• GreenTeaRedFlag [any]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    If you stepped through a time-travel portal, your conscience would effectively not exist between the original time and the time the portal leads to, yet no one would call you dead. If you could somehow install your mind into a new body, let’s say you download it into a flashdrive and plug it into someone else’s brain while your original body lays without a mind, people may call our body dead but not you. So when there is a continuity of self between the person who steps inot the teleporter and the person who steps out, I will never call that a death, that’s silly.

    • figaro@lemdro.id
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      1 year ago

      Downloading to a flash drive - I don’t think this is actually transferring consciousness. Flash drives are just copies.

      To survive the process, you would have to initially be plugged into something that is capable of acting as a full extension of your brain. You would then become simultaneously “one” with the device, as well as your current brain. Then somehow, your current brain functions would need to cease working, and you would be fully reliant on the new “brain.”

      From there, that process in reverse would bring you to a new body.

  • SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.net
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    1 year ago

    There was an episode of The Outer Limits (7x08 Think Like a Dinosaur) that dealt with this exact question.

    In that episode, humans are maybe-given a teleportation tech that creates a perfect copy somewhere else, but the aliens need to trust that we will ‘balance the equation’ (destroy the original) every time. That’s easy when the human in question is immobilized for transfer. Only one transfer goes wrong- the person being transferred is woken up before the transfer is confirmed, and then the transfer gets confirmed. So now you have the original human, who’s already been copied, and the transfer operator still has to ‘balance the equation’…

  • Tofu_Lewis [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Okaaaay, just because you’ve brought it up…

    Transporters in Star Trek are shown to definitely not be duplication machines. “Our Man Bashir” (DS9) is probably the most definitive proof of that.

    Personally, I think transporter technology explains the staunch atheist (but still open-minded and sometimes spiritualist) Federation mindset: they know that their entire being can be reduced to a matter/energy stream. The transporter makes a devastating philosophical challenge to the idea of a “soul.” Which is, ironically, why so many Federation officers refuse to accept anything that challenges that assumption (VOY “Sacred Ground”).