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!
I don’t buy the idea that disintegrating my molecules and reconstructing new ones is tantamount to murder or suicide.
If all I experience is being one place one moment and another place the next, then it’s me. It’s isn’t some fucking clone, it’s me. You’re just being turned into some other form (energy, if we’re using Star Trek rules) and then being turned back.
I’m pretty sure that at 26, I’m already a completely different person than the baby I was born as, literally. My cells have all died and been replaced. The horror. ./s
What if the original wasn’t destroyed? Wouldn’t it be a clone then? Which one would feel like it was really you?
Both of us would be me. Then, as our experiences diverged from the point of duplication, we’d become different people (See: Thomas, the duplicate of William Riker in Star Trek. The only reason Thomas and not Will is considered the copy is because of audience perspective, but empathizing with each of them makes one see how both are Will Riker at the start of the episode). This all of course, assumes we don’t discover something like the popular conception of souls during the early trials. But I don’t believe there’s anything about a “soul” that can’t be tied to the sum of one’s lived experience, which would be copied too.
I would consider a clone to be more expansive of who it could include besides copies of myself as I am now - it would also be someone grown from the literal same embryo as me who’d lived a completely different life with even a different name.
I think I pretty much agree. I think they would both be me just like me from yesterday and me from a week ago are the same me. They aren’t exactly the same, but they are both versions of me that my current self grew from.
Alright, but now instead of disintegrating and reconstructing, consider if a similar machine just duplicated your body atom for atom. Is that “you”, or a clone?
A clone. As far as I know, there’s nothing in our established understanding of the world to suggest that merely copying the physical materials of my atoms would reproduce my memories and personality.
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.
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.