Damn, I was going to ship of Theseus you about the cells in your body replacing themselves constantly, but apparently our brain neurons last a lifetime.
Now I don't think I would ever use a teleporter, either. Shit.
Its kinda crazy actually if you think about it, our ability to anticipate actions is our ability to land in outcomes expected to be made by the reality generating around us if you imagine the reality outside our bodily sensory input as a big monte carlo field of potentials in the form of intertwined variables...like a big llm.
That is why nervous system damage usually means life long problems. Brains and all their wiring are so arcane and complicated, even our bodies don't know how to grow more than one of them, and we often don't get it right the first time either unfortunately.
muscle cells too. the muscle cells you have now are the same cells you had as a kid (not entirely sure how far back it goes). they dont even divide when you gain muscle, the cells just get bigger and absorb nuclei from neighboring cells to support the extra mass. the cool thing is the nuclei stick around even if you let the muscles atrophy, so theyre forever changed by having once been big. thats probably part of why its easier to get back to muscle size youve been at before.
So far that we know of, neural cell DNA, tooth enamel, and eye lens crystallines, never have their atoms replaced.
Which is to say that we are a ship of theseus, and a transporter does not kill us. The only reason these atoms are not normally replaced is because there is no natural mechanism to replace them.
Radiocarbon Dating of the Human Eye Lens Crystallines Reveal Proteins without Carbon Turnover throughout Life
Lynnerup N, Kjeldsen H, Heegaard S, Jacobsen C, Heinemeier J (2008) Radiocarbon Dating of the Human Eye Lens Crystallines Reveal Proteins without Carbon Turnover throughout Life. PLOS ONE 3(1): e1529. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0001529
Not sure I would tie my identity to my neuron DNA, tooth enamel, and eye lens crystallines. Definitely agree with you that we are living ships of Theseus. I'm pretty sure there's no natural mechanism to replace those parts because it's really hard, and we work "well enough" without being able to.
A distinction between a teleporter and a transporter...
To teleport implies the original matter is instantly moved from one place to another so there would be no destruction and reconstituted copy. A wormhole would seem to be the only realistic way that could be achieved.
A transporter, well that means copy then kill. No one knows if the kill part is painful because noone survives it. I find it funny Riker's copy is actually the "original" and his lack of death is considered a transporter accident. Yet he is the one treated like the copy...
And all that said, barclay's experience in the transporter beam is more suggestive of a wormhole style device.
I don't know why I bothered to write all this out...
Iirc Thomas is not Will’s copy. Basically the transporter has a malfunction where Thomas and Will are both constituted on a transporter pad. So both are the “original” and also both are neither. In a sense, the William Thomas Riker who stepped onto that pad that day ceased to be, forked into two different lives.
I used to use this episode to talk about identity when I taught ethics back in the day. Both men carried on their lives under the belief that they were the same man who stepped onto a transporter pad on Nervala IV. Their experiences defined who they were, demonstrating that it’s more than biological material that makes any one of us us.
Now the deeper question is: since you can’t add matter to the universe, what’s missing to give life to two Rikers?
You know what, now that your mention it, wasn't the explanation that the signal was reflected back to the surface due to the ionising radiation of something, so the beam was kinda split or doubled. So my premise was wrong.
Yeah. They tried to split the beam to account for the radiation, half of it made it through, the other half mirrored back. I'm guessing the computer can extrapolate the remaining matter based off of data saved in the pattern buffer?
Either way, Thomas Riker was way under-utilized in Star Trek. I also love how "okay, sure" everyone is about this situation.
Sounds like trek had the technology to copy people. You would think if they are sending people out into the unknown to explore galaxies light years away they would just send a copy. Or at least keep a copy.
The are other methods from Star Trek that could potentially be size as well.
Like "hey you actually travel through this other dimension where your physical form is undisturbed and no time passes in this dimension"
Which sounds ok, but "by the way it's kinda a hell-dimension and your consciousness gets tortured for a distance-relative time there but won't retain the memories after..."
Oh dear lord. Yeah I could definitely see a variant where the hell dimension is just "work all the hours that it would have taken to traverse in normal space so that EvilCorp can generate profit for the pan-dimensional empire"
To transport just means to move, so if anything the term "transporter" implies physically moving people rather than copying. The term "teleport" is the more ambiguous one...
They both got converted into energy, Thomas is just as much a copy as Will.
Also, apparently your experience is constant across the process, as seen by Barclay grabbing someone out of the matter stream. Presumably someone would notice if it hurt...
no matter what, they were like 1000th generation of copies. "the original" died when riker stepped into the transporter for the first time. so discussing whether this one is 1001st, or 1002nd generation seems not that exciting...
Is it waylaid or weighed, as in driving over a scale at a inspection station?
Edit: lyrics all say "weighed", but the way it's sung over two beats I definitely hear waylaid. Truckers hauling overweight loads, or heavier than reported on the bill of lading (contraband), don't want to have to go over the scales because they'll get caught.
We always sung it as waylaid. As in stopped by the PoPo. The song also speaks of transporting "smokes and folks", so yeah, behave in a way that keeps one from ever talking to the authorities.
Yes thank you I agree that is what waylaid means. The lyrics however, are "weighed" as in pulling into a weigh station you usually see along the highway closed for some reason.
Exactly. The "me" of yesterday is already dead. He can't think, feel, act, reason, or anything else. I have memories of being him, but if I'd suffered head trauma, even those could be gone. The illusion of continuous, conscious experience is just that—an illusion.
The young-Earth people say that their god created the world about 6,000 years ago, and planted fossils to test our faith. I say that my god created the universe 6 seconds ago, including these memories that we seem to have. There's literally no way to prove otherwise.
And yet you have a vested interest in your continued survival. If you stepped into a transporter and it failed to disassemble you on departure, you would very much protest if a maintenance technician attempted manual disassembly
That's not a philosophical objection, though, it's just instinct. If the transporter made a copy of me, the copy would also very much object to this proposed method of error correction.
This is simultaneously the most depressing and most realistic take on the subject I've ever read. I've always considered time travel to the past to be impossible because the past already happened and is gone, there is nothing to go "back" to. Time is an arrow that only points to the future and is forever in motion, never leaving a trail behind.
With that said, I can still enjoy time-travel fiction for what it is, a fantasy, and suspend my disbelief enough to enjoy it.
I mean, the brain mostly consists of the same matter, aside from cycling synovial fluid, once you reach middle age. Recreate me a body but keep my original brain and I won't mind it, aside from all the horror.
The cells in your brain are not replaced like other cells in your body, but the atoms are. In fact, all of the atoms in your body are swapped out every seven years or so.
all of the atoms in your body are swapped out every seven years or so.
I'm not sure exactly what's true, but what you're saying seems like a factoid that gets repeated a lot but isn't really 100% true.
Structural stuff like the calcium in your bones... it would be interesting if it was really replaced on a schedule like that. It wouldn't shock me if it was getting replaced, but it would certainly be cool to learn how that would work.
Is the lens in your eye getting replaced like that? I'm trying to think of body parts that seem to not get constant automatic maintenance. How about the enamel on your teeth? Really replaced every 7 years?
Or if we're really just talking about atoms in your body, then famously the problem with heavy metal poisoning is that your body can't get rid of it. So, is it being replaced or is your body getting rid of it? Or... is it just there from before?
And if you want to get really pedantic, and I always do, what fun... Things like artificial hips or breast implants are definitely in people's bodies longer than 7 years but are not getting their atoms replaced.
My understanding of this factoid is that it has more to do with atoms tendency to swap particles when they bump into each other. So it’s sort of through attrition all of the atomic particles in your body are swapped out over the course of about seven years. So like as oxygen and carbon dioxide, for instance, move in and out of your brain and other tissues they leave electrons and shit behind and take some with them. But it also wouldn’t be the first time I had misunderstood something.
Hmm... ironic immortality! I have eternal life, but grow increasingly more weary and numb to it's joys until I wish for the sweet succor of death that will never come.
I don't think that would be real. People become bitter and weary because they get old and their bodies start hurting and their minds failing more and more.
They become bitter because they don't know how to handle their own minds. Hence being immortal gives one far more time to learn, but does not make learning inevitable
With the current constant scanning an analyzing and advertising pushed on us, I'd stay far as fuck away from any teleporting service....
If they have the tech to disassemble and reassemble you including memories, then they can manipulate that.
Would you trust Google Instant Transport Services to not tune your personality to be more favorable toward products from their ad partners, or just slightly tune your political opinions to be more inline with their own.
Just a slight adjustment, an active protester against new datacenters would become less aggressive, a random person starts buying more Pepsi instead of Coke, a change small enough that no one notices a big change in behavior.
Also, would you trust that your memories would stay private?
There’s also the possibility that consciousness (including memories) is part of some kind of metaphysical net that “latches” onto a particular collection of cells/matter like an attuned radio. So once your matter stream is reconstituted, your memories just “latch” no need to reconstruct the memories. If our consciousness exists in the space between electrical pulses in our brain then such a thing is a kind of energy, yeah? Perhaps, like some forms of matter, consciousness is something that can transcend space and time? Within Star Trek this might explain how species like Betazoids and Vulcans can use telepathy—they’re able to tune into the consciousness net.
Hey. That's close to my favourite theory :) although with different consequences. I like to believe that consciousness is just another property of matter that we can't measure (yet?). Stones, dust, grass, all atoms / particles have it. But it takes a certain complex arrangement - like our CNS - with the capability to store and retrieve information (and thus learn) to actually form a conscious mind.
However this would mean your mind gets fully destroyed on disassembly and likely the copy won't function / might be a vegetable on arrival because the unmeasured properties of atoms used to construct the copy were completely different (think of things like spin).
I know the theory your referring to, it grades the entire universes consciousness on a sliding scale from a neutron all the way up to a person.
But I don’t think that consciousness and memories are tied together at all. Consciousness is not well defined which makes it a fickle subject, but memories are a biological process that we can observe much more easily.
My understanding, based on a book I read once about neuroplasticity, is that memories are pathways that are literally burned into your brain by repeated sensory chemicals being sent to that particular part of the brain. As long as the transporter puts every single brain wrinkle back where it was and instructs the brain on which chemicals it sent down the pathways, you could probably put memories back into the head.
I wasn't referring any theory. While I am not delusional to think I am the only one, I came up with this entirely by myself.
Also, your "but" isn't a but. I was alluding to the same thing: memories is stored information, i.e. a structure like our brain growing.
Why I think the transporter might be catastrophic is because it could only reproduce the "software" accurately, the EEPROM-like memories. But the hardware might be all wrong.
Oh! Well the name that the other dude who thought about it gave it was Panpsychism, you might be interested to read about it.
Your “but” isn’t a but
But it is :P I’m saying that I think the hardware would be the easy part. Put all the same types of stuff in the same configuration, give it some instructions and you’ve got a fleshy automaton that should reasonably be able to recall the same things the other thing could. The “software” as you called it, would be more difficult I think.
We know what makes a memory, but we don’t know why someone makes a particular decision or what influences their personality to act how they do. Hell, putting two human beings right next to each other and stimulating them in the exact same way doesn’t even produce the same results between the two, so we couldn’t accurately instruct the new automaton on how to act like the old one
Panpsychism sounds a bit embellished, but I'll have a look. I think we have an analogy misunderstanding. I really meant memories etc as the software because it is "programmed" with our experiences. The hardware being the atoms that we can not accurately arrange in a copy because we have no concept of the conscience related property (e.g. conscience spin, for lack of a better word).
It could be like trying to run little endian software on a big endian architecture: instant crash.
If they have the tech to disassemble and reassemble you including memories, then they can manipulate that.
That's definitely not a given.
That's like saying that if you can perfectly scan and reproduce a book down to the smudges and crumbs, that you understand the contents of that book.
To us right now in 2026, mapping an entire brain, simulating it perfectly, then editing it slightly without breaking it seems a lot more doable than breaking down a human quark by quark and rebuilding them somewhere else. But, that isn't necessarily the case.
In the TNG episode Lonely Among Us Captain Picard gets taken over by an alien energy being. It hijacks his body and he teleports himself into a cloud of dispersed particles in a nebula. They spend more than an hour trying to recover him, and are about to give up, when Troi senses his consciousness, and they are able to reconstitute him through the transporter. This, and other mentions of "mental energy" in the show indicate that there is a canonical, scientific proof of the existence of the soul independent from the body, and that it can be transported without damage.
Anything more involved than that gets into philosophical debates about whether or not you die every time you go to sleep, and is about as useful a conversation as whether or not you can "know" if you are or aren't a brain in a jar.
This, and other mentions of “mental energy” in the show indicate that there is a canonical, scientific proof of the existence of the soul independent from the body, and that it can be transported without damage.
So what about the Riker duplicate? Which one is soulless? Or is the soul also copyable?
Thomas Riker isn't a transporter duplicate, he's a kidnap victim from a parallel dimension.
Thomas Riker supposedly proved that the transporter can be used to duplicate sentient living beings. So why aren't there mass-produced transporter duplicates? There are plenty of unscrupulous powers that would love to exploit this existential loophole and create huge armies of Jem Hadar or some such. They would have no ethical limitations on making such things, and broadly speaking if a scientific / engineering problem CAN be solved then it WILL be solved, and doubly more so when someone proves that it definitely CAN be solved.
Because the theory of his creation is wrong. He wasn't duplicated by the interference field, his transport beam was filtered through a parallel dimension and back, and captured Thomas from his home dimension and dropped him in ours. Thanks to the Mirror Universe, we know that transporter fuckery can cause trans-dimensional transporting. When they discovered Thomas, they got the interpretation of the phenomenon wrong, and set everyone on a drastically wrong path of research. His duplication hasn't been duplicated, because he was never duplicated to begin with.
Yeah, but it doesn't explain why less scrupulous factions don't just copy their most valuable biological assets. Best captains, strongest warriors. Most cunning spies.
I mean… if there were 25,000 of me around, we definitely wouldn’t be following someone else’s orders to die in their war. I imagine that if you copy a person too many times, they tend to stop taking directions as well. Like, if a person can’t unionize with themself, then I don’t know how to help them.
jem hadar maybe not, but even they have a limit, and once they thought they were no longer dependent on ketracel white, they reached it really quickly.
So I guess the answer is to get your clone army hooked
What if you copied them without their knowing? Like, you have an operative heading out on a secret mission. Undisclosed location. Then, just save them in the buffer. Bring them out whenever you need, like the Winter Soldier. You could even have concurrent missions going. Then, just delete them or store their patterns again when the mission is complete.
I’d use a teleporter with no hesitation. What’s important is my memories and sense of self, not the actual meat it’s in. I could find out I’m a copy of myself right now and not be bothered.
Yeah but once you step in the teleporter you stop being. The copy is only useful for other people to keep interacting with your clone, but the actual you is dead.
There's no “actual” you. Your body creates a sense of an “I”. If you copy that body including the brain, the copy will have the same. You wouldn't say that the copy’s sense of smell is somehow different, so why make a distinction for the sense of self?
Actually, now that I think about it, it's far worse than that. If a company has a teleporter that can build a copy of you, they can also build an almost-copy of you. Say, a copy that is less rebellious. More obedient.
Yeah, the idea's cool in fiction, but in reality I would never touch a machine like this. I will walk my ass over in analogue.
Well I imagined we were talking about an imaginary sci-fi technology. Obviously it would be more complicated and possibly at risk for some kind of manipulation in real life. If I were presented a teleporter where the only fault is a philosophical question about being a copy, then I don’t mind being a copy and my original self dying.
That feels like a very different statement than saying you don't mind stepping into the teleporter knowing you will die while a copy continues from where you left off on the other side.
Star Trek teleporter: fax machine / shredder combination (remember that time the shredder bit malfunctioned and we got double Riker..?)
Wormhole: just a weird long gateway (with a chance of spaghettification). No problems there unless it somehow takes you through some sort of hell dimension or something.
Stargate: somehow both, because let's be frank, the Ancients were kind of dicks. (Also, didn't actually need the whole buffer thing, that one Orlin built in Carter's basement with a box of scraps was completely analog, no computer bits, and it worked just fine until it didn't.)
It's not like that Riker episode was taken lightly. But, you would think that an event like that would have led to a lot more soul searching. For example, occasionally there were religious people in Star Trek -- what does this say about transporters and souls?
From what I remember, they spent a lot more time on the mechanics of a dude getting duplicated: the bureaucracy of it (his rank, etc.) and how it affected his relationships with Troi etc.
But, no talk of how every time someone is transported the original body is killed? No talk about how this might be a means of creating an army of clones?
Same deal with people being stored for a long time in the pattern buffer. Does this mean you can create backups of people so that if they die they can simply be beamed from that data?
Schlock Mercenary (webcomic) had a couple of good takes on this concept. The "wormgates" in SM were more like teleporters, in that they disintegrated you, reduced you to data, and recreated you on the other side. As a side effect, the Gatekeepers could make copies of you in transit, which is how they kept their galactic dominance intact, by interrogating and shredding gate-clones. Arguably, they murdered trillions of sapients with their gates.
In-universe, it's impossible to generate big wormholes, but the F'Sherl'Ganni "faked" it and everyone just kind of assumed there was some weird physics they'd figured out that nobody else knew.
The Teraport, in SM (or "tear-apart" as it was sometimes called derisively) at least had some continuity, by porting you through billions of microscopic wormholes. Whether that kills you or not, well, that's between you and Carl.
The "wormgates" in SM were more like teleporters, in that they disintegrated you, reduced you to data, and recreated you on the other side.
That's exactly how stargates work in the Stargate series (except for the bit where they could work like normal wormholes, but they've got a scanner/shredder/maker mechanism stuck in front of the wormhole for no apparent reason).
I don't think they ever duplicated anyone (with a stargate), but Teal'c('s data) once got stuck in the buffer. Technically nothing would prevent the gate from duplicating travelers, as long as it had enough energy and it could be prevented from flushing the buffer.
The bit I find worrying is that you'd have to trust you will be 1:1 reconstructed at the other side.
What happens if there's an error on the reconstruction side and it either fails to reconstruct you back properly, or at all?
Or what if some malicious party injects something into, or removes part of your reconstruction?
There'd be no way for you to know from the other side, so you could just be killed or maimed in an instant, and there'd be nothing you could do to stop it
If you're taking teleportation, you've likely already accepted (or are ignorant of) the fact that you as a literal being will perish - but you survive conceptually through your copy.
So I care if that copy gets made. If it doesn't, then I'm not just literally dead, but conceptually dead too.
I read one scifi novel where the teleportation was almost instant across the galaxy, the caveat was that it duplicated you, so the original walked out of the booth, while the copy was the one who actually went somewhere. Aside from the issues of having several of you around if you went back to the destination, not every teleport was great for the original either. One instance where they were trying to escape some creature planetside, and as they ran into the booth the main wondered if they'd be the one who made it to safety, or not. Of course next chapter picks up with the safe one's pov....
Do you think the transporter reconstructs the contents of your stomach & intestines? Like, do you still have to pee when you come out the other side, or does it just take care of business for you?
Assuming that whatever computer is processing your blueprint could accurately detect all of your poop and pee, then I don't see why it couldn't physically do that.
And the incentive would line up too, as it would both save the company money on reconstruction and be beneficial to the customer.
Better question yet is if it's possible to tamper the blueprint, where would the limit be?
Could it be used medically to essentially perform surgery on you (or rather your clone)?
Could the teleporter service basically offer you a character creation screen to make yourself however you'd want to look or be?
Of course, again, this relies on you trusting the teleporter service with your entire being. If they fail, you're not just literally dead, you're conceptually just gone.
Assuming that whatever computer is processing your blueprint could accurately detect all of your poop and pee, then I don't see why it couldn't physically do that.
Heh, well, there might be a pressure problem... but yeah if it's accurate enough to put all of the walls of your intestines back where they were, why bother reconstructing that log inside there? But then... do you fill the empty space with vacuum? air? fluid? or do you try to reconstruct the intestine, not as it was, but in a relaxed/empty state?
Better question yet is if it's possible to tamper the blueprint, where would the limit be?
Could it be used medically to essentially perform surgery on you (or rather your clone)?
Could the teleporter service basically offer you a character creation screen to make yourself however you'd want to look or be?
If we can get rid of your waste, we can at least get rid of kidney stones too, right? And probably tumors and parasites, maybe even bacterial infections.
If you fly instead, you have to trust the pilot, ATC, the mechanics, the aircraft engineers, the builder, its suppliers, and on and on. At least in a transporter malfunction, you die in an instant, rather than in terror as the plane crashes.
Everyone always focuses on the Ship of Theseus or the existential parts of this, but the societal impacts would be crazy.
Millions of people teleporting to the most beautiful places on earth and wrecking them, highways and boring parts of cities abandoned, mass death of people teleporting into a crush crowd at Mecca, landmarks toppled under the weight of teleporting tourists and bosses teleporting into your house for a "work from home" meeting, weapons and bombs being teleported into war zones...
Things would eventually find a new normal and teleporting food and resources around would remove the need for ships and trucks, you could explore the world much more easily and there would be lots of science to do in hard to reach places, marine biologists would have a field day exploring the deep ocean, doctors could teleport cancer cells out of patients, space agencies teleport probes, bases and astronauts to the moon and around the solar system...
Like it would be such a huge upheaval with so many implications. It's interesting that people really fixate on the "would I die though? What does dying even mean if I'm still around?" part, even though I think that's maybe the least interesting thing. I guess it taps into a very primal survival instinct?
Depends on how the technology works. It's more likely that you would need someone's how to receive or both ends, even if it were technically possible to just teleport randomly from point a to point b I feel like that feature would be disabled on commercial models precisely to stop the above from happening.
The ship of thesis is “the ship of thesis” because it is the ship that thesis is using. He could hop off a trireme and on to a “boston whaler” and it would be the ship of thesis.
Edit: you must live with me spelling sin. I will not alter time and reality to correct that which is.
I have a little voice in my head that says words and I guess how they are spelled based only on my phonix education in elementary school and my vaguely western New England/ upstate New York accent.
I may have, but, it was stored as a phonetic sound with in my mind. I could try and transliterate it in to the couple other languages I am familiar with the phonetics of, but I suspect the same error would occur.
I was thinking about IPoAC the other day and had a horrifying realisation of it's implications: teleporting someone will involve moving enough data to reconstitute an identical human being from the sending to the recieving teleporter, and assuming storage technology grows in a similar way, there will be a point where it's faster to be downloaded to a drive, strapped to a pigeon, and flown to your destination for reconstitution than it will be to wait for the data to transfer over.
No, the assumptions are that it would be a static but massive amount of data and that transfer bandwidths grow slower than can keep up with storage volume, which is why there would be a point rather than multiple ones. At some point the bandwidth would outgrow the data and forever more be faster at the task than IPoAC.
I used to think like that, but I have my doubts. Doesn't "Realm of Fear" show that you are conscious during the transfer process? So it's kinda like growing new brain synapses and starting to be conscious through them instead of old ones?
I always liked the idea of teleporters that are just wormhole pairs.
If you want to travel from New York to Paris you have to first go to your local wormhole station, walk through that and be taken to the central station for all US wormholes, walk over to the international portal and be taken to the global interface station, which would be located wherever the electricity is cheapest so probably somewhere in Iceland, then you walk over to the French national station, and be taken to some facility in France, and then from there walk over to the Paris wormhole.
All wormholes are 20 m across by standard allowing cargo containers to transport through, with the Americans have made system unnecessarily complicated by standardizing their wormholes to 2.5 giraffe widths.
So the real dilemma here is if you believe in a spirit or after life. Essentially you wouldnt ever get where you were going. But you would.
Honestly, who's to say that somewhere in the infinity between every second consciousness doesnt jump from one location to another breaking the continuation of persistent matter.
People say this but I don't understand why. I don't think there's any reason to believe we meaningfully cease to be "continuous" while asleep, in fact we're not even unconscious when we sleep, our brain keeps processing stimuli, in parts of the cycle we dream, etcetera.
While sleep isn't the right thought experiment, think of cryogenics: it works for the wood frog, which can come back from being completely frozen solid, so there's no reason to believe that our consciousness can't be fully interrupted and resumed.
Which ones? I'm never truly gone still in my bed. And as someone who has died coming back from death is not the same as waking up. One I lost days of memory after being brought back, I don't loose days when I wake up every morning.
What do you mean? You're only dreaming during REM sleep. That's only part of the sleep cycle. And the loss of memory is irrelevant here. We're talking about continuity of consciousness and its implications from a philosophical perspective. We're not talking about your soul being out of your body or something.
At least I think that's what you're trying to say? Some of your grammar makes your comment difficult to parse.
Sometimes dreaming and sometimes recalling doesn't prove you always have a stream of consciousness.
You have different sleep phases each night, some are entirely dream less. Large groups of your neurons sync up during NREM sleep, firing at the same time. I don't see how consciousness can survive becoming basically a pendulum. People awoken during NREM in studies usually say they weren't experiencing anything. Maybe they were and just didn't remember, we can't prove that, but it seems unlikely and it couldn't be much of an experience while most of your brain is busy flashing on and off again like a flickering lightbulb.
Then think about cryogenics. The wood frog can be frozen solid and come back to life by thawing, so there's nothing fundamentally preventing our existence from becoming discontinuous
This doesn't mean much. You only dream during REM sleep, one phase of your sleep cycle. But there are periods during every night where the lights are off and there's nobody home.
No it isn't. You're only dreaming during REM sleep. This is like, sleep cycle 101 here. The periods of deep sleep where your brain is doing its deep repair work? Your consciousness is not just reduced, but absent entirely. During slow-wave sleep, you have no awareness. The reason you haven't noticed these while you are sleeping is because you cannot be aware of your own periods where you completely lack awareness.
Just as you said, that depends on definition. And since we know jack shit about how conciousness works all of those definitions (minus one) will be flawed. Going by some definitions that include this, you could say you die every second. I had restless nights thinking about this and the only conclusion I came to is that it's ironically not worth losing sleep over this, because if this is true then one you can't do anything about it two you won't even notice it. Alternatively this is a flawed perspective and you are just overthinking something that isn't even true.
It still kinda fucks with me that they showed a transporter Cronenberg in TMP of all places, the first movie, these people rode around on a 5 year mission with some goofy malfunctions sure, but they trusted that transporter to use it constantly, just to watch some dude get slimed
Somehow I'm more scared of a holodeck, I don't mean getting hurt by falling from somewhere or shot in a novel with failing safety protocols, I mean clipping bug on a wall and getting sliced in half by the force field.
There's this thought experiment: think about delayed "scrapping" in the sender. Let's say by a minute? You'd have time to talk to yourself over a video call, then what are you going to think about "it's still me" when your copy walks away and you are about to be zapped?
They both have their own sense of self. By the time they fork, they're no longer the same individual (but very similar) and it doesn't matter which one gets destroyed: the bad part is the loss of the last copy of a personality, not a copy.
explain that first bit to the person I was replying to, not me :)
that's a very utilitarian approach. Which, I am sure, would be very comforting to the copy about to be destroyed. Also, by that logic you could kill twins/triplets at birth, all but the "last copy". Very dark, very cynical.
Isn't there a variation of this with an evil shapeshifter captain Kirk fighting real Kirk, where the real Kirk eventually tells Spock to "shoot both of us" and then Spock shoots the other, saying "this is how I knew it was you"?
And then they begin to diverge in to two separate people, who are distinct individuals, but still both you.
It’s not that complicated. So long as you don’t start imagining metaphysical hallucinations like “souls” because people want to pretend the “after life” is a thing because they’re scared of no longer being.
We can't prove conscious entities do or don't have souls. Asserting we don't, as if it's some kind of self-evident fact, is as arrogant as religious people asserting that we do.
Present me a rigorous definition of the concept, then a coherent evidence based argument for why we should even consider the concept as a potential, and then a series of experiments to prove or disprove the concept.
I will be chatting with the invisible, immaterial and mute elephant that lives in my living room until you do.
That entire statement is predicated on the assumption that everything about the universe, how it came to be, etc., is directly observable from within the universe, which we also cannot know with any certainty.
But I don't have to, you're the one who made the claim that we assuredly don't have souls, so prove it yourself.
everything about the universe, how it came to be, etc., is directly observable from within the universe
This is the only way that makes sense to approach it. Either it is and there's an objective truth and consistency to reality, or it isn't and there's literally infinite possibilities so any single possibility is infinitely unlikely and there's no reason to assume any of them are valid.
Where did I say there's no objective truth to the universe? Say I drew some pictures on small pieces of paper and arranged them adjacent to each other on a table, and then placed my hand flat on the table, then invited you to look. You can see pictures on the table, I then ask you whether there are any pictures under my hand. You (should) answer that you don't know. You not knowing whether there are pictures under my hand or not does nor change the objective truth of their existence. The hand represents what we don't know about the universe, and you (at least currently) don't have the technology to lift it.
An assertion that something does not exist does not need to be proven, since it is inherently a challenge to someone else’s assertion to something existing.
A negative can not be proven, if someone wishes to insist that a concept be considered, the burden of evidence fall upon them.
That's quite an oversimplification. What you're really asserting is that sentience has no part which is very difficult if not impossible to directly measure. You can throw your hands in the air and pretend you've not made any such claim, but you have. It's bizarre how many atheists display the same levels of dogmatism and fervour as their religious counterparts.
P.S. pretty odd that you felt the need to condescendingly imply I'd think talking to some kind of ghost elephant is equally plausible as not knowing the entire nature of the universe.
Point to the comment made before my edit. I clarified my comment after posting it, no comment was made prior to my edit.
There may have been one I did not see. As is the nature of federate platforms and de-federated instances. Or, perhaps even, a comment from someone I blocked previously.
The elephant crap was not in the original comment. That's not just a typo, mate. If you're incapable of admitting something so trivial, and deflect by bringing up previously blocking people, like that has anything to with it, you're certainly not worth any more of my time.
I know about the teapot, and it seems you've also missed the point. Did you not notice where I said it was as arrogant to claim we do have souls as fact?
We know we have consciousness, that's not a far-fetched untestable thing like a microscopic teapot in orbit. You accept that you have it as true, but it's basically impossible to prove, because how would an unconscious biological machine that reacts to all physical stimuli the same as a human be any different from a conscious one? We lack an explanation for why biological machines give rise to consciousness and why the universe is aware of itself. That's not an extraordinary claim. Why does awareness exist at all? Why does the universe not do everything it does now without being aware?
I recommend reading Blindsight. One of the few novels that actually changed the way I think (in this case about consciousness)
And yeah, it's real in the same sense as a sense of smell is real. It's just a byproduct of how our brains work. Copy the brain, copy the consciousness.
Teleporting will be so expensive and energy intensive that only billionaires will do it. It will be orders of magnitude more disruptive to the environment than private jets. You won't have the luxury to worry about your molcules.
The universe is a hologram, and our physical brain is just an antenna tuned to the higher dimension of consciousness. Your consciousness exists separately to your body, so if the transporter builds an exact copy of your body (and brain) you will just tune back in to your same consciousness when you're done transporting.
I agree with them on the principle that ST teleportation works like that. that's because teleporters and replicators are based on the same architecture and technology out of simplicity.
IRL, it's probably more likely going to be based on quantum entanglement in a controlled environment. meaning you will exist once in the entire known universe, but parts of you may exist in multiple locations simultaneously until they are not. this would be observed as no different than your current existence except for the potential to be scattered across the entire universe at a quantum level.
Quantum entanglement is the phenomenon in which the quantum state of each particle in a group cannot be described independently of the state of the others, even when the particles are separated by a large distance.
if we were able to develop a way to move matter, at the quantum level, through particles that are entangled it would essentially be teleportation. there's so many other obstacles in the way of that first though. the first big issue, how do you send matter in a quantum state and disregard all other matter that isn't supposed to be sent?
for a second there I thought I had accidentally posted to a science community. then I realized this is a meme community.
Imagine my relief when I came to the realization that you're probably some fat neck bearded armchair "quantum physicist" that's just trying to get a rise out of a "normie".
don't take science that has yet to be invented so serious. I'm not writing a thesis or scientific proof on it, and especially not on a meme board.
I'm not sure 'kill' is the correct word here. It seems to me that your conscience (aka: "you") is being sent around to various places while the body (aka: the last 20 years of groceries) is merely being reused to recreate some other person.
That's the way I see it anyway.
242 Comments
JohnnyCanuck@lemmy.ca · 82 pts · 19h
Damn, I was going to ship of Theseus you about the cells in your body replacing themselves constantly, but apparently our brain neurons last a lifetime.
Now I don't think I would ever use a teleporter, either. Shit.
red_bull_of_juarez@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 18 pts · 17h
Just believe we're inside a simulation and transporters won't matter.
confuser@lemmy.zip · 9 pts · 17h
Its kinda crazy actually if you think about it, our ability to anticipate actions is our ability to land in outcomes expected to be made by the reality generating around us if you imagine the reality outside our bodily sensory input as a big monte carlo field of potentials in the form of intertwined variables...like a big llm.
Joeffect@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 15h
Will they anti matter then?
Crozekiel@piefed.zip · 16 pts · 17h
That is why nervous system damage usually means life long problems. Brains and all their wiring are so arcane and complicated, even our bodies don't know how to grow more than one of them, and we often don't get it right the first time either unfortunately.
Serinus@lemmy.world · -18 pts · 17h
Well clearly you didn't get it right.
applebusch@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 6 pts · 11h
muscle cells too. the muscle cells you have now are the same cells you had as a kid (not entirely sure how far back it goes). they dont even divide when you gain muscle, the cells just get bigger and absorb nuclei from neighboring cells to support the extra mass. the cool thing is the nuclei stick around even if you let the muscles atrophy, so theyre forever changed by having once been big. thats probably part of why its easier to get back to muscle size youve been at before.
ignirtoq@feddit.online · 4 pts · 18h
But what about the atoms/molecules that make up those neurons? Do they last a lifetime?
Nouvellalia@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 17h
So far that we know of, neural cell DNA, tooth enamel, and eye lens crystallines, never have their atoms replaced.
Which is to say that we are a ship of theseus, and a transporter does not kill us. The only reason these atoms are not normally replaced is because there is no natural mechanism to replace them.
ignirtoq@feddit.online · 5 pts · 16h
Not sure I would tie my identity to my neuron DNA, tooth enamel, and eye lens crystallines. Definitely agree with you that we are living ships of Theseus. I'm pretty sure there's no natural mechanism to replace those parts because it's really hard, and we work "well enough" without being able to.
SippyCup@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 17h
Yun Tianming: am I joke to you?
Soggy@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 13h
Yeah but we don't know if consciousness lives in the meat or in the chemistry.
frazw@lemmy.world · 51 pts · 17h
A distinction between a teleporter and a transporter...
To teleport implies the original matter is instantly moved from one place to another so there would be no destruction and reconstituted copy. A wormhole would seem to be the only realistic way that could be achieved.
A transporter, well that means copy then kill. No one knows if the kill part is painful because noone survives it. I find it funny Riker's copy is actually the "original" and his lack of death is considered a transporter accident. Yet he is the one treated like the copy...
And all that said, barclay's experience in the transporter beam is more suggestive of a wormhole style device.
I don't know why I bothered to write all this out...
rovingnothing29@lemmy.world · 14 pts · 17h
Someone needs to. At least you put thought into it.
FrChazzz@lemmus.org · 11 pts · 15h
Iirc Thomas is not Will’s copy. Basically the transporter has a malfunction where Thomas and Will are both constituted on a transporter pad. So both are the “original” and also both are neither. In a sense, the William Thomas Riker who stepped onto that pad that day ceased to be, forked into two different lives.
I used to use this episode to talk about identity when I taught ethics back in the day. Both men carried on their lives under the belief that they were the same man who stepped onto a transporter pad on Nervala IV. Their experiences defined who they were, demonstrating that it’s more than biological material that makes any one of us us.
Now the deeper question is: since you can’t add matter to the universe, what’s missing to give life to two Rikers?
canthangmightstain@lemmy.today · 11 pts · 14h
The energy that was used in the original teleportation. I didn’t think it was that deep, it used more energy to reconstitute more matter.
frazw@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 13h
You know what, now that your mention it, wasn't the explanation that the signal was reflected back to the surface due to the ionising radiation of something, so the beam was kinda split or doubled. So my premise was wrong.
FrChazzz@lemmus.org · 4 pts · 11h
Yeah. They tried to split the beam to account for the radiation, half of it made it through, the other half mirrored back. I'm guessing the computer can extrapolate the remaining matter based off of data saved in the pattern buffer?
Either way, Thomas Riker was way under-utilized in Star Trek. I also love how "okay, sure" everyone is about this situation.
Daft_ish@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 3 pts · 9h
Sounds like trek had the technology to copy people. You would think if they are sending people out into the unknown to explore galaxies light years away they would just send a copy. Or at least keep a copy.
I wonder what earth piccard would be up to...
phx@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 17h
The are other methods from Star Trek that could potentially be size as well.
Like "hey you actually travel through this other dimension where your physical form is undisturbed and no time passes in this dimension"
Which sounds ok, but "by the way it's kinda a hell-dimension and your consciousness gets tortured for a distance-relative time there but won't retain the memories after..."
Aqivex@fedinsfw.app · 2 pts · 12h
Stop giving your time to corporations! W this, T that. They have played us for absolute fools, there is no need for economy class.
Seize the means of eldritchticity production comrade, don't believe any nonsense about colors. The trains are always on time under the F co-op too.
phx@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 4h
Oh dear lord. Yeah I could definitely see a variant where the hell dimension is just "work all the hours that it would have taken to traverse in normal space so that EvilCorp can generate profit for the pan-dimensional empire"
melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 7 pts · 13h
To transport just means to move, so if anything the term "transporter" implies physically moving people rather than copying. The term "teleport" is the more ambiguous one...
athatet@lemmy.zip · 5 pts · 15h
I’m glad you did.
Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 5 pts · 17h
Must do wonders for his self worth! 😄
Tahl_eN@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 16h
They both got converted into energy, Thomas is just as much a copy as Will. Also, apparently your experience is constant across the process, as seen by Barclay grabbing someone out of the matter stream. Presumably someone would notice if it hurt...
scholar@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 16h
Isn't Tom just another copy? He came out of the pattern buffer the same as Will iirc.
14th_cylon@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 7h
no matter what, they were like 1000th generation of copies. "the original" died when riker stepped into the transporter for the first time. so discussing whether this one is 1001st, or 1002nd generation seems not that exciting...
RampantParanoia2365@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 6h
Well, no, "transporter" means the first one, because that's how they're explained to work where they're called transporters.
TeaWithDani@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 7h
Now I understand why such and such movie about magicians calls the trick "the transported man".
hakunawazo@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 2h
A transporter is just Jason Statham in a suit. SCNR
pachrist@lemmy.world · 44 pts · 19h
My grandma won't drive on the interstate. These are the same.
Atelopus-zeteki@fedia.io · 18 pts · 18h
Quite reasonable. "Driven the back roads so I wouldn't get waylaid."
JoeBigelow@lemmy.ca · 4 pts · 18h
Is it waylaid or weighed, as in driving over a scale at a inspection station?
Edit: lyrics all say "weighed", but the way it's sung over two beats I definitely hear waylaid. Truckers hauling overweight loads, or heavier than reported on the bill of lading (contraband), don't want to have to go over the scales because they'll get caught.
Atelopus-zeteki@fedia.io · 2 pts · 17h
We always sung it as waylaid. As in stopped by the PoPo. The song also speaks of transporting "smokes and folks", so yeah, behave in a way that keeps one from ever talking to the authorities.
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 18h
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/waylay
JoeBigelow@lemmy.ca · 2 pts · 17h
Yes thank you I agree that is what waylaid means. The lyrics however, are "weighed" as in pulling into a weigh station you usually see along the highway closed for some reason.
DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 15h
My mom wouldn't drive on the freeway because she lacked confidence. It was too fast for her. She was fine riding with dad driving, though.
Hazel@piefed.blahaj.zone · 28 pts · 19h
Sleeping is just teleporting 8 hours into the future and life is just continuous reconstitution anyways.
SwingingTheLamp@piefed.zip · 13 pts · 17h
Exactly. The "me" of yesterday is already dead. He can't think, feel, act, reason, or anything else. I have memories of being him, but if I'd suffered head trauma, even those could be gone. The illusion of continuous, conscious experience is just that—an illusion.
The young-Earth people say that their god created the world about 6,000 years ago, and planted fossils to test our faith. I say that my god created the universe 6 seconds ago, including these memories that we seem to have. There's literally no way to prove otherwise.
starman2112@sh.itjust.works · 6 pts · 15h
And yet you have a vested interest in your continued survival. If you stepped into a transporter and it failed to disassemble you on departure, you would very much protest if a maintenance technician attempted manual disassembly
tatterdemalion@programming.dev · 2 pts · 11h
Not being in prolonged excruciating pain is very much part of the appeal of the transporter.
SwingingTheLamp@piefed.zip · 2 pts · 13h
Lol, love the "manual disassembly" terminology.
That's not a philosophical objection, though, it's just instinct. If the transporter made a copy of me, the copy would also very much object to this proposed method of error correction.
kaidenshi@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 17h
This is simultaneously the most depressing and most realistic take on the subject I've ever read. I've always considered time travel to the past to be impossible because the past already happened and is gone, there is nothing to go "back" to. Time is an arrow that only points to the future and is forever in motion, never leaving a trail behind.
With that said, I can still enjoy time-travel fiction for what it is, a fantasy, and suspend my disbelief enough to enjoy it.
Hazel@piefed.blahaj.zone · 3 pts · 15h
"Life is a message scribbled in the dark."
Gullible@sh.itjust.works · 12 pts · 19h
I mean, the brain mostly consists of the same matter, aside from cycling synovial fluid, once you reach middle age. Recreate me a body but keep my original brain and I won't mind it, aside from all the horror.
atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works · 7 pts · 18h
The cells in your brain are not replaced like other cells in your body, but the atoms are. In fact, all of the atoms in your body are swapped out every seven years or so.
BillyClark@piefed.social · 6 pts · 15h
I'm not sure exactly what's true, but what you're saying seems like a factoid that gets repeated a lot but isn't really 100% true.
Structural stuff like the calcium in your bones... it would be interesting if it was really replaced on a schedule like that. It wouldn't shock me if it was getting replaced, but it would certainly be cool to learn how that would work.
Is the lens in your eye getting replaced like that? I'm trying to think of body parts that seem to not get constant automatic maintenance. How about the enamel on your teeth? Really replaced every 7 years?
Or if we're really just talking about atoms in your body, then famously the problem with heavy metal poisoning is that your body can't get rid of it. So, is it being replaced or is your body getting rid of it? Or... is it just there from before?
And if you want to get really pedantic, and I always do, what fun... Things like artificial hips or breast implants are definitely in people's bodies longer than 7 years but are not getting their atoms replaced.
atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 14h
My understanding of this factoid is that it has more to do with atoms tendency to swap particles when they bump into each other. So it’s sort of through attrition all of the atomic particles in your body are swapped out over the course of about seven years. So like as oxygen and carbon dioxide, for instance, move in and out of your brain and other tissues they leave electrons and shit behind and take some with them. But it also wouldn’t be the first time I had misunderstood something.
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 14h
8 hours is for noobs. I can easily do 9-10
Lushed_Lungfish@lemmy.ca · 26 pts · 14h
Warhammer 40k: Can I interest you in a trip through literal hell?
Shanmugha@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 13h
Also: what kind of immortality would you like?
Furbag@pawb.social · 4 pts · 10h
Hmm... ironic immortality! I have eternal life, but grow increasingly more weary and numb to it's joys until I wish for the sweet succor of death that will never come.
flying_sheep@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 10h
I don't think that would be real. People become bitter and weary because they get old and their bodies start hurting and their minds failing more and more.
If you stay sharp and fit, you won't get bitter.
dehyzer@piefed.social · 2 pts · 6h
This is so blissfully optimistic that I'm not even gonna try to bring you back down to Earth with my weary bitterness.
Shanmugha@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 45m
They become bitter because they don't know how to handle their own minds. Hence being immortal gives one far more time to learn, but does not make learning inevitable
Shanmugha@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 44m
Sounds realistic as hell that
AnimalsDream@slrpnk.net · 24 pts · 10h
I would be the guy who says, "Open-source teleporters only."
I ain't risking having myself modified surreptitiously. 😑
yermaw@sh.itjust.works · 7 pts · 1h
Daft_ish@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 6 pts · 9h
No worries, its not you that was modified its your clone. Youre dead!
phx@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 4h
But if they were open source they'd have the worst name possibly, and possibly an equally awful UI.
I guess we can be glad that "the GIMP" is taken so nobody will reuse that for a future FOSSeporter
GlendatheGayWitch@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 4m
FOSSeporter makes it sound like everyone is dancing lol
echodot@feddit.uk · 1 pts · 3h
The important part is to start with the acronym and then try and figure out what it can stand for.
stoy@lemmy.zip · 23 pts · 17h
With the current constant scanning an analyzing and advertising pushed on us, I'd stay far as fuck away from any teleporting service....
If they have the tech to disassemble and reassemble you including memories, then they can manipulate that.
Would you trust Google Instant Transport Services to not tune your personality to be more favorable toward products from their ad partners, or just slightly tune your political opinions to be more inline with their own.
Just a slight adjustment, an active protester against new datacenters would become less aggressive, a random person starts buying more Pepsi instead of Coke, a change small enough that no one notices a big change in behavior.
Also, would you trust that your memories would stay private?
I am mashing my thumb raw by obliterating X.
dharmacurious@slrpnk.net · 10 pts · 17h
Honestly, I'd never thought of it, but if they can reconstitute you, memories and all, they can probably just straight read your fucking mind.
Jesus Christ, imagine a government that can know every single thought you'd ever had, and assassinate accordingly
FrChazzz@lemmus.org · 4 pts · 14h
There’s also the possibility that consciousness (including memories) is part of some kind of metaphysical net that “latches” onto a particular collection of cells/matter like an attuned radio. So once your matter stream is reconstituted, your memories just “latch” no need to reconstruct the memories. If our consciousness exists in the space between electrical pulses in our brain then such a thing is a kind of energy, yeah? Perhaps, like some forms of matter, consciousness is something that can transcend space and time? Within Star Trek this might explain how species like Betazoids and Vulcans can use telepathy—they’re able to tune into the consciousness net.
And, no, I don’t do drugs.
dharmacurious@slrpnk.net · 1 pts · 14h
There a series called Riverworld that I think you would enjoy.
The books, not that TV movie that's virtually entirely unrelated
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 14h
Hey. That's close to my favourite theory :) although with different consequences. I like to believe that consciousness is just another property of matter that we can't measure (yet?). Stones, dust, grass, all atoms / particles have it. But it takes a certain complex arrangement - like our CNS - with the capability to store and retrieve information (and thus learn) to actually form a conscious mind.
However this would mean your mind gets fully destroyed on disassembly and likely the copy won't function / might be a vegetable on arrival because the unmeasured properties of atoms used to construct the copy were completely different (think of things like spin).
JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 13h
I know the theory your referring to, it grades the entire universes consciousness on a sliding scale from a neutron all the way up to a person.
But I don’t think that consciousness and memories are tied together at all. Consciousness is not well defined which makes it a fickle subject, but memories are a biological process that we can observe much more easily.
My understanding, based on a book I read once about neuroplasticity, is that memories are pathways that are literally burned into your brain by repeated sensory chemicals being sent to that particular part of the brain. As long as the transporter puts every single brain wrinkle back where it was and instructs the brain on which chemicals it sent down the pathways, you could probably put memories back into the head.
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 13h
I wasn't referring any theory. While I am not delusional to think I am the only one, I came up with this entirely by myself.
Also, your "but" isn't a but. I was alluding to the same thing: memories is stored information, i.e. a structure like our brain growing.
Why I think the transporter might be catastrophic is because it could only reproduce the "software" accurately, the EEPROM-like memories. But the hardware might be all wrong.
JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 12h
Oh! Well the name that the other dude who thought about it gave it was Panpsychism, you might be interested to read about it.
But it is :P I’m saying that I think the hardware would be the easy part. Put all the same types of stuff in the same configuration, give it some instructions and you’ve got a fleshy automaton that should reasonably be able to recall the same things the other thing could. The “software” as you called it, would be more difficult I think.
We know what makes a memory, but we don’t know why someone makes a particular decision or what influences their personality to act how they do. Hell, putting two human beings right next to each other and stimulating them in the exact same way doesn’t even produce the same results between the two, so we couldn’t accurately instruct the new automaton on how to act like the old one
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 12h
Panpsychism sounds a bit embellished, but I'll have a look. I think we have an analogy misunderstanding. I really meant memories etc as the software because it is "programmed" with our experiences. The hardware being the atoms that we can not accurately arrange in a copy because we have no concept of the conscience related property (e.g. conscience spin, for lack of a better word). It could be like trying to run little endian software on a big endian architecture: instant crash.
phx@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 17h
Nah, Google would just lift your interests and then inject time-delayed ads into your brain...
stoy@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 16h
Nope that would be too obvious.
merc@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 12h
That's definitely not a given.
That's like saying that if you can perfectly scan and reproduce a book down to the smudges and crumbs, that you understand the contents of that book.
To us right now in 2026, mapping an entire brain, simulating it perfectly, then editing it slightly without breaking it seems a lot more doable than breaking down a human quark by quark and rebuilding them somewhere else. But, that isn't necessarily the case.
ScottyTheEngineer@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 15h
GITS, clever
stoy@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 13h
Didn't even think about that (:
GraniteM@lemmy.world · 19 pts · 18h
I've said it before and I'll say it again:
In the TNG episode Lonely Among Us Captain Picard gets taken over by an alien energy being. It hijacks his body and he teleports himself into a cloud of dispersed particles in a nebula. They spend more than an hour trying to recover him, and are about to give up, when Troi senses his consciousness, and they are able to reconstitute him through the transporter. This, and other mentions of "mental energy" in the show indicate that there is a canonical, scientific proof of the existence of the soul independent from the body, and that it can be transported without damage.
Anything more involved than that gets into philosophical debates about whether or not you die every time you go to sleep, and is about as useful a conversation as whether or not you can "know" if you are or aren't a brain in a jar.
darkwing_duck@sh.itjust.works · 5 pts · 17h
So what about the Riker duplicate? Which one is soulless? Or is the soul also copyable?
GraniteM@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 16h
Thomas Riker isn't a transporter duplicate, he's a kidnap victim from a parallel dimension.
Thomas Riker supposedly proved that the transporter can be used to duplicate sentient living beings. So why aren't there mass-produced transporter duplicates? There are plenty of unscrupulous powers that would love to exploit this existential loophole and create huge armies of Jem Hadar or some such. They would have no ethical limitations on making such things, and broadly speaking if a scientific / engineering problem CAN be solved then it WILL be solved, and doubly more so when someone proves that it definitely CAN be solved.
Because the theory of his creation is wrong. He wasn't duplicated by the interference field, his transport beam was filtered through a parallel dimension and back, and captured Thomas from his home dimension and dropped him in ours. Thanks to the Mirror Universe, we know that transporter fuckery can cause trans-dimensional transporting. When they discovered Thomas, they got the interpretation of the phenomenon wrong, and set everyone on a drastically wrong path of research. His duplication hasn't been duplicated, because he was never duplicated to begin with.
BoxOfFeet@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 16h
If your "soul" or "mental energy" is basically your brain programming, I would say it is copyable.
GraniteM@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 16h
Also a valid theory, and less complicated than the parallel universe kidnap victim theory.
BoxOfFeet@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 15h
Yeah, but it doesn't explain why less scrupulous factions don't just copy their most valuable biological assets. Best captains, strongest warriors. Most cunning spies.
idiomaddict@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 15h
I mean… if there were 25,000 of me around, we definitely wouldn’t be following someone else’s orders to die in their war. I imagine that if you copy a person too many times, they tend to stop taking directions as well. Like, if a person can’t unionize with themself, then I don’t know how to help them.
jem hadar maybe not, but even they have a limit, and once they thought they were no longer dependent on ketracel white, they reached it really quickly.
So I guess the answer is to get your clone army hooked
BoxOfFeet@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 14h
What if you copied them without their knowing? Like, you have an operative heading out on a secret mission. Undisclosed location. Then, just save them in the buffer. Bring them out whenever you need, like the Winter Soldier. You could even have concurrent missions going. Then, just delete them or store their patterns again when the mission is complete.
idiomaddict@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 13h
Well, fuck
GraniteM@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 12h
Isn't that the plot of Gemini Man? And The 6th Day? And Blade Runner?
FRYD@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 18 pts · 11h
I’d use a teleporter with no hesitation. What’s important is my memories and sense of self, not the actual meat it’s in. I could find out I’m a copy of myself right now and not be bothered.
Wrrzag@lemmy.ml · 9 pts · 10h
Yeah but once you step in the teleporter you stop being. The copy is only useful for other people to keep interacting with your clone, but the actual you is dead.
FRYD@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 8 pts · 9h
So what? There would be persistent awareness. The new me would remember everything up to the old me’s death and keep living. I’m fine with that.
Auli@lemmy.ca · 6 pts · 9h
As far as you know. You wouldn't know what they modified.
Daft_ish@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 9h
Id be more fine with not remembering but to each their own
flying_sheep@lemmy.ml · 7 pts · 10h
There's no “actual” you. Your body creates a sense of an “I”. If you copy that body including the brain, the copy will have the same. You wouldn't say that the copy’s sense of smell is somehow different, so why make a distinction for the sense of self?
lemming741@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 10h
A man cannot step into the same river twice
petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2 pts · 11h
I think this idea and confidence hold extremely true until you think about Elon Musk.
FRYD@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 4 pts · 11h
I have no idea what you mean lol
petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 8 pts · 10h
His machine would not work very well.
Actually, now that I think about it, it's far worse than that. If a company has a teleporter that can build a copy of you, they can also build an almost-copy of you. Say, a copy that is less rebellious. More obedient.
Yeah, the idea's cool in fiction, but in reality I would never touch a machine like this. I will walk my ass over in analogue.
flying_sheep@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 17m
I'm a biologist. Perfectly recording something is very very far removed from understanding something enough to make targeted modifications.
boonhet@lemmy.zip · 0 pts · 10h
Who guarantees the copy is exact? I don't think we can do checksums on living bodies.
FRYD@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 4 pts · 9h
Well I imagined we were talking about an imaginary sci-fi technology. Obviously it would be more complicated and possibly at risk for some kind of manipulation in real life. If I were presented a teleporter where the only fault is a philosophical question about being a copy, then I don’t mind being a copy and my original self dying.
GJdan@programming.dev · 1 pts · 9h
That feels like a very different statement than saying you don't mind stepping into the teleporter knowing you will die while a copy continues from where you left off on the other side.
FRYD@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2 pts · 9h
yeah I did realize that after thinking about it. Still I’m not sure. I guess it depends on what that experience is like.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 6h
Everybody says it's fine
leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 17 pts · 14h
Star Trek teleporter: fax machine / shredder combination (remember that time the shredder bit malfunctioned and we got double Riker..?)
Wormhole: just a weird long gateway (with a chance of spaghettification). No problems there unless it somehow takes you through some sort of hell dimension or something.
Stargate: somehow both, because let's be frank, the Ancients were kind of dicks. (Also, didn't actually need the whole buffer thing, that one Orlin built in Carter's basement with a box of scraps was completely analog, no computer bits, and it worked just fine until it didn't.)
merc@sh.itjust.works · 8 pts · 13h
It's not like that Riker episode was taken lightly. But, you would think that an event like that would have led to a lot more soul searching. For example, occasionally there were religious people in Star Trek -- what does this say about transporters and souls?
From what I remember, they spent a lot more time on the mechanics of a dude getting duplicated: the bureaucracy of it (his rank, etc.) and how it affected his relationships with Troi etc.
But, no talk of how every time someone is transported the original body is killed? No talk about how this might be a means of creating an army of clones?
Same deal with people being stored for a long time in the pattern buffer. Does this mean you can create backups of people so that if they die they can simply be beamed from that data?
14th_cylon@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 7h
that is exactly what they did when they lost picard in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonely_Among_Us
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 14h
I member!
Was interesting to see people try to explain to him why he was left behind...
rbos@lemmy.ca · 6 pts · 11h
Schlock Mercenary (webcomic) had a couple of good takes on this concept. The "wormgates" in SM were more like teleporters, in that they disintegrated you, reduced you to data, and recreated you on the other side. As a side effect, the Gatekeepers could make copies of you in transit, which is how they kept their galactic dominance intact, by interrogating and shredding gate-clones. Arguably, they murdered trillions of sapients with their gates.
In-universe, it's impossible to generate big wormholes, but the F'Sherl'Ganni "faked" it and everyone just kind of assumed there was some weird physics they'd figured out that nobody else knew.
The Teraport, in SM (or "tear-apart" as it was sometimes called derisively) at least had some continuity, by porting you through billions of microscopic wormholes. Whether that kills you or not, well, that's between you and Carl.
leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 10h
That's exactly how stargates work in the Stargate series (except for the bit where they could work like normal wormholes, but they've got a scanner/shredder/maker mechanism stuck in front of the wormhole for no apparent reason).
I don't think they ever duplicated anyone (with a stargate), but Teal'c('s data) once got stuck in the buffer. Technically nothing would prevent the gate from duplicating travelers, as long as it had enough energy and it could be prevented from flushing the buffer.
Th4tGuyII@fedia.io · 16 pts · 19h
The bit I find worrying is that you'd have to trust you will be 1:1 reconstructed at the other side.
What happens if there's an error on the reconstruction side and it either fails to reconstruct you back properly, or at all?
Or what if some malicious party injects something into, or removes part of your reconstruction?
There'd be no way for you to know from the other side, so you could just be killed or maimed in an instant, and there'd be nothing you could do to stop it
bunkyprewster@startrek.website · 6 pts · 18h
What do you care? That's not you on the other side, just your copy.
Th4tGuyII@fedia.io · 6 pts · 18h
If you're taking teleportation, you've likely already accepted (or are ignorant of) the fact that you as a literal being will perish - but you survive conceptually through your copy.
So I care if that copy gets made. If it doesn't, then I'm not just literally dead, but conceptually dead too.
Rhaedas@fedia.io · 3 pts · 18h
I read one scifi novel where the teleportation was almost instant across the galaxy, the caveat was that it duplicated you, so the original walked out of the booth, while the copy was the one who actually went somewhere. Aside from the issues of having several of you around if you went back to the destination, not every teleport was great for the original either. One instance where they were trying to escape some creature planetside, and as they ran into the booth the main wondered if they'd be the one who made it to safety, or not. Of course next chapter picks up with the safe one's pov....
SwingingTheLamp@piefed.zip · 3 pts · 17h
::: spoiler Tap for spoiler That's the plot twist in The Prestige, too. :::
Th4tGuyII@fedia.io · 1 pts · 18h
There's a game called SOMA that plays around with a similar idea - but for digitization.
And of course the answer's quite straightforward. If you're the copy that got in the chair, you're the one left behind.
The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 17h
"Fantastic! Another successful transport. Although now I feel compelled to spend lots of money at Burger King for some reason."
NaibofTabr@infosec.pub · 5 pts · 18h
Do you think the transporter reconstructs the contents of your stomach & intestines? Like, do you still have to pee when you come out the other side, or does it just take care of business for you?
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 18h
I always thought the lack of bathrooms was because they had little waste transporters that beamed the pee out.
Serinus@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 17h
Whenever they talk about tracing "warp signatures" what they mean is the waste trail transported just outside of the ship.
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 12h
This is not dissimilar to what happened in the age of sail.
Th4tGuyII@fedia.io · 4 pts · 18h
Assuming that whatever computer is processing your blueprint could accurately detect all of your poop and pee, then I don't see why it couldn't physically do that.
And the incentive would line up too, as it would both save the company money on reconstruction and be beneficial to the customer.
Better question yet is if it's possible to tamper the blueprint, where would the limit be? Could it be used medically to essentially perform surgery on you (or rather your clone)? Could the teleporter service basically offer you a character creation screen to make yourself however you'd want to look or be?
Of course, again, this relies on you trusting the teleporter service with your entire being. If they fail, you're not just literally dead, you're conceptually just gone.
NaibofTabr@infosec.pub · 2 pts · 17h
Heh, well, there might be a pressure problem... but yeah if it's accurate enough to put all of the walls of your intestines back where they were, why bother reconstructing that log inside there? But then... do you fill the empty space with vacuum? air? fluid? or do you try to reconstruct the intestine, not as it was, but in a relaxed/empty state?
If we can get rid of your waste, we can at least get rid of kidney stones too, right? And probably tumors and parasites, maybe even bacterial infections.
HerbGrower@slrpnk.net · 2 pts · 18h
Oh, sorry about that. Glitch in the teleporter gave your friend a 30cm cock.
Huh, turns out when you lept into the teleporter after him it balanced it by removing yours.
TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org · 6 pts · 18h
New bottom surgery just dropped.
ILikeTraaaains@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 18h
https://youtu.be/V_e9iDdKrXA
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 18h
Pattern buffers
SwingingTheLamp@piefed.zip · 1 pts · 17h
If you fly instead, you have to trust the pilot, ATC, the mechanics, the aircraft engineers, the builder, its suppliers, and on and on. At least in a transporter malfunction, you die in an instant, rather than in terror as the plane crashes.
14th_cylon@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 6h
what happens when you die in a car accident? your family and friends mourn for a while and life continues...
Tower@lemmy.zip · 16 pts · 19h
The Machine
TechLich@lemmy.world · 15 pts · 7h
Everyone always focuses on the Ship of Theseus or the existential parts of this, but the societal impacts would be crazy.
Millions of people teleporting to the most beautiful places on earth and wrecking them, highways and boring parts of cities abandoned, mass death of people teleporting into a crush crowd at Mecca, landmarks toppled under the weight of teleporting tourists and bosses teleporting into your house for a "work from home" meeting, weapons and bombs being teleported into war zones...
Things would eventually find a new normal and teleporting food and resources around would remove the need for ships and trucks, you could explore the world much more easily and there would be lots of science to do in hard to reach places, marine biologists would have a field day exploring the deep ocean, doctors could teleport cancer cells out of patients, space agencies teleport probes, bases and astronauts to the moon and around the solar system...
Like it would be such a huge upheaval with so many implications. It's interesting that people really fixate on the "would I die though? What does dying even mean if I'm still around?" part, even though I think that's maybe the least interesting thing. I guess it taps into a very primal survival instinct?
Agent641@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 1h
Can I just teleport the poop out of my colon and the piss out of my balls, so I don't have to get up to go to the bathroom?
echodot@feddit.uk · 2 pts · 3h
Depends on how the technology works. It's more likely that you would need someone's how to receive or both ends, even if it were technically possible to just teleport randomly from point a to point b I feel like that feature would be disabled on commercial models precisely to stop the above from happening.
sundray@lemmus.org · 14 pts · 16h
"What if instead of landing craft, we just used some kind of teleporter thingy? It'd be a lot cheaper over all."
"Great idea, Gene. I'm sure this won't have any future story repercussions that get way out of hand!"
hansolo@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 15h
It's all retconned from a money and plot decision. That should tell you enough.
megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 14 pts · 14h
The ship of thesis is “the ship of thesis” because it is the ship that thesis is using. He could hop off a trireme and on to a “boston whaler” and it would be the ship of thesis.
Edit: you must live with me spelling sin. I will not alter time and reality to correct that which is.
Zamboni_Driver@lemmy.ca · 26 pts · 14h
How can you spell trireme correctly, but not Theseus
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 14h
Did you refer some meme I never heard of, of is that really how you thought "Theseus" was spelled?
megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 5 pts · 14h
I have a little voice in my head that says words and I guess how they are spelled based only on my phonix education in elementary school and my vaguely western New England/ upstate New York accent.
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 13h
But have you like... Never read the name before?
shakes head in polyglot disbelief
megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2 pts · 13h
I may have, but, it was stored as a phonetic sound with in my mind. I could try and transliterate it in to the couple other languages I am familiar with the phonetics of, but I suspect the same error would occur.
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 13h
interesting how differently we people store information...
megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2 pts · 13h
You ever read “Blind sight” by Peter Watts?
Really interesting hard sci-fi book about minds.
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 12h
Not yet. Noted.
Jankatarch@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 14h
Quick question: Do you pronounce it as "gif" or "gif?"
megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 6 pts · 13h
Yes
Simon_Shitewood@lemmy.ml · 13 pts · 19h
I was thinking about IPoAC the other day and had a horrifying realisation of it's implications: teleporting someone will involve moving enough data to reconstitute an identical human being from the sending to the recieving teleporter, and assuming storage technology grows in a similar way, there will be a point where it's faster to be downloaded to a drive, strapped to a pigeon, and flown to your destination for reconstitution than it will be to wait for the data to transfer over.
Ghoelian@piefed.social · 3 pts · 17h
You would also have to trust there is only one receiver, hackers would instantly try to break in any way they can to steal certain people's
SippyCup@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 17h
Stargate has entered the chat
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 14h
You are somehow assuming
Did you confuse this with the scenario of average bandwidth?
Simon_Shitewood@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 14h
No, the assumptions are that it would be a static but massive amount of data and that transfer bandwidths grow slower than can keep up with storage volume, which is why there would be a point rather than multiple ones. At some point the bandwidth would outgrow the data and forever more be faster at the task than IPoAC.
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 13h
You phrased that weirdly then. As if that point would be in the future, with an initial phase of transfer by radio.
Btw, that "IPoAC" could then easily be replaced by putting a human on a plane :p
Simon_Shitewood@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 12h
It would be in the future, we haven't invented the means to either scan or reconstitute a human yet.
And sure, but we're talking about IPoAC, not sensible things.
cattywampas@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 19h
Well, Vulcans canonically have souls. Maybe everyone does?
chaogomu@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 18h
Nope, that's just the Vulcans. Q thought it would be funny to give a species who focuses on logic something so illogical.
Skullgrid@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 19h
I used to think like that, but I have my doubts. Doesn't "Realm of Fear" show that you are conscious during the transfer process? So it's kinda like growing new brain synapses and starting to be conscious through them instead of old ones?
echodot@feddit.uk · 9 pts · 3h
I always liked the idea of teleporters that are just wormhole pairs.
If you want to travel from New York to Paris you have to first go to your local wormhole station, walk through that and be taken to the central station for all US wormholes, walk over to the international portal and be taken to the global interface station, which would be located wherever the electricity is cheapest so probably somewhere in Iceland, then you walk over to the French national station, and be taken to some facility in France, and then from there walk over to the Paris wormhole.
All wormholes are 20 m across by standard allowing cargo containers to transport through, with the Americans have made system unnecessarily complicated by standardizing their wormholes to 2.5 giraffe widths.
Daft_ish@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 9 pts · 9h
So the real dilemma here is if you believe in a spirit or after life. Essentially you wouldnt ever get where you were going. But you would.
Honestly, who's to say that somewhere in the infinity between every second consciousness doesnt jump from one location to another breaking the continuation of persistent matter.
nexguy@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 9h
This happens now to you every night. Your stream of consciousness ends forever and a new one is created upon waking.
Pleasant dreams
NochMehrG@feddit.org · 7 pts · 19h
I totally agree with that rant!!
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca · 6 pts · 13h
Every meal you eat becomes part of you. You are basically teleporting your way through time with the refrigerator.
AnimalsDream@slrpnk.net · 6 pts · 10h
Meanwhile Buddha: have I got some bad, but also good news for you...
gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 6 pts · 12h
Fun fact: if continuity's the only definition of self, then we die every single night, and a different person who thinks they're us awakes
melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 12 pts · 12h
People say this but I don't understand why. I don't think there's any reason to believe we meaningfully cease to be "continuous" while asleep, in fact we're not even unconscious when we sleep, our brain keeps processing stimuli, in parts of the cycle we dream, etcetera.
flying_sheep@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 10m
While sleep isn't the right thought experiment, think of cryogenics: it works for the wood frog, which can come back from being completely frozen solid, so there's no reason to believe that our consciousness can't be fully interrupted and resumed.
WoodScientist@lemmy.world · -2 pts · 10h
This isn't true. Dreaming is only during certain periods of the sleep cycle. Through many parts of the night, you are truly gone.
Auli@lemmy.ca · 3 pts · 9h
Which ones? I'm never truly gone still in my bed. And as someone who has died coming back from death is not the same as waking up. One I lost days of memory after being brought back, I don't loose days when I wake up every morning.
WoodScientist@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 9h
What do you mean? You're only dreaming during REM sleep. That's only part of the sleep cycle. And the loss of memory is irrelevant here. We're talking about continuity of consciousness and its implications from a philosophical perspective. We're not talking about your soul being out of your body or something.
At least I think that's what you're trying to say? Some of your grammar makes your comment difficult to parse.
magic_smoke@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 5 pts · 11h
Not entirely true. I've had dreams while asleep or heard things that really happened only to recall th em later when I awoke.
Sleep might represent a reduction in consciousness, but I'm still a stream do consciousness.
lemonwood@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 10h
Sometimes dreaming and sometimes recalling doesn't prove you always have a stream of consciousness. You have different sleep phases each night, some are entirely dream less. Large groups of your neurons sync up during NREM sleep, firing at the same time. I don't see how consciousness can survive becoming basically a pendulum. People awoken during NREM in studies usually say they weren't experiencing anything. Maybe they were and just didn't remember, we can't prove that, but it seems unlikely and it couldn't be much of an experience while most of your brain is busy flashing on and off again like a flickering lightbulb.
flying_sheep@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 10h
Then think about cryogenics. The wood frog can be frozen solid and come back to life by thawing, so there's nothing fundamentally preventing our existence from becoming discontinuous
WoodScientist@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 10h
This doesn't mean much. You only dream during REM sleep, one phase of your sleep cycle. But there are periods during every night where the lights are off and there's nobody home.
Auli@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 9h
When your brain is always active during sleep.
WoodScientist@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 9h
No it isn't. You're only dreaming during REM sleep. This is like, sleep cycle 101 here. The periods of deep sleep where your brain is doing its deep repair work? Your consciousness is not just reduced, but absent entirely. During slow-wave sleep, you have no awareness. The reason you haven't noticed these while you are sleeping is because you cannot be aware of your own periods where you completely lack awareness.
halvar@lemy.lol · 2 pts · 11h
Just as you said, that depends on definition. And since we know jack shit about how conciousness works all of those definitions (minus one) will be flawed. Going by some definitions that include this, you could say you die every second. I had restless nights thinking about this and the only conclusion I came to is that it's ironically not worth losing sleep over this, because if this is true then one you can't do anything about it two you won't even notice it. Alternatively this is a flawed perspective and you are just overthinking something that isn't even true.
ianhclark510@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 5 pts · 18h
It still kinda fucks with me that they showed a transporter Cronenberg in TMP of all places, the first movie, these people rode around on a 5 year mission with some goofy malfunctions sure, but they trusted that transporter to use it constantly, just to watch some dude get slimed
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 19h
Still a dystopian future without HSR.
CubitOom@infosec.pub · 2 pts · 15h
I'd rather be killed and replaced with an exact copy than have to depend on commercial airlines and airports.
TBi@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 16h
Why even bother going to visit? They are just copies of copies anyway.
Mrkawfee@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 9h
We'd argue over the Ship of Theseus every Christmas over replicator Turkey
moakley@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 16h
This articulates a very strong opinion I've had for most of my life. My top three fears have always been: zombies, whales, and teleportation.
Axolotl_cpp@feddit.it · 4 pts · 18h
I barelly trust a software auto-saving, there is no fucking way i am gonna trust a teleport machine
quediuspayu@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 4 pts · 17h
Somehow I'm more scared of a holodeck, I don't mean getting hurt by falling from somewhere or shot in a novel with failing safety protocols, I mean clipping bug on a wall and getting sliced in half by the force field.
Sanctus@anarchist.nexus · 3 pts · 17h
Please, Grandpa. Its a portal. Its open. I am looking at you. Just step through. There is no deconstruction.
samus12345@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 15h
Fuck that. As long as my memories and sense of self get carried over, I'm still me. And If I get transporter cloned, I'm two mes!
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 14h
There's this thought experiment: think about delayed "scrapping" in the sender. Let's say by a minute? You'd have time to talk to yourself over a video call, then what are you going to think about "it's still me" when your copy walks away and you are about to be zapped?
samus12345@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 14h
It's a persistent sense of self and there's no pain or anything, so fine.
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 13h
I think you missed the point of the thought experiment. How can you have a persistent sense of self with two bodies in remote locations?
flying_sheep@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 11h
They both have their own sense of self. By the time they fork, they're no longer the same individual (but very similar) and it doesn't matter which one gets destroyed: the bad part is the loss of the last copy of a personality, not a copy.
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 11h
flying_sheep@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 10h
I wrote about this topic! And I don't think my outlook is dark; I just think you're wrong about “continuity” playing any role at all!
https://phil.red/blog/2025/9/5/identity-illusion
melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2 pts · 13h
What if the original version of you did suffer?
Soggy@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 13h
Sucks to be them I guess, but they're not me anymore.
samus12345@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 10h
Then that's entirely different, and I would wonder why the technology was developed at all!
merc@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 13h
Knowing humans, each one would think "Wait, you're zapping the wrong one!"
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 13h
Isn't there a variation of this with an evil shapeshifter captain Kirk fighting real Kirk, where the real Kirk eventually tells Spock to "shoot both of us" and then Spock shoots the other, saying "this is how I knew it was you"?
merc@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 12h
I mean, there's the goatee universe, but that's different.
megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 3 pts · 14h
And then they begin to diverge in to two separate people, who are distinct individuals, but still both you.
It’s not that complicated. So long as you don’t start imagining metaphysical hallucinations like “souls” because people want to pretend the “after life” is a thing because they’re scared of no longer being.
samus12345@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 14h
Yeah, they'd become more of a sibling as time goes on.
If there WERE a soul, well, that soul would get replicated, too!
lawks@aussie.zone · 1 pts · 14h
We can't prove conscious entities do or don't have souls. Asserting we don't, as if it's some kind of self-evident fact, is as arrogant as religious people asserting that we do.
megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 3 pts · 14h
Present me a rigorous definition of the concept, then a coherent evidence based argument for why we should even consider the concept as a potential, and then a series of experiments to prove or disprove the concept.
I will be chatting with the invisible, immaterial and mute elephant that lives in my living room until you do.
lawks@aussie.zone · 1 pts · 14h
That entire statement is predicated on the assumption that everything about the universe, how it came to be, etc., is directly observable from within the universe, which we also cannot know with any certainty.
But I don't have to, you're the one who made the claim that we assuredly don't have souls, so prove it yourself.
Soggy@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 13h
This is the only way that makes sense to approach it. Either it is and there's an objective truth and consistency to reality, or it isn't and there's literally infinite possibilities so any single possibility is infinitely unlikely and there's no reason to assume any of them are valid.
lawks@aussie.zone · 1 pts · 13h
Where did I say there's no objective truth to the universe? Say I drew some pictures on small pieces of paper and arranged them adjacent to each other on a table, and then placed my hand flat on the table, then invited you to look. You can see pictures on the table, I then ask you whether there are any pictures under my hand. You (should) answer that you don't know. You not knowing whether there are pictures under my hand or not does nor change the objective truth of their existence. The hand represents what we don't know about the universe, and you (at least currently) don't have the technology to lift it.
megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 1 pts · 13h
An assertion that something does not exist does not need to be proven, since it is inherently a challenge to someone else’s assertion to something existing.
A negative can not be proven, if someone wishes to insist that a concept be considered, the burden of evidence fall upon them.
lawks@aussie.zone · 1 pts · 13h
That's quite an oversimplification. What you're really asserting is that sentience has no part which is very difficult if not impossible to directly measure. You can throw your hands in the air and pretend you've not made any such claim, but you have. It's bizarre how many atheists display the same levels of dogmatism and fervour as their religious counterparts.
P.S. pretty odd that you felt the need to condescendingly imply I'd think talking to some kind of ghost elephant is equally plausible as not knowing the entire nature of the universe.
megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2 pts · 13h
So… you define the concept of soul as being comparable with sentience?
Do you mean sentience or sapience?
lawks@aussie.zone · 1 pts · 13h
Poor etiquette to significantly edit your comment without noting so, especially after it's already received a reply.
megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 1 pts · 13h
Point to the comment made before my edit. I clarified my comment after posting it, no comment was made prior to my edit.
There may have been one I did not see. As is the nature of federate platforms and de-federated instances. Or, perhaps even, a comment from someone I blocked previously.
lawks@aussie.zone · 0 pts · 12h
The elephant crap was not in the original comment. That's not just a typo, mate. If you're incapable of admitting something so trivial, and deflect by bringing up previously blocking people, like that has anything to with it, you're certainly not worth any more of my time.
flying_sheep@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 10h
Russell's teapot. You can't prove the non-existence of literally infinite things, yet you probably assume that they don't exist.
The burden of proof is on the one claiming that something exists.
lawks@aussie.zone · 1 pts · 7h
I know about the teapot, and it seems you've also missed the point. Did you not notice where I said it was as arrogant to claim we do have souls as fact?
We know we have consciousness, that's not a far-fetched untestable thing like a microscopic teapot in orbit. You accept that you have it as true, but it's basically impossible to prove, because how would an unconscious biological machine that reacts to all physical stimuli the same as a human be any different from a conscious one? We lack an explanation for why biological machines give rise to consciousness and why the universe is aware of itself. That's not an extraordinary claim. Why does awareness exist at all? Why does the universe not do everything it does now without being aware?
flying_sheep@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 2h
I recommend reading Blindsight. One of the few novels that actually changed the way I think (in this case about consciousness)
And yeah, it's real in the same sense as a sense of smell is real. It's just a byproduct of how our brains work. Copy the brain, copy the consciousness.
flying_sheep@lemmy.ml · 3 pts · 11h
I wrote a blog post about this: https://phil.red/blog/2025/9/5/identity-illusion
lightnsfw@reddthat.com · 2 pts · 17h
You die and are sent to hell and there's 1000s of copies of you there too.
RedGreenBlue@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 6h
Teleporting will be so expensive and energy intensive that only billionaires will do it. It will be orders of magnitude more disruptive to the environment than private jets. You won't have the luxury to worry about your molcules.
RampantParanoia2365@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 6h
I mean, yeah, it probably would do that. Unless it works like the universe where they're called transporters.
Daft_ish@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 9h
Sounds like relief, honestly. And a fresh start for clone me.
Digit@lemmy.today · 2 pts · 16h
... why not a spaceship.
only seconds slower than destroying yourself where you were and re-creating yourself where your copy goes.
kopasz7@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 18h
Unless you got some space-time warping wormhole shenanigans to keep my being continous as I teleport, no frickin way!
brownsugga@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 1h
The universe is a hologram, and our physical brain is just an antenna tuned to the higher dimension of consciousness. Your consciousness exists separately to your body, so if the transporter builds an exact copy of your body (and brain) you will just tune back in to your same consciousness when you're done transporting.
gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2 pts · 28m
What drugs aren't you on? And can I come along?
Atelopus-zeteki@fedia.io · 2 pts · 18h
Nope right out! I'm walking, or riding a horse, donkey, or ox.
SippyCup@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 17h
Planning on joining the FBI I see
Atelopus-zeteki@fedia.io · 1 pts · 16h
Rude.
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 15h
I agree with them on the principle that ST teleportation works like that. that's because teleporters and replicators are based on the same architecture and technology out of simplicity.
IRL, it's probably more likely going to be based on quantum entanglement in a controlled environment. meaning you will exist once in the entire known universe, but parts of you may exist in multiple locations simultaneously until they are not. this would be observed as no different than your current existence except for the potential to be scattered across the entire universe at a quantum level.
bunchberry@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 14h
What beneficial role would quantum entanglement possibly play in teleporting a human?
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 14h
I think they just thought using a smart expression they don't understand would make people perceive them as smart?
rob_t_firefly@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 14h
Which is basically how all the Trek productions ever have managed the Treknobabble explanations for imaginary technology.
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 13h
or maybe I just wanted to shit on your day like the big fat asshole I am.
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 13h
if we were able to develop a way to move matter, at the quantum level, through particles that are entangled it would essentially be teleportation. there's so many other obstacles in the way of that first though. the first big issue, how do you send matter in a quantum state and disregard all other matter that isn't supposed to be sent?
bunchberry@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 11h
I'm still not understanding what about that quotation leads you to think moving matter "at the quantum level" leads to teleportation.
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 11h
for a second there I thought I had accidentally posted to a science community. then I realized this is a meme community.
Imagine my relief when I came to the realization that you're probably some fat neck bearded armchair "quantum physicist" that's just trying to get a rise out of a "normie".
don't take science that has yet to be invented so serious. I'm not writing a thesis or scientific proof on it, and especially not on a meme board.
bunchberry@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 2h
gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 1 pts · 12h
Because they're not killed, it's literally covered by multiple episodes, they're streaming and aware the whole time.
There's even a episode where someone's awareness is stuck in the buffer after their body is destroyed
bitjunkie@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 12h
You kind of defeated yourself here
Randelung@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 12h
If everyone around you is already only a copy of a copy, what use are you being the original?
Aeao@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 12h
Are you a movie executive by chance?
Duamerthrax@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 12h
Given how much real Boomers took to ai slop, they probably wouldn't think that deeply about being killed and copied constantly.
Bob71@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 9h
I'm not sure 'kill' is the correct word here. It seems to me that your conscience (aka: "you") is being sent around to various places while the body (aka: the last 20 years of groceries) is merely being reused to recreate some other person. That's the way I see it anyway.
14th_cylon@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 7h
i would like to point your attention to
Duamerthrax@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 8h
Nerve cells do not get replaced or renewed that easily. Everything else is a support system for that.