You know those sci-fi teleporters like in Star Trek where you disappear from one location then instantaneously reappear in another location? Do you trust that they are safe to use?
To fully understand my question, you need to understand the safety concerns regarding teleporters as explained in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQHBAdShgYI
spoiler
I wouldn’t, because the person that reappears aint me, its a fucking clone. Teleporters are murder machines. Star Trek is a silent massacre!
I am with Bob Johansson (Bobbyverse) on this one. Star trek is utterly inconsistent with how transporters work. They only ever play up when it’s convenient for the plot line, but the rest of the time they’re totally fine and no one worries about it.
Transporters are supposed to move the atoms by converting them into energy, moving that energy through subspace, and then converting them back to atoms on the other side, the only energy in the system is the energy that was created when the atoms were converted, so it shouldn’t be possible to create a transporter clone, no matter how many “confinement beams” you have, as where would it’s atoms come from?
If we talking time tested technology that’s been around for a couple centuries (i.e. Star Trek), sure.
Brand new tech? No thanks.
Of course I would.
Everything that makes you -you- is contained in the physicality of your brain. Even fairly small changes in your brain will create large shifts in cognition and personality. So anything that replicates your body and brain, down to the last atom, is going to be creating -you-. As far as you are concerned, nothing happened; you ceased to be in one place, and immediately sprang into existence in another.
“As far as you are concerned”
Correction: “as far as anyone else is concerned.”
Consciousness IS continuity. If you are disentigrated and a perfect clone pops up somewhere to replace you… you died. Your current stream of consciousness ended and a perfect copy replaced you.
As far as all external observers are concerned it’s still you. But from your own perspective? Well you won’t have one anymore, you’ll be dead.
If we’re talking exactly like star trek I’m 90% on board with it. Yeah, yeah, so I’m a clone now, big whoop.
You wanna know the 10% that really fucking haunt me?! Mother fucking Tuvix. Everyone you know can turn into a Tuvix situation real fast, that’s the real nightmare.
I love Star Trek, but using the transporter as a plot device led to some really bs situations. Tuvix. The time it made everyone children. The time Picard fucked off to be an energy being so they just used last week’s pattern to rematerialize him… Thomas Riker… I could keep going.
I mean think about what would need to happen for Tuvix to exist. The computer would somehow have to do some really complex genetics work to create a hybrid species and somehow merge the 2 very different brains into one stable and coherent organism.
An IRL tuvix situation would be a dead blob of body horror on the transporter pad. They’d be like, fuck clean-up on isle 5, data corruption and pull the last good backup. Because keeping literally just the most recent copy would be criminally negligent. Then they’d rematerialize you but it was you from 2 days ago and you get to wonder for the rest of your life what the other version of you did in the 2 days.
This question all comes down to your opinion of what makes a person a person, whether that means we have something greater than the collection of our atoms, or whether we are simply the emergent outcome of the complex arrangement of atoms. If you subscribe to the former then you also need to believe that this machine is somehow capable of either transporting/transplanting that “soul” for lack of a better expression. Where if you subscribe to the latter than this is most certainly a suicide cloning machine.
I personally subscribe to the idea that consciousness is an emergent property of complexity. Given a sufficiently large enough series of inputs you can observe new and unexpected outputs that appear to be on higher orders of complexity than their inputs. This response is an example of that, from electrons flowing through transistors we end up with operating systems, hardware IO, web browsers, networking protocols, ASCII standards, font rendering, etc. All of that complexity emerges from a massive amount of on/off switches arranged in patterns over time.
Following this chain of reasoning I believe that making an exact duplicate of me down to the state of each atom is no different than that entity being me, however as a conscious being with human ethics and morals I put value in the singularity of my existence, and so a plurality of Zetaphor is something I find undesirable as it fundamentally challenges my perception of what it means to be myself.
So assuming the entity leaving the transporter is me, there’s two ways to approach the way a machine like this could operate:
- It reads my state in its entirety and then destroys (or encodes for transport) that state
- Or it’s creating the new instance of me bit by bit as it reads my current state
That means one of two things, either there is a brief moment of time where two identical copies of me are in the universe, or there is a period of time where zero complete copies of me exist in the universe. So either I stopped existing momentarily and then was recreated from scratch (death and clone birth), or I existed in two places at once and then died in one (cloning and suicide).
Your original copy would die. Your life as you know it would end the moment you teleport.
Sure on the other end a replica would come out, presumably with all your memories etc intact, but it would not be you, you would not experience it. It would go on living your life, thinking it was you, everyone around it treating it like it was you, and presumably doing all the same things you would have done.
Except it is not you. Your experience ended at the teleporter. And many fools would never realize this, because the dead aren’t around to tell us.
I don’t buy the idea that disintegrating my molecules and reconstructing new ones is tantamount to murder or suicide.
If all I experience is being one place one moment and another place the next, then it’s me. It’s isn’t some fucking clone, it’s me. You’re just being turned into some other form (energy, if we’re using Star Trek rules) and then being turned back.
I’m pretty sure that at 26, I’m already a completely different person than the baby I was born as, literally. My cells have all died and been replaced. The horror. ./s
I don’t buy the idea that disintegrating my molecules and reconstructing new ones is tantamount to murder or suicide.
I definitely don’t think teleportation in science fiction is meant to be killing the person using it and making a clone of them. Like unless a story is specifically about that, I don’t think any given sci-fi author is trying to set up some sinister background plot where everyone is unknowingly killing themselves all the time.
But I do still have to wonder if that’s how it would end up working out in real life. Sure all our cells have died and been replaced since we were born, but that typically doesn’t happen with all your cells at the same time lol. imo it’s probably less about cells and more about like… Consciousness or “the soul” or whatever, I don’t know. Whatever it is, I accept that teleporters in fiction have some way to store and transport it, whether it’s stated in the narrative or not. But in real life I have no idea how we’d be able to tell if such a thing could even work.
if you translocated Theseus’ ship, is it still the same ship? what if you extracted the data from the transport buffer to reassemble the original in its original location?
For a ship, yes. For a living organism with consciousness… I’m not so sure.
If automobiles were invented, would you use them instead of horses?
Cars don’t rip you apart molecularly, unless you get into a crash. A teleporter will rip you apart every time. This isn’t a discussion of the “safety” of teleporters, it’s a discussion of what consciousness is.
Absolutely! I might even die instantly, which is just a bonus :V
