Since Picard 3 it’s canon that the transporter is a meat printer that relies on cached DNA to do shallow copies.
Hacking that cache was the big plot reveal of how the borg-changelings infiltrated starfleet.
Transporters are made by Creality. Ender 1387 models.
Why can’t we accept that the transporter “moves” matter, but warp travel does. I always saw it as similar things at the end of the day.
I get you. I want it to be that too.
But there’s a difference. Don’t read on if you prefer your version of reality (it’s all just made up anyways… to a large extend, at least).
Transporters don’t technically “move” matter in the traditional sense. They dematerialize a person or object into an energy pattern, transmit that pattern to a destination, and then rematerialize it using stored molecular data.
Philosophically, this raises questions about continuity of consciousness. Some argue it’s more like copying and deleting than moving.
The Warp Drive on the other hand manipulates spacetime. It creates a subspace bubble around the ship, allowing it to travel faster than light by distorting the space ahead and behind it. This means that matter isn’t converted or transmitted. It stays intact and is carried through warped space.
So yes, both are “movement” technologies. One is teleportation via disassembly, and the other is locomotion via spacetime manipulation. But they are inherently different.
I will geek out for the rest of my day after this.
Then yes, they’re mercifully killing the originals and replacing them with clones.
I wonder if there ever has been someone in the ST universe that didn’t want to be teleported due faith or ethics reasons.
Here’s what I don’t get.
Okay. All that is true. Yet they clearly still retain a certain sense of self. The same memories, experiences, personalities and such.
Remember reading about a guy who cloned several generations of cats, all the same stock. Each cat was clearly unique.
Maybe the distinction is that the experiences are basically the same going though it.
In any case. Why can’t they keep generic information on hand and and clone up a fresh body and plant the bits relevant to memory and experience and stuff?
The cat thing is basically the difference between reinstalling the same application on a different computer vs doing a RAM dump save state and moving all the data to another computer and running it there.
If you duplicate all the existing neural pathways, they behave the same even if it’s a copy. If you allow new pathways to form from the same exact genetic codebase, it still ends up slightly different due to random chance and the experience of the copy compared to the experience of the original.
Transporters are save state backups. Even if it exclusively rebuilt you from different molecules, everything would still behave the same as the original would have. Ergo, Thomas Riker, who is exactly the same (memories, preferences, desires, etc.) up until the transporter accident - where the vastly different experiences resulted in vastly different personal growth.
The issue is with the conscience and the soul. Essentially the question is: “If your whole body is taken apart atom by atom, does the soul get taken along with it?”
In this case, the soul can just mean ‘you’. The ‘you’ that is seeing through your eyes right now, and is giving you the current experience you are now experiencing. To give an easier example, let’s say you are copied exactly four feet to your right. Your copy will look exactly like you, have all your memories, yadda yadda yadda. It seems pretty obvious that ‘you’ won’t all of a sudden be seeing through your copy’s eyes, no? If you get vaporised, then, your conscience is not going to just teleport into your clone, right? At least there’s nothing to suggest that would happen.
Teleportation is just a fancy version of this in a different order. You are vaporised first, then your atoms are moved real fast to the new location, then your copy uses those atoms. There’s zero reason to think that the ‘you’ which was vaporised is ever coming back. Once it’s gone, it’s gone, or at least that’s the idea.
Whether you believe in the spiritual concept of a soul, or that your experience of the world is just a specific instance of electrical charges in some fancy meat, both seem to suggest that once the anima departs, it will never return. A new anima must instead be made.
What does it matter if there’s new “anima”. I am me. It doesn’t matter if it’s my original body or another body. It’s whatever is my current frame of reference for the corresponding meat bag that I inhabit.
I really don’t understand the whole “well I died, and this isn’t me”… are you conscious? Lucid? Retain your memories? Then what does it matter?
“Well what if the original is still around or there are two copies?” Again, it doesn’t matter, because at that point they are two physically distinct entities. You only inhabit one of them and the moment you start experiencing different stimuli, you’re two separate people. Granted at that point there are some legal and logistical issues, but it’s not a metaphysical one.
You don’t seem to get my point. We’re talking about the instance of you reading this comment right now. As in ‘you’. That’s the anima.
If that anima is destroyed you cease to exist, because you are that anima. The reassembled you will not be ‘you’, because ‘you’ were destroyed when you were vaporized. You’re not just gonna come back from that. So whether that anima is obliterated or not should matter to you.
Your ability to observe the world is based on the current instance of your whole self in its current configuration, and if that configuration is completely obliterated, you’re gone. It doesn’t matter if they make a copy of you after - even with the same atoms.
Then by that logic, you die every time you lose consciousness or go to sleep. If I’m in one body, lose consciousness and awaken in another body, it’s really no different because I’m still me.
It doesn’t matter if it’s the same atoms or not, I am me.
Maybe you do, and your existence only lasts a day, and you’re just oblivious that you’ll disappear when you lay down tonight. Or maybe we can acknowledge that you never fully lose all brain activity when asleep and that that matters.
You are a current instance of you only, held together by temperal and spacial coherence. If either of those then you cease to exist. Ergo, teleportation and time travel both kill you.
I understand your view, I just think i fundamentally disagree with what makes “you” “you”. Good thought problem to chat about
It’s one of my favorites to argue on.
Except, in your final statement that’s kinda false? The “Anima” is just the electrical signals of the meat suit. That’s it, that’s the “you”. There is 0 evidence that’s ever been produced of any kind that there is any existence of a soul or spirit beyond “trust me bro.”
In this case you have 2 exact copies of “you” and milliseconds later those two copies diverge as new neurons are formed. As soon as they start forming their own experience at that point each one is different, their own “me” (from their points of view). No need to make up some higher level of meaning such as a soul.
We are all just brains riding around in an electrical meat suit, listening to chemical signals from the bacteria in our guts and some how finding meaning and purpose in an uncaring universe. That’s a helluva a lot more amazing and meaningful then a cosmic space daddy giving us “us”
You say there is zero evidence, but there are, just use introspection, you are you. Cogito ergo sum.
Make 2 “copies” it’s obvioys they aren not both you. Maybe neither.
I’ll walk 😁
Cogito ergo sum. Latin for the internal “trust me bro”
They are each themselves perfectly “you” until the first neuron forms independently.
There isn’t some nebulous soul they are sharing, no “I have a soul and those two don’t”.
They are all the same “Chemical impulse”machines until their split experience causes different neurons to form.
Well let’s turn the table, you can’t prove the opposite either.
You can’t prove a negative. But we know how neurons work -
There’s no evidence that continuous consciousness isn’t an illusion due to memory being good enough.
Sure, and if ot is so, then teleport is ok. But if it isn’t, which can’t be disproven, teleport is nono.
I’ve been trying to be faith-agnostic about it, as in the signals in your brain, some weird angel possession a meat mech, whatever. There is a clear phenomena where ‘you’ come into existance and get to look through your eyes. ‘You’ get to experience the world through these signals, and the full explanation of how that becomes a first person perspective observing the world is still not cleanly explained. That’s the anima, the soul, ‘you’.
Teleportation both, destroys your body completely and so when the copy gets made on the other side it’s not going to be the same you even if you use all the same atoms, and only interacts with the physical world so no spiritual soul would be brought along with it.
Basically, you will go into the teleporter, they’ll fire it up, and then you’ll stop being able to see, think, feel, or do anything relating to existence because you stopped existing. A new anima will be created when the copy of your physiology is constructed on the other end. ‘You’ never come back.
Cloning is very different though. In cloning you aren’t exactly copying the neurons and their connections. That means the cloned cat will learn different things, be different, just from that very fact. All it takes is one or two small daily differences in routine as the kitten grows and bam, different personality.
It’s the classic struggle of how much is nature (genetics) and how much is nurture.
With teleportation the neutral pathways are copied. It becomes more of a question of what makes you “you”. Is there some spirit that gets left behind? Is it the memories that do get copied? Is it merely enough that you believe you’re you?
Your question pretty much answers the other. If they were destroying and making a copy at the destination, then there could be 20 Piccards, or they could always bring the dead right back to life at any age they’d want. They could just re-maie a person any time.
Since that never happens, it means they must be converting them into energy or something like that, and then reassembling, and not making a copy
Except, not. Thomas Ryker was a copy, for example.
They only became different people as their experiences changed. (Which started pretty much as they came through the transport.)
Well then they are just making copies, I suppose.
The transporter only works due to a magic box called the Heisenberg Compensator. It does some kind of end run around the fact that you can’t precisely know both the position and momentum of a particle. The question of “how does it work?” is answered with “very well, thank you”.
Anyway, neurons are known to rely on quantum mechanics for part of their signalling. You do have to copy them very exactly or you won’t have the same person on the other side. The Heisenberg Compensator seems to be a tech that only works with transporters and nothing else. Whatever magic is happening inside there, you wouldn’t be able to use it to copy a neural pattern, store it away for an extended time, and stick it in another body.
Except when it happens, like in strange new world, or the next generation.
They store living beings for extended periods in the pattern buffer.
In Strange new worlds it was a hyper advanced thing, in TNG it was Scotty.
For book explorations on this theme see :
and
Though the latter doesn’t focus on it as much as the former.
Mhm. US centric 3.6. I will skip the first. Have listened to and enjoyed Bobiverse. :)
It’s less US centric than it is catered to US sensibilities of narrative, but it’s a valid criticism.
The reason i mentioned it is because it deals with the exact situation outlined in the original post.
Who the hell are any of us?
You. Me. Us.
I’m an identical twin none of this scares me. Ive been a duplicate my entire life.
The scary part isn’t being a duplicate, it’s more like if someone killed you and then said “but you have a twin so it’s fine”
Do you have that intoxicating ditto scent?
(Oof, there’s a good chance you’re too young to remember that smell, whereas I’m so old I not only huffed it as a child, I ran off dittos for my pupils as an adult)
Edit for the youths: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MdOjjZK0INM
so you were the kid huffing the mimeo too huh
Until the end I thought you were talking about a Pokémon reference I didn’t get, and I’m old enough that Pokémon wasn’t a thing until I was an adult.
Is there a way to make text indigo on Lemmy? 🤔
My favorite take on this question comes from Existential Comics
Wow, I haven’t seen that comic in years; the first time I saw it I was in a pretty bad mental space and I think this perspective helped more than I realized at the time. Thanks for the memory ❤️
i love that one. sometimes it’s a giggle, sometimes it’s a gutpunch, always worth reading.
That’s a solid one
Damn, that’s really good.
Oof.
By the Law of Theseus, does it matter?
It’s less Theseus and more Humpty Dumpty.
By Grabthar’s Hammer, by the Suns of Warvan
By the beard of Zeus!
Great Knights of Columbus!
By Jaal’s infected arsehole!
Sweet llamas of the Bahamas!
Sweet guinea pig of Winnipeg!
It’s barbados slim!
Let’s say you’re given two ways to travel faster than light:
Star Trek Teleporter/Matter Reassembler
And
Shuttle through the Wormhole to the Gamma Quadrant
Which would you prefer and why?
Teleporter lets you chose locations
You are everywhere dude
Send a postcard. I’ll keep my ass on the couch at home.
Y’all thought Picard’a brother was the bad guy.
Man just wanted to live and drink wine. C’est la vida loca
If the transporter is going to kill me and recreate me at the destination, then I’m going wormhole.
Either way works for me. Better than the options currently available on planet Earth at this point in history.
Furthermore, any civilization able to have matter reassembly and wormhole travel available as convenient means of travel will be amazing to experience and live in.
Beam me up, Scotty!
the wormhole seems safer, since its the prophets artificial wormhole and its stable, made more stable later in the series, not so for other wormholes, they seem to have the same dangers as random transporter malfunctions . The transporter seems fickle , numerous incidents where it had cloned, killed, merged 2 people into one, depending on the plot of the episode, or it cant transport fast enough when someone is shooting a disruptor weapon at you, ends up killing the person, or the transporter picks up some wierd pathogen/lifeforms. plus the wormhole doesnt require energy to use, so no problems activating it.
honorable mentions, is other than the ICONIAN gateways which is probably the best ftl type of instananeous rift travel, subspace catapults, or even the caretakers intergalatic ftl dimensional rift generator/teleporter, other forms of transporters/rift/interdimensional teleporters are pretty complicated and somewhat dangerous.
I remember Noam Chomsky mentioning this when talking to his kids or grandkids when talking about psychic continuity. I believe the question was surrounding what would happen if you weren’t “teleported”, but instead you remained on the ship as well as the remote location.
Star Trek science has always been for non scientists. if you could move a pattern and save a pattern, then everyone would backup to the last healthy copy of themselves.
But they do. On several occasions a ship’s doctor has managed to completely restore a mutated crewmate back to how they were before based on data stored in the medical computers. This is only possible if the medical computer contains a full biological backup, in the form of data.
Episodes like Threshold and that one where the Enterprise crew turn into children come to mind. The latter actually involves transporters.
Episodes like Threshold and that one where the Enterprise crew turn into children come to mind. The latter actually involves transporters.
They don’t usually revert the crew using the backup data, though. They just program it to make changes to their bodies, like removing things. It wouldn’t be any stranger than removing an alien pathogen.
The backup data, I think was only used for Pulaski when she got the ageing disease (where it might have been a reference pattern to correct errors, and they had to actually compare with a known good genome), and for Tuvix.
We do also know that a bad transport can’t just be retried either. The Motion Picture had a transport go wrong, and Starbase One couldn’t just restart the transport with backup data, or repair what they got back. Similarly, Scotty couldn’t just load up Franklin’s backup from the Jenolan’s computers and transport him in either.
Failed transports generally seem to stem from not having quality data to reconstruct with. Not getting a good enough sensor lock, damage to the buffer corrupting the data, etc.
The entire point of a backup is to overwrite and replace bad data, though. If a backup was kept, it would logically follow that it would be possible to overwrite the damaged parts of the pattern, since we know that transports can succeed even if a portion if the pattern is lost.
Geordi specigically brings up it being impossible to materialise Franklin because his pattern had degraded too much, not that it was degraded at all, and would suggest that there’s a threshold before repairs are no longer possible.
Not always they use the healthy backup. Check out dr. M’Benga’s daughter.
A transporter trace might not have existed to begin with, and depending on how the disease acted, any old traces might have been lost.
For example, if she had an illness that only started presenting itself long after she caught it, like Tholian shingles. There may no longer be a healthy trace to pull from, or the disease caused damage that a backup cannot sufficiently repair.
We do know that some health conditions generally preclude transport. It’s not very healthy for foetuses to be transported. Voyager did it, and the baby had to spend several days in ICU to make sure that being transported didn’t mangle their neurochemistry, which would suggest that’s also something a transporter cannot readily fix.
As previously stated, I’m leaving NuTrek out of this discussion entirely as NuTrek doesn’t care about continuity in the slightest.
there is ethics about body modification and especially about enhancing your self artificially, it’s seen as a dead end because people who are artificially “perfected” end up being stagnant and pointless. experiencing aging and illness is a part of ethical behavior, or is ultimately preferable to the alternative.
Star Trek can’t decide whether it wants to be hand-wavey, “whatever moves the plot along” science or super-serious explained-in-detail science and ends up being the worst of both worlds.
FWIW, you’ve made this, in a thread about scifi transience:
Star Trek… ends up being the worst…
Just sayin’.
I’d also lose all my memories since the backup. With those memories goes the way I make decisions. Not the most desirable way of maintaining youth and health. Kirk made that point in ST:V:
"Damn it, Bones, you’re a doctor. You know that pain and guilt can’t be taken away with a wave of a magic wand. They’re the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves.
I don’t want my pain taken away!
I need my pain!"
What if my pain made me a worse version of myself?
The you are a worse version of yourself.
What if my pain made me a worse version of myself?
Then we would restore from backup, right?
But you could still save a copy of yourself each morning and then if you die, recreate your last save point, no? Then you only lose a day.
Maybe a yearly save point too incase theres any long term thing you don’t catch fast enough like cancer…
Thomas Riker wasn’t the one at the destination, so he’s not the original.
Gotem.
Thomas Riker is: …The Prestige!
💨🫲🏻🧔🏻♂️ 🫱🏻💨
In all likelihood nobody on the enterprise is an original. The entire ship is run by >!shadow people !<
It would be interesting to have a series where they take the best of the best Starfleet personnel, intentionally copy them with a transporter, and stick them on their own ship to do an extra dangerous, super difficult mission.
Intentionally send them on Boarding runs to take over other ships.
But then of course eventually you will have the problem that you need one Picard to rule above all others. Space is apparently only so big - given the constant politics.
What exactly defines you as “you”?
Why do you say it’s a suicide if you never saw or felt anything, and you manage to say around somewhere afterwards?
if we had those machines, people would just stop having this discussion.
Why do you say it’s a suicide if you never saw or felt anything, and you manage to say around somewhere afterwards?
Because you are killed, and society gets to keep running with a photocopy of you. From an external perspective, you move from a to b. From your perspective, you die.
Because technically, it’s a scanner + printer and not a mover. It’s just that the original is deliberately destroyed every time (unless something goes wrong *looks at Miles*).
IIRC, it’s even mentioned that people going through the transporter are cached. Like, they store snapshots, so you can compare the changes between older you and newer you. You can also store a person in buffer digitally, meaning you can copy and print as many as you want.
It’s just that the original is deliberately destroyed every time
If it’s so fast that you don’t see it, it doesn’t happen.
Again, if we had those machines, and they were reliable (unlike the Star Trek ones) everybody would use them, nobody would blink an eye. Nobody would have any answer to those philosophical questions, and close to nobody would spend their days thinking about them.
Just because that’s your viewpoint doesn’t mean that everyone will automatically think that way. There would probably be some that are averse to it and some that don’t care.
I mean, just because it happens fast or in an unnoticeable way doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. If somebody vaporized themselves instantly it’s still suicide. Sure, people would probably accept the fact that their original is being killed for convenience, but the fact stays.
They use that cache gimmick in Strange New Worlds a few times. One for a spoiler plot. But also in a flashback to the war they mention “storing” medical patients in the buffer because there are too many wounded and they can’t keep up.
It’s definitely used in older series as well.
Given the discussion surrounding this, anyone who’s into gaming should check out Soma; as it tackles a lot of the questions/scenarios in this thread but with robot host instead of clones. Minor spoiler:
Tap for spoiler
Including one of the copies still being there (and conscious) after you transfer to a new “body” and the protagonist freaking out at the implications of this occurring.
The discussion around Soma always annoys me because people tend to get really worked up and take its premise as fact, like this must be the way it would really work and there’s no other possible way for things to go.
Like, for example, what would it be like if they maintained a perfect shared stream of consciousness between the original and the new body with the new body also having a copy of your memories up to that point?
spoiler
They do show the main character being able to inhabit another body like his at the same time, but never really expand on it iirc
Would you lose your sense of “self” and experience something like phantom limb but it’s an entire body? What would “you” experience if the original body died during this hypothetical experiment? Who knows. ¯\(ツ)/¯
They show that you are both conscious. The fact that identical clone A and identical clone B with for 1 second idebtical consciousness would both look at their hand when they wake up is actually more evidence they are truly identical
But I LOVED SOMA. One of my favorites in the horror genre
