Sorry about that ridiculous watermark.
The fact that two Rikers existed is all the proof I need to be full Luddite. Save your death machines for the next person, thanks!
And they treat the one on the planet like he’s a copy when he’d logically be the original with the one on the Enterprise being the duplicate.
They are both copies. They explain that the guy operating the transporter was losing him, so he used a second beam to try to compensate. On beam made it through, the other bounced off the st uff in the atmosphere that was causing the problem and rematerialized him on the planet. I’m pretty sure this explanation was in the episode in order to establish that both Rikers are equally real.
Except that that explanation means Tom was made with the original Riker materials and Will was made from matter reserves on the ship using the original Riker as a template.
Ship of Theseus
No, USS Enterprise NCC 1701-D. But I can see why that would be confusing.
Both beams were pulling in genuine Will Riker. Presumably they are both a mix of the original material and additional material formed by the transporter. That or the transporter is violating the law of conservation of energy.
I think that makes both Rikers equally fake, not real.
Equally fake and equally real are the same thing.
Equally fake and equally real are equal?
Beg to differ.
The Queen gives birth to twin boys. It’s a stormy night and the midwife isn’t sure which is older. They are equally the ‘real’ king.
Two counterfeit dollar bills are equally fake.
This is a semantics argument. The way the person you’re talking to means it, two things being equally fake also means that they’re equally real, because they are both just as real as the other (that is, not).
If one counterfeit dollar buys a soda, does it matter who’s king?
This one Trinitys
i always felt that it was wrong that they gave the riker that got out a promotion; but wouldn’t do the same thing for the riker that didn’t get out even though he was the one who paid the price for his heroism while the other riker simply got lucky and both did the same thing that earned that promotion.
Well shoot! I’d never thought about that and now I’m mad!
Give Tom Riker his promotion!
This is why I want monsters Inc style linked door-wormholes. It’s less… Reconstituted flesh.
Less room for duplicates, more room for halfsies I guess
I’ll take the small chance of being cut in half over the guaranteed murder box, thanks.
Good news, I’m pretty sure holes in reality are more likely than the reconstitution beam.
I hear the testers for those get cake.
With mint frosting
Or Portal’s… well, portals.
That’s the Iconian gateway system, and it’s pretty boss.
Existential Comics’ “The Machine” feels highly relevant here
That comic really came out with a banger on day 1
Damn right, goes hard!
I am neither an emergent property nor atoms, I simply am…
I personally never took much seriousness in the whole “What if your bed is a death machine!?!” idea
There’s too much continuity for that to make sense, I mean, I remember most of my dreams, so I can basically account for everything… And many of my dreams are effected by outside stimuli…
Yeah, the comic’s story and message are beautiful, but the “sleep kills you” argument is poorly thought out, and based on a shallow understanding of what continuity actually means. It’s not about consciousness, it’s about continuity. The processes in the brain that make up your mind don’t stop as soon as you fall asleep.
There’s an argument to be made about how you’re never the same person that you were even just a moment ago, because you’re constantly changing. That’s also shallow and lazy, and ignores the continuity we’re talking about.
There’s an argument to be made that from your perspective, continuity isn’t broken. That’s also shallow and lazy, because it treats the perception of continuity as if it’s the same thing as real continuity. As far as your clone is concerned, continuity wasn’t broken. But I was never worried about whether my clone will die when I go in the teleporter, you know?
We don’t even know that the brain makes the mind, it could easily be the other way around.
No, we do know that the brain makes the mind. Physical changes to the brain can make predictable changes to the mind, but your thoughts don’t change the structure of your brain.
While your first point is true, your second is not. It’s actually been found that if you change the way you think about stuff, your brain actually changes. It’s this little thing called neuroplasticity and it’s fucking wild. - https://www.healthline.com/health/rewiring-your-brain
We’ve also observed intelligence and seeming awareness from things like fungus, which don’t even have brains.
Yeah, I’m aware of that. Vasanas are a related topic. But these are results of physical interactions between neurons in your brain. There’s nothing nonphysical about your mind that creates or alters matter supernaturally. My point stands, the mind is, as far as a naturalistic philosophy is concerned, an emergent property of complex interactions in the brain.
If my thought moved the neurons as opposed to my neurons making the thought as demonstrated by neuroplasticity, than the brain cannot be the origin.
There are parts of your sleep that you’re basically unconscious and nearly impossible to wake.
The dreams could be a whole life being uploaded to your brain, hence the weirdness, until it’s initialized and you wake up.
A whole life uploaded from… where?
From them of course! :D
Everyone remembers his irascibility in the film but ignores that, for the three original years, he transported without complaint in nearly every episode. And it was a reliable, proven technology that apparently only got worse and more twitchy a couple of decades later.
About the time O’Brien was born.
The plot thickens
Plenty of folks become more irascible as they age. It’s one thing to do something under orders when you’re young, and quite another thing to do them when you’re retired.
Also, he would have seen more and more incidents as time went on
“In other words: They DRAFTED me!”
Maybe it was kind of like getting B. A. Baracus into a helicopter- they had to drug him first.
Yeah, but once you think it you can’t get it out of your head.
I’m going through another cycle of binging EVERYTHING. Yes he did transport regularly, but he also certainly complained about it multiple times. Orders are orders in the end. Sometimes the hardest part of keeping a job is bottling up and repressing all those little existential horrors.
I think I’ve explained this too many times to do it again, but: teleportation doesn’t have to be “destroy and reconstitute” any more than going through a door necessitates killing you and reconstituting you on the other side of the door. The key is establishing continuity of your mind across the intervening space, which is mostly an engineering problem.
Star Trek transporters are “destroy and reconstitute” though. They are explicitly described as such. The whole Thomas Riker situation even requires it to be the case.
Star Trek just throws all its rules out from one episode to the next. The Star Trek franchise is the McDonalds of sci-fi; you don’t choose it because it’s good, you choose it because it’s available.
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I think we are still in the realm of a physics problem for teleportation lol
Fusion is an engineering problem. the sun does it. We’ve done it. We just suck at it.
Teleporting is not possible as far as we know …unless I missed something huge in science news
It’s not all that different to a fax machine, the way it’s described in st.
You just need to be able to accurately scan and place atoms to achieve the ‘teleportation’ being discussed here.
Thinking about it even that is probably not possible, as you’d need to know both the position and momentum and state of every sub atomic particle in the body.
It’s definitely not because the more you know about an electrons position, the less you know about it’s speed and vice versa.
Heisenberg compensators are Star Trek’s answer to that. It’s physically impossible to do that in the real world, but in Star Trek they’ve figured it out
For sure. I wish they would’ve given that to us instead of the molecule in that movie about the whale. (Sorry I’m not well versed on star trek
I felt like they hinted in some episodes that there was some rule of nature they were exploiting to get it to work. Like imagine trying to tell someone in the 11th century that humans made machines that can fly, they imagine some mechanical thing flapping wings. They imagine it because they don’t know what air does when it passes over a fast moving surface. It isn’t like the transporter really stores your pattern down to every particle, there was something that they found that made it a lot easier problem to solve.
Yeah someone mentioned the Heisenberg compensators to me in a different comment and I’m betting that’s what you are referring to.
Does quantum entanglement count? Probably depends on your definition of “teleportation”, I’d assume.
No, unfortunately. the closest we’ve come with that is proving that the universe isn’t locally real. Three physicists just won the nobel prize for proving it. Which is mind boggling in it’s own right
The real problem with all of this is that people can’t get away from the idea of a soul. Something intangible unmeasurable that is really “us” riding around in a meat-robot. It’s hard for people (me included) to realize that the meat packaging is all that we are. If you destroy My body and recreate it, nothing will have been lost. The continuity within the meat computer in my head is all that I am. There is no “me” outside of that… And that’s a really hard concept to accept and internalize.
If you destroy My body and recreate it, nothing will have been lost. The continuity within the meat computer in my head is all that I am.
If you perfectly recreate your body without destroying the original, the original doesn’t start seeing and hearing through the clone. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, there’s no difference between the you that steps into the transporter and the you that steps out of it, but you do actually die when you’re “transported.” You don’t get to see what’s on the other side of the transporter, another being that shares your exact memories does.
I dunno even if there is no you in a metaphysical sense the deconstruction method still ends your personal subjective experience of being you which sucks. Sure the next you might be just as much you as the first one but you don’t get to be around to enjoy that.
I dunno even if there is no you in a metaphysical sense the deconstruction method still ends your personal subjective experience of being you which sucks. Sure the next you might be just as much you as the first one but you don’t get to be around to enjoy that.
But it doesn’t and that’s the point. You are not the collection of atoms that make up your body, YOU are the software program that is running on your brain-computer. The software program can be transferred (or copied) and you are still you. There is no “you” outside of that software.
Your idea of what constitutes “you” Is wrong. Your subjective experience ends when you get dismantled. We can say this definitively, because when the transporter fails to dismantle the original, they don’t get to see through their copy’s eyes. If they don’t get to see what the transporter clone sees when both are alive, then it stands to reason that if they get dismantled, they still don’t get to see what their clone sees. Their subjective experience ends.
I disagree with you, but I don’t know that I can explain it anymore clearly than I already have. There is no metaphysical “you” that exists outside of the software running in your head. You would experience perfect continuity if your body was dismantled and reconstructed. There is no real “you” except the software program that is running on your meat CPU.
Like I said, this is a hard thing to wrap your head around.
There is no metaphysical “you” that exists outside of the software running in your head.
100% agreed.
You would experience perfect continuity if your body was dismantled and reconstructed.
I’m going to explain it a different way.
This is Bill.
🕺⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
I’m going to transport Bill over here.
☁️⬜⬜⬜⬜🕺
That’s still the same Bill, right? There’s continuity?
Now I’m going to do a Tom Riker, and unsuccessfully transport Bill.
🕺⬜⬜⬜⬜🕺
Which one is the real Bill?
If I’m understanding your argument right, you seem to think both of these are Bill. Which they are, but they’re not the same Bill. Despite both of them subjectively feeling a sense of continuity, only Left Bill has existed for more than a few seconds. If I correct my mistake by shooting Left Bill in the head, his subjective experience of being Bill is over. If I never made the mistake, and successfully dismantled him, the same would occur. For him, continuity is not maintained through the transporter.
I was never concerned with whether the me that steps out of the transporter experiences continuity. I’m only concerned with whether the me that exists right now does.
You understand me correctly and correctly predicted my response. Your last paragraph is the interesting part however.
Imagine you have an AI. It’s a fully functional self aware AI. Let’s call this software “Bob”. From one instance to the next, this software is just memory and processing inside a computer. It is aware of it’s place in the universe to the same extent we are. Let’s say you pause the CPU. Did you just kill the AI? Of course not. Now lets say you make a perfect copy of the AI on two separate computers in two separate locations. The AI asks me “which one is the ‘real’ me?” My answer is their both the “real you,” but one moment they start processing independently, they’re now two different individuals that deviate from the moment of the copy.
Now lets say you change a stick of memory in the original AI, is that the same entity? If you unplug the memory cards and fly them to another location and plug them back in, is that the same entity? If you FTP the entity from California to Germany and install it on another machine, is that the same entity? It’s all the same answer as making a copy.
We humans are only the sum of the software in our heads. There is no real us, only the code executing line by line in our biological processor. That’s why there is no “real you” in this discussion, only software, and the person on the other side of the transporter is just as much the real you as the copy that’s destroyed. You are just a self-aware program.
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But the mind does not have continuity. You mind ends and a new copy starts and thinks it has continuity.
Have you ever gone slept?
Yes? How does that break continuity in your mind? You go “unconscious,” but the chemical reactions that make up your mind are still going
Does it matter? If so, why?
I’m confused here. No, it doesn’t matter that I’ve gone to sleep. I don’t have a new mind when I wake up.
How can you tell if it is the old mind of a new mind with the memories of the old one?
Because the process of chemical reactions in my brain never stopped. I suppose if, without my knowledge, I was killed and replaced with a clone that has all my memories, there would be no way for me to tell, but the sleeping isn’t what kills me there
Right so why does a gap matter?
There’s no gap in continuity when I’m asleep. The chemical processes comprising my mind don’t stop. The mind is a process of chemical reactions, regardless of whether it’s conscious at any given time. My mind Is my mind regardless of whether it’s aware of its surroundings at any given time. If the product of the physical interactions between the neurons in my brain.
I would be hesitant to get on a teleporter even if they were proven “safe”. It could be possible that from my point of view, that’ll be the last thing I ever see. But from everyone else’s point of view Im alive and I walked out the other end without breaking a sweat. But this is a different instance of “me”. From my point of view, would I be “dead” forever or would I be able to witness myself going out for drinks later that day?
Maybe it turns out that if you make an exact backup of a brain, reconstruct and restore the biologic equivalent of ram and system registers back to their original state (sort of how operating systems do multitasking), then it all works out. But maybe turning the brain completely off or whatever is enough to put the “system” in an “off” state and when it restarts, it’ll be a new instance. Maybe you don’t remember the part where you stopped existing so it doesn’t matter.
Really makes you wonder if humans had a soul and an afterlife what exactly happens when the last copy of you finally dies naturally.
Like you go to heaven and meet some version of you that lived for a fifteen minute coffee run, and boy is he missed that from his perspective he died at 19 years old because you just had to beam down and try the new Starbucks drink. All the other teleported yous are there.
Shit what about your spouse? There could be like 900 of you but only 400 of her. Now you all have to spend eternity together.
Putting aside the whole problems with maintaining continuity in a civilization that laughs at all the problems of FTL and relativity why is continuity important?
Because I want to see where I’m going, and if my consciousness ends, I don’t get to see it
I just don’t understand why a gap matters. I had to get knocked out for surgery once and I woke up the same person, sans appendix.
This is why I hate using the word consciousness in these debates. It’s too ill defined, and isn’t really what I mean anyway. The process of chemical reactions in my brain is my mind, regardless of whether it’s aware of any external stimuli.
It’s also irrelevant to the discussion about teleportation. Whether or not you’re the same person after you’ve gone to sleep and woken up is debatable, but whether or not the person who steps into the transporter is the person that steps out of a transporter isn’t. Like I’ve said too many times in this thread, if you step into the transporter and it fails to dismantle you when it creates your copy, you and your copy are two distinct individuals. You don’t get to see through your copy’s eyes. So when the one who stepped into the transporter dies, that individual’s subjective experience ends. This is the same whether they die before the copy is made, as the copy is made, or after the copy is made. They never get to see the other side of the transporter.
For the iteration who came out the other side of the transporter, this is a meaningless distinction. But for the iteration who stepped into the transporter, the distinction is quite literally life and death.
and woken up is debatable,
Tell my creditors that
Typical McCoy. Calls turbolifts elevators and transporters teleporters.
“Old man yells at matter stream.”
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Hyperion suggests that you do not think about the fact that this is only a digital reconstruction of your original body, which died the first time you respawned. Do NOT think about this!
I still can’t believe we are this many years out from ebaumsworld and still people are putting fucking watermarks on memes.
I get watermarking with your username, or if the platform automatically adds a small one (ifunny), but holy cow this is covering like 1/4 of the text
Not only that, but they‘re also literal bombs. Remember E=mc^2? With a technology capable of converting 100% of matter into usable energy, you‘d have a pretty scary bomb bomb.
And yet, on the list of bomb bombs Star Trek has given us, it’s pretty far down there. I mean, wanna talk about WMDs? Look up Genesis or Generations. Those fuckers are un-nuking stars and collapsing nebulae because why not.
I think McCoy was more afraid of accidents than existential factors.
Doesn’t it Galileo’s transporter you?
…takes the you matter and dissolves it into a stream of particles which are reassembled in a different location, so when transport is 50% done, you’re in two places at once (whilst the “plan” for you is in the pattern buffer, don’t know where the matter is exactly)… i mean, it forms you into a beam of molecules right? Beams you up.
At one point there’s a Barkley episode and he seems conscious for most of the process, just in a kind of super position.
After the half way point, there’s more “you” in the destination than in the original location…so who are you? Where are you?
Then again, we know that accidents and reflections can be produced… So maybe I’m wrong and new matter/particles are being introduced otherwise how would Tom Riker exist…
…I mean, after all, Tuvix wasn’t twice as dense as your average crew member.
Anyways, Dr. Polaski supposedly has McCoy’s attitude towards transporters. However I think even she gave in here and there, as did McCoy.
Some wild-card ideas to think about here are this:
What we’re afraid of is losing continuity of conscious experience, so a transporter brings to mind the concept of just making a copy who has your memories and thus does not share your qualia or experience of life. But we don’t even know what retains that continuity to begin with. We have no idea why you seem to be the same person you were last year when most of your atoms have changed. We don’t know why you’re the same person when you’re put under anesthesia… and in fact, you might not be. It may very well be that every time you are put under general anesthesia, a new consciousness emerges inside your brain, with the feeling like they’ve always lived in that brain with those memories.
Now step that back again. What about sleep? Can you prove you’re the same consciousness that existed yesterday or before your last nap when consciousness was turned off and back on again?
Basically, we don’t know what happens when consciousness turns off for any reason and why it comes back seeming to pick right up where it left off, but there are also a lot of people who say maybe it doesn’t turn back on. And in fact, it can even be scaled up again… can you prove you’re the same continuous entity that was aware of the universe a moment ago? What even IS a continual experience? Can it exist without memory?
If the brain just creates a story for our consciousness to make sense of the universe and can create and invent stories and filter things from your senses, how sure are we that there even IS a continual conscious experience? Your brain could be tricking you at every moment, there might not even BE such thing as consciousness ending, maybe when you “die” you immediately occupy the next most-probable configuration. And maybe this also can be tied to the new research that says if you could scan every particle that makes up a human body and recreate it, it would necessarily destroy the old copy, because the more you know about one property of a particle, the less you know about the other. The more you know where they are, the less you know about where they’re going.
A lot of maybes here for a technology that may never exist in any capacity, but it’s a great insight into how inexplicable the universe and our experience of it really is.
Good use of the Heisenberg Uncertainty principal of quantum mechanics near the end of your comment (the more we can know about speed, the less we can know about position)… And of course it’s always fun to see the word qualia being used.
Personally I think we’re a meat glitch. That is to say, the survival of our biology is aided by having predictive models of threats, pattern seeking and problem solving capacities (what to do about such threats), and some sense of mappable logic/reason (which solutions are best), all of which requires coordination (a story to help make choices)… But we’re essentially a meat glitch.
This internal illusion of possessing consciousness may have evolved in order to aid long term survival, and perhaps to reproduce and do the other things life forms do… I think Data and Dr. Crusher discuss the definition of life at some point, detailing the requisite processes… Having an identity isn’t listed as one.
I believe it’s been theorised that some species seem to act more as hives, there have even been some examples of humans being able to act in hive like ways. The technologist Kevin Kelly wrote about some of this in the 90s giving an example where a crowd could hold up a red or green sided paddle to play a game of ping pong on a big screen… One side of the room vs the other… Green paddles being a way to beckon the on-screen paddle to that location. The game was playable and seemingly coordinated just by having the feedback loop of the screen and the crowd, that was enough to create an overwhelming sense of shared willful and purposeful behaviour.
Most of us place our identity within ourselves as individuals, some learn to place it within their families. Richard Dawkins seems to believe it’s actually at the level of the genes (makes that case in his book the selfish gene)… But the fact that we can to some degree place identity in different ways and locations suggests something of its unreality… Of course whose in control of that, and whether shifting it can be willful and comfortable, let alone controlled by a transporter chief is another question.
can you prove you’re the same continuous entity that was aware of the universe a moment ago?
I certainly don’t feel like the person from 20 years ago whose memories I hold. It seems like a completely different person lived those experiences. I know him, but I do not feel like him. Too much has changed about my personality, my body, and my life.
My hot take of the day is that sleep is not truly unconsciousness, because you’re still to some extent aware of your surroundings. If you weren’t, then you wouldn’t react to light, or alarm clocks, or cold water on your face, or any number of other external stimuli
My second hot take of the day is that Last Thursdayism is a fun idea, but is disruptive to actual conversations about reality
I don’t think Last Thursdayism is a truly valid model of reality because it’s also deeply rooted in our own ideas of causality and consciousness. But it’s an important tool for attacking the real question which you touch on here, which is what exactly IS consciousness, if you can be unconscious and woken up by an alarm clock, even if you’re not dreaming or experiencing anything at all, how tf does that work? What parts of consciousness actually make up our sense of awareness and being alive? Is there wiggle-room? There are conjoined twins who can “travel” in each other’s brains, does that mean consciousness is a distinct “thing” almost like a soul? Or is that also a trick by the brain to preserve continuity? And if so, why? Why does the brain need to simulate the experience of being a singular entity even when presented with an alternative? What happens if we start attaching upgrades and RAM chips to our brains and slowly start spending more of our conscious thought in those upgraded regions, and start Ship of Theseus’ing our brains? When can we let go of biology and would that interrupt the conscious experience if you do it very slowly?
We have far more questions than answers, and my point is that we don’t know enough about our conscious experience to define what it is and how to preserve it. We might be missing something really huge about the universe that is just simply being edited out of our perceptions by a brain designed to survive animals and weather and to only present us with information to that end.
But if that’s how it works, how can we account for the duplication scenarios? The matter for the duplicate would have to come from somewhere. I think it’s more likely to be that the information for construction is trasmitted, especially with how often they use the concept of the tranportation buffer. But they dont ever specify I dont think so it’s all speculation
Matter is energy. You’d turn energy into matter.
But that doesn’t account for the transporter clones. You can’t make two men out of the matter/energy of one
The problem is we’re taking about something that’s physically impossible in our universe. So at some point it breaks down…
That’s why they have a magical device called a Heisenberg compensator. To remove quantum effects from the universe…which is obviously impossible.
The point in question is whether the matter/energy is directly transported and used to reconstitute someone, or if the information for reconstitution is transmitted and local matter used to reconstitute the thing being transported. A “ship of theseus”-esque query
“But what if it kills you, but no one can tell?”
this is pascal’s wager for nerds
Pascal’s wager argues that if there are 2 different and non provable outcomes to a belief, you should believe the one that has better consequences for you.
In this case there are no divine consequences of being destroyed and reassembled in another location.
This is probably more of a ship of Theseus question.
-A man can’t step into the same teleporter twice.
Proverbs for the 24th century
The point of Pascal’s wager is how non provable beliefs can’t be logically reasoned one way or the other. Like how there is no objective original and duplicate ship of theseus.
People arguing over the danger of the transporter is a lot like trying to reason any unsolvable paradox, and especially like arguing over having faith. Better than roko’s basilisk, though, that’s pascal’s wager for scuzzy tools.
Assuming the first time is voluntary there’s potentially divine consequences to suicide.
Me with brain chip implants, especially those with non-libre software
All that could have been avoided by having a drop pod launched to the surface containing a mechanical avatar. The crew member just sits down in a chair to remotely control the avatar using an FTL link for instant control. Of course the avatar has a hologram projector so it looks exactly like the crew member. But that would be too safe and not dramatic enough.
That would make for an interesting story concept. It’d be cool to see the avatar, after exposure to various people occupying their body, begin to form it’s own consciousness with shared traits.
This is almost the plot of a doctor who episode
Right, the goo people. I knew the idea had to come from somewhere.
Ohh man! You’re right!
I completely forgot about that episode.
I don’t know why, but I feel like I’ve seen/read something similar to what you proposed… maybe because of ‘The Island’ to a degree?
I agree though, it would be a fascinating story for sure.
Was a central aspect of the story in Xenoblade Chronicles X.
Isn’t this Dollhouse?
Not quite. The avatar being used is a blank slate, whereas in Dollhouse they added personalities over the existing minds. What you’ve suggested is more akin to what the hirogen did on Voyager.
Something went really wrong with computers after humans for warp. That’s why you can break any evil one by acting crazy or telling it to calculate pi. Also why Data doesn’t just wifi.
That’s kinda how a piece of technology in Dark Matter works! Not the new show, the one that came out in 2015.
McCoy is a doctor, not an engineer
