Tbh the same logic can be applied to sleeping. If our consciousness is akin to computer ram and sleep is the brain cleaning up that ram, how can you know that when you wake up you're still the same person that went to sleep last night?
how can you know that when you wake up you're still the same person that went to sleep last night?
Because you are composed of 99.99999% the exact same molecules. When you transport, you are literally ripped apart and recreated with new molecules at the destination site. That's how the transporter works. Your bed does not work that way.
What would happen if I were able to put your brain in a blender and then rearrange everything exactly as it was? Would you be the same?
Typical McCoy. Calls turbolifts elevators and transporters teleporters.
Not only that, but they‘re also literal bombs. Remember E=mc^2? With a technology capable of converting 100% of matter into usable energy, you‘d have a pretty scary bomb bomb.
And yet, on the list of bomb bombs Star Trek has given us, it's pretty far down there. I mean, wanna talk about WMDs? Look up Genesis or Generations. Those fuckers are un-nuking stars and collapsing nebulae because why not.
I don't think transporters in star trek kill people, I just think they move them through subspace and the transporter malfunctions are subspace oddities
Personally, as long as it's provably safe, I'm fine with it.
As far as I'm concerned, if my consciousness is intact, and my body is a carbon copy, that's me. I place more weight on my consciousness being me than those specific atoms being me.
Besides, we all shed all of our atoms and replace them with new ones dozens of times throughout our lives. So we've already died in that way, I guess? But then again, it doesn't happen all at once, it's more of a ~~Ship~~ Body of Theseus type of thing.
My kid and I have discussed this at length. It's true, Bones and a few others live in a universe where they're the only soulful humanoids, surrounded by digital facsimiles. It must be depressing.
Ever wonder if that transporter tech was used to rebuild you better, stronger, smarter, faster?
Can't remember the exact story, but Larry Niven used that idea. Basically, you teleported from one side of the room to the other, but left all the poisons your cells had built up behind. The hero does this accidentally, then notices himself growing healthier over time.
In another universe, Relg phased Silk through stone and found the cure for the common cold as the illness couldnt pass through with them...for some reason
Doesn't it Galileo's transporter you?
...takes the you matter and dissolves it into a stream of particles which are reassembled in a different location, so when transport is 50% done, you're in two places at once (whilst the "plan" for you is in the pattern buffer, don't know where the matter is exactly)... i mean, it forms you into a beam of molecules right? Beams you up.
At one point there's a Barkley episode and he seems conscious for most of the process, just in a kind of super position.
After the half way point, there's more "you" in the destination than in the original location...so who are you? Where are you?
Then again, we know that accidents and reflections can be produced... So maybe I'm wrong and new matter/particles are being introduced otherwise how would Tom Riker exist...
...I mean, after all, Tuvix wasn't twice as dense as your average crew member.
Anyways, Dr. Polaski supposedly has McCoy's attitude towards transporters. However I think even she gave in here and there, as did McCoy.
Some wild-card ideas to think about here are this:
What we're afraid of is losing continuity of conscious experience, so a transporter brings to mind the concept of just making a copy who has your memories and thus does not share your qualia or experience of life. But we don't even know what retains that continuity to begin with. We have no idea why you seem to be the same person you were last year when most of your atoms have changed. We don't know why you're the same person when you're put under anesthesia... and in fact, you might not be. It may very well be that every time you are put under general anesthesia, a new consciousness emerges inside your brain, with the feeling like they've always lived in that brain with those memories.
Now step that back again. What about sleep? Can you prove you're the same consciousness that existed yesterday or before your last nap when consciousness was turned off and back on again?
Basically, we don't know what happens when consciousness turns off for any reason and why it comes back seeming to pick right up where it left off, but there are also a lot of people who say maybe it doesn't turn back on. And in fact, it can even be scaled up again... can you prove you're the same continuous entity that was aware of the universe a moment ago? What even IS a continual experience? Can it exist without memory?
If the brain just creates a story for our consciousness to make sense of the universe and can create and invent stories and filter things from your senses, how sure are we that there even IS a continual conscious experience? Your brain could be tricking you at every moment, there might not even BE such thing as consciousness ending, maybe when you "die" you immediately occupy the next most-probable configuration. And maybe this also can be tied to the new research that says if you could scan every particle that makes up a human body and recreate it, it would necessarily destroy the old copy, because the more you know about one property of a particle, the less you know about the other. The more you know where they are, the less you know about where they're going.
A lot of maybes here for a technology that may never exist in any capacity, but it's a great insight into how inexplicable the universe and our experience of it really is.
The best take on transporters was in a 'Buzz Lightyear' cartoon.
Buzz tells his team that a scientist has developed a transporter. The farm boy says that it sounds like a great invention; with a transporter the ship can stay up in orbit and the crew can teleport to the surface.
Everyone just looks at him like he's an idiot.
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