You know those sci-fi teleporters like in Star Trek where you disappear from one location then instantaneously reappear in another location? Do you trust that they are safe to use?
To fully understand my question, you need to understand the safety concerns regarding teleporters as explained in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQHBAdShgYI
spoiler
I wouldn’t, because the person that reappears aint me, its a fucking clone. Teleporters are murder machines. Star Trek is a silent massacre!
If it opens a spacetime tunnel and I cross it with all my original atoms, yes.
If it disintegrates me to 3d print a copy on the other side, no.
Stargate yes, Star Trek no.
Only if there is a DHD on both sides. I don’t want some in-house built crap that ignores the failsafes that the original builders put in place
Even then, you have pretty much no way of knowing if there’s an iris. So it’s all fun and games until SLAM, all your atoms gets squished into metal.
The Iris always seemed like a bad idea to me, what if the sg team lost their code thing and had to leave a planet in am emergency?
That’s why they were military…KIA
is star trek really clone rather than teleport? I haven’t really watched much of it (only like 3 or 4 seasons).
The general idea is a teleporter rips you apart and the atoms go to the destination to be reassembled in the previous state.
Whether or not it kills you is speculation. Arguably you’re pretty dead if you’re ripped apart atom by atom, and then a clone is assembled using the same parts.
But I don’t think it’s answerable if the recreated “you” is a clone or not until people can figure out what the mind even is.
Also if there’s any chance of a Fly situation happening I’m not going. Even if it’s like a .00000001% chance then fuck that lol
When just driving down a freeway, you have a much, much greater than 0.00000001% chance of suffering a worse outcome than the “fly situation” ;) .
Just sayin’.
Assuming we’re talking about our reality, this device is getting made by a corporation who will release it as soon as the potential profit exceeds the cost from its non-zero error rate.
No, I’m not getting into some Musk 2.0’s shoddy body disintegrator.
I always assume this is asking me as if I was in one of the examples universes like Star Trek. I 100% would never get in Musk’s Teslaporter, but in a world where it’s as widespread as airplanes and trains? Would use, wouldn’t be murder.
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If it’s wormhole based tech then yeah why not, atomic based teleportation comes with too many philosophical and existential flavors for me personally
If it’s wormhole based tech then yeah why not…
Trans dimensional horrors. See: Event Horizon
What pronouns do “Trans dimensional horrors” use?
Hor/ror
Phtagn/Phtagns
I totally respect the way you approached it. I would totally use either, but I value myself very little and value being able to get somewhere that has alcohol quickly to dull the things I feel very much.
I totally respect the way you approached it. I would totally use either, but I value myself very little and value being able to get somewhere that has alcohol quickly to dull the things I feel very much.
Yup.
Not only would I use it, I would abuse it.
I’d duplicate myself more than once, and at least once so I could fuck myself.
I’d tweak the transporter to adjust my body as I went through it. Best weight-loss, gym routine, plastic surgery, dick-enhancement pill ever, all in one.
I would be the reason such devices would be strictly regulated by people with ethics. “Is it murder if you kill your clone?” “Who cares, energize and last one stabbed wins!”
How would you deal with yourself after you fuck yourself?!
Do you want a really creepy twin with much less resources than you to walk around the world? Would you wanna kill that person? No one would notice surely.
Similar matter is dealt with in the book Dark Matter.
Those all sound like problems for later!
I am with Bob Johansson (Bobbyverse) on this one. Star trek is utterly inconsistent with how transporters work. They only ever play up when it’s convenient for the plot line, but the rest of the time they’re totally fine and no one worries about it.
Transporters are supposed to move the atoms by converting them into energy, moving that energy through subspace, and then converting them back to atoms on the other side, the only energy in the system is the energy that was created when the atoms were converted, so it shouldn’t be possible to create a transporter clone, no matter how many “confinement beams” you have, as where would it’s atoms come from?
I always figured that’s what the pattern buffer is for - the replicator can make a person atom-by-atom from energy, but the buffer holds the ‘consciousness’, and that’s the unreliable bit. Thomas Riker happens because the transporter system copies Riker into the buffer twice due to interference, so when the replicator fires up it creates two Riker bodies and puts one copy into each, sucking down some extra power from the ship to compensate for the missing energy.
I don’t buy the idea that disintegrating my molecules and reconstructing new ones is tantamount to murder or suicide.
If all I experience is being one place one moment and another place the next, then it’s me. It’s isn’t some fucking clone, it’s me. You’re just being turned into some other form (energy, if we’re using Star Trek rules) and then being turned back.
I’m pretty sure that at 26, I’m already a completely different person than the baby I was born as, literally. My cells have all died and been replaced. The horror. ./s
What if the original wasn’t destroyed? Wouldn’t it be a clone then? Which one would feel like it was really you?
Both of us would be me. Then, as our experiences diverged from the point of duplication, we’d become different people (See: Thomas, the duplicate of William Riker in Star Trek. The only reason Thomas and not Will is considered the copy is because of audience perspective, but empathizing with each of them makes one see how both are Will Riker at the start of the episode). This all of course, assumes we don’t discover something like the popular conception of souls during the early trials. But I don’t believe there’s anything about a “soul” that can’t be tied to the sum of one’s lived experience, which would be copied too.
I would consider a clone to be more expansive of who it could include besides copies of myself as I am now - it would also be someone grown from the literal same embryo as me who’d lived a completely different life with even a different name.
I think I pretty much agree. I think they would both be me just like me from yesterday and me from a week ago are the same me. They aren’t exactly the same, but they are both versions of me that my current self grew from.
Death is information-theoretic, fight me OP. /s
I’ll add the caveat that it’s entirely possible I still couldn’t afford teleportation.
If you were a Federation citizen living on any of the core worlds (earth, vulcan, andoria, and tellar prime) I think you’d be okay. It’s not like it’s something you have in the home anyways - we don’t get much civilian life in Star trek but it’s implied that you just physically go to the transport pad you want to use and use it.
Oh, if we’re in Star Trek I’m fine. Post-scarcity utopia and all. Only Star Trek-style teleportation was specified, though, and in our lifetime a gritty cyberpunk world seems more likely.
People seem to think that inventing a matter replicator would prevent this, meanwhile all I can think is “they’d DRM the living shit out of replication tech”. You want HEALTHY food? Better pay us 12.99 a month for the “Fit Package”. “Sorry, but only Apple-certified replicator patterns work with the iWant.”
Do they ever address the replicability of replicators in Star Trek? I suppose if you need a traditional manufacturing facility and special know-how to make replicators that could be exactly what happens. Vulcans, who IIRC give us replicators, might not have any such vulnerability to commercial anti-features, though.
Not directly. We know that there are materials a replicator can’t replicate - latinum (Ferengi currency) and dilithium (part of the power for warp drive) - or that are hard to replicate and so people prefer the real thing. I imagine that there are 24th century versions of the heavy metals we put in our modern day computers that can’t be replicated. We even have references to “industrial replicators” in DS9, which implies to me something that spits out a prefabricated factory that then makes things, in addition to just being food replicators that can be deployed in a refugee camp.
Alright, but now instead of disintegrating and reconstructing, consider if a similar machine just duplicated your body atom for atom. Is that “you”, or a clone?
A clone. As far as I know, there’s nothing in our established understanding of the world to suggest that merely copying the physical materials of my atoms would reproduce my memories and personality.
I don’t buy the idea that disintegrating my molecules and reconstructing new ones is tantamount to murder or suicide.
I definitely don’t think teleportation in science fiction is meant to be killing the person using it and making a clone of them. Like unless a story is specifically about that, I don’t think any given sci-fi author is trying to set up some sinister background plot where everyone is unknowingly killing themselves all the time.
But I do still have to wonder if that’s how it would end up working out in real life. Sure all our cells have died and been replaced since we were born, but that typically doesn’t happen with all your cells at the same time lol. imo it’s probably less about cells and more about like… Consciousness or “the soul” or whatever, I don’t know. Whatever it is, I accept that teleporters in fiction have some way to store and transport it, whether it’s stated in the narrative or not. But in real life I have no idea how we’d be able to tell if such a thing could even work.
It’s a literal suicide booth.
Sure, you can go on all day about changing out broom handles and whatever other metaphor you like, but I don’t need my body to be a point of interaction with any consciousness and the world, i need it to be a point of interaction between my consciousness and the world.
I have a lot of feelings about the emptiness of identity and the ultimate unity of the universe, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to off myself for the sake of convenience.
If I make a copy of myself, I’m still myself. I don’t become the copy. I have no reason to believe that a genetically identical clone that’s somehow got a copy of my memories will spontaneously cause my consciousness to jump to the other clone. No evidence of any such thing happening.
If I, then, make a copy of myself on Mars, why would I expect to spontaneously inhabit it?
The only reason being ripped apart and having an identical copy made looks like teleportation is the timing. There’s a short story about this, where a teleporter malfunction leaves the original version of the traveler alive. Protocol is to ‘balance the equation’ by incinerating the survivor, which as it turned out was the fate of anyone who stepped into the teleporter under normal circumstances.
Think about a file in a computer system. Copying the file and making changes doesn’t change the original file. When you download something and alter it, that’s a different copy of the file that’s been changed, not the original. Even when you move something rather than copy it, what’s actually happening is it’s being copied and then the original is destroyed.
Seamless for everyone else, sure. But a tragic, needless, and utterly stupid death for the one who enters the machine.
The only way I would use Teleportation is if this problem gets resolved. One way (as unfeasible as teleporters themselves) would be to essentially Quantum entangle your brain to the new body, essentially making it so your conscience briefly is in control of two bodies, then afterwards destroy the original body and with it the entanglement.
Fair enough, wormholes do circumvent the entire issue by nature of being bridges through space-time instead of messing with the person’s molecular integrity
I’d prefer the nightmare dimension version thanks.
If I, then, make a copy of myself on Mars, why would I expect to spontaneously inhabit it?
As best we can tell, though, you don’t inhabit your body, you are your body.
Admittedly, we don’t really understand the nature of consciousness at all, so it’d make sense to hold off on using Star Trek-style transporters until we do.
Of course I would.
Everything that makes you -you- is contained in the physicality of your brain. Even fairly small changes in your brain will create large shifts in cognition and personality. So anything that replicates your body and brain, down to the last atom, is going to be creating -you-. As far as you are concerned, nothing happened; you ceased to be in one place, and immediately sprang into existence in another.
Every atom in your brain gets replaced every four five years anyway so clearly it’s the position and structure of the atoms that’s important rather than the atoms themselves. So obviously there is no point worrying about it because it happens anyway, and you’re clearly fine.
The individual atoms probably get replaced far more often. And I think that, depending on how you look at -you-, the -you- of a year ago isn’t the same -you- as who you are now; the change is just so gradual that you don’t notice.
This is just blatantly untrue.
Some cells don’t renew hardly at all, some do it all the time but the brain isn’t “renewed” every X years.
“As far as you are concerned”
Correction: “as far as anyone else is concerned.”
Consciousness IS continuity. If you are disentigrated and a perfect clone pops up somewhere to replace you… you died. Your current stream of consciousness ended and a perfect copy replaced you.
As far as all external observers are concerned it’s still you. But from your own perspective? Well you won’t have one anymore, you’ll be dead.
Yeah but that happens when you sleep
I’m not convinced they’re at all the same. Consciousness may go dormant during sleep, and you may not remember it, but it’s still a continuous, uninterrupted, stream of electricity.
This kind of teleportation would completely snuff out that fire and replace it with an identical one at another location. It’s not the same as sleep.
…But the -me- that just popped into existence isn’t going to perceive a gap in continuity at all. It may be a new -me-, but it has all the memories and experiences that -I- had just prior to being disintegrated. From the perspective of the new -me- there’s no change at all.
Are you the same person as the person that went to sleep last night? How would you know that you weren’t replaced by a clone with precisely the same memories and experiences? Or a clone that thinks that it has the same memories and experiences? I can remember last night, but can I prove that my memories are accurate?
The fact that a clone would be seamlessly picking up my stream of consciousness after I die would be little consolation to me.
Sleep may be similar from a philosophical or external point of view. But I’m not sold that lack consciousness during sleep is in the same league as completely destroying, and then, rebuilding it.
Nope, I have a hard enough time thinking about my consciousness being “the same person” even after sleeping. No way am I getting taken apart and cloned by choice.
Arthur C. Clarke covered it in his first published story.
I don’t travel by wire! You see, I helped invent the thing!
https://zoboko.com/text/qll1oe8j/the-collected-stories-of-arthur-c-clarke/7
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Absolutely! I might even die instantly, which is just a bonus :V
Peak Lemmy - as soon as anyone mentions a potentially fatal experiment, the comments are all like Bender at the beginning of Futurama!
if you translocated Theseus’ ship, is it still the same ship? what if you extracted the data from the transport buffer to reassemble the original in its original location?
For a ship, yes. For a living organism with consciousness… I’m not so sure.
I get the disintegration qualms. But slap some TNG-era biofilters on that baby and filter out heavy metal accumulations, budding cancer cells, chest congestion, etc., and I’d be first in line.
No, I don’t see any possible solution to continuity of consciousness. See Walk like a Dinosaur to understand the implications, but basically you would need to destroy the original and duplicate it from scratch.
If there is such a thing as a soul, it would likely be impossible to duplicate, but even if not, you would have to destroy the original.
I would use it. Anything to not have to use public transportation or fly in an airplane ever again.
I was a definite “no” until you made me consider it as an alternative to flying Delta.
