Sorry about that ridiculous watermark.
“But what if it kills you, but no one can tell?”
this is pascal’s wager for nerds
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.
-A man can’t step into the same teleporter twice.
Proverbs for the 24th century
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.
I am not. You are already a process, a continuous state of going in and out of existence.
And yet despite this being philosophically sound my student loan people do not agree.
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.
You might like Glasshouse by Charles Stross.
I love that Borderlands makes this joke when you respawn.
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!
Me with brain chip implants, especially those with non-libre software
This is why I want monsters Inc style linked door-wormholes. It’s less… Reconstituted flesh.
Less room for duplicates, more room for halfsies I guess
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.
*“…I teleported home one night, With Ron and Sid and Meg. Ron stole Meggie’s heart away, And I got Sidney’s leg.” *
Teleportation Blues, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
Maybe that’s why there are so few Indians and Pakistanis in the Trek universe.
Someone had to be the first Porthos.
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.
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I think we are still in the realm of a physics problem for teleportation lol
Fusion is an engineering problem. the sun does it. We’ve done it. We just suck at it.
Teleporting is not possible as far as we know …unless I missed something huge in science news
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.
Yeah someone mentioned the Heisenberg compensators to me in a different comment and I’m betting that’s what you are referring to.
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.
It’s definitely not because the more you know about an electrons position, the less you know about it’s speed and vice versa.
Heisenberg compensators are Star Trek’s answer to that. It’s physically impossible to do that in the real world, but in Star Trek they’ve figured it out
For sure. I wish they would’ve given that to us instead of the molecule in that movie about the whale. (Sorry I’m not well versed on star trek
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 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.
But it doesn’t and that’s the point. You are not the collection of atoms that make up your body, YOU are the software program that is running on your brain-computer. The software program can be transferred (or copied) and you are still you. There is no “you” outside of that software.
Your idea of what constitutes “you” Is wrong. Your subjective experience ends when you get dismantled. We can say this definitively, because when the transporter fails to dismantle the original, they don’t get to see through their copy’s eyes. If they don’t get to see what the transporter clone sees when both are alive, then it stands to reason that if they get dismantled, they still don’t get to see what their clone sees. Their subjective experience ends.
I disagree with you, but I don’t know that I can explain it anymore clearly than I already have. There is no metaphysical “you” that exists outside of the software running in your head. You would experience perfect continuity if your body was dismantled and reconstructed. There is no real “you” except the software program that is running on your meat CPU.
Like I said, this is a hard thing to wrap your head around.
There is no metaphysical “you” that exists outside of the software running in your head.
100% agreed.
You would experience perfect continuity if your body was dismantled and reconstructed.
I’m going to explain it a different way.
This is Bill.
🕺⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
I’m going to transport Bill over here.
☁️⬜⬜⬜⬜🕺
That’s still the same Bill, right? There’s continuity?
Now I’m going to do a Tom Riker, and unsuccessfully transport Bill.
🕺⬜⬜⬜⬜🕺
Which one is the real Bill?
If I’m understanding your argument right, you seem to think both of these are Bill. Which they are, but they’re not the same Bill. Despite both of them subjectively feeling a sense of continuity, only Left Bill has existed for more than a few seconds. If I correct my mistake by shooting Left Bill in the head, his subjective experience of being Bill is over. If I never made the mistake, and successfully dismantled him, the same would occur. For him, continuity is not maintained through the transporter.
I was never concerned with whether the me that steps out of the transporter experiences continuity. I’m only concerned with whether the me that exists right now does.
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But the mind does not have continuity. You mind ends and a new copy starts and thinks it has continuity.
Have you ever gone slept?
Yes? How does that break continuity in your mind? You go “unconscious,” but the chemical reactions that make up your mind are still going
Does it matter? If so, why?
I’m confused here. No, it doesn’t matter that I’ve gone to sleep. I don’t have a new mind when I wake up.
How can you tell if it is the old mind of a new mind with the memories of the old one?
Because the process of chemical reactions in my brain never stopped. I suppose if, without my knowledge, I was killed and replaced with a clone that has all my memories, there would be no way for me to tell, but the sleeping isn’t what kills me there
Right so why does a gap matter?
There’s no gap in continuity when I’m asleep. The chemical processes comprising my mind don’t stop. The mind is a process of chemical reactions, regardless of whether it’s conscious at any given time. My mind Is my mind regardless of whether it’s aware of its surroundings at any given time. If the product of the physical interactions between the neurons in my brain.
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?
Because I want to see where I’m going, and if my consciousness ends, I don’t get to see it
I just don’t understand why a gap matters. I had to get knocked out for surgery once and I woke up the same person, sans appendix.
This is why I hate using the word consciousness in these debates. It’s too ill defined, and isn’t really what I mean anyway. The process of chemical reactions in my brain is my mind, regardless of whether it’s aware of any external stimuli.
It’s also irrelevant to the discussion about teleportation. Whether or not you’re the same person after you’ve gone to sleep and woken up is debatable, but whether or not the person who steps into the transporter is the person that steps out of a transporter isn’t. Like I’ve said too many times in this thread, if you step into the transporter and it fails to dismantle you when it creates your copy, you and your copy are two distinct individuals. You don’t get to see through your copy’s eyes. So when the one who stepped into the transporter dies, that individual’s subjective experience ends. This is the same whether they die before the copy is made, as the copy is made, or after the copy is made. They never get to see the other side of the transporter.
For the iteration who came out the other side of the transporter, this is a meaningless distinction. But for the iteration who stepped into the transporter, the distinction is quite literally life and death.
and woken up is debatable,
Tell my creditors that
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.
About the time O’Brien was born.
The plot thickens
Maybe it was kind of like getting B. A. Baracus into a helicopter- they had to drug him first.
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
“In other words: They DRAFTED me!”
I still can’t believe we are this many years out from ebaumsworld and still people are putting fucking watermarks on memes.
I think McCoy was more afraid of accidents than existential factors.
McCoy is a doctor, not an engineer
Dunno if this is just the millennial in me but I’d use one even if I was directly told it clones and kills me. Better than TSA.
Also I don’t fear going to sleep or general anesthesia.
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.
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.
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.
Isn’t this Dollhouse?
The fact that two Rikers existed is all the proof I need to be full Luddite. Save your death machines for the next person, thanks!
And they treat the one on the planet like he’s a copy when he’d logically be the original with the one on the Enterprise being the duplicate.
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.
Except that that explanation means Tom was made with the original Riker materials and Will was made from matter reserves on the ship using the original Riker as a template.
Ship of Theseus
No, USS Enterprise NCC 1701-D. But I can see why that would be confusing.
I think that makes both Rikers equally fake, not real.
Equally fake and equally real are the same thing.
This one Trinitys
Equally fake and equally real are equal?
Beg to differ.
The Queen gives birth to twin boys. It’s a stormy night and the midwife isn’t sure which is older. They are equally the ‘real’ king.
Two counterfeit dollar bills are equally fake.
