIN needs sleep. Specifically, REM sleep to process all the new data that was taken in. Converting short-term memories into long-term memories. Sorting and organizing data. A kind of hard drive defragmentation.
Our sleep is normally presented like a sine wave. We regain base level consciousness cyclically several times a night, which is why we dream. Which is why our dreams are usually tied to recent memories. The more good sleep we get, the more our brains can deal with recent experiences.
When we wake up, it's like rebooting a device after an OS update. It's us, but with altered software. We are as much the person we were yesterday as the Ship of Theseus is still the Ship of Theseus after having pieces fixed and replaced. The whole is who we are, not the bits that changed.
Because brain activity doesn't stop when I'm sleeping, it's more like the brain is just idling.
If we wanna go with computer terms, sleeping isn't shutdown. Sleeping is sitting on the desktop with no active windows. All the background processes don't stop when you're just sitting there and admiring your sick wallpaper.
This is why I don't like the word "consciousness" in these discussions. It has too many different but similar meanings. Our minds are, as far as we can tell, a property of the interactions between neurons in our brains. Sleep doesn't stop those interactions, even if we are "unconscious" during sleep.
how can you know that when you wake up you're still the same person that went to sleep last night?
Because you are composed of 99.99999% the exact same molecules. When you transport, you are literally ripped apart and recreated with new molecules at the destination site. That's how the transporter works. Your bed does not work that way.
The best take on transporters was in a 'Buzz Lightyear' cartoon.
Buzz tells his team that a scientist has developed a transporter. The farm boy says that it sounds like a great invention; with a transporter the ship can stay up in orbit and the crew can teleport to the surface.
I liked the method described in "Old Man's War." It wasn't teleporting exactly, but the premise could be used here too. The consciousness of the person was being transferred to another body and during the process, The singular consciousness was aware of being in two places for a short while.
Dark Matter (the other one: the Canadian sci-fi show) had something called Transfer Transit kinda like that.
They scan you and rapidly grow a clone at your destination with all your memories. Clone has like a 3-5 day lifespan, but is otherwise "you". It goes and does whatever you planned to do at the far end.
The main you stays behind and does whatever until the clone returns to a Transfer Transit pod on the far end. It's memories are then uploaded to you and the clone disintegrates. You now " remember" everything the clone did on your behalf as if you did it personally.
I really liked that for how it allowed for interesting story telling. The clones can die without actually sacrificing the characters but there's still fairly high stakes because the originals won't know what happened while their opponents do.
Really sucks that the show got cancelled, especially on that huge cliffhanger.
Personally, as long as it's provably safe, I'm fine with it.
As far as I'm concerned, if my consciousness is intact, and my body is a carbon copy, that's me. I place more weight on my consciousness being me than those specific atoms being me.
Besides, we all shed all of our atoms and replace them with new ones dozens of times throughout our lives. So we've already died in that way, I guess? But then again, it doesn't happen all at once, it's more of a Ship Body of Theseus type of thing.
99.9% of the time you’d be right. But what if it accidentally made a copy of you. You can argue that you’re still you and rhe other is an independent person, but who gets the rights as the “real” you? All your possessions, bank accounts, debts, job, etc. ?
I see what you mean, but in my mind the chances of that would be so astronomically low that I personally wouldn't be put off by it. To me it's a bit like asking "what if the plane blows up?" or "what if the plane gets taken over by terrorists?"
Like yeah it's a possibility, but if the risk is low enough I'm still gonna go ahead with it for the convenience factor.
Not to mention, if we have the technology to construct human bodies and minds on the other side of that teleporter, what is to stop them from modifying the machines to change your brain (or body). I have lost any trust I once had in any government or company to believe them if, hypothetically, they tell me they have the know-how to change my opinion of Coca Cola upon reconstruction.
Can't remember the exact story, but Larry Niven used that idea. Basically, you teleported from one side of the room to the other, but left all the poisons your cells had built up behind. The hero does this accidentally, then notices himself growing healthier over time.
In another universe, Relg phased Silk through stone and found the cure for the common cold as the illness couldnt pass through with them...for some reason
Well we know the pattern buffer can hold a person indefinitely (SNW doc’s daughter) and they have bio filters that remove any bug changing the genome pattern you beamed down with…that’s all defensive, I’m sure the tech could be turned up to 11 but then you’re flying near Khan’s territory
My kid and I have discussed this at length. It's true, Bones and a few others live in a universe where they're the only soulful humanoids, surrounded by digital facsimiles. It must be depressing.
I'm firmly on the anti-transporter side, but I'm also super into the concept of artificial personhood. The people that step out of those transporters have just as much of a soul as the people who stepped in, even if they are separate people
I'm on the fence: pro-transporter, anti-disintegration. If transporter technology existed without the suicide booth aspect and I could just send a copy of myself halfway around the globe in an instant I'd do it. Biggest problem I see is funding all the new clones of me running around. If there was somehow a way for us all to sync our memories occasionally without melting our consciousness that would be cool too.
I don't think transporters in star trek kill people, I just think they move them through subspace and the transporter malfunctions are subspace oddities
They shred your body down to its atoms, and re-assemble it somewhere else. If we have any sort of soul, or inner ghost, it almost certainly dies when your body is shredded.
I never understood the problem people seem to complain about here.
A perfect copy, is perfect. There's no detectable, no measurable, no identifiable difference.
So what are you talking about? Unless you don't think perfect is actually perfect.
Because it's still a copy, so you still die. Imagine if there was a delay between the copy being produced and the original being destroyed, long enough for them to see each other if transported within the same room.
You are a different person than you were yesterday.
You have all sorts of new and different experiences from that person.
You're even a different person reading the last word in this sentence, than you were when reading the first.
It mainly depends if you believe in a soul that is never copied that makes it "you", or a purely mechanical view of consciousness that says if all parts are copied there is no difference.
From an outsider's point of view sure, but does your consciousness dies when dematerialized, only to have a copy of your consciousness going on in the rematerialized body as if nothing happened?
That is only an actual issue when you are some sort of spiritualist. From a materialist point of view, the entirety of you is "just" a very complex interplay of elementary particles.
ITT people who think they’re only themselves only if they’re completely continuous. Any number of them could have been replaced with a clone while sleeping and not know the difference. I am me, and that’s all the matters to me.
Of course I wouldn't know. But the former me who got dragged off is dead. That's the whole point, the clone has no way of knowing and simply continues on life while the original dies.
And because we only exist in the present, we rely on our memories of the past to tell who we are. Our memories tell me I'm me, so I think I'm me.
Maybe it doesn't matter to you, but the reason I don't want to die is because I want to be aware. If I am never conscious again, but a copy of me is, good for them I guess, I wish them the best, but it's not what I want. I'm not conscious of waking up in the morning, even if they're me. I'm dead.
But a perfect copy is more like the you who stepped onto the pad, then then you are like the you who went to sleep last night.
All sorts of changes happened, while you were sleeping.
All sorts of changes happened while you were typing your last comment.
The you of now is a very different person then the you of 5min ago.
Imagine the machine makes one such perfect copy of you without successfully dismantling you. That person stands in front of you. Do you see through their eyes? No. If you die, do they die too? Of course not. It doesn't matter how perfect the copy they are, they are not the same person as you. If the biological processes in your body end, you die. The you that steps into these teleportation machines never gets to see what happens on the other side of them.
Fuck it, kill me. My mind is the part I care about anyway. If you get that where it's going, I'm not bothered. You could even make some improvements on my meat housing before you replicate the next one, I don't mind. Go wild
What if you wake up in hell, or on the next plane of existence, knowing that a soulless likeness of you is carrying on with your friends and family as if nothing happened, and nobody will mourn for your death?
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