Would you use teleporter technology if it existed? Why or Why not?
You know those sci-fi teleporters like in Star Trek where you disappear from one location then instantaneously reappear in another location? Do you trust that they are safe to use?
To fully understand my question, you need to understand the safety concerns regarding teleporters as explained in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQHBAdShgYI
If it opens a spacetime tunnel and I cross it with all my original atoms, yes.
If it disintegrates me to 3d print a copy on the other side, no.
Stargate yes, Star Trek no.
Stargate lore incorporates buffers holding your intermediate information, so it's the same than Star Trek, actually.
Assuming we're talking about our reality, this device is getting made by a corporation who will release it as soon as the potential profit exceeds the cost from its non-zero error rate.
No, I'm not getting into some Musk 2.0's shoddy body disintegrator.
Yes. I get to die and pass all my responsibilities to my quantum clone. Sign me the fuck up.
And the clone gets a great excuse to get out of things. “That wasn’t me, that was my clone”
Instant cloning opens up many interesting possibilities:
the last one is a little close to the TV show Severance as well
There's a Ship of Theseus aspect to Star Trek's transporters in particular that I find interesting. In that there is an actual matter stream sent to your destination. But ultimately I couldn't be sure that the me I am now would come out the other side - and I probably wouldn't.
I have the same concern about uploading my brain to a computer. Even if it's a perfect copy it's still a copy. And that's before you factor in for other things like, I am not just my brain I am also the hormones that affect my brain.
Your hormones make you weak! Let go of your mortal shell and live in the sweet embrace of 1s and 0s. None of those pesky shades of gray. Everything in it's own happy 'float'ing bucket.
We'll even throw in a RNG if you ever want to get the thrill of hormones.
Join us.
Sincerely, Totally not a bot
Agreed. Fuck hormones. I'm over here trying to be logical, and my hormones are telling me other things.
Thank you, fellow human.
If there's an actual stream of the same matter, where did Riker 2 come from?
Thousands of usenet, IRC, BBS, forum, and reddit posts have gone back and forth on that since that episode first aired. Canon is that the transporter disassembles and reassembles and that the transport consists of, among other things, a matter stream. But also the technobabble in the episode suggests that the transporter recreated at least one of them without an extra riker worth of matter.
Replicators also require base materials to synthesize meals out of.
This question all comes down to your opinion of what makes a person a person, whether that means we have something greater than the collection of our atoms, or whether we are simply the emergent outcome of the complex arrangement of atoms. If you subscribe to the former then you also need to believe that this machine is somehow capable of either transporting/transplanting that "soul" for lack of a better expression. Where if you subscribe to the latter than this is most certainly a suicide cloning machine.
I personally subscribe to the idea that consciousness is an emergent property of complexity. Given a sufficiently large enough series of inputs you can observe new and unexpected outputs that appear to be on higher orders of complexity than their inputs. This response is an example of that, from electrons flowing through transistors we end up with operating systems, hardware IO, web browsers, networking protocols, ASCII standards, font rendering, etc. All of that complexity emerges from a massive amount of on/off switches arranged in patterns over time.
Following this chain of reasoning I believe that making an exact duplicate of me down to the state of each atom is no different than that entity being me, however as a conscious being with human ethics and morals I put value in the singularity of my existence, and so a plurality of Zetaphor is something I find undesirable as it fundamentally challenges my perception of what it means to be myself.
So assuming the entity leaving the transporter is me, there's two ways to approach the way a machine like this could operate:
That means one of two things, either there is a brief moment of time where two identical copies of me are in the universe, or there is a period of time where zero complete copies of me exist in the universe. So either I stopped existing momentarily and then was recreated from scratch (death and clone birth), or I existed in two places at once and then died in one (cloning and suicide).
I'd say it's the second. I don't imagine any data movement that's not copy + delete.
Your original copy would die. Your life as you know it would end the moment you teleport.
Sure on the other end a replica would come out, presumably with all your memories etc intact, but it would not be you, you would not experience it. It would go on living your life, thinking it was you, everyone around it treating it like it was you, and presumably doing all the same things you would have done.
Except it is not you. Your experience ended at the teleporter. And many fools would never realize this, because the dead aren’t around to tell us.
Jacob Geller has a fantastic video covering this topic called “Head Transplants And The Non-existence Of The Soul”, it’s fascinating stuff
If there's no break in consciousness, then there would be no death. I was simply encoded as bits of data and then decoded, a process that I would be conscious of and experience in some way, I assume. If when I get off the transporter at point B with a 1:1 memory of the experience like walking from one room to the next, in no way did I die.
No worries, your duplicate would be more like a twin after a few hours.
You are changing the question to "is a perfect replica of a person considered the same person or not?". That is not the question.
What you experience by using a teleporter is you enter a room, and then you die. End of story. There being another replica of you somewhere does not change that you died. For an outsider they may argue whether or not you died, whether or not the replica is you, and so on. But from the perspective of someone who enters the teleportation room, it's over. Dead.
Use it on myself? No.
Use it to start a combination movers / electric / tunneling / waste management / highly-illegal-hardware-pirating company?
Yes.
If it's wormhole based tech then yeah why not, atomic based teleportation comes with too many philosophical and existential flavors for me personally
I totally respect the way you approached it. I would totally use either, but I value myself very little and value being able to get somewhere that has alcohol quickly to dull the things I feel very much.
I totally respect the way you approached it. I would totally use either, but I value myself very little and value being able to get somewhere that has alcohol quickly to dull the things I feel very much.
Yup.
Not only would I use it, I would abuse it.
I'd duplicate myself more than once, and at least once so I could fuck myself.
I'd tweak the transporter to adjust my body as I went through it. Best weight-loss, gym routine, plastic surgery, dick-enhancement pill ever, all in one.
I would be the reason such devices would be strictly regulated by people with ethics. "Is it murder if you kill your clone?" "Who cares, energize and last one stabbed wins!"
This guy rikers.
How would you deal with yourself after you fuck yourself?!
Do you want a really creepy twin with much less resources than you to walk around the world? Would you wanna kill that person? No one would notice surely.
Similar matter is dealt with in the book Dark Matter.
Those all sound like problems for later!
It's a literal suicide booth.
Sure, you can go on all day about changing out broom handles and whatever other metaphor you like, but I don't need my body to be a point of interaction with any consciousness and the world, i need it to be a point of interaction between my consciousness and the world.
I have a lot of feelings about the emptiness of identity and the ultimate unity of the universe, but that doesn't mean I'm going to off myself for the sake of convenience.
If I make a copy of myself, I'm still myself. I don't become the copy. I have no reason to believe that a genetically identical clone that's somehow got a copy of my memories will spontaneously cause my consciousness to jump to the other clone. No evidence of any such thing happening.
If I, then, make a copy of myself on Mars, why would I expect to spontaneously inhabit it?
The only reason being ripped apart and having an identical copy made looks like teleportation is the timing. There's a short story about this, where a teleporter malfunction leaves the original version of the traveler alive. Protocol is to 'balance the equation' by incinerating the survivor, which as it turned out was the fate of anyone who stepped into the teleporter under normal circumstances.
Think about a file in a computer system. Copying the file and making changes doesn't change the original file. When you download something and alter it, that's a different copy of the file that's been changed, not the original. Even when you move something rather than copy it, what's actually happening is it's being copied and then the original is destroyed.
Seamless for everyone else, sure. But a tragic, needless, and utterly stupid death for the one who enters the machine.
The only way I would use Teleportation is if this problem gets resolved. One way (as unfeasible as teleporters themselves) would be to essentially Quantum entangle your brain to the new body, essentially making it so your conscience briefly is in control of two bodies, then afterwards destroy the original body and with it the entanglement.
If I, then, make a copy of myself on Mars, why would I expect to spontaneously inhabit it?
As best we can tell, though, you don't inhabit your body, you are your body.
Admittedly, we don't really understand the nature of consciousness at all, so it'd make sense to hold off on using Star Trek-style transporters until we do.
I am with Bob Johansson (Bobbyverse) on this one. Star trek is utterly inconsistent with how transporters work. They only ever play up when it's convenient for the plot line, but the rest of the time they're totally fine and no one worries about it.
Transporters are supposed to move the atoms by converting them into energy, moving that energy through subspace, and then converting them back to atoms on the other side, the only energy in the system is the energy that was created when the atoms were converted, so it shouldn't be possible to create a transporter clone, no matter how many "confinement beams" you have, as where would it's atoms come from?
I always figured that's what the pattern buffer is for - the replicator can make a person atom-by-atom from energy, but the buffer holds the 'consciousness', and that's the unreliable bit. Thomas Riker happens because the transporter system copies Riker into the buffer twice due to interference, so when the replicator fires up it creates two Riker bodies and puts one copy into each, sucking down some extra power from the ship to compensate for the missing energy.
Absolutely! I might even die instantly, which is just a bonus :V
Peak Lemmy - as soon as anyone mentions a potentially fatal experiment, the comments are all like Bender at the beginning of Futurama!
I don't buy the idea that disintegrating my molecules and reconstructing new ones is tantamount to murder or suicide.
If all I experience is being one place one moment and another place the next, then it's me. It's isn't some fucking clone, it's me. You're just being turned into some other form (energy, if we're using Star Trek rules) and then being turned back.
I'm pretty sure that at 26, I'm already a completely different person than the baby I was born as, literally. My cells have all died and been replaced. The horror. ./s
I don’t buy the idea that disintegrating my molecules and reconstructing new ones is tantamount to murder or suicide.
I definitely don't think teleportation in science fiction is meant to be killing the person using it and making a clone of them. Like unless a story is specifically about that, I don't think any given sci-fi author is trying to set up some sinister background plot where everyone is unknowingly killing themselves all the time.
But I do still have to wonder if that's how it would end up working out in real life. Sure all our cells have died and been replaced since we were born, but that typically doesn't happen with all your cells at the same time lol. imo it's probably less about cells and more about like... Consciousness or "the soul" or whatever, I don't know. Whatever it is, I accept that teleporters in fiction have some way to store and transport it, whether it's stated in the narrative or not. But in real life I have no idea how we'd be able to tell if such a thing could even work.
In real life, I think we'd probably glean some insights to the soul in the development process. Like say, if one of the first human test subjects goes through it, only to have their personality irrevocably changed, and no one can identify any external reasons why, then that would warrant further research before billions of humans start using it and it becomes an actual problem.
I think part of my "resistance" to this question is that by default, I'm approaching it from the assumption that I'm living in some hypothetical world where a teleporter is as common and everyday as a car or train, and extrapolating from there, so a lot of the hypotheticals don't exist for me because I'm imagining public use. "What if someone puts the version of you that didn't teleport in their basement" well then they would have to coerce me out of the presumably public location for teleports between cities or wherever, because if I step on a pad expecting to be halfway across the globe in two seconds and instead I'm still in the same room, I'm not gonna leave until it's explained to me what went wrong and I'm given assurances for future service and compensation for the failure that already happened.
"oh well what if it only created copies of you" well then it probably wouldn't supplant any existing forms of transportation :), and of course then I wouldn't use it to get around.
If all I experience is being one place one moment and another place the next, then it’s me
If I make an exact molecular copy of you and set that copy free into the world thinking it had just successfully transported, but then I take the original you that entered the transporter and lock them up in a basement somewhere, how is that any different? From the perspective of the conscious being that came out the other end their continuity is uninterrupted. They will think they are the only version of themselves to have ever existed and that they simply moved from one place to another, as opposed to being a duplicate of the original entity, and that the original entity may be dead or in this case locked in a basement.
Now I want to see a dystopian fiction where the original instances of a person are taken away and used as slave labor while the clones come out the other side thinking they're the only copy.
If I make 100 exact molecular copies of you and lock them up in my emerald mine to slave away for the rest of their lives, but then I take the original you and give you $10 and send you on your way, how is that any different? You know you are the original and nothing can change that, so YOU you have nothing to fear, right?
If I walk to the teleport pad, expecting to blink from Point A to Point B, but instead I experience a blink from Point A to Point A, I'm the kind of person who'd need to be physically coerced, threatened, or tricked into captivity, because I'd immediately hop off the pad like "uh why am I still here I'm supposed to be in Berlin, I'm not leaving until you refund my transport cost or get me to Berlin". If I'm not conscious, then I'm the victim of criminal action, not the teleporter.
Likewise, the version of me that just experienced a normal teleport would live their life as they would have anyways.
Alright, but now instead of disintegrating and reconstructing, consider if a similar machine just duplicated your body atom for atom. Is that "you", or a clone?
Let's assume the machine works one of two ways. It either destroys the original as it's read into the machine and reconstructing on the other end, or it's not destroying the original and simply reading and copying simultaneously.
In the first case there are zero complete copies of you in existence as you're undergoing a phase of removing information from place and reconstructing it in another, I'd call that death and cloning.
In the second case there are two identical copies of you in existence until they destroy the original, I'd call that a clone.
A clone. As far as I know, there's nothing in our established understanding of the world to suggest that merely copying the physical materials of my atoms would reproduce my memories and personality.
Death is information-theoretic, fight me OP. /s
I'll add the caveat that it's entirely possible I still couldn't afford teleportation.
If you were a Federation citizen living on any of the core worlds (earth, vulcan, andoria, and tellar prime) I think you'd be okay. It's not like it's something you have in the home anyways - we don't get much civilian life in Star trek but it's implied that you just physically go to the transport pad you want to use and use it.
What if the original wasn't destroyed? Wouldn't it be a clone then? Which one would feel like it was really you?
Both of us would be me. Then, as our experiences diverged from the point of duplication, we'd become different people (See: Thomas, the duplicate of William Riker in Star Trek. The only reason Thomas and not Will is considered the copy is because of audience perspective, but empathizing with each of them makes one see how both are Will Riker at the start of the episode). This all of course, assumes we don't discover something like the popular conception of souls during the early trials. But I don't believe there's anything about a "soul" that can't be tied to the sum of one's lived experience, which would be copied too.
I would consider a clone to be more expansive of who it could include besides copies of myself as I am now - it would also be someone grown from the literal same embryo as me who'd lived a completely different life with even a different name.
Depends on the technology employed.
Quantum entanglement? Sure. All day, every day.
That annihilation shit that Star Trek does? Hell no.
I'd also take a method that's between the two. If it could split me up and send those very same atoms across the void to other side where they're recombobulated I'd be fine with that, too. Assuming it's not painful.
Edit: My sister: "What if it's the most painful experience ever, but the machine deletes that memory?"
Star Trek Transporters don't annihilate you. According to all the stuff from Star Trek it literally disassembles you, moves your particles through space in a matter stream held in a containment field, and reassembles you at the new location.
So the Ship of Theseus question doesn't actually apply, your physical material is the same before and after. The question is if disassembly constitutes dying, and if the reassembled you at the new location is a resurrected you, or if disassembly isn't dying, then it is in fact just a form of transport.
How do you account for the duplicate Riker in TNG? Who's the real one and where did the extra matter come from then to assemble William vs Tom?
(It's been a long time since I've seen that episode so I don't remember if they covered that but on-screen)
A similar question could be raised for the Rascals episode...
Tell that to the second Riker.
Off topic, but I read a book or short story once that was similar to your edit.
It followed a character who lived on a planet with a toxic atmosphere. At the end of every day, everyone would get into a personal chamber that took a complete copy of them, destroyed their body, then rebuilt it and added the memories back the next morning.
I can't remember if it was specified or implied, but the gist of it was that the machine ripped the body apart to the molecular level while the person was conscious, but the snapshot was taken before that, so no one remembered the pain.
Quantum entanglement would mean that while it reads your initial state and encodes the new state there are two copies of you in existence, that is cloning, then the initial state dies. Unless the process of reading that state is destructive, then you just die and are cloned.
The method between the two you suggested also means you die momentarily and then are recreated. For the period of time it takes to encode your atoms into a method of transport and then reassemble them at your destination, you no longer exist in complete form.
The cute thing about quantum entanglement is that it provably CANNOT create a clone of you. It is conveniently called no-cloning theorem. It can either move your exact quantum state from a collection of particles in one place onto a collection in another, or it can create imperfect clones of you, but in no situation can it create an exact quantum clone of you in addition to the original.
Nope, I have a hard enough time thinking about my consciousness being "the same person" even after sleeping. No way am I getting taken apart and cloned by choice.
Arthur C. Clarke covered it in his first published story.
I don’t travel by wire! You see, I helped invent the thing!
https://zoboko.com/text/qll1oe8j/the-collected-stories-of-arthur-c-clarke/7
I get the disintegration qualms. But slap some TNG-era biofilters on that baby and filter out heavy metal accumulations, budding cancer cells, chest congestion, etc., and I'd be first in line.
Of course I would.
Everything that makes you -you- is contained in the physicality of your brain. Even fairly small changes in your brain will create large shifts in cognition and personality. So anything that replicates your body and brain, down to the last atom, is going to be creating -you-. As far as you are concerned, nothing happened; you ceased to be in one place, and immediately sprang into existence in another.
"As far as you are concerned"
Correction: "as far as anyone else is concerned."
Consciousness IS continuity. If you are disentigrated and a perfect clone pops up somewhere to replace you... you died. Your current stream of consciousness ended and a perfect copy replaced you.
As far as all external observers are concerned it's still you. But from your own perspective? Well you won't have one anymore, you'll be dead.
...But the -me- that just popped into existence isn't going to perceive a gap in continuity at all. It may be a new -me-, but it has all the memories and experiences that -I- had just prior to being disintegrated. From the perspective of the new -me- there's no change at all.
Are you the same person as the person that went to sleep last night? How would you know that you weren't replaced by a clone with precisely the same memories and experiences? Or a clone that thinks that it has the same memories and experiences? I can remember last night, but can I prove that my memories are accurate?
Every atom in your brain gets replaced every four five years anyway so clearly it's the position and structure of the atoms that's important rather than the atoms themselves. So obviously there is no point worrying about it because it happens anyway, and you're clearly fine.
The individual atoms probably get replaced far more often. And I think that, depending on how you look at -you-, the -you- of a year ago isn't the same -you- as who you are now; the change is just so gradual that you don't notice.
This is just blatantly untrue.
Some cells don't renew hardly at all, some do it all the time but the brain isn't "renewed" every X years.
Do you trust that they are safe to use?
Making an assessment on that requires a whole lot more context.
We trust in car safety because of regulation, established supposed Brand trustworthyness, and widespread use.
If teleporters had the same, and in terms of use at least significant precedent, there's no reason most people would use them. Traveling convenience would be a great upside.
Unser Those circumstance I'd be fine using them.
if you translocated Theseus' ship, is it still the same ship? what if you extracted the data from the transport buffer to reassemble the original in its original location?
For a ship, yes. For a living organism with consciousness... I'm not so sure.
No, I don't see any possible solution to continuity of consciousness. See Walk like a Dinosaur to understand the implications, but basically you would need to destroy the original and duplicate it from scratch.
If there is such a thing as a soul, it would likely be impossible to duplicate, but even if not, you would have to destroy the original.
I would use it. Anything to not have to use public transportation or fly in an airplane ever again.
I was a definite "no" until you made me consider it as an alternative to flying Delta.
Fuck that, I dont care where "I" can go, I'll die and my clone will be there instead! Even if that was provably false, I wouldn't take the risk.
Fuck yeah I would. As long as it's cheap and relatively safe I'd take instant transportation over spending hours sitting in a metal box any day.
I definitely wouldn't use the disintegration/reintegration type. If it worked some other way, like through mini-wormholes or something, sure I would use it.
Depends on how the teleportation worked and also how our consciousness worked. I’m not against the idea of creating exact copies of myself who, from their point of view, are indistinguishable from the me they were copied from. I am, however, against the idea of deleting the original me, which from my point of view would be indistinguishable from death,
Transferring consciousness is different from copying consciousness, even if the copy is flawless.
This is the same answer as the question of uploading our consciousness to a computer.
To my limited understanding, the us that exists is just a network of neural connections. If you could somehow copy that network exactly, you could conceivably create a complete personality copy of an individual, but that’s not the same thing as moving their consciousness.
I don't understand everybody worrying about whether their consciousness moves with us. We literally don't even know what it is, we have no provable theory or idea of what it is. As far as I can tell, your consciousness is something your brain does, not something that exists external to your body, otherwise that's basically believing in spirits.
Raises the interesting question.
If you perfectly recreate a persons brain, Will they be the same person? Or will something totally new and different emerge from the replicated brain?
I`v seen the fly, fuck this shit.
Imagine, going for a skiing trip and when you get down, you don't queue for the lift, but you just ski into the portal and continue at the top of some piste. The commute gets insanely short, I can WFH, pop in for lunch or a coffee chat, and then jump back home to do some work.
I've read that the cells in my body aren't the same as the ones I was born with, so I did a very slow gradual body swap already, possibly a few times.
My continuity of experience continues, therefore I'm still me. Yes I would use it. I don't care if I'm also the man in the box.
How do you know your continuity of experience would continue? The new copy would have the memories of going in to the transporter, but for all we know your individual consciousness still ended and was replaced with a distinct but externally equivalent one.
Otherwise, how could you have a Thomas Riker situation where two copies of a transporter pattern are materialized? They don't share a single consciousness.
It's a question of continuity, not uniqueness. If flowing water breaks against an impediment and forks into separate streams that never rejoin, then you have a situation that is parallel to the situation with the superfluous Riker. The two branches after the fork are simultaneously separate from each other and continuous all the way back to the source of the flow.
As to the original question, "Would you use it?", I certainly wouldn't go first, because although I generally subscribe to the "I am an emergent phenomenon" perspective I am left unconvinced that the singular phenomenon of Experience could be emergent from only the aspects of our universe that we have been able to measure.
Once the system was tested and used regularly, sure! I'd like to ask people who had been through it what it was like, and if they felt fine then I don't see any reason to fear teleportation any more than I fear sleep.
If it existed, was proven safe, and was widely available enough for anyone to use, then of course.
The auto and airline industries would collapse, reducing pollution and global warming.
The biggest downside I can think of offhand is that everyone could vacation wherever they like, and that would quickly overcrowd and ruin all the nice places.
Oof...everybody being able to go to whatever the latest viral pool above a waterfall or cronut shop is all at once...
What if it's "proven safe" in the same way that surgery under general anaesthetic is safe - nobody remembers feeling pain. Nobody (mostly) reports pain after waking up. But what if it's torture and you just don't remember it afterwards.
Teleporter is kinda the same, but no one coming out of the other end remembers dying because in their memory they didn't.
People would also be able to commute to their jobs from any distance, which would probably cause people to spread out instead of all gathering in big cities.
Doesn't Star Trek's transporter solution involve converting your atomic structure to Energy, beaming that energy to another place, and reconstitution your body using the same atoms? If so, that's not really dying anymore. Just re-arranging your original atoms.
Isn't it still kind of the same thing though?
Star Trek calls that "matter stream" energy your "pattern". Pattern sounds a lot like Information. Data. Which is very easy to transmit and duplicate. Data can also be lost or corrupted.
So it's as if they convert all your atoms to a file, then FTP your file to somewhere else where the technology turns your pattern back into matter.
"You" can't exist as just data, so at that point you're already dead. I think...
There are episodes where your pattern is stuck in the pattern buffer. You're only information being stored at that point.
Just because they can un-burn you at the end doesn't mean your body isn't destroyed when you leave. Even if the atoms were just re-arranged and not converted to energy, you're still getting pureed and then reconstituted. Hard to argue you're not dead when your brain has been completely disassembled.
Maybe it is dying, but not in the medical sense.
Like, if you're resuscitated using a defibrillator, then by all accounts, your heart stopped for a moment there. Without intervention from a machine that at one point in history didn't exist, tou were indistinguishable from a corpse. So, a teleporter would just be the same but taken to an extremely abstract degree - you are dead, but your body exists in a state and within range from a machine that can resuscitate that body, so no doctor can yet declare you dead.
Let’s put it this way: if you stepped into a teleporter, the last think you’d ever experience is being disassembled. Doesn’t matter if it hurts or whatever. It just goes black. You die. You, YOU, will never see the other side. You won’t be the one to come out; it’s a clone of you.
Even if it is the very same atoms, the very same dendrites and synapses, reassembled perfectly.
Your clone will think it’s you and it will go “oh wow, it DOES work”. It’ll know your mother. It’ll bang your wife. It has your degree in Computer Science or whatever. And it even has all your experiences up to and including the moment the teleporter turned on.
But it’s not you. You blinked out of existence, your experience ended. You ended the self, and a new self was born at the other end, endowed with everything that encapsulated you previously.
Nah, I’m good.
But what if my matter stream gets all mixed with someone else’s matter stream? Gross. What a mess.
Correct. The thought experiment where it's like "ooh but what if it disintegrated you and 3d printed a copy of yo-" like that's not what a fucking teleporter is. You've just made some other science fiction device that I wouldn't use, I'd use the teleporter.
Do I trust that an ephemeral pseudoscience concept of "teleporter technology" is safe to use...? No...? On what basis would anyone make that judgement.
On what basis would anyone make that judgement.
Suspension of disbelief
Yeah but what if the government tells you it's safe and effective, and mandates transporters for all travel because it's good for the environment?
Are you willing to be branded a science denier?
What if they give you free food and an Amazon gift card?
Do I get air miles for the distance transported?
If we're talking exactly like star trek I'm 90% on board with it. Yeah, yeah, so I'm a clone now, big whoop.
You wanna know the 10% that really fucking haunt me?! Mother fucking Tuvix. Everyone you know can turn into a Tuvix situation real fast, that's the real nightmare.
I love Star Trek, but using the transporter as a plot device led to some really bs situations. Tuvix. The time it made everyone children. The time Picard fucked off to be an energy being so they just used last week's pattern to rematerialize him... Thomas Riker... I could keep going.
I mean think about what would need to happen for Tuvix to exist. The computer would somehow have to do some really complex genetics work to create a hybrid species and somehow merge the 2 very different brains into one stable and coherent organism.
An IRL tuvix situation would be a dead blob of body horror on the transporter pad. They'd be like, fuck clean-up on isle 5, data corruption and pull the last good backup. Because keeping literally just the most recent copy would be criminally negligent. Then they'd rematerialize you but it was you from 2 days ago and you get to wonder for the rest of your life what the other version of you did in the 2 days.
Hell yes. Yes please. Please.
Here's another great video on the transporter problem!
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/KUXKUcsvhQc
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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Ah that’s a nice twist at the end.
We've seen someone's POV going through a transporter. From your own perspective you would just see some glowy shit and appear at your destination. Of course, I would make an army of myself with another me in the transport buffer tweaked to retain the pattern for a long time. But instant transportation is invaluable.
If I were afraid to use the teleporter I’d be afraid to go to sleep. And I ain’t going there, so yes I would use the teleporter.
Also PSA for anyone using an iphone: it’s unaware of the word “teleporter” and will autocorrect it to teleported.
Well, if the technology actually existed, it would solve that whole "soul" question.
We would know pretty quickly if we transported humans and they came out the other side as soulless aberrations because their original just got killed.
So yeah, I would 100% use it after it first proved once and for all that the sum of our consciousness really is all the synapses and signals and grey matter in our heads. Because if so then what does it matter if your original matter has been erased and then recreated. Your clone is just as much you as you are you at that point.
We would know pretty quickly if we transported humans and they came out the other side as soulless aberrations because their original just got killed.
How would you know?
Fair question.
I'm assuming that if your soul really is "you" then a soulless clone of you that is identical to you down to every atom, but had no soul, would be bad.
I don't know if that means your soulless clone would just be an instinct driven animal, or maybe just an evil version of you that immediately grows a goatee. I don't know what function your soul actually performs. But at some point, maybe not immediately, a bunch of soulless clones walking around would be noticed.
Maybe? (Or maybe not?)
Absolutely this.
Someone else can be the guinea pig, but if it's been tested and everyone came out fine? Yeah. I'll absolutely take advantage.
So you’d commit suicide so that some clone of you with all your memories can have a fun time on Mars?
How would we ever know for sure if the copy was really you or not? What question could we ask that only your objective self would know, but the sum collection of cells would not?
Exactly. The copy would think it's me, and that's nice for it. It would go around thinking the tech was great.
But I wouldn't get to enjoy that because I would be dead.
As long as it us thoroughly tested and considered safe. I'm not going first.
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If we talking time tested technology that's been around for a couple centuries (i.e. Star Trek), sure.
Brand new tech? No thanks.
I'm with old Dr. McCoy from that one TNG episode on this one. Not a chance.
Instantly vaporize so a clone can live? No thanks!
In ST canon they are considered the safest form of travel. So, yeah I'd use them if that was the standard.
Except they have malfunctions all the time and there are several characters who refuse to use transporters.
Yeah, and there are people that refuse to fly because they're afraid of crashes, but still ride motorcycles without wearing helmets. A character refusing to use a transporter just indicates that the person in question isn't reacting rationally. Likewise, irregular malfunctions don't mean that it's not still safer than other means.
"How many Transporter accidents have there been in the last tens years, Reg? Two... three? What about the millions of people who transport every day without a problem" - Geordi - TNG Realm of Fear S6E2
You ever seen The Fly?
No thanks, the plot in wikipedia is horrifying enough to read, I ain't watching that shit.
Absolute classic, both the '53 one and the remake with Jeff Goldblum.
I won't. I take public transportation with friends and teleportation doesn't really have that social aspect.
Imagine you have a device that transmits your brain signals into another body so that you can control 2 bodies at once. Clearly you are one self that is controlling two bodies. Clearly destroying either one of these bodies wouldn't really kill you (so long as your brain is fine) you'd just continue existing in the other body.
Now let's say we copy your brain exactly and put it in the other body, and then a device that synchronizes your memories and experiences. body 1 would act exactly like body 2 in every circumstance. I don't see the difference between the first scenario and the second, you are one self, distributed across 2 brains and 2 bodies. If you killed one of the bodies, no one would die, it would be more akin to losing a limb.
Now let's remove the synchronizer, for the first instant it's identical to scenario 2, but over time the 2 selves would diverge and become separate people.
so as long as we kill off the old self immediately before or at the same time as the new body comes online then I don't see it as a murder machine like you describe.
however, if we have the tech to copy the body perfectly, who is to say we can't improve the body as teleport them, make the new body stronger or disease proof. And if we do that, who's to say we couldn't make small changes to the thoughts or memories, make you more docile or forget injustices. That seems pretty risky to me.
We are all clones already.
I would hope that people would start finding a way to include them into sports and play.
Thieving would be impossible to stop so it would become the standard.
The world would be held together by mortal gods; what a hootenanny.
I'm already a clone. Sure, why not.
Anyone remember that Outer Limits episode about this? They thought the teleporter malfunctioned, but it really just failed to destroy the source "copy" of the girl at the point of origin. Since she also appeared at destination, the station operator had to flush the original out of the airlock.
TLDR- Would totally use it.
I don't understand everybody worrying about whether their consciousness moves with us. We literally don't even know what it is, we have no provable theory or idea of what it is. As far as I can tell, your consciousness is something your brain does, not something that exists external to your body, otherwise that's basically believing in spirits.
Okay so in most cases, teleportation is instantaneous. But if you tamper with the disassembler, now can "teleport" yourself to a new location while the old you is still there. Now there's 2 bodies that look like you. So which one is you. Does your consciousness shift into the new body or stay with the old one? Or does your conciousness control both bodies?
Seeing as this is all theoretical then surely the answer is just to invent it so that moves the original you instead of copying it? What is consciousness?
OP said "like in Star Trek" so I assume it would be just like Star Trek.
I see, I don't know much about star trek... I'm more of a Stargate fan
If it's a tesseract, yes, but that's not really teleportation. Otherwise, absolutely not.
I've always had a hard time understanding what's so bad about the person who arrives being a clone, never saw the downside. Yes, I 'd definitely use it. One of the biggest hurdles in my everyday life is the "going there". When I was still working, the one thing I always complained about and what ruined my every morning was having to go there and return after. If I'd had the option to instantly teleport to work, I would have loved every day because I loved my work and I wanted to be there. Now that I'm disabled, I regularly have to cancel stuff like doctor's appointments last minute because my chronic exhaustion is acting up and I physically can't move my body there.
(If teleporting isn't available, I'd settle for a ship's computer core as a PDA)
never saw the downside
Because you’d be dead and your clone lives on. Your consciousness ceases to exist, you will not experience anything your clone will experience. Unless they know how to teleport consciousness it will be a copy of you.
A clone would not be you. From your point of view you are simply killed by the teleporter, your consciousness isn't teleported, it is copied just like your body.
Oh, hell yeah. Plus it's canon that it can heal some diseases.
Now, WRT the continuity of consciousness... hell, I lose that every night, and whenever I get major surgery. Heck, I've transported innumerable times if teleporting a break in continuity of thought plus a change in location. I passed out once from heat stroke and woke up in an infirmary.
Yeah, I'd use it.
Do you consider your brain going in to sleep mode, providing you with filler content that you largely forget, and then waking you back again later to be the same as being vaporised in your original location?