
Is beaming down in Star Trek a death sentence? - Tomte
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/is-beaming-down-in-star-trek-a-death-sentence/
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Smaug123
There's a whole section in here about how people do stuff while being
transported, and then about energy beings. This is just fiction, people! The
philosophical issues from the start of the article are just made
unrealistically complicated if you also posit that teleportation has to obey
the demands of the plot. Make sure to be clear about the difference between
"is teleportation _in Star Trek_ a death sentence" and "is teleportation _in
principle_ a death sentence". [As has been rightly pointed out, I really mean
"teleportation by beaming". There are other possible means of teleportation
which don't require disassembling one's self and reassembling it elsewhere:
for example, travel through wormholes.]

Teleportation in principle is not a death sentence if (like me) you're a
reductionist who believes that the mind is a pattern which happens to be
encoded on a physical substrate. To copy the substrate perfectly implies
copying perfectly the pattern encoded on it, and hence (since I'm a
reductionist) copying perfectly the self.

No comment from my end about teleportation in Star Trek being a death
sentence.

~~~
TomMarius
What if someone made an exact copy of you? Would your consciousness gain a
second body?

~~~
Smaug123
Yep. Both are me; they start diverging as soon as the copy is made.

~~~
gnaritas
Both _were_ you, they stopped being both you the second they started diverging
which is the second they came into existence.

~~~
Smaug123
Per the parallel thread: the word "are" is misleading, and you should
distinguish between the two things you mean by it. (I should have done that
myself in the grandparent to this comment.) I am who I was five minutes ago,
and I am also not who I was five minutes ago, for two different senses of the
word "am" which happen to have the same word in English.

~~~
charlesism
I think it's more accurate to say the problem is "me." We don't need to worry
about it most of the time, but the only "me" around is the state of your brain
at this instance in space and time. Anything else is just _more_ or _less_
"me"-like, but not exactly "me." So if someone recreated you in triplicate,
the instant after they appeared, all four of you would all be the same amount
"you," though you four would all diverge thereafter, and be more and more some
other version of you.

~~~
gnaritas
Simply put, identity and equality are different things; he's conflating them.
This was already pointed out, but he didn't grok it.

~~~
Smaug123
I'm not conflating identity and equality; I'm arguing that you mean two
different things by "identity" but are using one word to refer to both,
resulting in confusion all round.

~~~
gnaritas
I was not replying to you, you're intellectually dishonest, we're done, I've
made that clear.

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lisper
The real irony here is that Gene Roddenberry did not invent the transporter
because he thought it was a good idea from a dramatic point of view, but
because he was forced into it by budgetary constraints. Back in the 1960's it
was way beyond the financial means of a weekly TV show to produce a special
effect of a shuttlecraft landing on a planet or in the shuttle bay for every
episode, so they invented the transporter as a way of getting people to and
from planetary surfaces with reasonable production costs. That real-world
reality has shaped the face of science fiction for fifty years.

Nowadays we have the technology to fly spaceships around on screen pretty much
at will, which actually presents a dramatic opportunity: someone could write a
Star Trek episode where they actually take seriously the possibility that the
transporter is a bad idea and ban it in favor of shuttlecrafts. I think this
could make a really good premise for a novel and/or movie. It could even re-
shape the face of science fiction for the next fifty years the way the
original transporter did for the last fifty.

~~~
krapp
>Someone could write a Star Trek episode where they actually take seriously
the possibility that the transporter is a bad idea and ban it in favor of
shuttlecrafts.

Star Trek Enterprise kind of did that, because it was set in a time when
transporters were new technology and deemed unfit for anything but cargo.
Unfortunately because it's a franchise staple to see the away teams beaming
down to planets, they took the coward's way out and quickly forgot it.

~~~
lisper
"The Orroville" is also a (very good IMHO) Trek knockoff that dispenses with
the transporter.

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sillysaurus3
Related: CGP Grey's "The Trouble with Transporters"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQHBAdShgYI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQHBAdShgYI)

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grue2
Is sleep a death sentence?

To boil it down, "I" am made of two things: qualia and memories.

During unconscious sleep, those mysterious qualia disappear, except for brief
chaotic flashes which we call dreams. Meanwhile a physical process takes place
in the brain: those memories are reorganized, reformatted, and reconstituted.

In this view, there is a very literal sense to the idiom "I woke up feeling
like a brand new person." Yet, few people go to sleep at night worrying that
"they" will no longer exist in the morning, even though that is quite arguably
the case.

I would worry about biological sleep long before I worried about teleporters.
While any OSHA-compliant teleporter can (we would assume) preserve the
continuity and integrity of one's memories, sleep doesn't even have that
feature.

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nly
If "you" are the product of your experiences (environment) acting upon your
corporeal components (atoms, your "blueprints" etc), then isn't it true that
the "me" from 1 nanosecond ago ceased to exist and a "new me" is actually
being created in every new frame in time?

If you think of it this way, I don't see why being demolecularized by a
transporter, and being reconstructed on a ship in orbit, is any different to
walking across a room.

In both transitions the state of trillions of atoms in my body change, and I
gain and lose atoms, the difference is only one of magnitude.

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dghf
No mention of the accidental creation of two William Thomas Rikers?

> If, however, we destroy the ship but mail its blueprints somewhere else and
> then build a new, identical ship, it’s not the same ship. It’s a separate
> ship built from the same blueprints. _It doesn’t even matter whether you use
> the same planks or not_. [Emphasis added.]

The last sentence implies that something designed to be repeatedly
disassembled and reassembled is a different object on each assembly. That
doesn't sound right.

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guscost
Teleportation is a fiction and you can just invent the necessary details to
decide whatever you want, but I still like this webcomic treatment:

[http://existentialcomics.com/comic/1](http://existentialcomics.com/comic/1)

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lend000
It comes down to the philosophical question -- are you better defined by _the
pattern_ of matter and energy that represents you, or are you _the_ matter and
energy that represents you?

I personally believe it's the former. I.e. if I had a terminal illness and I
made a copy of myself (the same except healthy), I like to think I would be
happy to let it carry on my life and work.

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krapp
What would likely happen is that a society that invents a transporter would be
forced to redefine their cultural parameters for concepts like "death" and
"self" because the device is just _too useful_ to ignore, despite any
existential ramifications it may present.

So the answer to this perennial Trek puzzle depends, ironically, on a certain
point of view.

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rcarmo
Statistically, yes, if you're wearing a red shirt.

At least until they re-did all the wardrobe so that Security wore gold or navy
blue :)

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aswanson
No way in effing hell I'd teleport, even with tech 1000000 years advanced from
today.

~~~
yazaddaruvala
There is another.

Teleportation in Star Trek is "beaming", but worm holes are the alternate
means of teleportation. There is no notion of death when traveling through a
worm hole.

~~~
krapp
There was a Star Trek species called the T'Kon who used something like
wormholes to create dimensional gates that let them just walk to other planets
as easily as walking across the room. That was presented as a technological
feat "sufficiently close to magic" even to the Federation. Wormholes in that
universe seem to be rare and unstable and weird, though not nearly so much as
in Farscape, where they seem to be able to access all of space and time, IIRC.

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adjkant
Related: "What Makes You You?"

[https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/12/what-makes-you-
you.html](https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/12/what-makes-you-you.html)

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del_operator
Polyopic heatuscopy is just an odd hallucination where you are split into
multiple copies of yourself. You and your forks are aware of each others
thoughts, but you may not be able to distinguish the real you.

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mannykannot
If Chalmers is right, it would seem that a transporter would be a machine for
making p-zombies.

~~~
k__
Why? Just you beging copied and your first instance dying doesn't make the
copy a p-zombie.

~~~
mannykannot
Chalmers believes in the metaphysical possibility of p-zombies and argues that
this necessarily implies that physicalism is false. If a transporter recreates
the physical structure of a person, but physicalism is false, then this
recreation must be without any of the subjective qualia of the original. Under
the premise that the transporter works, however, the re-creation acts as if it
has these qualia, so therefore it must be, by definition, a p-zombie.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie#Zombie_ar...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie#Zombie_arguments)

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dagenleg
If you've played "Soma" it explores this concept a lot.

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aaronblohowiak
If you like these ideas, read the Altered Carbon series :)

