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!
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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
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.
I think I pretty much agree. I think they would both be me just like me from yesterday and me from a week ago are the same me. They aren’t exactly the same, but they are both versions of me that my current self grew from.
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?
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.
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
Until the spy starts sapping it!
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.
Absolutely! I might even die instantly, which is just a bonus :V
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here’s another great video on the transporter problem!
