"A difference which makes no difference, is no difference." - William James
If the person stepping out of the transporter looks like me, acts like me, and has continuity of experience with me, then he is me.
That a newly fabricated person believes itself to have continuity may have little bearing on the original's abrupt termination of existence.
This basically sums up my concerns. It could be fine, it could be horrible, and there's no experiment I can conceive of that would be able to provide conclusive data either way.
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
"A difference which makes no difference, is no difference." - William James
If the person stepping out of the transporter looks like me, acts like me, and has continuity of experience with me, then he is me.
That a newly fabricated person believes itself to have continuity may have little bearing on the original's abrupt termination of existence.
What is your proof that the original's existence was ever terminated? After all, the person stepping out of the transporter is identical to the person who stepped into it, down to the last memory and strand of DNA. Where's the evidence that anyone at all died in the process? No body, no trace of a body, no missing experiences from the universe, no missing unique person - everything after is as it was before.
Only someone whose egocentricity is so strong as to believe that any change, even a change of state or location, is the equivalent of death would be worried about this question.
And yet the consequences of being wrong would be... severe.
It is ultimately a variant on the usual destructive brain upload game. Your consciousness is being transferred to a new body... uh huh, sure. Its a joke absolutely NO ONE would accept if the original body didn't collapse/die in the process. Because if they didn't it would be painfully obvious the process duplicates the mind.
Same thing happens here, and the various transports gone wrong are revealing. We know the transporter duplicates people, because you have instances if it running off more than one duplicate. That most of the time it neatly destroys and duplicates the target in synchronicity doesn't change the visible evidence that the second half of the process is duplication.
And yes, my egocentrism is more than adequate to the task of believing that the production of a flawless duplicate somewhere else is inadequate compensation for my impending death by sub-atomic dismantling .
The whole die and cloned myth is kind of blown apart by a TNG episode which shows quite clearly that people are still conscious while in the matter stream.
and then in the TNG episode "Second Chances" they confirm the clone hypothesis is kind of correct when they find due to a malfunction one Riker or duplicate/clone was left behind on Nervala IV while another Riker duplicate/clone goes on to live the life the other Riker would have had if they had used a shuttle instead of the transporter.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
The whole die and cloned myth is kind of blown apart by a TNG episode which shows quite clearly that people are still conscious while in the matter stream.
and then in the TNG episode "Second Chances" they confirm the clone hypothesis is kind of correct when they find due to a malfunction one Riker or duplicate/clone was left behind on Nervala IV while another Riker duplicate/clone goes on to live the life the other Riker would have had if they had used a shuttle instead of the transporter.
A made-up fictional technology that works in whatever way the current plot happens to require...who would've thought?
The whole die and cloned myth is kind of blown apart by a TNG episode which shows quite clearly that people are still conscious while in the matter stream.
and then in the TNG episode "Second Chances" they confirm the clone hypothesis is kind of correct when they find due to a malfunction one Riker or duplicate/clone was left behind on Nervala IV while another Riker duplicate/clone goes on to live the life the other Riker would have had if they had used a shuttle instead of the transporter.
A made-up fictional technology that works in whatever way the current plot happens to require...who would've thought?
This, transporters are not even feasible but just a a piece of fictional technology to lessen the budget per episode
"The meaning of victory is not to merely defeat your enemy but to destroy him, to completely eradicate him from living memory, to leave no remnant of his endeavours, to crush utterly his achievement and remove from all record his every trace of existence. From that defeat no enemy can ever recover. That is the meaning of victory."
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
transporters...you do realize there's worse in this game, i routinely throw out miniature singularities that somehow only effect enemies...gravity doesn't work that way, it has no discretion. transporters themselves considering the distance involved and how much interference there is in orbit...outside the safe shell of the magnetosphere and atmosphere of the planet would require any transporter like tech to have error correction. one *boop* there ya go ain't going to do it. corruption in the beam would have to be accounted for and corrected.
it's all sci-fi...heavy on the 'fi' bit at times.
Dr. Patricia Tanis ~ "Bacon is for sycophants and products of incest."
Donate Brains, zombies in Washington DC are starving.
new sciencific concepts, with lot of anomoly effect theories.
1. reverse reality, discovered Terran/federation mirror universe.
2. time distortions, when they found data's body parts from past
3. double rikers, since that base was sort of experiemental for exotic energy sources, some are unstable.
4. 2nd dimensional limbo when one of the ship exploded and most of the crew trapped in transporter energy and they were rescued.
5. hostile/enemy can kidnap anyone while in teleport mode, they didnt need dna or data in transporter files.
6. stargate had one of episodes where there is multiple carters, t'ceals, and professors due to solar flare storms, creating the nexus effect.
no one knows if this is the only earth or multiple earths, are we in earth prime or 734th earth? infinity theories of prime or nexus reality.
could the big bang might have "echo theory"?
edit to add; who knows if the alien may have a special "DNA Ark"?
And yet the consequences of being wrong would be... severe.
No, you'd be dead instantly and wouldn't know anything better, while your double wouldn't either.
It could very well be that you actually die every time you make a new thought, because after all, you're not the same person anymore.
Or what about sleeping - you spend hours of time and you usually have no memory of what happened in between (and even if you have some memory, it's a complete mess and often makes no sense). For all we know, your true self dies in the night and a copy is reassembled to be very similar to the original.
And the doubling is also not particularly worrisome. Star Trek does allow time travel and alternate timelines that all leave room for the same person existing twice at the same time - just with different memories.
And if we believe in metaphysical stuff like souls - why should a transporter be able to create a soul out of nothing? If a soul missing from a living person is unnoticeable, isn't it one of those "a difference that does not matter is no difference", aka it doesn't exist. But since we posit they do exist, the more logical conclusion is that the soul just moves the newly assembled body. (Probably since it's so similar).
Without metaphysics, we only have the fundamental laws of nature, and we are made up from fundamental particles. And these particles have no unique identity - Proton A is the same as Proton B, so replacing every Proton, Electron, Neutron and what not in your body with a different one shouldn't be a problem, it still arrives at the same matter arrangement.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Dieing means you no longer have an impact on life, the living world, no matter if it is meaningful or not. It really stops for you. Being transported is dieing. Your body is completely taken apart, If it isn't fixed, you are dead. However, you are fixed and can go on with life and have an impact on the world. It is the same as sleeping, having a nap, in coma etc. You are away, but do come back.
Now here is the problem. We can see if our body is still correct after transport, bloodpressure, sugar level etc but how about our memory? How do you know your memory is still the same or all kinds of menthal things. You like tea, after being transported you don't like tea anymore. Before you are in love, after you are no longer in love, or your love is aimed at someone else. These things will happen.
LAFORGE: Apparently there was a massive energy surge in the distortion field around the planet just at the moment you tried to beam out. The Transporter Chief tried to compensate by initiating a second containment beam. DATA: An interesting approach. He must have been planning to reintegrate the two patterns in the transport buffer. LAFORGE: Actually, it wasn't really necessary. Commander Riker's pattern maintained its integrity with just the one containment beam. He made it back to the ship just fine. CRUSHER: What happened to the second beam? LAFORGE: The Transporter Chief shut it down, but somehow it was reflected back to the surface. PICARD: And another William Riker materialised there. RIKER: How was the second pattern able to maintained its integrity? LAFORGE: The containment beam must have had the exact same phase differential as the distortion field. RIKER: Which one of them is real? LAFORGE: That's the thing. Both. You were both materialised from a complete pattern. CRUSHER: Up until that moment, you were the same person.
MinutePhysics [. . .] explain that scientists began looking at a thing called quantum teleportation in the nineties. This is the process whereby quantum information – such as the state of an atom–- could be transmitted. However, a major clause in this theory is the “no cloning theorem.” Essentially, to create a replica of a quantum state, the original must be destroyed in order to obtain all the information.
Science is still pretty shady on what exactly constitutes consciousness and what makes you “you,” so it's still hard to say. However, if it was something to do with the quantum state of certain electrons and atoms in our brain, then it doesn’t look too hopeful that “you” would survive the journey.
This episode aired August 11, 2013 while the following Big Bang Theory episode aired April 14, 2008. However, the OP is just using an argument that has already been on these forums a few times already. The OP is just being lazy about their conspiracy theories unlike their previous ones since there is already a thread produced this week that deals with transporters killing the original and transporting a clone to another location.
We may as well be debating the science of ancient Greek mythology. Sometimes you just have to take a story at face value and not try to analyze it to death.
Howard Tayler had an interesting variation on this in the webcomic Schlock Mercenary. All interstellar traffic in the beginning of the series went through one of the official Wormgates, wormhole gates leading to specific destinations. Turned out these were being run by the F'sherl-Ganni, who were taking advantage of a secret aspect of the gates - they duplicated everyone who went through them. The F'sherl-Ganni were taking the originals, interrogating them to find out any useful information, and disposing of the corpses. When Tagon's Toughs found this out, they started taking the Wormgate network apart. (There was also a man known now as Gav, who had been cryogenically suspended for over a thousand years starting in the 1990s. Due to an error while all this was going on, Gav was duplicated 950 million times. He is now the single largest demographic in the Galaxy, leading to someone researching and reproducing Guinness at his request.)
(Of course, this being Schlock Mercenary, resident mad scientist Kevyn Andreysen came up with an alternative, which he called the teraport - you create a multitude of microscopic wormholes, and your ship goes through all of them at once, essentially reducing it (and everything and everyone aboard) to their constituent atoms, only to be reassembled at the other end. One of the Toughs misheard, and thought it was called the "tear-apart" because of this. Then they ignited a galactic war, because the Teraport Area Denial (TAD) field hadn't been developed yet, so anyone could teraport to anywhere, including in orbit of a world they wanted to attack. This led to the development of the Fleetmind, when a coalition of ship AIs discovered that the F'sherl-Ganni had originally created the Wormgates because teraporting disturbs dark-matter entities native to the Andromeda galaxy, which can come here by way of the wormhole in the central galactic black hole...)
Star Trek Battles member. Want to roll with a good group of people regardless of fleets and not have to worry about DPS while doing STFs? Come join the channel and join in the fun!
OK, I'm a bit irritated that something I proposed in another thread would be an interesting idea for trek to explore at some point, was stolen and used as an attempt to start a flame war ...
Reminds me a little bit of "Think Like a Dinosaur" by James Patrick Kelly. It was turned into an episode of "The Outer Limits." The story deals with intergalactic teleportation and reveals that the person that steps into the teleporter is actually killed and a copy is generated on the other side.
"I'm not big on telepaths myself. I'm not big on guns either. But if everyone else has them, I want to make sure I can get my hands on the biggest one I can."
Couldn't starfleet regularly make two duplicate patterns of important people, rematerialize one, and put the other pattern in a feedback loop in storage in case something happened to the one, they could pull the other out of pattern storage? Immortality has been right under their fingers and they haven't even realized it.
She's right for once this is how it works.. In REAL life.
"He shall be my finest warrior, this generic man who was forced upon me.
Like a badass I shall make him look, and in the furnace of war I shall forge him.
he shall be of iron will and steely sinew.
In great armour I shall clad him and with the mightiest weapons he shall be armed.
He will be untouched by plague or disease; no sickness shall blight him.
He shall have such tactics, strategies and machines that no foe will best him in battle.
He is my answer to cryptic logic, he is the Defender of my Romulan Crew.
He is Tovan Khev... and he shall know no fear."
"A difference which makes no difference, is no difference." - William James
If the person stepping out of the transporter looks like me, acts like me, and has continuity of experience with me, then he is me.
That a newly fabricated person believes itself to have continuity may have little bearing on the original's abrupt termination of existence.
What is your proof that the original's existence was ever terminated? After all, the person stepping out of the transporter is identical to the person who stepped into it, down to the last memory and strand of DNA. Where's the evidence that anyone at all died in the process? No body, no trace of a body, no missing experiences from the universe, no missing unique person - everything after is as it was before.
Only someone whose egocentricity is so strong as to believe that any change, even a change of state or location, is the equivalent of death would be worried about this question.
I disagree... There are events which I still wish to experience. If I was to be transported, I would be unable to experience those events. Why would I willingly undertake a procedure which would definitely prevent me from experiencing the events I wish to experience? The knowledge that 'another me' would? Sorry, but I'd rather experience it for myself...
That said, if the original matter in the matter stream is actually being reassembled, rather than merely replicated, then all well and good
I really shouldn't entertain the OP, but the clone remark riled me up a little...
What is it with people being disturbed by the prospect of clones? If we follow the transporter example of a clone, the clone has your genetic code, your memories, your body. For all intents and purposes, it is you. Why is a clone less valuable than the original person? If we believe in the soul and in God (as I do), then surely God would guide the soul to this duplicated body so we could continue our natural* life.
And in regards to 'regular' clones... Why is a regular clone somehow a bad thing? Again, it has your body, memories, etc. It is you. As far as the clone knows, it has always been you. It's not the clone's fault for existing, anymore than it's a child's fault for being born. As Odo said "killing your clone is still murder!"
*As natural as our lives are now. Are people who are resuscitated soulless? After all, the did die.
I really shouldn't entertain the OP, but the clone remark riled me up a little...
What is it with people being disturbed by the prospect of clones? If we follow the transporter example of a clone, the clone has your genetic code, your memories, your body. For all intents and purposes, it is you. Why is a clone less valuable than the original person? If we believe in the soul and in God (as I do), then surely God would guide the soul to this duplicated body so we could continue our natural* life.
And in regards to 'regular' clones... Why is a regular clone somehow a bad thing? Again, it has your body, memories, etc. It is you. As far as the clone knows, it has always been you. It's not the clone's fault for existing, anymore than it's a child's fault for being born. As Odo said "killing your clone is still murder!"
*As natural as our lives are now. Are people who are resuscitated soulless? After all, the did die.
A regular clone would not share our memories or our personality, only our DNA. A transporter clone would only have those things because it's a literal copy of us up to that point in time.
Comments
This basically sums up my concerns. It could be fine, it could be horrible, and there's no experiment I can conceive of that would be able to provide conclusive data either way.
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
Only someone whose egocentricity is so strong as to believe that any change, even a change of state or location, is the equivalent of death would be worried about this question.
It is ultimately a variant on the usual destructive brain upload game. Your consciousness is being transferred to a new body... uh huh, sure. Its a joke absolutely NO ONE would accept if the original body didn't collapse/die in the process. Because if they didn't it would be painfully obvious the process duplicates the mind.
Same thing happens here, and the various transports gone wrong are revealing. We know the transporter duplicates people, because you have instances if it running off more than one duplicate. That most of the time it neatly destroys and duplicates the target in synchronicity doesn't change the visible evidence that the second half of the process is duplication.
And yes, my egocentrism is more than adequate to the task of believing that the production of a flawless duplicate somewhere else is inadequate compensation for my impending death by sub-atomic dismantling
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
and then in the TNG episode "Second Chances" they confirm the clone hypothesis is kind of correct when they find due to a malfunction one Riker or duplicate/clone was left behind on Nervala IV while another Riker duplicate/clone goes on to live the life the other Riker would have had if they had used a shuttle instead of the transporter.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
A made-up fictional technology that works in whatever way the current plot happens to require...who would've thought?
This, transporters are not even feasible but just a a piece of fictional technology to lessen the budget per episode
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
it's all sci-fi...heavy on the 'fi' bit at times.
Donate Brains, zombies in Washington DC are starving.
new sciencific concepts, with lot of anomoly effect theories.
1. reverse reality, discovered Terran/federation mirror universe.
2. time distortions, when they found data's body parts from past
3. double rikers, since that base was sort of experiemental for exotic energy sources, some are unstable.
4. 2nd dimensional limbo when one of the ship exploded and most of the crew trapped in transporter energy and they were rescued.
5. hostile/enemy can kidnap anyone while in teleport mode, they didnt need dna or data in transporter files.
6. stargate had one of episodes where there is multiple carters, t'ceals, and professors due to solar flare storms, creating the nexus effect.
no one knows if this is the only earth or multiple earths, are we in earth prime or 734th earth? infinity theories of prime or nexus reality.
could the big bang might have "echo theory"?
edit to add; who knows if the alien may have a special "DNA Ark"?
It could very well be that you actually die every time you make a new thought, because after all, you're not the same person anymore.
Or what about sleeping - you spend hours of time and you usually have no memory of what happened in between (and even if you have some memory, it's a complete mess and often makes no sense). For all we know, your true self dies in the night and a copy is reassembled to be very similar to the original.
And the doubling is also not particularly worrisome. Star Trek does allow time travel and alternate timelines that all leave room for the same person existing twice at the same time - just with different memories.
And if we believe in metaphysical stuff like souls - why should a transporter be able to create a soul out of nothing? If a soul missing from a living person is unnoticeable, isn't it one of those "a difference that does not matter is no difference", aka it doesn't exist. But since we posit they do exist, the more logical conclusion is that the soul just moves the newly assembled body. (Probably since it's so similar).
Without metaphysics, we only have the fundamental laws of nature, and we are made up from fundamental particles. And these particles have no unique identity - Proton A is the same as Proton B, so replacing every Proton, Electron, Neutron and what not in your body with a different one shouldn't be a problem, it still arrives at the same matter arrangement.
Now here is the problem. We can see if our body is still correct after transport, bloodpressure, sugar level etc but how about our memory? How do you know your memory is still the same or all kinds of menthal things. You like tea, after being transported you don't like tea anymore. Before you are in love, after you are no longer in love, or your love is aimed at someone else. These things will happen.
Nothing new here. James Blish suggested this idea back in the '70s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spock_Must_Die!
This episode aired August 11, 2013 while the following Big Bang Theory episode aired April 14, 2008. However, the OP is just using an argument that has already been on these forums a few times already. The OP is just being lazy about their conspiracy theories unlike their previous ones since there is already a thread produced this week that deals with transporters killing the original and transporting a clone to another location.
(Of course, this being Schlock Mercenary, resident mad scientist Kevyn Andreysen came up with an alternative, which he called the teraport - you create a multitude of microscopic wormholes, and your ship goes through all of them at once, essentially reducing it (and everything and everyone aboard) to their constituent atoms, only to be reassembled at the other end. One of the Toughs misheard, and thought it was called the "tear-apart" because of this. Then they ignited a galactic war, because the Teraport Area Denial (TAD) field hadn't been developed yet, so anyone could teraport to anywhere, including in orbit of a world they wanted to attack. This led to the development of the Fleetmind, when a coalition of ship AIs discovered that the F'sherl-Ganni had originally created the Wormgates because teraporting disturbs dark-matter entities native to the Andromeda galaxy, which can come here by way of the wormhole in the central galactic black hole...)
Star Trek Battles member. Want to roll with a good group of people regardless of fleets and not have to worry about DPS while doing STFs? Come join the channel and join in the fun!
http://forum.arcgames.com/startrekonline/discussion/1145998/star-trek-battles-channel-got-canon/p1
This video says it.
"He shall be my finest warrior, this generic man who was forced upon me.
Like a badass I shall make him look, and in the furnace of war I shall forge him.
he shall be of iron will and steely sinew.
In great armour I shall clad him and with the mightiest weapons he shall be armed.
He will be untouched by plague or disease; no sickness shall blight him.
He shall have such tactics, strategies and machines that no foe will best him in battle.
He is my answer to cryptic logic, he is the Defender of my Romulan Crew.
He is Tovan Khev... and he shall know no fear."
That said, if the original matter in the matter stream is actually being reassembled, rather than merely replicated, then all well and good
Squash, dead. Disassemble, dead. *panicked tone* Disassemble, DEAD! *runs away*
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
What is it with people being disturbed by the prospect of clones? If we follow the transporter example of a clone, the clone has your genetic code, your memories, your body. For all intents and purposes, it is you. Why is a clone less valuable than the original person? If we believe in the soul and in God (as I do), then surely God would guide the soul to this duplicated body so we could continue our natural* life.
And in regards to 'regular' clones... Why is a regular clone somehow a bad thing? Again, it has your body, memories, etc. It is you. As far as the clone knows, it has always been you. It's not the clone's fault for existing, anymore than it's a child's fault for being born. As Odo said "killing your clone is still murder!"
*As natural as our lives are now. Are people who are resuscitated soulless? After all, the did die.
Trials of Blood and Fire
Moving On Parts 1-3 - Part 4
In Cold Blood
A regular clone would not share our memories or our personality, only our DNA. A transporter clone would only have those things because it's a literal copy of us up to that point in time.