You know those sci-fi teleporters like in Star Trek where you disappear from one location then instantaneously reappear in another location? Do you trust that they are safe to use?
To fully understand my question, you need to understand the safety concerns regarding teleporters as explained in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQHBAdShgYI
spoiler
I wouldn’t, because the person that reappears aint me, its a fucking clone. Teleporters are murder machines. Star Trek is a silent massacre!
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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.
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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”
Well I think if teleporters actually do get invented one day, the law would make the clone legally the same person as the original
Instant cloning opens up many interesting possibilities:
- Dying of old age while having some unpaid loans on your account? Don’t worry, per your loan contract you signed, your creditor can “revive” you using the cloning tech so you can continue working and paying your debt.
- Do you have an illness that’s very expensive to treat? Just die and pass everything to your clone.
- There might be some black market cloners so you can create an illegal clone to do unpleasant stuff (e.g. working, cleaning house, etc) while you’re relaxing at home. Once the illegal clone finished their task, they can just die and disintegrate wherever. The disposable clone don’t have to know that they are a disposable clone or they’ll revolt and reports you for human right violation. You can wake up in the morning, go to work, then went home only to find your original self chilling in the couch while your body starts disintegrating. “oh shit, I’m the clone…”
the last one is a little close to the TV show Severance as well
There’s a book called the Crystal Phoenix that explores this kind of stuff. People will get addicted to heroin for the weekend, then upload themselves to their crystal and let someone pay to murder them horribly while their memories go into a new clone. It’s really dark.
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
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:
- It reads my state in its entirety and then destroys (or encodes for transport) that state
- Or it’s creating the new instance of me bit by bit as it reads my current state
That means one of two things, either there is a brief moment of time where two identical copies of me are in the universe, or there is a period of time where zero complete copies of me exist in the universe. So either I stopped existing momentarily and then was recreated from scratch (death and clone birth), or I existed in two places at once and then died in one (cloning and suicide).
I’d say it’s the second. I don’t imagine any data movement that’s not copy + delete.
One package drop and you could loose a finger or the ability to tie your shoes or the memory of your wedding day.
Yup. Something like that happens in Michael Crichton’s Timeline, where the copy going back and forth in time is imperfect, with relatively low resolution, so things like capillaries sometime connect wrong and people has irrigation problems, bruises, and they even die.
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
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.
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.
Fair enough, wormholes do circumvent the entire issue by nature of being bridges through space-time instead of messing with the person’s molecular integrity
I’d prefer the nightmare dimension version thanks.
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.
If it’s wormhole based tech then yeah why not, atomic based teleportation comes with too many philosophical and existential flavors for me personally
If it’s wormhole based tech then yeah why not…
Trans dimensional horrors. See: Event Horizon
What pronouns do “Trans dimensional horrors” use?
Hor/ror
Phtagn/Phtagns
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!
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.
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?
The fact that a clone would be seamlessly picking up my stream of consciousness after I die would be little consolation to me.
Sleep may be similar from a philosophical or external point of view. But I’m not sold that lack consciousness during sleep is in the same league as completely destroying, and then, rebuilding it.
Seriously tho, why does it matter? If you are annihilated and a down to the quark exact duplicate is created, what’s the difference?
No difference for the rest of the universe, but the difference between life and death to my current stream of consciousness.
Imagine if the teleporter malfunctioned and created the duplicate on the other end but failed to disentigeate you. A worker notices you’re still in the machine and says, “oops sorry, had a malfunction on this end. Give us a minute to fix the issue and we’ll destroy you. No worries though, ‘you’ made it out the other end.”
Wouldn’t you do everything in your power to get out of that machine before they could fix it and kill you?
While I agree with you it would -for me- still depend on how the process works. Suppose the new copy needs to be compared with the original after being constituted for safety reasons. So the original doesn’t get destroyed before the copy is created. So for an instant there will be 2 ‘yous’. That makes jt less desirable for me. Now suppose the verification time -either due to technical or administrative purposes- takes minutes or hours? At that point I would not step into a transporter.
Yeah but that happens when you sleep
I’m not convinced they’re at all the same. Consciousness may go dormant during sleep, and you may not remember it, but it’s still a continuous, uninterrupted, stream of electricity.
This kind of teleportation would completely snuff out that fire and replace it with an identical one at another location. It’s not the same as sleep.
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.
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…
To quote MST3k, “It’s just a show, you should really just relax.”
Non-seriously, though, in Trek lore, energy and mass are still interchangeable via e=mc^2 – the weird conditions on the planet caused the matter stream to be mirrored and the extra energy came from the ship adding More Power to the transport process.
It probably means that the real, original Riker, made up of atoms that were built from energy from the original Riker is the one that ended up on the planet.
Fair enough. Sometimes you can’t help but go down these rabbit holes though.
Whenever you’re tempted, remember this is the same show where Dr. Crusher nearly fucked a candle ghost.
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.
But I still exist and am not quantumly annihilated.
And afaik about entanglement, it would just clone me on the other side leaving another copy of me at the start. At least, that’s how it reads when describing the difference between entanglement and how Star Trek works.
Exactly, if you are not annihilated then that means two identical versions of an entity that thinks it’s you exist simultaneously, and now one of them has to be killed to maintain the illusion of this being transport rather than cloning.
This is not true. There would not be two exact copies, quantum entanglement cannot clone things. It is literally not possible. It goes by the name of “no-cloning theorem”.
Yeah but the quantum entanglement ensures the new copy is like you down to every last detail. Atomic resolution digitizes you and probably loses information.
That’s not what quantum entanglement means, but either way, you die when you step into the teleporter. Some clone that thinks it’s you on the other side lives out the rest of your days. There aren’t two ways about this.
If they could make a portal that bent space time so that origin and destination were “next to” each other, I’d consider it.
Anything that has to take me apart and put me back together is just creating a copy of me, my consciousness would not be continuous no matter what illusion we put the clone under.
So no, fuck teleportation.
I’ve seen the 6th Day. I think I can manage 😤
Those old Arnie moves have some deep philosophical quandaries huh. 6th day, Terminator, Total Recall, Last Action Hero, Running Man, Junior.
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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 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.
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
