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 genocide!
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.
Only if there is a DHD on both sides. I don’t want some in-house built crap that ignores the failsafes that the original builders put in place
Even then, you have pretty much no way of knowing if there’s an iris. So it’s all fun and games until SLAM, all your atoms gets squished into metal.
The Iris always seemed like a bad idea to me, what if the sg team lost their code thing and had to leave a planet in am emergency?
That’s why they were military…KIA
is star trek really clone rather than teleport? I haven’t really watched much of it (only like 3 or 4 seasons).
The general idea is a teleporter rips you apart and the atoms go to the destination to be reassembled in the previous state.
Whether or not it kills you is speculation. Arguably you’re pretty dead if you’re ripped apart atom by atom, and then a clone is assembled using the same parts.
But I don’t think it’s answerable if the recreated “you” is a clone or not until people can figure out what the mind even is.
Death is a state in which your biological functions cease. So no, it doesn’t kill you, since you function properly after.
Is it me functioning or is it a clone?
How does it matter, with the exact same memories?
So you’d be fine with a scientist creating a perfect clone of you, and then killing you, letting the clone take your place?
If it had the same memories.
It doesn’t matter to anyone but you, since the clone is indistinguishable from you, but you’re still dead.
Also if there’s any chance of a Fly situation happening I’m not going. Even if it’s like a .00000001% chance then fuck that lol
When just driving down a freeway, you have a much, much greater than 0.00000001% chance of suffering a worse outcome than the “fly situation” ;) .
Just sayin’.
I mean I’d probably rather be dead than Fly’d, so I dunno what the odds of something worse than that actually are lol.
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.
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.
the last one is a little close to the TV show Severance as well
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.
I always assume this is asking me as if I was in one of the examples universes like Star Trek. I 100% would never get in Musk’s Teslaporter, but in a world where it’s as widespread as airplanes and trains? Would use, wouldn’t be murder.
wouldn’t be murder
Except even in a world where it’s in widespread use, there’s no way to know it isn’t murder.
The world would keep functioning and no one would be the wiser, but the entire population would be artificial clones whose lifespans last from one transport gate to another.In the context of Star Trek it’s been in use for a couple hundred years. Societally they’ve accepted the implications and decided it’s not murder or clones (mostly).
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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.
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.
Use it on myself? No.
Use it to start a combination movers / electric / tunneling / waste management / highly-illegal-hardware-pirating company?
Yes.
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!
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.
The tricky part here is that technically this means you could do/think/say something that the new you won’t remember, before the death occurs.
Unless there’s some sort of induced coma(right terminology?) involved.
The tricky part here is that technically this means you could do/think/say something that the new you won’t remember, before the death occurs. Unless there’s some sort of induced coma(right terminology?) involved.
Exactly. But that would be the price of that kind of transport. See the short story “Think like a dinosaur” by James Patrick Kelly: that is exactly the situation. With very grim consecuences, in the particular case shown.
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.
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.
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.
Jacob Geller has a fantastic video covering this topic called “Head Transplants And The Non-existence Of The Soul”, it’s fascinating stuff
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!
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?”
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.
If you actually lose consciousness during the process, there might be an argument, but if I can walk onto a platform while having a conversation with someone and continue that conversation seamlessly with no gaps in my short term memory then I did not die and there was no destruction, merely the encoding and decoding of myself into my equivalent in energy in a process that might as well be instantaneous.
We can re-attach limbs, imagine if it were possible to be completely disassembled, shipped first class mail around the world, and then re-assembled. Wouldn’t we be the same person?
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.
Tell that to the second Riker.
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.
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.
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
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.
Imagine it malfunctions while you dissappear and you never reappear in another location, getting stuck in the void forever until the end of time
New fear unlocked
there’s that short story by Stephen King called The Jaunt which has something like this. It’s pretty good
That was longer than I thought.
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.
