Damn, I was going to ship of Theseus you about the cells in your body replacing themselves constantly, but apparently our brain neurons last a lifetime.
Now I don't think I would ever use a teleporter, either. Shit.
That is why nervous system damage usually means life long problems. Brains and all their wiring are so arcane and complicated, even our bodies don't know how to grow more than one of them, and we often don't get it right the first time either unfortunately.
Its kinda crazy actually if you think about it, our ability to anticipate actions is our ability to land in outcomes expected to be made by the reality generating around us if you imagine the reality outside our bodily sensory input as a big monte carlo field of potentials in the form of intertwined variables...like a big llm.
They don't match anything but do trigger the "nearest" response to a stimulus, so kinda like pattern matching but that implies doing it on purpose.
But yeah the rest I agree with.
So far that we know of, neural cell DNA, tooth enamel, and eye lens crystallines, never have their atoms replaced.
Which is to say that we are a ship of theseus, and a transporter does not kill us. The only reason these atoms are not normally replaced is because there is no natural mechanism to replace them.
Radiocarbon Dating of the Human Eye Lens Crystallines Reveal Proteins without Carbon Turnover throughout Life
Lynnerup N, Kjeldsen H, Heegaard S, Jacobsen C, Heinemeier J (2008) Radiocarbon Dating of the Human Eye Lens Crystallines Reveal Proteins without Carbon Turnover throughout Life. PLOS ONE 3(1): e1529. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0001529
Not sure I would tie my identity to my neuron DNA, tooth enamel, and eye lens crystallines. Definitely agree with you that we are living ships of Theseus. I'm pretty sure there's no natural mechanism to replace those parts because it's really hard, and we work "well enough" without being able to.
A distinction between a teleporter and a transporter...
To teleport implies the original matter is instantly moved from one place to another so there would be no destruction and reconstituted copy. A wormhole would seem to be the only realistic way that could be achieved.
A transporter, well that means copy then kill. No one knows if the kill part is painful because noone survives it. I find it funny Riker's copy is actually the "original" and his lack of death is considered a transporter accident. Yet he is the one treated like the copy...
And all that said, barclay's experience in the transporter beam is more suggestive of a wormhole style device.
I don't know why I bothered to write all this out...
Iirc Thomas is not Will’s copy. Basically the transporter has a malfunction where Thomas and Will are both constituted on a transporter pad. So both are the “original” and also both are neither. In a sense, the William Thomas Riker who stepped onto that pad that day ceased to be, forked into two different lives.
I used to use this episode to talk about identity when I taught ethics back in the day. Both men carried on their lives under the belief that they were the same man who stepped onto a transporter pad on Nervala IV. Their experiences defined who they were, demonstrating that it’s more than biological material that makes any one of us us.
Now the deeper question is: since you can’t add matter to the universe, what’s missing to give life to two Rikers?
You know what, now that your mention it, wasn't the explanation that the signal was reflected back to the surface due to the ionising radiation of something, so the beam was kinda split or doubled. So my premise was wrong.
Yeah. They tried to split the beam to account for the radiation, half of it made it through, the other half mirrored back. I'm guessing the computer can extrapolate the remaining matter based off of data saved in the pattern buffer?
Either way, Thomas Riker was way under-utilized in Star Trek. I also love how "okay, sure" everyone is about this situation.
I assume they sent a lot more data than it takes to make a single person. Eventually enough data for a whole Ryker was received at each location, while a lot more data got scattered.
Sounds like trek had the technology to copy people. You would think if they are sending people out into the unknown to explore galaxies light years away they would just send a copy. Or at least keep a copy.
The are other methods from Star Trek that could potentially be size as well.
Like "hey you actually travel through this other dimension where your physical form is undisturbed and no time passes in this dimension"
Which sounds ok, but "by the way it's kinda a hell-dimension and your consciousness gets tortured for a distance-relative time there but won't retain the memories after..."
Oh dear lord. Yeah I could definitely see a variant where the hell dimension is just "work all the hours that it would have taken to traverse in normal space so that EvilCorp can generate profit for the pan-dimensional empire"
To transport just means to move, so if anything the term "transporter" implies physically moving people rather than copying. The term "teleport" is the more ambiguous one...
They both got converted into energy, Thomas is just as much a copy as Will.
Also, apparently your experience is constant across the process, as seen by Barclay grabbing someone out of the matter stream. Presumably someone would notice if it hurt...
no matter what, they were like 1000th generation of copies. "the original" died when riker stepped into the transporter for the first time. so discussing whether this one is 1001st, or 1002nd generation seems not that exciting...
Bob's Alternate Teleport Engine - A reimplementation of the standard protocol.
Ben's Unified Teleporter Template Placed Largely Under Ground - You do need to dig a big hole, but the result is very neat, with just the teleport pad and controls showing.
Complex Linear Indoor Teleporter - Works like a corridor, letting you just walk from one building to another.
For number 2 there's a derivative which can also vibrate, which is said to make the process much more pleasant.
Oh and it's entirely built out of rust, nobody really knows why though.
The faster you walk into number three, the sooner you reach the destination.
But you need to have the endurance to make it to the end.
Is it waylaid or weighed, as in driving over a scale at a inspection station?
Edit: lyrics all say "weighed", but the way it's sung over two beats I definitely hear waylaid. Truckers hauling overweight loads, or heavier than reported on the bill of lading (contraband), don't want to have to go over the scales because they'll get caught.
We always sung it as waylaid. As in stopped by the PoPo. The song also speaks of transporting "smokes and folks", so yeah, behave in a way that keeps one from ever talking to the authorities.
Yes thank you I agree that is what waylaid means. The lyrics however, are "weighed" as in pulling into a weigh station you usually see along the highway closed for some reason.
I always liked the idea of teleporters that are just wormhole pairs.
If you want to travel from New York to Paris you have to first go to your local wormhole station, walk through that and be taken to the central station for all US wormholes, walk over to the international portal and be taken to the global interface station, which would be located wherever the electricity is cheapest so probably somewhere in Iceland, then you walk over to the French national station, and be taken to some facility in France, and then from there walk over to the Paris wormhole.
All wormholes are 20 m across by standard allowing cargo containers to transport through, with the Americans have made system unnecessarily complicated by standardizing their wormholes to 2.5 giraffe widths.
Excuse me sir or ma'am (or none of the above) do you want to co-write a movie? lol this is an amazing premise if it hasn't been done (and my apologies if you're referencing a movie i'm not aware of)
That works for teleportation that needs a receiver, like for a phone call. In ST you only need a transmitter, so it's more like a wormhole whose far end you can put wherever you want.
Exactly. The "me" of yesterday is already dead. He can't think, feel, act, reason, or anything else. I have memories of being him, but if I'd suffered head trauma, even those could be gone. The illusion of continuous, conscious experience is just that—an illusion.
The young-Earth people say that their god created the world about 6,000 years ago, and planted fossils to test our faith. I say that my god created the universe 6 seconds ago, including these memories that we seem to have. There's literally no way to prove otherwise.
And yet you have a vested interest in your continued survival. If you stepped into a transporter and it failed to disassemble you on departure, you would very much protest if a maintenance technician attempted manual disassembly
That's not a philosophical objection, though, it's just instinct. If the transporter made a copy of me, the copy would also very much object to this proposed method of error correction.
I mean, the brain mostly consists of the same matter, aside from cycling synovial fluid, once you reach middle age. Recreate me a body but keep my original brain and I won't mind it, aside from all the horror.
The cells in your brain are not replaced like other cells in your body, but the atoms are. In fact, all of the atoms in your body are swapped out every seven years or so.
all of the atoms in your body are swapped out every seven years or so.
I'm not sure exactly what's true, but what you're saying seems like a factoid that gets repeated a lot but isn't really 100% true.
Structural stuff like the calcium in your bones... it would be interesting if it was really replaced on a schedule like that. It wouldn't shock me if it was getting replaced, but it would certainly be cool to learn how that would work.
Is the lens in your eye getting replaced like that? I'm trying to think of body parts that seem to not get constant automatic maintenance. How about the enamel on your teeth? Really replaced every 7 years?
Or if we're really just talking about atoms in your body, then famously the problem with heavy metal poisoning is that your body can't get rid of it. So, is it being replaced or is your body getting rid of it? Or... is it just there from before?
And if you want to get really pedantic, and I always do, what fun... Things like artificial hips or breast implants are definitely in people's bodies longer than 7 years but are not getting their atoms replaced.
My understanding of this factoid is that it has more to do with atoms tendency to swap particles when they bump into each other. So it’s sort of through attrition all of the atomic particles in your body are swapped out over the course of about seven years. So like as oxygen and carbon dioxide, for instance, move in and out of your brain and other tissues they leave electrons and shit behind and take some with them. But it also wouldn’t be the first time I had misunderstood something.
Everyone always focuses on the Ship of Theseus or the existential parts of this, but the societal impacts would be crazy.
Millions of people teleporting to the most beautiful places on earth and wrecking them, highways and boring parts of cities abandoned, mass death of people teleporting into a crush crowd at Mecca, landmarks toppled under the weight of teleporting tourists and bosses teleporting into your house for a "work from home" meeting, weapons and bombs being teleported into war zones...
Things would eventually find a new normal and teleporting food and resources around would remove the need for ships and trucks, you could explore the world much more easily and there would be lots of science to do in hard to reach places, marine biologists would have a field day exploring the deep ocean, doctors could teleport cancer cells out of patients, space agencies teleport probes, bases and astronauts to the moon and around the solar system...
Like it would be such a huge upheaval with so many implications. It's interesting that people really fixate on the "would I die though? What does dying even mean if I'm still around?" part, even though I think that's maybe the least interesting thing. I guess it taps into a very primal survival instinct?
Depends on how the technology works. It's more likely that you would need someone's how to receive or both ends, even if it were technically possible to just teleport randomly from point a to point b I feel like that feature would be disabled on commercial models precisely to stop the above from happening.
There are a couple old sci fi stories that feature "time tourism", where they have to stop sending people to popular events like the crucifixion of Jesus because they're getting overcrowded. Robert Silverberg's novel Up the Line and Garry Kilworth's Let's Go to Golgotha! In one of them the time travelers vastly outnumber the locals, and swing the vote to release one of the thieves instead of Jesus, because that's what the travelers think they're supposed to do.
Hmm... ironic immortality! I have eternal life, but grow increasingly more weary and numb to it's joys until I wish for the sweet succor of death that will never come.
I don't think that would be real. People become bitter and weary because they get old and their bodies start hurting and their minds failing more and more.
They become bitter because they don't know how to handle their own minds. Hence being immortal gives one far more time to learn, but does not make learning inevitable
With the current constant scanning an analyzing and advertising pushed on us, I'd stay far as fuck away from any teleporting service....
If they have the tech to disassemble and reassemble you including memories, then they can manipulate that.
Would you trust Google Instant Transport Services to not tune your personality to be more favorable toward products from their ad partners, or just slightly tune your political opinions to be more inline with their own.
Just a slight adjustment, an active protester against new datacenters would become less aggressive, a random person starts buying more Pepsi instead of Coke, a change small enough that no one notices a big change in behavior.
Also, would you trust that your memories would stay private?
There’s also the possibility that consciousness (including memories) is part of some kind of metaphysical net that “latches” onto a particular collection of cells/matter like an attuned radio. So once your matter stream is reconstituted, your memories just “latch” no need to reconstruct the memories. If our consciousness exists in the space between electrical pulses in our brain then such a thing is a kind of energy, yeah? Perhaps, like some forms of matter, consciousness is something that can transcend space and time? Within Star Trek this might explain how species like Betazoids and Vulcans can use telepathy—they’re able to tune into the consciousness net.
Hey. That's close to my favourite theory :) although with different consequences. I like to believe that consciousness is just another property of matter that we can't measure (yet?). Stones, dust, grass, all atoms / particles have it. But it takes a certain complex arrangement - like our CNS - with the capability to store and retrieve information (and thus learn) to actually form a conscious mind.
However this would mean your mind gets fully destroyed on disassembly and likely the copy won't function / might be a vegetable on arrival because the unmeasured properties of atoms used to construct the copy were completely different (think of things like spin).
I know the theory your referring to, it grades the entire universes consciousness on a sliding scale from a neutron all the way up to a person.
But I don’t think that consciousness and memories are tied together at all. Consciousness is not well defined which makes it a fickle subject, but memories are a biological process that we can observe much more easily.
My understanding, based on a book I read once about neuroplasticity, is that memories are pathways that are literally burned into your brain by repeated sensory chemicals being sent to that particular part of the brain. As long as the transporter puts every single brain wrinkle back where it was and instructs the brain on which chemicals it sent down the pathways, you could probably put memories back into the head.
I wasn't referring any theory. While I am not delusional to think I am the only one, I came up with this entirely by myself.
Also, your "but" isn't a but. I was alluding to the same thing: memories is stored information, i.e. a structure like our brain growing.
Why I think the transporter might be catastrophic is because it could only reproduce the "software" accurately, the EEPROM-like memories. But the hardware might be all wrong.
Oh! Well the name that the other dude who thought about it gave it was Panpsychism, you might be interested to read about it.
Your “but” isn’t a but
But it is :P I’m saying that I think the hardware would be the easy part. Put all the same types of stuff in the same configuration, give it some instructions and you’ve got a fleshy automaton that should reasonably be able to recall the same things the other thing could. The “software” as you called it, would be more difficult I think.
We know what makes a memory, but we don’t know why someone makes a particular decision or what influences their personality to act how they do. Hell, putting two human beings right next to each other and stimulating them in the exact same way doesn’t even produce the same results between the two, so we couldn’t accurately instruct the new automaton on how to act like the old one
Panpsychism sounds a bit embellished, but I'll have a look. I think we have an analogy misunderstanding. I really meant memories etc as the software because it is "programmed" with our experiences. The hardware being the atoms that we can not accurately arrange in a copy because we have no concept of the conscience related property (e.g. conscience spin, for lack of a better word).
It could be like trying to run little endian software on a big endian architecture: instant crash.
If they have the tech to disassemble and reassemble you including memories, then they can manipulate that.
That's definitely not a given.
That's like saying that if you can perfectly scan and reproduce a book down to the smudges and crumbs, that you understand the contents of that book.
To us right now in 2026, mapping an entire brain, simulating it perfectly, then editing it slightly without breaking it seems a lot more doable than breaking down a human quark by quark and rebuilding them somewhere else. But, that isn't necessarily the case.
I’d use a teleporter with no hesitation. What’s important is my memories and sense of self, not the actual meat it’s in. I could find out I’m a copy of myself right now and not be bothered.
Yeah but once you step in the teleporter you stop being. The copy is only useful for other people to keep interacting with your clone, but the actual you is dead.
Would you be cool going into the execution chamber and getting shot to transport yourself? Would the memory of the death make a difference, or the ability to visit your previous remains? What happens if there is an accident and the new you wakes up, but the execution chamber fails and the old you is still alive?
If you don't mind there's no problem, of course, but quite a few people want to keep living. If you told a terminally ill person "so you'll die, but don't worry cause we can clone you and tell everybody you got better" I think "oh well then no problem" wouldn't be a universal answer.
There's no “actual” you. Your body creates a sense of an “I”. If you copy that body including the brain, the copy will have the same. You wouldn't say that the copy’s sense of smell is somehow different, so why make a distinction for the sense of self?
What makes you think that “your self” exists as anything else but an emergent property of your brain existing?
You're just describing a feeling that we all share, but there's no indication that it's more than that. Check out my writings about this topic (link to a scientific book coming to the same conclusion at the end)
It's a "I think therefore I am" kind of thing. I know I'm the same person I was five years ago, just with some new memories, and some memories have faded. But I am still the same person.
I don't know whether you are the same person you were five years ago.
The show "Earth 2" in the 90s had an interesting concept in the backstory where not every human had a soul, and they made a device that could detect whether people had souls. I sometimes wonder if that's the case, not everyone is actually a sentient being and just a biological machine.
Of course there's no way to know, so we have to assume that if someone is a human, they are sentient. Same logic as the TNG episode "Measure of a Man", but it applies to humans just as it does to robots.
Actually, now that I think about it, it's far worse than that. If a company has a teleporter that can build a copy of you, they can also build an almost-copy of you. Say, a copy that is less rebellious. More obedient.
Yeah, the idea's cool in fiction, but in reality I would never touch a machine like this. I will walk my ass over in analogue.
Specific changes, maybe. But broad ones? "Uehhh, make the amygdala smaller. Squash it. ... Well, find a mapping of a guy with a smaller one, then. Do like a copy paste."
All I'm saying is they would try, and trying is enough for me to nope the fuck out of all of it.
Well I imagined we were talking about an imaginary sci-fi technology. Obviously it would be more complicated and possibly at risk for some kind of manipulation in real life. If I were presented a teleporter where the only fault is a philosophical question about being a copy, then I don’t mind being a copy and my original self dying.
That feels like a very different statement than saying you don't mind stepping into the teleporter knowing you will die while a copy continues from where you left off on the other side.
In the TNG episode Lonely Among Us Captain Picard gets taken over by an alien energy being. It hijacks his body and he teleports himself into a cloud of dispersed particles in a nebula. They spend more than an hour trying to recover him, and are about to give up, when Troi senses his consciousness, and they are able to reconstitute him through the transporter. This, and other mentions of "mental energy" in the show indicate that there is a canonical, scientific proof of the existence of the soul independent from the body, and that it can be transported without damage.
Anything more involved than that gets into philosophical debates about whether or not you die every time you go to sleep, and is about as useful a conversation as whether or not you can "know" if you are or aren't a brain in a jar.
This, and other mentions of “mental energy” in the show indicate that there is a canonical, scientific proof of the existence of the soul independent from the body, and that it can be transported without damage.
So what about the Riker duplicate? Which one is soulless? Or is the soul also copyable?
Thomas Riker isn't a transporter duplicate, he's a kidnap victim from a parallel dimension.
Thomas Riker supposedly proved that the transporter can be used to duplicate sentient living beings. So why aren't there mass-produced transporter duplicates? There are plenty of unscrupulous powers that would love to exploit this existential loophole and create huge armies of Jem Hadar or some such. They would have no ethical limitations on making such things, and broadly speaking if a scientific / engineering problem CAN be solved then it WILL be solved, and doubly more so when someone proves that it definitely CAN be solved.
Because the theory of his creation is wrong. He wasn't duplicated by the interference field, his transport beam was filtered through a parallel dimension and back, and captured Thomas from his home dimension and dropped him in ours. Thanks to the Mirror Universe, we know that transporter fuckery can cause trans-dimensional transporting. When they discovered Thomas, they got the interpretation of the phenomenon wrong, and set everyone on a drastically wrong path of research. His duplication hasn't been duplicated, because he was never duplicated to begin with.
Yeah, but it doesn't explain why less scrupulous factions don't just copy their most valuable biological assets. Best captains, strongest warriors. Most cunning spies.
I mean… if there were 25,000 of me around, we definitely wouldn’t be following someone else’s orders to die in their war. I imagine that if you copy a person too many times, they tend to stop taking directions as well. Like, if a person can’t unionize with themself, then I don’t know how to help them.
jem hadar maybe not, but even they have a limit, and once they thought they were no longer dependent on ketracel white, they reached it really quickly.
So I guess the answer is to get your clone army hooked
What if you copied them without their knowing? Like, you have an operative heading out on a secret mission. Undisclosed location. Then, just save them in the buffer. Bring them out whenever you need, like the Winter Soldier. You could even have concurrent missions going. Then, just delete them or store their patterns again when the mission is complete.
The bit I find worrying is that you'd have to trust you will be 1:1 reconstructed at the other side.
What happens if there's an error on the reconstruction side and it either fails to reconstruct you back properly, or at all?
Or what if some malicious party injects something into, or removes part of your reconstruction?
There'd be no way for you to know from the other side, so you could just be killed or maimed in an instant, and there'd be nothing you could do to stop it
Do you think the transporter reconstructs the contents of your stomach & intestines? Like, do you still have to pee when you come out the other side, or does it just take care of business for you?
Assuming that whatever computer is processing your blueprint could accurately detect all of your poop and pee, then I don't see why it couldn't physically do that.
And the incentive would line up too, as it would both save the company money on reconstruction and be beneficial to the customer.
Better question yet is if it's possible to tamper the blueprint, where would the limit be?
Could it be used medically to essentially perform surgery on you (or rather your clone)?
Could the teleporter service basically offer you a character creation screen to make yourself however you'd want to look or be?
Of course, again, this relies on you trusting the teleporter service with your entire being. If they fail, you're not just literally dead, you're conceptually just gone.
Assuming that whatever computer is processing your blueprint could accurately detect all of your poop and pee, then I don't see why it couldn't physically do that.
Heh, well, there might be a pressure problem... but yeah if it's accurate enough to put all of the walls of your intestines back where they were, why bother reconstructing that log inside there? But then... do you fill the empty space with vacuum? air? fluid? or do you try to reconstruct the intestine, not as it was, but in a relaxed/empty state?
Better question yet is if it's possible to tamper the blueprint, where would the limit be?
Could it be used medically to essentially perform surgery on you (or rather your clone)?
Could the teleporter service basically offer you a character creation screen to make yourself however you'd want to look or be?
If we can get rid of your waste, we can at least get rid of kidney stones too, right? And probably tumors and parasites, maybe even bacterial infections.
If you're taking teleportation, you've likely already accepted (or are ignorant of) the fact that you as a literal being will perish - but you survive conceptually through your copy.
So I care if that copy gets made. If it doesn't, then I'm not just literally dead, but conceptually dead too.
I read one scifi novel where the teleportation was almost instant across the galaxy, the caveat was that it duplicated you, so the original walked out of the booth, while the copy was the one who actually went somewhere. Aside from the issues of having several of you around if you went back to the destination, not every teleport was great for the original either. One instance where they were trying to escape some creature planetside, and as they ran into the booth the main wondered if they'd be the one who made it to safety, or not. Of course next chapter picks up with the safe one's pov....
If you fly instead, you have to trust the pilot, ATC, the mechanics, the aircraft engineers, the builder, its suppliers, and on and on. At least in a transporter malfunction, you die in an instant, rather than in terror as the plane crashes.
Star Trek teleporter: fax machine / shredder combination (remember that time the shredder bit malfunctioned and we got double Riker..?)
Wormhole: just a weird long gateway (with a chance of spaghettification). No problems there unless it somehow takes you through some sort of hell dimension or something.
Stargate: somehow both, because let's be frank, the Ancients were kind of dicks. (Also, didn't actually need the whole buffer thing, that one Orlin built in Carter's basement with a box of scraps was completely analog, no computer bits, and it worked just fine until it didn't.)
It's not like that Riker episode was taken lightly. But, you would think that an event like that would have led to a lot more soul searching. For example, occasionally there were religious people in Star Trek -- what does this say about transporters and souls?
From what I remember, they spent a lot more time on the mechanics of a dude getting duplicated: the bureaucracy of it (his rank, etc.) and how it affected his relationships with Troi etc.
But, no talk of how every time someone is transported the original body is killed? No talk about how this might be a means of creating an army of clones?
Same deal with people being stored for a long time in the pattern buffer. Does this mean you can create backups of people so that if they die they can simply be beamed from that data?
they always had a bit of extra something, if some writer decided they need it for the story, that is the problem with made-up stuff. transporters and macroeconomy of their utopian society were prime examples of this, they were always interpreted as the writer decided to and it was better not to think about it much.
Schlock Mercenary (webcomic) had a couple of good takes on this concept. The "wormgates" in SM were more like teleporters, in that they disintegrated you, reduced you to data, and recreated you on the other side. As a side effect, the Gatekeepers could make copies of you in transit, which is how they kept their galactic dominance intact, by interrogating and shredding gate-clones. Arguably, they murdered trillions of sapients with their gates.
In-universe, it's impossible to generate big wormholes, but the F'Sherl'Ganni "faked" it and everyone just kind of assumed there was some weird physics they'd figured out that nobody else knew.
The Teraport, in SM (or "tear-apart" as it was sometimes called derisively) at least had some continuity, by porting you through billions of microscopic wormholes. Whether that kills you or not, well, that's between you and Carl.
The "wormgates" in SM were more like teleporters, in that they disintegrated you, reduced you to data, and recreated you on the other side.
That's exactly how stargates work in the Stargate series (except for the bit where they could work like normal wormholes, but they've got a scanner/shredder/maker mechanism stuck in front of the wormhole for no apparent reason).
I don't think they ever duplicated anyone (with a stargate), but Teal'c('s data) once got stuck in the buffer. Technically nothing would prevent the gate from duplicating travelers, as long as it had enough energy and it could be prevented from flushing the buffer.
The Stargate ring transporters didn't distirybthe copy, they just fired the object out in a straight line inside hyperspace. Though the Asgard system properly did kill the original.
They did digitise the victim, sorry, “traveler”, send the data and mass through the wormhole, store the data in a buffer on the receiving gate (there might have also been a buffer for outgoing data in the sending gate, I'm not sure) and reconstitute a copy on its “event horizon” (which wasn't really an event horizon and actually turned out to have absolutely nothing to do with the wormhole, being instead the interface for the fax machine).
Teal'c (or rather data that could be reconstituted into a copy of Teal'c) once got stuck in the buffer, and Carter had to hack the gate so that it would create an “event horizon” without the actual wormhole, thus tricking the fax machine into reconstituting “Teal'c”, about two days later than it should have of it hadn't malfunctioned.
The ship of thesis is “the ship of thesis” because it is the ship that thesis is using. He could hop off a trireme and on to a “boston whaler” and it would be the ship of thesis.
Edit: you must live with me spelling sin. I will not alter time and reality to correct that which is.
I have a little voice in my head that says words and I guess how they are spelled based only on my phonix education in elementary school and my vaguely western New England/ upstate New York accent.
I may have, but, it was stored as a phonetic sound with in my mind. I could try and transliterate it in to the couple other languages I am familiar with the phonetics of, but I suspect the same error would occur.
I was thinking about IPoAC the other day and had a horrifying realisation of it's implications: teleporting someone will involve moving enough data to reconstitute an identical human being from the sending to the recieving teleporter, and assuming storage technology grows in a similar way, there will be a point where it's faster to be downloaded to a drive, strapped to a pigeon, and flown to your destination for reconstitution than it will be to wait for the data to transfer over.
No, the assumptions are that it would be a static but massive amount of data and that transfer bandwidths grow slower than can keep up with storage volume, which is why there would be a point rather than multiple ones. At some point the bandwidth would outgrow the data and forever more be faster at the task than IPoAC.
The universe is a hologram, and our physical brain is just an antenna tuned to the higher dimension of consciousness. Your consciousness exists separately to your body, so if the transporter builds an exact copy of your body (and brain) you will just tune back in to your same consciousness when you're done transporting.
The universe is a poop and our physical brain is just a toilet plumped into the higher dimension of consciousness. Your consciousness sits inside of your body like diarrhea in a butt, so if the transporter flushes your consciousness down the doodoo shit pipe, you'll just fill it up again like toilet water.
Interesting concept. There could be a sci fi story about the brains of two intelligent creatures on vastly distant planets whose brains happen to have the exact same tuning and are attached to the same consciousness, with full awareness of both lives. How they cope with this would be fascinating. On Earth they would probably be considered mentally ill. Or maybe the story is that this is fairly common and is what's really going on behind a lot of people's mental problems.
y'know, it is interesting how fear of teleporters is handled but never stigma against teleportees. this hypothetical star trek grandparent is very understanding, but in the early days of the technology i can imagine many people wouldn't be
Remember Enterprise (the show), and how the Teleporter was only for cargo due to its newness as a technology?.. but one episode they used it on people for an emergency and ended up with debris stuck in their bodies upon rematerialization?
I used to think like that, but I have my doubts. Doesn't "Realm of Fear" show that you are conscious during the transfer process? So it's kinda like growing new brain synapses and starting to be conscious through them instead of old ones?
So the real dilemma here is if you believe in a spirit or after life. Essentially you wouldnt ever get where you were going. But you would.
Honestly, who's to say that somewhere in the infinity between every second consciousness doesnt jump from one location to another breaking the continuation of persistent matter.
Aldebaran's great, okay,
Algol's pretty neat,
Betelgeuse's pretty girls,
Will knock you off your feet.
They'll do anything you like
Real fast and then real slow,
But if you have to take me apart to get me there
Then I don't want to go.
Take me apart, take me apart,
What a way to roam
And if you have to take me apart to get me there
I'd rather stay at home.
Sirius is paved with gold
So I've heard it said
By nuts who then go on to say
"See Tau before you're dead."
I'll gladly take the high road
Or even take the low,
But if you have to take me apart to get me there
Then I, for one, won't go.
Take me apart, take me apart,
You must be off your head,
And if you try to take me apart to get me there
I'll stay right here in bed.
People say this but I don't understand why. I don't think there's any reason to believe we meaningfully cease to be "continuous" while asleep, in fact we're not even unconscious when we sleep, our brain keeps processing stimuli, in parts of the cycle we dream, etcetera.
While sleep isn't the right thought experiment, think of cryogenics: it works for the wood frog, which can come back from being completely frozen solid, so there's no reason to believe that our consciousness can't be fully interrupted and resumed.
Which ones? I'm never truly gone still in my bed. And as someone who has died coming back from death is not the same as waking up. One I lost days of memory after being brought back, I don't loose days when I wake up every morning.
What do you mean? You're only dreaming during REM sleep. That's only part of the sleep cycle. And the loss of memory is irrelevant here. We're talking about continuity of consciousness and its implications from a philosophical perspective. We're not talking about your soul being out of your body or something.
At least I think that's what you're trying to say? Some of your grammar makes your comment difficult to parse.
Then think about cryogenics. The wood frog can be frozen solid and come back to life by thawing, so there's nothing fundamentally preventing our existence from becoming discontinuous
Sometimes dreaming and sometimes recalling doesn't prove you always have a stream of consciousness.
You have different sleep phases each night, some are entirely dream less. Large groups of your neurons sync up during NREM sleep, firing at the same time. I don't see how consciousness can survive becoming basically a pendulum. People awoken during NREM in studies usually say they weren't experiencing anything. Maybe they were and just didn't remember, we can't prove that, but it seems unlikely and it couldn't be much of an experience while most of your brain is busy flashing on and off again like a flickering lightbulb.
This doesn't mean much. You only dream during REM sleep, one phase of your sleep cycle. But there are periods during every night where the lights are off and there's nobody home.
No it isn't. You're only dreaming during REM sleep. This is like, sleep cycle 101 here. The periods of deep sleep where your brain is doing its deep repair work? Your consciousness is not just reduced, but absent entirely. During slow-wave sleep, you have no awareness. The reason you haven't noticed these while you are sleeping is because you cannot be aware of your own periods where you completely lack awareness.
Just as you said, that depends on definition. And since we know jack shit about how conciousness works all of those definitions (minus one) will be flawed. Going by some definitions that include this, you could say you die every second. I had restless nights thinking about this and the only conclusion I came to is that it's ironically not worth losing sleep over this, because if this is true then one you can't do anything about it two you won't even notice it. Alternatively this is a flawed perspective and you are just overthinking something that isn't even true.
there is true teleportation, dimensional teleporting(in TNG there was one race that had it, but it damages them permanently) but federation never had that kind of technology. which doesnt "disitengrate you"
It still kinda fucks with me that they showed a transporter Cronenberg in TMP of all places, the first movie, these people rode around on a 5 year mission with some goofy malfunctions sure, but they trusted that transporter to use it constantly, just to watch some dude get slimed
Teleporting will be so expensive and energy intensive that only billionaires will do it. It will be orders of magnitude more disruptive to the environment than private jets. You won't have the luxury to worry about your molcules.
Somehow I'm more scared of a holodeck, I don't mean getting hurt by falling from somewhere or shot in a novel with failing safety protocols, I mean clipping bug on a wall and getting sliced in half by the force field.
I'm not sure 'kill' is the correct word here. It seems to me that your conscience (aka: "you") is being sent around to various places while the body (aka: the last 20 years of groceries) is merely being reused to recreate some other person.
That's the way I see it anyway.
There's this thought experiment: think about delayed "scrapping" in the sender. Let's say by a minute? You'd have time to talk to yourself over a video call, then what are you going to think about "it's still me" when your copy walks away and you are about to be zapped?
They both have their own sense of self. By the time they fork, they're no longer the same individual (but very similar) and it doesn't matter which one gets destroyed: the bad part is the loss of the last copy of a personality, not a copy.
explain that first bit to the person I was replying to, not me :)
that's a very utilitarian approach. Which, I am sure, would be very comforting to the copy about to be destroyed. Also, by that logic you could kill twins/triplets at birth, all but the "last copy". Very dark, very cynical.
Isn't there a variation of this with an evil shapeshifter captain Kirk fighting real Kirk, where the real Kirk eventually tells Spock to "shoot both of us" and then Spock shoots the other, saying "this is how I knew it was you"?
And then they begin to diverge in to two separate people, who are distinct individuals, but still both you.
It’s not that complicated. So long as you don’t start imagining metaphysical hallucinations like “souls” because people want to pretend the “after life” is a thing because they’re scared of no longer being.
We can't prove conscious entities do or don't have souls. Asserting we don't, as if it's some kind of self-evident fact, is as arrogant as religious people asserting that we do.
Present me a rigorous definition of the concept, then a coherent evidence based argument for why we should even consider the concept as a potential, and then a series of experiments to prove or disprove the concept.
I will be chatting with the invisible, immaterial and mute elephant that lives in my living room until you do.
That entire statement is predicated on the assumption that everything about the universe, how it came to be, etc., is directly observable from within the universe, which we also cannot know with any certainty.
But I don't have to, you're the one who made the claim that we assuredly don't have souls, so prove it yourself.
everything about the universe, how it came to be, etc., is directly observable from within the universe
This is the only way that makes sense to approach it. Either it is and there's an objective truth and consistency to reality, or it isn't and there's literally infinite possibilities so any single possibility is infinitely unlikely and there's no reason to assume any of them are valid.
Where did I say there's no objective truth to the universe? Say I drew some pictures on small pieces of paper and arranged them adjacent to each other on a table, and then placed my hand flat on the table, then invited you to look. You can see pictures on the table, I then ask you whether there are any pictures under my hand. You (should) answer that you don't know. You not knowing whether there are pictures under my hand or not does nor change the objective truth of their existence. The hand represents what we don't know about the universe, and you (at least currently) don't have the technology to lift it.
An assertion that something does not exist does not need to be proven, since it is inherently a challenge to someone else’s assertion to something existing.
A negative can not be proven, if someone wishes to insist that a concept be considered, the burden of evidence fall upon them.
That's quite an oversimplification. What you're really asserting is that sentience has no part which is very difficult if not impossible to directly measure. You can throw your hands in the air and pretend you've not made any such claim, but you have. It's bizarre how many atheists display the same levels of dogmatism and fervour as their religious counterparts.
P.S. pretty odd that you felt the need to condescendingly imply I'd think talking to some kind of ghost elephant is equally plausible as not knowing the entire nature of the universe.
Point to the comment made before my edit. I clarified my comment after posting it, no comment was made prior to my edit.
There may have been one I did not see. As is the nature of federate platforms and de-federated instances. Or, perhaps even, a comment from someone I blocked previously.
The elephant crap was not in the original comment. That's not just a typo, mate. If you're incapable of admitting something so trivial, and deflect by bringing up previously blocking people, like that has anything to with it, you're certainly not worth any more of my time.
I know about the teapot, and it seems you've also missed the point. Did you not notice where I said it was as arrogant to claim we do have souls as fact?
We know we have consciousness, that's not a far-fetched untestable thing like a microscopic teapot in orbit. You accept that you have it as true, but it's basically impossible to prove, because how would an unconscious biological machine that reacts to all physical stimuli the same as a human be any different from a conscious one? We lack an explanation for why biological machines give rise to consciousness and why the universe is aware of itself. That's not an extraordinary claim. Why does awareness exist at all? Why does the universe not do everything it does now without being aware?
I recommend reading Blindsight. One of the few novels that actually changed the way I think (in this case about consciousness)
And yeah, it's real in the same sense as a sense of smell is real. It's just a byproduct of how our brains work. Copy the brain, copy the consciousness.
The belief that it's a byproduct of the physics of our brains is just that, a belief. It's not provable even if we both think it's the most likely cause.
I think knowing about drugs able to cause ego death, we're already close to a proof. Like, if it can be temporarily disabled without long term effects, what else can it be than a feeling.
I think we can only get closer if we understand the human brain much better than we do.
I agree with them on the principle that ST teleportation works like that. that's because teleporters and replicators are based on the same architecture and technology out of simplicity.
IRL, it's probably more likely going to be based on quantum entanglement in a controlled environment. meaning you will exist once in the entire known universe, but parts of you may exist in multiple locations simultaneously until they are not. this would be observed as no different than your current existence except for the potential to be scattered across the entire universe at a quantum level.
Quantum entanglement is the phenomenon in which the quantum state of each particle in a group cannot be described independently of the state of the others, even when the particles are separated by a large distance.
if we were able to develop a way to move matter, at the quantum level, through particles that are entangled it would essentially be teleportation. there's so many other obstacles in the way of that first though. the first big issue, how do you send matter in a quantum state and disregard all other matter that isn't supposed to be sent?
for a second there I thought I had accidentally posted to a science community. then I realized this is a meme community.
Imagine my relief when I came to the realization that you're probably some fat neck bearded armchair "quantum physicist" that's just trying to get a rise out of a "normie".
don't take science that has yet to be invented so serious. I'm not writing a thesis or scientific proof on it, and especially not on a meme board.
have the kids ask the grandparent if they voted trump. if so, which it probably is. just means the grandparent is nothing more then a moron with nothing but nonsense and lies for their arguments.
Y'know how there's the DS9 episode of the sniper who teleports bullets? Yea, I would transport my penis into people then beam it back. The medicine will be there, so it will be like some invertebrates who can rip off their penis so the female can use it to impregnate herself. It's just the obvious move to make moving into the future, obviously.
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Damn, I was going to ship of Theseus you about the cells in your body replacing themselves constantly, but apparently our brain neurons last a lifetime.
Now I don't think I would ever use a teleporter, either. Shit.
That is why nervous system damage usually means life long problems. Brains and all their wiring are so arcane and complicated, even our bodies don't know how to grow more than one of them, and we often don't get it right the first time either unfortunately.
Well clearly you didn't get it right.
Just believe we're inside a simulation and transporters won't matter.
Its kinda crazy actually if you think about it, our ability to anticipate actions is our ability to land in outcomes expected to be made by the reality generating around us if you imagine the reality outside our bodily sensory input as a big monte carlo field of potentials in the form of intertwined variables...like a big llm.
Aren’t LLMs basically pattern matching systems.
Humans are also pattern matching, and then predicting machines, but with way more inputs and senses than the LLMs.
They don't match anything but do trigger the "nearest" response to a stimulus, so kinda like pattern matching but that implies doing it on purpose. But yeah the rest I agree with.
Will they anti matter then?
But what about the atoms/molecules that make up those neurons? Do they last a lifetime?
So far that we know of, neural cell DNA, tooth enamel, and eye lens crystallines, never have their atoms replaced.
Which is to say that we are a ship of theseus, and a transporter does not kill us. The only reason these atoms are not normally replaced is because there is no natural mechanism to replace them.
Not sure I would tie my identity to my neuron DNA, tooth enamel, and eye lens crystallines. Definitely agree with you that we are living ships of Theseus. I'm pretty sure there's no natural mechanism to replace those parts because it's really hard, and we work "well enough" without being able to.
Yun Tianming: am I joke to you?
Yeah but we don't know if consciousness lives in the meat or in the chemistry.
A distinction between a teleporter and a transporter...
To teleport implies the original matter is instantly moved from one place to another so there would be no destruction and reconstituted copy. A wormhole would seem to be the only realistic way that could be achieved.
A transporter, well that means copy then kill. No one knows if the kill part is painful because noone survives it. I find it funny Riker's copy is actually the "original" and his lack of death is considered a transporter accident. Yet he is the one treated like the copy...
And all that said, barclay's experience in the transporter beam is more suggestive of a wormhole style device.
I don't know why I bothered to write all this out...
Someone needs to. At least you put thought into it.
Iirc Thomas is not Will’s copy. Basically the transporter has a malfunction where Thomas and Will are both constituted on a transporter pad. So both are the “original” and also both are neither. In a sense, the William Thomas Riker who stepped onto that pad that day ceased to be, forked into two different lives.
I used to use this episode to talk about identity when I taught ethics back in the day. Both men carried on their lives under the belief that they were the same man who stepped onto a transporter pad on Nervala IV. Their experiences defined who they were, demonstrating that it’s more than biological material that makes any one of us us.
Now the deeper question is: since you can’t add matter to the universe, what’s missing to give life to two Rikers?
The energy that was used in the original teleportation. I didn’t think it was that deep, it used more energy to reconstitute more matter.
You know what, now that your mention it, wasn't the explanation that the signal was reflected back to the surface due to the ionising radiation of something, so the beam was kinda split or doubled. So my premise was wrong.
Yeah. They tried to split the beam to account for the radiation, half of it made it through, the other half mirrored back. I'm guessing the computer can extrapolate the remaining matter based off of data saved in the pattern buffer?
Either way, Thomas Riker was way under-utilized in Star Trek. I also love how "okay, sure" everyone is about this situation.
I assume they sent a lot more data than it takes to make a single person. Eventually enough data for a whole Ryker was received at each location, while a lot more data got scattered.
Sounds like trek had the technology to copy people. You would think if they are sending people out into the unknown to explore galaxies light years away they would just send a copy. Or at least keep a copy.
I wonder what earth piccard would be up to...
Just copy Data everywhere.
The are other methods from Star Trek that could potentially be size as well.
Like "hey you actually travel through this other dimension where your physical form is undisturbed and no time passes in this dimension"
Which sounds ok, but "by the way it's kinda a hell-dimension and your consciousness gets tortured for a distance-relative time there but won't retain the memories after..."
Stop giving your time to corporations! W this, T that. They have played us for absolute fools, there is no need for economy class.
Seize the means of eldritchticity production comrade, don't believe any nonsense about colors. The trains are always on time under the F co-op too.
Oh dear lord. Yeah I could definitely see a variant where the hell dimension is just "work all the hours that it would have taken to traverse in normal space so that EvilCorp can generate profit for the pan-dimensional empire"
To transport just means to move, so if anything the term "transporter" implies physically moving people rather than copying. The term "teleport" is the more ambiguous one...
In this case transporter is more ambiguous not because of the literal meaning, but the association with a particular technology.
Must do wonders for his self worth! 😄
I’m glad you did.
They both got converted into energy, Thomas is just as much a copy as Will. Also, apparently your experience is constant across the process, as seen by Barclay grabbing someone out of the matter stream. Presumably someone would notice if it hurt...
Isn't Tom just another copy? He came out of the pattern buffer the same as Will iirc.
no matter what, they were like 1000th generation of copies. "the original" died when riker stepped into the transporter for the first time. so discussing whether this one is 1001st, or 1002nd generation seems not that exciting...
Well, no, "transporter" means the first one, because that's how they're explained to work where they're called transporters.
Now I understand why such and such movie about magicians calls the trick "the transported man".
A transporter is just Jason Statham in a suit. SCNR
I would be the guy who says, "Open-source teleporters only."
I ain't risking having myself modified surreptitiously. 😑
In that case if you're a union leader, you just get deleted
No worries, its not you that was modified its your clone. Youre dead!
But if they were open source they'd have the worst name possibly, and possibly an equally awful UI.
I guess we can be glad that "the GIMP" is taken so nobody will reuse that for a future FOSSeporter
For number 2 there's a derivative which can also vibrate, which is said to make the process much more pleasant. Oh and it's entirely built out of rust, nobody really knows why though.
The faster you walk into number three, the sooner you reach the destination.
But you need to have the endurance to make it to the end.
The important part is to start with the acronym and then try and figure out what it can stand for.
Yes. The H.R.U.M.F. principle!
The first one wouldn't have a ui, it'd be a Unix-style command, probably called tsck, or killu or something.
FOSSeporter makes it sound like everyone is dancing lol
My grandma won't drive on the interstate. These are the same.
Quite reasonable. "Driven the back roads so I wouldn't get waylaid."
Is it waylaid or weighed, as in driving over a scale at a inspection station?
Edit: lyrics all say "weighed", but the way it's sung over two beats I definitely hear waylaid. Truckers hauling overweight loads, or heavier than reported on the bill of lading (contraband), don't want to have to go over the scales because they'll get caught.
We always sung it as waylaid. As in stopped by the PoPo. The song also speaks of transporting "smokes and folks", so yeah, behave in a way that keeps one from ever talking to the authorities.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/waylay
Yes thank you I agree that is what waylaid means. The lyrics however, are "weighed" as in pulling into a weigh station you usually see along the highway closed for some reason.
My mom wouldn't drive on the freeway because she lacked confidence. It was too fast for her. She was fine riding with dad driving, though.
I always liked the idea of teleporters that are just wormhole pairs.
If you want to travel from New York to Paris you have to first go to your local wormhole station, walk through that and be taken to the central station for all US wormholes, walk over to the international portal and be taken to the global interface station, which would be located wherever the electricity is cheapest so probably somewhere in Iceland, then you walk over to the French national station, and be taken to some facility in France, and then from there walk over to the Paris wormhole.
All wormholes are 20 m across by standard allowing cargo containers to transport through, with the Americans have made system unnecessarily complicated by standardizing their wormholes to 2.5 giraffe widths.
You would like Peter F. Hamilton's Commonwealth saga.
Excuse me sir or ma'am (or none of the above) do you want to co-write a movie? lol this is an amazing premise if it hasn't been done (and my apologies if you're referencing a movie i'm not aware of)
That works for teleportation that needs a receiver, like for a phone call. In ST you only need a transmitter, so it's more like a wormhole whose far end you can put wherever you want.
Sleeping is just teleporting 8 hours into the future and life is just continuous reconstitution anyways.
Exactly. The "me" of yesterday is already dead. He can't think, feel, act, reason, or anything else. I have memories of being him, but if I'd suffered head trauma, even those could be gone. The illusion of continuous, conscious experience is just that—an illusion.
The young-Earth people say that their god created the world about 6,000 years ago, and planted fossils to test our faith. I say that my god created the universe 6 seconds ago, including these memories that we seem to have. There's literally no way to prove otherwise.
And yet you have a vested interest in your continued survival. If you stepped into a transporter and it failed to disassemble you on departure, you would very much protest if a maintenance technician attempted manual disassembly
Lol, love the "manual disassembly" terminology.
That's not a philosophical objection, though, it's just instinct. If the transporter made a copy of me, the copy would also very much object to this proposed method of error correction.
Not being in prolonged excruciating pain is very much part of the appeal of the transporter.
"Life is a message scribbled in the dark."
I mean, the brain mostly consists of the same matter, aside from cycling synovial fluid, once you reach middle age. Recreate me a body but keep my original brain and I won't mind it, aside from all the horror.
The cells in your brain are not replaced like other cells in your body, but the atoms are. In fact, all of the atoms in your body are swapped out every seven years or so.
I'm not sure exactly what's true, but what you're saying seems like a factoid that gets repeated a lot but isn't really 100% true.
Structural stuff like the calcium in your bones... it would be interesting if it was really replaced on a schedule like that. It wouldn't shock me if it was getting replaced, but it would certainly be cool to learn how that would work.
Is the lens in your eye getting replaced like that? I'm trying to think of body parts that seem to not get constant automatic maintenance. How about the enamel on your teeth? Really replaced every 7 years?
Or if we're really just talking about atoms in your body, then famously the problem with heavy metal poisoning is that your body can't get rid of it. So, is it being replaced or is your body getting rid of it? Or... is it just there from before?
And if you want to get really pedantic, and I always do, what fun... Things like artificial hips or breast implants are definitely in people's bodies longer than 7 years but are not getting their atoms replaced.
My understanding of this factoid is that it has more to do with atoms tendency to swap particles when they bump into each other. So it’s sort of through attrition all of the atomic particles in your body are swapped out over the course of about seven years. So like as oxygen and carbon dioxide, for instance, move in and out of your brain and other tissues they leave electrons and shit behind and take some with them. But it also wouldn’t be the first time I had misunderstood something.
8 hours is for noobs. I can easily do 9-10
Everyone always focuses on the Ship of Theseus or the existential parts of this, but the societal impacts would be crazy.
Millions of people teleporting to the most beautiful places on earth and wrecking them, highways and boring parts of cities abandoned, mass death of people teleporting into a crush crowd at Mecca, landmarks toppled under the weight of teleporting tourists and bosses teleporting into your house for a "work from home" meeting, weapons and bombs being teleported into war zones...
Things would eventually find a new normal and teleporting food and resources around would remove the need for ships and trucks, you could explore the world much more easily and there would be lots of science to do in hard to reach places, marine biologists would have a field day exploring the deep ocean, doctors could teleport cancer cells out of patients, space agencies teleport probes, bases and astronauts to the moon and around the solar system...
Like it would be such a huge upheaval with so many implications. It's interesting that people really fixate on the "would I die though? What does dying even mean if I'm still around?" part, even though I think that's maybe the least interesting thing. I guess it taps into a very primal survival instinct?
Can I just teleport the poop out of my colon and the piss out of my balls, so I don't have to get up to go to the bathroom?
Where are you storing your piss again?
Piss is stored in the balls
When you're a little older you'll learn about what actually comes from the balls.
Yeah it's piss
Or you could eat whatever you want and then teleport it out of you. No more fatties -- unless they like that shit.
But that would enable bioterrorism, where you teleport your waste into the body of someone you want to kill. We would all have to wear tinfoil suits.
Depends on how the technology works. It's more likely that you would need someone's how to receive or both ends, even if it were technically possible to just teleport randomly from point a to point b I feel like that feature would be disabled on commercial models precisely to stop the above from happening.
There are a couple old sci fi stories that feature "time tourism", where they have to stop sending people to popular events like the crucifixion of Jesus because they're getting overcrowded. Robert Silverberg's novel Up the Line and Garry Kilworth's Let's Go to Golgotha! In one of them the time travelers vastly outnumber the locals, and swing the vote to release one of the thieves instead of Jesus, because that's what the travelers think they're supposed to do.
There's a book where people have figured out teleportation so they have to hide women to prevent kidnappings.
Warhammer 40k: Can I interest you in a trip through literal hell?
Also: what kind of immortality would you like?
Hmm... ironic immortality! I have eternal life, but grow increasingly more weary and numb to it's joys until I wish for the sweet succor of death that will never come.
Sounds realistic as hell that
I don't think that would be real. People become bitter and weary because they get old and their bodies start hurting and their minds failing more and more.
If you stay sharp and fit, you won't get bitter.
This is so blissfully optimistic that I'm not even gonna try to bring you back down to Earth with my weary bitterness.
They become bitter because they don't know how to handle their own minds. Hence being immortal gives one far more time to learn, but does not make learning inevitable
With the current constant scanning an analyzing and advertising pushed on us, I'd stay far as fuck away from any teleporting service....
If they have the tech to disassemble and reassemble you including memories, then they can manipulate that.
Would you trust Google Instant Transport Services to not tune your personality to be more favorable toward products from their ad partners, or just slightly tune your political opinions to be more inline with their own.
Just a slight adjustment, an active protester against new datacenters would become less aggressive, a random person starts buying more Pepsi instead of Coke, a change small enough that no one notices a big change in behavior.
Also, would you trust that your memories would stay private?
I am mashing my thumb raw by obliterating X.
Honestly, I'd never thought of it, but if they can reconstitute you, memories and all, they can probably just straight read your fucking mind.
Jesus Christ, imagine a government that can know every single thought you'd ever had, and assassinate accordingly
There’s also the possibility that consciousness (including memories) is part of some kind of metaphysical net that “latches” onto a particular collection of cells/matter like an attuned radio. So once your matter stream is reconstituted, your memories just “latch” no need to reconstruct the memories. If our consciousness exists in the space between electrical pulses in our brain then such a thing is a kind of energy, yeah? Perhaps, like some forms of matter, consciousness is something that can transcend space and time? Within Star Trek this might explain how species like Betazoids and Vulcans can use telepathy—they’re able to tune into the consciousness net.
And, no, I don’t do drugs.
There a series called Riverworld that I think you would enjoy.
The books, not that TV movie that's virtually entirely unrelated
Hey. That's close to my favourite theory :) although with different consequences. I like to believe that consciousness is just another property of matter that we can't measure (yet?). Stones, dust, grass, all atoms / particles have it. But it takes a certain complex arrangement - like our CNS - with the capability to store and retrieve information (and thus learn) to actually form a conscious mind.
However this would mean your mind gets fully destroyed on disassembly and likely the copy won't function / might be a vegetable on arrival because the unmeasured properties of atoms used to construct the copy were completely different (think of things like spin).
I know the theory your referring to, it grades the entire universes consciousness on a sliding scale from a neutron all the way up to a person.
But I don’t think that consciousness and memories are tied together at all. Consciousness is not well defined which makes it a fickle subject, but memories are a biological process that we can observe much more easily.
My understanding, based on a book I read once about neuroplasticity, is that memories are pathways that are literally burned into your brain by repeated sensory chemicals being sent to that particular part of the brain. As long as the transporter puts every single brain wrinkle back where it was and instructs the brain on which chemicals it sent down the pathways, you could probably put memories back into the head.
I wasn't referring any theory. While I am not delusional to think I am the only one, I came up with this entirely by myself.
Also, your "but" isn't a but. I was alluding to the same thing: memories is stored information, i.e. a structure like our brain growing.
Why I think the transporter might be catastrophic is because it could only reproduce the "software" accurately, the EEPROM-like memories. But the hardware might be all wrong.
Oh! Well the name that the other dude who thought about it gave it was Panpsychism, you might be interested to read about it.
But it is :P I’m saying that I think the hardware would be the easy part. Put all the same types of stuff in the same configuration, give it some instructions and you’ve got a fleshy automaton that should reasonably be able to recall the same things the other thing could. The “software” as you called it, would be more difficult I think.
We know what makes a memory, but we don’t know why someone makes a particular decision or what influences their personality to act how they do. Hell, putting two human beings right next to each other and stimulating them in the exact same way doesn’t even produce the same results between the two, so we couldn’t accurately instruct the new automaton on how to act like the old one
Panpsychism sounds a bit embellished, but I'll have a look. I think we have an analogy misunderstanding. I really meant memories etc as the software because it is "programmed" with our experiences. The hardware being the atoms that we can not accurately arrange in a copy because we have no concept of the conscience related property (e.g. conscience spin, for lack of a better word). It could be like trying to run little endian software on a big endian architecture: instant crash.
Nah, Google would just lift your interests and then inject time-delayed ads into your brain...
Nope that would be too obvious.
That's definitely not a given.
That's like saying that if you can perfectly scan and reproduce a book down to the smudges and crumbs, that you understand the contents of that book.
To us right now in 2026, mapping an entire brain, simulating it perfectly, then editing it slightly without breaking it seems a lot more doable than breaking down a human quark by quark and rebuilding them somewhere else. But, that isn't necessarily the case.
GITS, clever
Didn't even think about that (:
I’d use a teleporter with no hesitation. What’s important is my memories and sense of self, not the actual meat it’s in. I could find out I’m a copy of myself right now and not be bothered.
Yeah but once you step in the teleporter you stop being. The copy is only useful for other people to keep interacting with your clone, but the actual you is dead.
So what? There would be persistent awareness. The new me would remember everything up to the old me’s death and keep living. I’m fine with that.
As far as you know. You wouldn't know what they modified.
Id be more fine with not remembering but to each their own
Would you be cool going into the execution chamber and getting shot to transport yourself? Would the memory of the death make a difference, or the ability to visit your previous remains? What happens if there is an accident and the new you wakes up, but the execution chamber fails and the old you is still alive?
If you don't mind there's no problem, of course, but quite a few people want to keep living. If you told a terminally ill person "so you'll die, but don't worry cause we can clone you and tell everybody you got better" I think "oh well then no problem" wouldn't be a universal answer.
There's no “actual” you. Your body creates a sense of an “I”. If you copy that body including the brain, the copy will have the same. You wouldn't say that the copy’s sense of smell is somehow different, so why make a distinction for the sense of self?
Because I don't really care about what the copy can do and think, because I'll be dead. My self disappears, even if someone else has a copy of it.
What makes you think that “your self” exists as anything else but an emergent property of your brain existing?
You're just describing a feeling that we all share, but there's no indication that it's more than that. Check out my writings about this topic (link to a scientific book coming to the same conclusion at the end)
https://phil.red/blog/2025/9/5/identity-illusion
A man cannot step into the same river twice
What happens to "you" several years from now when every cell in your body has been replaced by mitosis?
It's a "I think therefore I am" kind of thing. I know I'm the same person I was five years ago, just with some new memories, and some memories have faded. But I am still the same person.
I don't know whether you are the same person you were five years ago.
The show "Earth 2" in the 90s had an interesting concept in the backstory where not every human had a soul, and they made a device that could detect whether people had souls. I sometimes wonder if that's the case, not everyone is actually a sentient being and just a biological machine.
Of course there's no way to know, so we have to assume that if someone is a human, they are sentient. Same logic as the TNG episode "Measure of a Man", but it applies to humans just as it does to robots.
I think this idea and confidence hold extremely true until you think about Elon Musk.
I have no idea what you mean lol
His machine would not work very well.
Actually, now that I think about it, it's far worse than that. If a company has a teleporter that can build a copy of you, they can also build an almost-copy of you. Say, a copy that is less rebellious. More obedient.
Yeah, the idea's cool in fiction, but in reality I would never touch a machine like this. I will walk my ass over in analogue.
I'm a biologist. Perfectly recording something is very very far removed from understanding something enough to make targeted modifications.
Specific changes, maybe. But broad ones? "Uehhh, make the amygdala smaller. Squash it. ... Well, find a mapping of a guy with a smaller one, then. Do like a copy paste."
All I'm saying is they would try, and trying is enough for me to nope the fuck out of all of it.
Who guarantees the copy is exact? I don't think we can do checksums on living bodies.
Well I imagined we were talking about an imaginary sci-fi technology. Obviously it would be more complicated and possibly at risk for some kind of manipulation in real life. If I were presented a teleporter where the only fault is a philosophical question about being a copy, then I don’t mind being a copy and my original self dying.
That feels like a very different statement than saying you don't mind stepping into the teleporter knowing you will die while a copy continues from where you left off on the other side.
yeah I did realize that after thinking about it. Still I’m not sure. I guess it depends on what that experience is like.
Everybody says it's fine
We can, but we won't.
Try new Coke.
I've said it before and I'll say it again:
In the TNG episode Lonely Among Us Captain Picard gets taken over by an alien energy being. It hijacks his body and he teleports himself into a cloud of dispersed particles in a nebula. They spend more than an hour trying to recover him, and are about to give up, when Troi senses his consciousness, and they are able to reconstitute him through the transporter. This, and other mentions of "mental energy" in the show indicate that there is a canonical, scientific proof of the existence of the soul independent from the body, and that it can be transported without damage.
Anything more involved than that gets into philosophical debates about whether or not you die every time you go to sleep, and is about as useful a conversation as whether or not you can "know" if you are or aren't a brain in a jar.
So what about the Riker duplicate? Which one is soulless? Or is the soul also copyable?
Thomas Riker isn't a transporter duplicate, he's a kidnap victim from a parallel dimension.
Thomas Riker supposedly proved that the transporter can be used to duplicate sentient living beings. So why aren't there mass-produced transporter duplicates? There are plenty of unscrupulous powers that would love to exploit this existential loophole and create huge armies of Jem Hadar or some such. They would have no ethical limitations on making such things, and broadly speaking if a scientific / engineering problem CAN be solved then it WILL be solved, and doubly more so when someone proves that it definitely CAN be solved.
Because the theory of his creation is wrong. He wasn't duplicated by the interference field, his transport beam was filtered through a parallel dimension and back, and captured Thomas from his home dimension and dropped him in ours. Thanks to the Mirror Universe, we know that transporter fuckery can cause trans-dimensional transporting. When they discovered Thomas, they got the interpretation of the phenomenon wrong, and set everyone on a drastically wrong path of research. His duplication hasn't been duplicated, because he was never duplicated to begin with.
If your "soul" or "mental energy" is basically your brain programming, I would say it is copyable.
Also a valid theory, and less complicated than the parallel universe kidnap victim theory.
Yeah, but it doesn't explain why less scrupulous factions don't just copy their most valuable biological assets. Best captains, strongest warriors. Most cunning spies.
I mean… if there were 25,000 of me around, we definitely wouldn’t be following someone else’s orders to die in their war. I imagine that if you copy a person too many times, they tend to stop taking directions as well. Like, if a person can’t unionize with themself, then I don’t know how to help them.
jem hadar maybe not, but even they have a limit, and once they thought they were no longer dependent on ketracel white, they reached it really quickly.
So I guess the answer is to get your clone army hooked
What if you copied them without their knowing? Like, you have an operative heading out on a secret mission. Undisclosed location. Then, just save them in the buffer. Bring them out whenever you need, like the Winter Soldier. You could even have concurrent missions going. Then, just delete them or store their patterns again when the mission is complete.
Isn't that the plot of Gemini Man? And The 6th Day? And Blade Runner?
Well, fuck
The bit I find worrying is that you'd have to trust you will be 1:1 reconstructed at the other side.
What happens if there's an error on the reconstruction side and it either fails to reconstruct you back properly, or at all?
Or what if some malicious party injects something into, or removes part of your reconstruction?
There'd be no way for you to know from the other side, so you could just be killed or maimed in an instant, and there'd be nothing you could do to stop it
"Fantastic! Another successful transport. Although now I feel compelled to spend lots of money at Burger King for some reason."
Do you think the transporter reconstructs the contents of your stomach & intestines? Like, do you still have to pee when you come out the other side, or does it just take care of business for you?
I always thought the lack of bathrooms was because they had little waste transporters that beamed the pee out.
Whenever they talk about tracing "warp signatures" what they mean is the waste trail transported just outside of the ship.
This is not dissimilar to what happened in the age of sail.
Assuming that whatever computer is processing your blueprint could accurately detect all of your poop and pee, then I don't see why it couldn't physically do that.
And the incentive would line up too, as it would both save the company money on reconstruction and be beneficial to the customer.
Better question yet is if it's possible to tamper the blueprint, where would the limit be? Could it be used medically to essentially perform surgery on you (or rather your clone)? Could the teleporter service basically offer you a character creation screen to make yourself however you'd want to look or be?
Of course, again, this relies on you trusting the teleporter service with your entire being. If they fail, you're not just literally dead, you're conceptually just gone.
Heh, well, there might be a pressure problem... but yeah if it's accurate enough to put all of the walls of your intestines back where they were, why bother reconstructing that log inside there? But then... do you fill the empty space with vacuum? air? fluid? or do you try to reconstruct the intestine, not as it was, but in a relaxed/empty state?
If we can get rid of your waste, we can at least get rid of kidney stones too, right? And probably tumors and parasites, maybe even bacterial infections.
What do you care? That's not you on the other side, just your copy.
If you're taking teleportation, you've likely already accepted (or are ignorant of) the fact that you as a literal being will perish - but you survive conceptually through your copy.
So I care if that copy gets made. If it doesn't, then I'm not just literally dead, but conceptually dead too.
I read one scifi novel where the teleportation was almost instant across the galaxy, the caveat was that it duplicated you, so the original walked out of the booth, while the copy was the one who actually went somewhere. Aside from the issues of having several of you around if you went back to the destination, not every teleport was great for the original either. One instance where they were trying to escape some creature planetside, and as they ran into the booth the main wondered if they'd be the one who made it to safety, or not. Of course next chapter picks up with the safe one's pov....
::: spoiler Tap for spoiler That's the plot twist in The Prestige, too. :::
There's a game called SOMA that plays around with a similar idea - but for digitization.
And of course the answer's quite straightforward. If you're the copy that got in the chair, you're the one left behind.
https://youtu.be/V_e9iDdKrXA
Oh, sorry about that. Glitch in the teleporter gave your friend a 30cm cock.
Huh, turns out when you lept into the teleporter after him it balanced it by removing yours.
New bottom surgery just dropped.
If you fly instead, you have to trust the pilot, ATC, the mechanics, the aircraft engineers, the builder, its suppliers, and on and on. At least in a transporter malfunction, you die in an instant, rather than in terror as the plane crashes.
Fun science fiction fact: Sometimes a transporter accident can take several horrific seconds to die.
what happens when you die in a car accident? your family and friends mourn for a while and life continues...
Pattern buffers
"What if instead of landing craft, we just used some kind of teleporter thingy? It'd be a lot cheaper over all."
"Great idea, Gene. I'm sure this won't have any future story repercussions that get way out of hand!"
It's all retconned from a money and plot decision. That should tell you enough.
Star Trek teleporter: fax machine / shredder combination (remember that time the shredder bit malfunctioned and we got double Riker..?)
Wormhole: just a weird long gateway (with a chance of spaghettification). No problems there unless it somehow takes you through some sort of hell dimension or something.
Stargate: somehow both, because let's be frank, the Ancients were kind of dicks. (Also, didn't actually need the whole buffer thing, that one Orlin built in Carter's basement with a box of scraps was completely analog, no computer bits, and it worked just fine until it didn't.)
It's not like that Riker episode was taken lightly. But, you would think that an event like that would have led to a lot more soul searching. For example, occasionally there were religious people in Star Trek -- what does this say about transporters and souls?
From what I remember, they spent a lot more time on the mechanics of a dude getting duplicated: the bureaucracy of it (his rank, etc.) and how it affected his relationships with Troi etc.
But, no talk of how every time someone is transported the original body is killed? No talk about how this might be a means of creating an army of clones?
Same deal with people being stored for a long time in the pattern buffer. Does this mean you can create backups of people so that if they die they can simply be beamed from that data?
that is exactly what they did when they lost picard in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonely_Among_Us
That had a bit of extra magic sprinkled in though. It wasn't purely transporter tech.
they always had a bit of extra something, if some writer decided they need it for the story, that is the problem with made-up stuff. transporters and macroeconomy of their utopian society were prime examples of this, they were always interpreted as the writer decided to and it was better not to think about it much.
I member!
Was interesting to see people try to explain to him why he was left behind...
Schlock Mercenary (webcomic) had a couple of good takes on this concept. The "wormgates" in SM were more like teleporters, in that they disintegrated you, reduced you to data, and recreated you on the other side. As a side effect, the Gatekeepers could make copies of you in transit, which is how they kept their galactic dominance intact, by interrogating and shredding gate-clones. Arguably, they murdered trillions of sapients with their gates.
In-universe, it's impossible to generate big wormholes, but the F'Sherl'Ganni "faked" it and everyone just kind of assumed there was some weird physics they'd figured out that nobody else knew.
The Teraport, in SM (or "tear-apart" as it was sometimes called derisively) at least had some continuity, by porting you through billions of microscopic wormholes. Whether that kills you or not, well, that's between you and Carl.
That's exactly how stargates work in the Stargate series (except for the bit where they could work like normal wormholes, but they've got a scanner/shredder/maker mechanism stuck in front of the wormhole for no apparent reason).
I don't think they ever duplicated anyone (with a stargate), but Teal'c('s data) once got stuck in the buffer. Technically nothing would prevent the gate from duplicating travelers, as long as it had enough energy and it could be prevented from flushing the buffer.
The Stargate ring transporters didn't distirybthe copy, they just fired the object out in a straight line inside hyperspace. Though the Asgard system properly did kill the original.
They did digitise the victim, sorry, “traveler”, send the data and mass through the wormhole, store the data in a buffer on the receiving gate (there might have also been a buffer for outgoing data in the sending gate, I'm not sure) and reconstitute a copy on its “event horizon” (which wasn't really an event horizon and actually turned out to have absolutely nothing to do with the wormhole, being instead the interface for the fax machine).
Teal'c (or rather data that could be reconstituted into a copy of Teal'c) once got stuck in the buffer, and Carter had to hack the gate so that it would create an “event horizon” without the actual wormhole, thus tricking the fax machine into reconstituting “Teal'c”, about two days later than it should have of it hadn't malfunctioned.
The ship of thesis is “the ship of thesis” because it is the ship that thesis is using. He could hop off a trireme and on to a “boston whaler” and it would be the ship of thesis.
Edit: you must live with me spelling sin. I will not alter time and reality to correct that which is.
How can you spell trireme correctly, but not Theseus
Quick question: Do you pronounce it as "gif" or "gif?"
Yes
Did you refer some meme I never heard of, of is that really how you thought "Theseus" was spelled?
I have a little voice in my head that says words and I guess how they are spelled based only on my phonix education in elementary school and my vaguely western New England/ upstate New York accent.
But have you like... Never read the name before?
shakes head in polyglot disbelief
I may have, but, it was stored as a phonetic sound with in my mind. I could try and transliterate it in to the couple other languages I am familiar with the phonetics of, but I suspect the same error would occur.
interesting how differently we people store information...
You ever read “Blind sight” by Peter Watts?
Really interesting hard sci-fi book about minds.
Not yet. Noted.
The Machine
I was thinking about IPoAC the other day and had a horrifying realisation of it's implications: teleporting someone will involve moving enough data to reconstitute an identical human being from the sending to the recieving teleporter, and assuming storage technology grows in a similar way, there will be a point where it's faster to be downloaded to a drive, strapped to a pigeon, and flown to your destination for reconstitution than it will be to wait for the data to transfer over.
You would also have to trust there is only one receiver, hackers would instantly try to break in any way they can to steal certain people's
Stargate has entered the chat
You are somehow assuming
Did you confuse this with the scenario of average bandwidth?
No, the assumptions are that it would be a static but massive amount of data and that transfer bandwidths grow slower than can keep up with storage volume, which is why there would be a point rather than multiple ones. At some point the bandwidth would outgrow the data and forever more be faster at the task than IPoAC.
You phrased that weirdly then. As if that point would be in the future, with an initial phase of transfer by radio.
Btw, that "IPoAC" could then easily be replaced by putting a human on a plane :p
It would be in the future, we haven't invented the means to either scan or reconstitute a human yet.
And sure, but we're talking about IPoAC, not sensible things.
The universe is a hologram, and our physical brain is just an antenna tuned to the higher dimension of consciousness. Your consciousness exists separately to your body, so if the transporter builds an exact copy of your body (and brain) you will just tune back in to your same consciousness when you're done transporting.
What drugs aren't you on? And can I come along?
Dmt probably, and youll have to ask the entities in the waiting room for that
No drugs- just look into holographic universe
Yeah, it's what's known as a conspiracy theory with zero evidence
What if the transporter makes an exact copy without destroying the original?
Then the copy gets a new consciousness but has all your memories.
Decoherence swiftly followed by complete cognitive collapse.
The universe is a poop and our physical brain is just a toilet plumped into the higher dimension of consciousness. Your consciousness sits inside of your body like diarrhea in a butt, so if the transporter flushes your consciousness down the doodoo shit pipe, you'll just fill it up again like toilet water.
Thanks Hugh
Interesting concept. There could be a sci fi story about the brains of two intelligent creatures on vastly distant planets whose brains happen to have the exact same tuning and are attached to the same consciousness, with full awareness of both lives. How they cope with this would be fascinating. On Earth they would probably be considered mentally ill. Or maybe the story is that this is fairly common and is what's really going on behind a lot of people's mental problems.
Well, Vulcans canonically have souls. Maybe everyone does?
Nope, that's just the Vulcans. Q thought it would be funny to give a species who focuses on logic something so illogical.
y'know, it is interesting how fear of teleporters is handled but never stigma against teleportees. this hypothetical star trek grandparent is very understanding, but in the early days of the technology i can imagine many people wouldn't be
Remember Enterprise (the show), and how the Teleporter was only for cargo due to its newness as a technology?.. but one episode they used it on people for an emergency and ended up with debris stuck in their bodies upon rematerialization?
Conspiracy theorists would have a field day
I used to think like that, but I have my doubts. Doesn't "Realm of Fear" show that you are conscious during the transfer process? So it's kinda like growing new brain synapses and starting to be conscious through them instead of old ones?
So the real dilemma here is if you believe in a spirit or after life. Essentially you wouldnt ever get where you were going. But you would.
Honestly, who's to say that somewhere in the infinity between every second consciousness doesnt jump from one location to another breaking the continuation of persistent matter.
This happens now to you every night. Your stream of consciousness ends forever and a new one is created upon waking.
Pleasant dreams
I totally agree with that rant!!
So does everybody else.
Aldebaran's great, okay,
Algol's pretty neat,
Betelgeuse's pretty girls,
Will knock you off your feet.
They'll do anything you like
Real fast and then real slow,
But if you have to take me apart to get me there
Then I don't want to go.
Take me apart, take me apart,
What a way to roam
And if you have to take me apart to get me there
I'd rather stay at home.
Sirius is paved with gold
So I've heard it said
By nuts who then go on to say
"See Tau before you're dead."
I'll gladly take the high road
Or even take the low,
But if you have to take me apart to get me there
Then I, for one, won't go.
Take me apart, take me apart,
You must be off your head,
And if you try to take me apart to get me there
I'll stay right here in bed.
Go Stick Your Head In A Pig
I teleported home last night with Ron and Sid and Meg
Ron stole Meggy's heart away and I got Sidney's leg.
Meanwhile Buddha: have I got some bad, but also good news for you...
I barelly trust a software auto-saving, there is no fucking way i am gonna trust a teleport machine
Every meal you eat becomes part of you. You are basically teleporting your way through time with the refrigerator.
Still a dystopian future without HSR.
I'd rather be killed and replaced with an exact copy than have to depend on commercial airlines and airports.
We'd argue over the Ship of Theseus every Christmas over replicator Turkey
Fun fact: if continuity's the only definition of self, then we die every single night, and a different person who thinks they're us awakes
People say this but I don't understand why. I don't think there's any reason to believe we meaningfully cease to be "continuous" while asleep, in fact we're not even unconscious when we sleep, our brain keeps processing stimuli, in parts of the cycle we dream, etcetera.
While sleep isn't the right thought experiment, think of cryogenics: it works for the wood frog, which can come back from being completely frozen solid, so there's no reason to believe that our consciousness can't be fully interrupted and resumed.
This isn't true. Dreaming is only during certain periods of the sleep cycle. Through many parts of the night, you are truly gone.
Which ones? I'm never truly gone still in my bed. And as someone who has died coming back from death is not the same as waking up. One I lost days of memory after being brought back, I don't loose days when I wake up every morning.
What do you mean? You're only dreaming during REM sleep. That's only part of the sleep cycle. And the loss of memory is irrelevant here. We're talking about continuity of consciousness and its implications from a philosophical perspective. We're not talking about your soul being out of your body or something.
At least I think that's what you're trying to say? Some of your grammar makes your comment difficult to parse.
Not entirely true. I've had dreams while asleep or heard things that really happened only to recall th em later when I awoke.
Sleep might represent a reduction in consciousness, but I'm still a stream do consciousness.
Then think about cryogenics. The wood frog can be frozen solid and come back to life by thawing, so there's nothing fundamentally preventing our existence from becoming discontinuous
Sometimes dreaming and sometimes recalling doesn't prove you always have a stream of consciousness. You have different sleep phases each night, some are entirely dream less. Large groups of your neurons sync up during NREM sleep, firing at the same time. I don't see how consciousness can survive becoming basically a pendulum. People awoken during NREM in studies usually say they weren't experiencing anything. Maybe they were and just didn't remember, we can't prove that, but it seems unlikely and it couldn't be much of an experience while most of your brain is busy flashing on and off again like a flickering lightbulb.
This doesn't mean much. You only dream during REM sleep, one phase of your sleep cycle. But there are periods during every night where the lights are off and there's nobody home.
When your brain is always active during sleep.
No it isn't. You're only dreaming during REM sleep. This is like, sleep cycle 101 here. The periods of deep sleep where your brain is doing its deep repair work? Your consciousness is not just reduced, but absent entirely. During slow-wave sleep, you have no awareness. The reason you haven't noticed these while you are sleeping is because you cannot be aware of your own periods where you completely lack awareness.
Just as you said, that depends on definition. And since we know jack shit about how conciousness works all of those definitions (minus one) will be flawed. Going by some definitions that include this, you could say you die every second. I had restless nights thinking about this and the only conclusion I came to is that it's ironically not worth losing sleep over this, because if this is true then one you can't do anything about it two you won't even notice it. Alternatively this is a flawed perspective and you are just overthinking something that isn't even true.
there is true teleportation, dimensional teleporting(in TNG there was one race that had it, but it damages them permanently) but federation never had that kind of technology. which doesnt "disitengrate you"
It still kinda fucks with me that they showed a transporter Cronenberg in TMP of all places, the first movie, these people rode around on a 5 year mission with some goofy malfunctions sure, but they trusted that transporter to use it constantly, just to watch some dude get slimed
Teleporting will be so expensive and energy intensive that only billionaires will do it. It will be orders of magnitude more disruptive to the environment than private jets. You won't have the luxury to worry about your molcules.
Somehow I'm more scared of a holodeck, I don't mean getting hurt by falling from somewhere or shot in a novel with failing safety protocols, I mean clipping bug on a wall and getting sliced in half by the force field.
Why even bother going to visit? They are just copies of copies anyway.
This articulates a very strong opinion I've had for most of my life. My top three fears have always been: zombies, whales, and teleportation.
I mean every other thing in life is now just a digital representation of life, why not life. Ascend us damn it.
Please, Grandpa. Its a portal. Its open. I am looking at you. Just step through. There is no deconstruction.
Given how much real Boomers took to ai slop, they probably wouldn't think that deeply about being killed and copied constantly.
I'm not sure 'kill' is the correct word here. It seems to me that your conscience (aka: "you") is being sent around to various places while the body (aka: the last 20 years of groceries) is merely being reused to recreate some other person. That's the way I see it anyway.
i would like to point your attention to
Nerve cells do not get replaced or renewed that easily. Everything else is a support system for that.
Nope right out! I'm walking, or riding a horse, donkey, or ox.
Planning on joining the FBI I see
Rude.
You die and are sent to hell and there's 1000s of copies of you there too.
You mean I don’t have to be conscious anymore? And that a con?
... why not a spaceship.
only seconds slower than destroying yourself where you were and re-creating yourself where your copy goes.
I mean, yeah, it probably would do that. Unless it works like the universe where they're called transporters.
Murdock? That you Reg?
Fuck that. As long as my memories and sense of self get carried over, I'm still me. And If I get transporter cloned, I'm two mes!
There's this thought experiment: think about delayed "scrapping" in the sender. Let's say by a minute? You'd have time to talk to yourself over a video call, then what are you going to think about "it's still me" when your copy walks away and you are about to be zapped?
It's a persistent sense of self and there's no pain or anything, so fine.
I think you missed the point of the thought experiment. How can you have a persistent sense of self with two bodies in remote locations?
They both have their own sense of self. By the time they fork, they're no longer the same individual (but very similar) and it doesn't matter which one gets destroyed: the bad part is the loss of the last copy of a personality, not a copy.
I wrote about this topic! And I don't think my outlook is dark; I just think you're wrong about “continuity” playing any role at all!
https://phil.red/blog/2025/9/5/identity-illusion
What if the original version of you did suffer?
Sucks to be them I guess, but they're not me anymore.
Then that's entirely different, and I would wonder why the technology was developed at all!
Knowing humans, each one would think "Wait, you're zapping the wrong one!"
Isn't there a variation of this with an evil shapeshifter captain Kirk fighting real Kirk, where the real Kirk eventually tells Spock to "shoot both of us" and then Spock shoots the other, saying "this is how I knew it was you"?
I mean, there's the goatee universe, but that's different.
And then they begin to diverge in to two separate people, who are distinct individuals, but still both you.
It’s not that complicated. So long as you don’t start imagining metaphysical hallucinations like “souls” because people want to pretend the “after life” is a thing because they’re scared of no longer being.
Yeah, they'd become more of a sibling as time goes on.
If there WERE a soul, well, that soul would get replicated, too!
We can't prove conscious entities do or don't have souls. Asserting we don't, as if it's some kind of self-evident fact, is as arrogant as religious people asserting that we do.
Present me a rigorous definition of the concept, then a coherent evidence based argument for why we should even consider the concept as a potential, and then a series of experiments to prove or disprove the concept.
I will be chatting with the invisible, immaterial and mute elephant that lives in my living room until you do.
That entire statement is predicated on the assumption that everything about the universe, how it came to be, etc., is directly observable from within the universe, which we also cannot know with any certainty.
But I don't have to, you're the one who made the claim that we assuredly don't have souls, so prove it yourself.
This is the only way that makes sense to approach it. Either it is and there's an objective truth and consistency to reality, or it isn't and there's literally infinite possibilities so any single possibility is infinitely unlikely and there's no reason to assume any of them are valid.
Where did I say there's no objective truth to the universe? Say I drew some pictures on small pieces of paper and arranged them adjacent to each other on a table, and then placed my hand flat on the table, then invited you to look. You can see pictures on the table, I then ask you whether there are any pictures under my hand. You (should) answer that you don't know. You not knowing whether there are pictures under my hand or not does nor change the objective truth of their existence. The hand represents what we don't know about the universe, and you (at least currently) don't have the technology to lift it.
An assertion that something does not exist does not need to be proven, since it is inherently a challenge to someone else’s assertion to something existing.
A negative can not be proven, if someone wishes to insist that a concept be considered, the burden of evidence fall upon them.
That's quite an oversimplification. What you're really asserting is that sentience has no part which is very difficult if not impossible to directly measure. You can throw your hands in the air and pretend you've not made any such claim, but you have. It's bizarre how many atheists display the same levels of dogmatism and fervour as their religious counterparts.
P.S. pretty odd that you felt the need to condescendingly imply I'd think talking to some kind of ghost elephant is equally plausible as not knowing the entire nature of the universe.
So… you define the concept of soul as being comparable with sentience?
Do you mean sentience or sapience?
Poor etiquette to significantly edit your comment without noting so, especially after it's already received a reply.
Point to the comment made before my edit. I clarified my comment after posting it, no comment was made prior to my edit.
There may have been one I did not see. As is the nature of federate platforms and de-federated instances. Or, perhaps even, a comment from someone I blocked previously.
The elephant crap was not in the original comment. That's not just a typo, mate. If you're incapable of admitting something so trivial, and deflect by bringing up previously blocking people, like that has anything to with it, you're certainly not worth any more of my time.
Russell's teapot. You can't prove the non-existence of literally infinite things, yet you probably assume that they don't exist.
The burden of proof is on the one claiming that something exists.
I know about the teapot, and it seems you've also missed the point. Did you not notice where I said it was as arrogant to claim we do have souls as fact?
We know we have consciousness, that's not a far-fetched untestable thing like a microscopic teapot in orbit. You accept that you have it as true, but it's basically impossible to prove, because how would an unconscious biological machine that reacts to all physical stimuli the same as a human be any different from a conscious one? We lack an explanation for why biological machines give rise to consciousness and why the universe is aware of itself. That's not an extraordinary claim. Why does awareness exist at all? Why does the universe not do everything it does now without being aware?
I recommend reading Blindsight. One of the few novels that actually changed the way I think (in this case about consciousness)
And yeah, it's real in the same sense as a sense of smell is real. It's just a byproduct of how our brains work. Copy the brain, copy the consciousness.
The belief that it's a byproduct of the physics of our brains is just that, a belief. It's not provable even if we both think it's the most likely cause.
I think knowing about drugs able to cause ego death, we're already close to a proof. Like, if it can be temporarily disabled without long term effects, what else can it be than a feeling.
I think we can only get closer if we understand the human brain much better than we do.
The philosophical discussions in this thread remind me of Staying Alive (not the song).
Unless you got some space-time warping wormhole shenanigans to keep my being continous as I teleport, no frickin way!
Sounds like relief, honestly. And a fresh start for clone me.
I wrote a blog post about this: https://phil.red/blog/2025/9/5/identity-illusion
I agree with them on the principle that ST teleportation works like that. that's because teleporters and replicators are based on the same architecture and technology out of simplicity.
IRL, it's probably more likely going to be based on quantum entanglement in a controlled environment. meaning you will exist once in the entire known universe, but parts of you may exist in multiple locations simultaneously until they are not. this would be observed as no different than your current existence except for the potential to be scattered across the entire universe at a quantum level.
What beneficial role would quantum entanglement possibly play in teleporting a human?
I think they just thought using a smart expression they don't understand would make people perceive them as smart?
Which is basically how all the Trek productions ever have managed the Treknobabble explanations for imaginary technology.
or maybe I just wanted to shit on your day like the big fat asshole I am.
if we were able to develop a way to move matter, at the quantum level, through particles that are entangled it would essentially be teleportation. there's so many other obstacles in the way of that first though. the first big issue, how do you send matter in a quantum state and disregard all other matter that isn't supposed to be sent?
I'm still not understanding what about that quotation leads you to think moving matter "at the quantum level" leads to teleportation.
for a second there I thought I had accidentally posted to a science community. then I realized this is a meme community.
Imagine my relief when I came to the realization that you're probably some fat neck bearded armchair "quantum physicist" that's just trying to get a rise out of a "normie".
don't take science that has yet to be invented so serious. I'm not writing a thesis or scientific proof on it, and especially not on a meme board.
Because they're not killed, it's literally covered by multiple episodes, they're streaming and aware the whole time.
There's even a episode where someone's awareness is stuck in the buffer after their body is destroyed
You kind of defeated yourself here
If everyone around you is already only a copy of a copy, what use are you being the original?
Are you a movie executive by chance?
have the kids ask the grandparent if they voted trump. if so, which it probably is. just means the grandparent is nothing more then a moron with nothing but nonsense and lies for their arguments.
Y'know how there's the DS9 episode of the sniper who teleports bullets? Yea, I would transport my penis into people then beam it back. The medicine will be there, so it will be like some invertebrates who can rip off their penis so the female can use it to impregnate herself. It's just the obvious move to make moving into the future, obviously.