This has been discussed in soft canon (where the answer has generally been yes the animating consciousness or what have you goes with the transporter beam) but examples of "transporter clones" have happened in hard ans soft canon (e.g.Thomas Riker), so I imagine that it depends on what the writer needs for a given story.
I have rationalized the fact that I can die on an away mission and come back a few moments later to be the result of a transporter 'accident'. Essentially my ship is crewed my an army of clones of me. When one dies, the next oldest one is promoted.
And we are all soulless mass murders who never take prisoners.
I have rationalized the fact that I can die on an away mission and come back a few moments later to be the result of a transporter 'accident'. Essentially my ship is crewed my an army of clones of me. When one dies, the next oldest one is promoted.
And we are all soulless mass murders who never take prisoners.
You can hack the mind and create fake memories using electrical and/or chemical stimuli, despite those events never occurring.
So, what would happen when you beam someone up? Their physical states would be in-tact, as would their personality.
Now, if you had two "copies" - they begin to differ in personality immediately as the mind is a composite of several components.
In fact, if you remove the corpus callosum, you can have two brains operating at once (though with different functions in each). Our minds are, generally speaking, an amalgamation of two sets of inputs and decisions - hence the variability in choices.
So, were Tuvok and Neelix's "souls" combined, or an entirely new one created, for Tuvix? Ehh... not sure I really want to open that can of worms, but...
Also, what happens if someone takes your photograph while you're being transported?
thinking back to the TNG episode where Barclay has a fear of the transporter, and subsequently finds people living in some kind of transporter limbo, He is conscious the whole time he is beaming in the matter stream. So this could mean that ones conscious being or "soul" moves with the matter. Or it means that transporters would need to be able to re-initiate life processes once the matter has been relocated. Otherwise a transporter would just take a live person in one place and make them into a dead person in another place.
My guess is when your body is broken down to the most simpliste state for transportation the molecules or even the atoms could carry what is known as your soul or the energy that defines you. Thats just what I think. I do believe in souls.
This question goes all the way back to the original series, and some of the first novels written for/about it. Just as the existence of souls is itself a matter of faith, not science, it can only be answered on those terms, and the answer is likely to be a personal one.
obviously cosciousness is a byproduct of our brians being configured the way they are seeing as how conciousness can be interputed or even removed all together by strokes and or brain trauma and leave use a veggie or even more or less brain dead if not brain dead.
So imho consiousness is somewhat linked to the idea of a soul but not entirely, and to state this I do believe in souls. I think it is much more likely that souls are both part of and seperate from you, more like an external harddrive, so when the primary eventually fails the external disconects and moves on with the total culmination of lifes experiences and in essence takes over where the body failed. And in the process of teleportation when one is atomized and reconfigured in the exact state it was dematerialized in the soul just follows the info to the new point and reintigrates, if it would ever not be integrated, cuz who is to say souls if they exist are not anywhere and everywhere at the same time, seeing as how the afterlife could work on completely diffrent physics if it worked on any kind at all.
If consciousness were merely a byproduct of our brain then there should be a way to measure it and master it. So far we haven't been able to and it's just something we can only talk about philosophically and literally EVERYTHING we know about it right now is based off assumptions. We assume everyone else has this sense of self. We assume you don't have it if you're a veggie. We assume you have the same sense of self if it goes away and comes back or we assume it's a different one.
We have theories and beliefs. No proofs. Heck, there's barely any evidence if any.
the transporter is just a fancy space fax machine, also in wrath of kahn kirk and marcus are carrying a conversation while in the materialization process. so it appears that you are totaly aware while you are in transit.
Setting aside the matter of souls, the real question would be 'am I still the same me that stepped onto that transporter pad?'.
The fact that transporter duplicates like Thomas Riker can exist within Star Trek canon suggests otherwise; they cannot both be the single individual that was involved in that transporter accident. Furthermore, if a transporter is capable of making a copy, regardless of the circumstances in which it occurred, than this would imply that making copies is all it does; it simply wouldn't be possible otherwise.
If it were simply a matter of moving an object from point A to point B, then there would not have been enough data/material/whatever to make two people out of one.
As someone else suggested, the transporter is like a fax machine; except it is one that discreetly destroys the original paper so folks are fooled into thinking the sheet has been crammed down the phone line somehow.
---EDIT---
Needless to say, I would be visiting places by shuttle
Spiritual discussions aside, I side with Dr. McCoy on the issue. It would be shuttles or nothing for me. The reason why has to do with thermodynamics and energy. Even with the most advanced "compensators" and "amplifiers" when Starfleet beams you over to ESD you wouldn't arrive entirely intact. Even if you arrived 99.9997% you haven't completely transported. And when your talking about the hugely important placement and structure of neuro synapses which are pretty tiny the minutae becomes vital.
2cents; Teleporters are not replicators. Soul is a religious concept. Religion is a human creation. The closest thing to what one may have called Soul, any vulcan might logically declare (mind, vulcan is a human creation), would be consciousness..? Consciousness, in the 21st century of man, is both scientifically and philosophically being questioned; Like matter and non-matter, things made outof quarks and/or rather quark-fabrics made out of non-things we cannot yet confirm. (higgs, graviton) Logic may dictate that if, for one, neurons and socalled (highly debated) mirror neurons were transported(redefined momentum) as-is, the 'same' yet undefined non-things (like singular mesons composed of a quark and an anti-quark) 'should' be there aswell. Then again, one tiny distortion.. oops, better not fear for that.. 24th century shrinks may welcome teleporterfobia, no pun intended.. err There is no resolution as of yet.. we can not seem to agree on a definition of the undefined. Or can we.. in the future more may agree that stating anything absolute (outof your own (sub -and)conscious self (ie. fantasy, self fulfilling prophecy, paranoia)) is impossible.. As Einstein tickled; "Imagination is more important than knowledge".. Google for 'Athene's C = h f' as it may inspire for renewed theories. I'm curious what implications other trekkies may come up with. Cheers!
The soul isn't specifically a religious concept but non-religious people fear the word. Some people take it to simply be your uniqueness, your consciousness and your individuality and sense of self or the feeling of existence. I think therefore I am.
If the sense of self has a scientific "body" and is made of something I don't think we've discovered it. I have a hard time believing the increasingly popular view that our brains create the illusion of a consciousness and it's really nothing outside of electrical impulses. That doesn't make sense to me and I don't see how something like this could exist but be an illusion of sorts.
Setting aside the matter of souls, the real question would be 'am I still the same me that stepped onto that transporter pad?'.
The fact that transporter duplicates like Thomas Riker can exist within Star Trek canon suggests otherwise; they cannot both be the single individual that was involved in that transporter accident. Furthermore, if a transporter is capable of making a copy, regardless of the circumstances in which it occurred, than this would imply that making copies is all it does; it simply wouldn't be possible otherwise.
If there are souls and humans generally have them, the creation of souls is possible. That happens whenever a new child is born (or maybe even earlier, whatever).
So maybe a transporter that has an accident just creates a second soul? No need for a copy.
It might be new to some or not, but our cells are constantly replaced, and even "deeper", the molecules and atoms that make them are replaced. I don't remember the exact time intervals, but it happens often enough. All the cells and atoms you have a decade ago might no longer be part of you now. If you are still the same person (if you'd argue that experience has changed you) or still have the same soul as before, then maybe something just speeding up the process of your body losing parts and reassembling them somewhere else won't change that either. Your soul doesn't seem to be deeply connected to specific material particles in the first place, so why would it care if they were reorganized a little and transported someplace else? The soul still seems to "know" which set of atoms it belongs to today... Or maybe it is even a "decision" of the soul... "Yes, I am Wiliam T.Riker. This is the body I like, and it's now 500km from where it was before, but still mine."
"Oh, shiny, two William T.Riker's body? I can't decide, quick create a duplicate of me and one of us go the one that just appeared a few kilometers away."
Or maybe there just is no soul and the question is meaningless. Your self is destroyed or sustained just as it is by the continous cell regeneration and atom recycling...
2cents; Teleporters are not replicators. Soul is a religious concept. Religion is a human creation. The closest thing to what one may have called Soul, any vulcan might logically declare (mind, vulcan is a human creation), would be consciousness..? Consciousness, in the 21st century of man, is both scientifically and philosophically being questioned; Like matter and non-matter, things made outof quarks and/or rather quark-fabrics made out of non-things we cannot yet confirm. (higgs, graviton) Logic may dictate that if, for one, neurons and socalled (highly debated) mirror neurons were transported(redefined momentum) as-is, the 'same' yet undefined non-things (like singular mesons composed of a quark and an anti-quark) 'should' be there aswell. Then again, one tiny distortion.. oops, better not fear for that.. 24th century shrinks may welcome teleporterfobia, no pun intended.. err There is no resolution as of yet.. we can not seem to agree on a definition of the undefined. Or can we.. in the future more may agree that stating anything absolute (outof your own (sub -and)conscious self (ie. fantasy, self fulfilling prophecy, paranoia)) is impossible.. As Einstein tickled; "Imagination is more important than knowledge".. Google for 'Athene's C = h f' as it may inspire for renewed theories. I'm curious what implications other trekkies may come up with. Cheers!
Hmmm, maybe if you split up the paragraphs......eyes bleeding........
Seriously tho.....I haven't seen this type of clarity in a long time....very correct you are sir yet only in the scientific sense.
Also consider that we can take a single skin cell, reprogram it, and we can make blood, organs, bone...etc etc just from a single skin cell.
So in essence a single cell of a human IS a whole...and thus if it can be reprogrammed to take on a different task than what was orginally set for....you could consider that to beam yerself...all yer doing is reoganising said cells back to its orginal structure.
If there are souls and humans generally have them, the creation of souls is possible. That happens whenever a new child is born (or maybe even earlier, whatever).
So maybe a transporter that has an accident just creates a second soul? No need for a copy.
It might be new to some or not, but our cells are constantly replaced, and even "deeper", the molecules and atoms that make them are replaced. I don't remember the exact time intervals, but it happens often enough. All the cells and atoms you have a decade ago might no longer be part of you now. If you are still the same person (if you'd argue that experience has changed you) or still have the same soul as before, then maybe something just speeding up the process of your body losing parts and reassembling them somewhere else won't change that either. Your soul doesn't seem to be deeply connected to specific material particles in the first place, so why would it care if they were reorganized a little and transported someplace else? The soul still seems to "know" which set of atoms it belongs to today... Or maybe it is even a "decision" of the soul... "Yes, I am Wiliam T.Riker. This is the body I like, and it's now 500km from where it was before, but still mine."
"Oh, shiny, two William T.Riker's body? I can't decide, quick create a duplicate of me and one of us go the one that just appeared a few kilometers away."
Or maybe there just is no soul and the question is meaningless. Your self is destroyed or sustained just as it is by the continous cell regeneration and atom recycling...
If you want to look at it that way, then imagine this; let's suppose your body was divided up into its component cells, and then every one of those cells was used to create a clone of you and given a copy of your memories and personality.
Which one is you? I mean the you that I'm talking to right now?
My thought would be 'none of them'. I would consider you to be dead; In fact, I imagine most people would.
Now, if a transporter does nothing but move you from point A to point B, then it is like stepping through a door; and if getting confused about which way you were going while stepping through a doorway resulted in there being one of you on each side of it, then one might reasonably ask 'where the heck did that guy come from?'. It makes no sense that one human body can go in, and two can come out; there simply wasn't enough matter involved to make two people.
This tells me that the matter has not been moved; it has been scanned, turned into data, and then a copy has been built (using that data as a template) out of matter found at the target destination. Copying data is simple, so in the case of Thomas Riker, the data was sent in two directions, resulting in two copies of Riker. It is the only explanation that allows for there being two people stepping out of that doorway.
The thing of it is, nobody would ever know. The only person who would notice anything was amiss was the one who got scanned to death on the transporter pad; and he or she would be in no position to tell anyone. The copy would think it was the original, and it would seem like the original to everybody else; so they all assume it was a success.
If there is such a thing as a soul, then Kirk or Picard, upon arriving at the great Starbase in the sky, would find hundreds of themselves waiting for them due to all the times they had stepped into a transporter.
Or do they "kill you" then reconfigure your exact being upon materializing? (meaning you have no soul)
Oh please, the "Soul Theory" of identity is so lame and outdated. If we speak from the body theory, then I would posit yes, you did indeed die during the transportation process. The person who results on the other side is someone entirely different yet exactly like you.
In order to justify that you are indeed the same person you could probably use the ego accumulation device, which I do believe has merit.
Comments
Brrrraaaaiiiinnnnsss!
*edit* +1
Also not sure but it feels like this thread will end up violating forum rule number 11.
And we are all soulless mass murders who never take prisoners.
That would explain what happened to Ceti Alpha 5
now can they transport a person's memories exactly?
So, what would happen when you beam someone up? Their physical states would be in-tact, as would their personality.
Now, if you had two "copies" - they begin to differ in personality immediately as the mind is a composite of several components.
In fact, if you remove the corpus callosum, you can have two brains operating at once (though with different functions in each). Our minds are, generally speaking, an amalgamation of two sets of inputs and decisions - hence the variability in choices.
Also, what happens if someone takes your photograph while you're being transported?
"You will always be a child of two worlds."
You don't have a soul. So, neither?
So imho consiousness is somewhat linked to the idea of a soul but not entirely, and to state this I do believe in souls. I think it is much more likely that souls are both part of and seperate from you, more like an external harddrive, so when the primary eventually fails the external disconects and moves on with the total culmination of lifes experiences and in essence takes over where the body failed. And in the process of teleportation when one is atomized and reconfigured in the exact state it was dematerialized in the soul just follows the info to the new point and reintigrates, if it would ever not be integrated, cuz who is to say souls if they exist are not anywhere and everywhere at the same time, seeing as how the afterlife could work on completely diffrent physics if it worked on any kind at all.
We have theories and beliefs. No proofs. Heck, there's barely any evidence if any.
The fact that transporter duplicates like Thomas Riker can exist within Star Trek canon suggests otherwise; they cannot both be the single individual that was involved in that transporter accident. Furthermore, if a transporter is capable of making a copy, regardless of the circumstances in which it occurred, than this would imply that making copies is all it does; it simply wouldn't be possible otherwise.
If it were simply a matter of moving an object from point A to point B, then there would not have been enough data/material/whatever to make two people out of one.
As someone else suggested, the transporter is like a fax machine; except it is one that discreetly destroys the original paper so folks are fooled into thinking the sheet has been crammed down the phone line somehow.
---EDIT---
Needless to say, I would be visiting places by shuttle
Yes, thank you thats the episode im talking about.
I say no, not entirely.
If the sense of self has a scientific "body" and is made of something I don't think we've discovered it. I have a hard time believing the increasingly popular view that our brains create the illusion of a consciousness and it's really nothing outside of electrical impulses. That doesn't make sense to me and I don't see how something like this could exist but be an illusion of sorts.
So maybe a transporter that has an accident just creates a second soul? No need for a copy.
It might be new to some or not, but our cells are constantly replaced, and even "deeper", the molecules and atoms that make them are replaced. I don't remember the exact time intervals, but it happens often enough. All the cells and atoms you have a decade ago might no longer be part of you now. If you are still the same person (if you'd argue that experience has changed you) or still have the same soul as before, then maybe something just speeding up the process of your body losing parts and reassembling them somewhere else won't change that either. Your soul doesn't seem to be deeply connected to specific material particles in the first place, so why would it care if they were reorganized a little and transported someplace else? The soul still seems to "know" which set of atoms it belongs to today... Or maybe it is even a "decision" of the soul... "Yes, I am Wiliam T.Riker. This is the body I like, and it's now 500km from where it was before, but still mine."
"Oh, shiny, two William T.Riker's body? I can't decide, quick create a duplicate of me and one of us go the one that just appeared a few kilometers away."
Or maybe there just is no soul and the question is meaningless. Your self is destroyed or sustained just as it is by the continous cell regeneration and atom recycling...
Hmmm, maybe if you split up the paragraphs......eyes bleeding........
Seriously tho.....I haven't seen this type of clarity in a long time....very correct you are sir yet only in the scientific sense.
Also consider that we can take a single skin cell, reprogram it, and we can make blood, organs, bone...etc etc just from a single skin cell.
So in essence a single cell of a human IS a whole...and thus if it can be reprogrammed to take on a different task than what was orginally set for....you could consider that to beam yerself...all yer doing is reoganising said cells back to its orginal structure.
Very Lucid....Cheers right back at ya
If you want to look at it that way, then imagine this; let's suppose your body was divided up into its component cells, and then every one of those cells was used to create a clone of you and given a copy of your memories and personality.
Which one is you? I mean the you that I'm talking to right now?
My thought would be 'none of them'. I would consider you to be dead; In fact, I imagine most people would.
Now, if a transporter does nothing but move you from point A to point B, then it is like stepping through a door; and if getting confused about which way you were going while stepping through a doorway resulted in there being one of you on each side of it, then one might reasonably ask 'where the heck did that guy come from?'. It makes no sense that one human body can go in, and two can come out; there simply wasn't enough matter involved to make two people.
This tells me that the matter has not been moved; it has been scanned, turned into data, and then a copy has been built (using that data as a template) out of matter found at the target destination. Copying data is simple, so in the case of Thomas Riker, the data was sent in two directions, resulting in two copies of Riker. It is the only explanation that allows for there being two people stepping out of that doorway.
The thing of it is, nobody would ever know. The only person who would notice anything was amiss was the one who got scanned to death on the transporter pad; and he or she would be in no position to tell anyone. The copy would think it was the original, and it would seem like the original to everybody else; so they all assume it was a success.
If there is such a thing as a soul, then Kirk or Picard, upon arriving at the great Starbase in the sky, would find hundreds of themselves waiting for them due to all the times they had stepped into a transporter.
Oh please, the "Soul Theory" of identity is so lame and outdated. If we speak from the body theory, then I would posit yes, you did indeed die during the transportation process. The person who results on the other side is someone entirely different yet exactly like you.
In order to justify that you are indeed the same person you could probably use the ego accumulation device, which I do believe has merit.