At best we are no further away.
Right, but what I’m saying is that the possibility of creating this sort of replicate is much more plausible and almost certainly much nearer at hand than far-fetched discussions of teleportation. It’s plausible that we may be able to read the entire contents of a human brain and re-instantiate it in another intelligence engine, whether organic or artificial, which would then possess the original human consciousness and memories.
What should be done with the original? I propose that the person consenting to such a transfer grant that authority to the new instantiation. After all, who better to decide your fate than you? I suspect that if the transfer occurred because the original was frail and sickly, the new instance would care for it until its last days very dearly indeed.
Technically, this would be widespread assisted suicide/cloning for the purpose of…traveling?
This dilemma has nothing whatsoever to do with whether transportation might be technically feasible in the far future. That is the thread title: Are we any closer? Might it be possible at some future time?
Possible sociological and ethical complications have nothing – zero – to do with whether it might be technically achievable.
Also, these issues have also already been covered in the Star Trek universe. In 1970 the first Star Trek Novel for adults, “Spock Must Die!”, discussed in considerable detail the same ethical and philosphical issues you raised: Spock Must Die! - Wikipedia!
Achieving this would equate to solving a significant % of the teleportation problem. Alas there is no realistically projected method which could remotely achieve this. Just because some futurists have discussed philosophical aspects does not mean it is technically on the horizon. Those discussions can be misleading and do not mean there is any rational hope whatsoever this could be achieved. People read the philosophical discussions (which can be very interesting) and this implies the technology is at hand or at least on the horizon. It is not.
The human brain is the most complex structure in the universe. There is no current or envisioned technology which would enable scanning and reproducing it on the molecular or possibly atomic level required to totally reconstitute the original contents and function. There is also no achievable short cut that has ever been postulated which could confidently attain the same result without scanning and replicating the brain on essentially a molecular or atomic level.
A good example of how little is known about neurobiology: even with insects it is unknown how behavior is encoded on a molecular level. This is different from morphology – body plan, color, etc. E.g, at conception an ant consists of a single cell. Everything it knows – how to build, farm, cooperate, eat, reproduce, etc. is encoded in that one cell. It does not learn by observation. You will rarely see any books or papers on this because it is unknown. If there is not the faintest idea how behavioral encoding happens for insects, it cannot be scanned and reproduced, and the human brain is as far above that as stars are above the earth.
Even in the initial series, teleportation was not perfect. The individuals experienced slight degradation with each “jump”. That’s the actual reason the “mission” was canceled after three years instead of the original planned five years. 
I don’t think this follows at all. If you can duplicate an ant over there, down to the molecular/atomic level, and if all the innate behavior is encoded therein, then one can expect the new instance to have all the same behavior. There is no need at all for the inventors of the duplicating machine to have any idea how behavioral encoding works for this to happen. Just copy the ant, verbatim.
The idea is similar to copying an encrypted data file: You can make a bit-for-bit copy of a file that you can’t interpret (because it’s all encrypted gobbledygook), and the copy will be exactly as decryptable as the original (by someone who knows the key).
The in-story explanation that the transporter is a found device from an alien civilization is lame. Scotty is seen, in several episodes, doing repair work on a malfunctioning transporter. I can’t imagine that if the transporter were just a mysterious black box.
(ETA: Unless Scotty himself was an alien who came, in some preserved form, with the black box, and the Federation scientists somehow managed to “thaw” him.)
Pardon me, but, yes, I have! Honest! I’ve participated vigorously in the last three “Star Trek Transporter” threads, and have answered your questions.
Anyway, FWIW, I’ll answer again. But it’s complicated.
If I went into the duplicator with the foreknowledge that I might be the one who has to agree to be destroyed, I might well accept that risk. I might take the 50-50 chance, and, once I’ve made that bargain, then, yeah, I’m willing to be destroyed. (May we presume that disintegration is instant and painless?)
I’d be cheesed if I hadn’t agreed ahead of time, and some switcheroo were played on me. But if it’s part of the deal, then, yeah, I’m good. I know that a perfect duplicate of me is out there doing business as usual. I know that duplicate is “really me” – at least up to the point where our fates diverged.
Anyway, I’m answering your question, just to make absolutely sure you can’t complain, “No one has ever answered this question.” But I recommend that we not continue this discussion here, because it isn’t GQ fodder, but IMHO mulch instead.
Actually, science has some knowledge of the topic. There are lots of experiments showing how ambient environmental chemicals can affect/alter insect behavior, and some work has been done on genetically modified insects.
You’re right that it is a subject about which very little is known, but to say that nothing is known is a bit too strong a claim.
Yes, second this.
The issue of whether personal identity can be transported / teleported is a philosophical problem that is much-discussed, not least here on the Dope. A recent example / car crash is: Teleportation physics question
I suggest for this thread we stick a pin in that discussion and just discuss the feasibility of doing this in the near future (answer: not feasible at all).
Agreed. I’ll be mighty damn impressed when they first “teleport” a water molecule or a CO2 molecule. However, I’m betting it happens inside the next twenty years.
Is there any way we can identify a specific molecule? Are there tests that distinguish one water molecule from another one? How would you know the difference between a machine that transmits water molecules and a pair of synchronized machines, one of which destroys water molecules and one of which creates them?
Well, since the exact phrase “Beam me up, Scotty” has not yet been used on Star Trek, we’ve made zero progress.
This happens all the time in the real world. The field technician replaces Line Replaceable Units then tests the apparatus, yet he never understands the details of the underlying device.
The explanation is not that the complete transporter itself is a found device and used “as is”. Rather elements of the transporter technology and information were found that enabled people in the Star Trek era to cobble together a working device without fully understanding it.
A similar fictional scenario was portrayed in the book & movie Contact when an advanced alien civilization transmitted plans to earth for a teleportation machine. The earth technicians could follow the plans, build the machine, monitor its performance, repair it – yet not understand the underlying mechanism.
In the Star Trek universe this explanational device was not thoroughly or consistently used. However it shows that someone, somewhere on the creative staff understood the need to rationalize the extreme level of technology required for the transporter.
“Nothing” is a correct term for current knowledge of how behavior is encoded on a molecular level in the insect brain. If there is any research paper describing this in any detail, I have never seen it.
If a cave man pokes a stick inside a computer and notices the screen flash, he does not have the slightest understanding of the underlying principles of operation.
Note this differs from understanding the genetic basis for disease mechanisms, morphology, and biological function as expressed by proteins. There is some understanding about that, but essentially nothing about behavioral encoding – it remains one of the greatest mysteries in biology.
While this is correct, it assumes a magical perfect copy mechanism. If some advanced alien civilization gave you a black box which did that, of course you don’t need to understand how biological function works.
But to develop that on our own in would seem to require this understanding. Otherwise what scanning approach would you use? Cellular? Synaptic? Molecular? Atomic? Is the behavior encoded statically or is it in the ongoing dynamic spatio-temporal firing pattern among neurons?
Consider a much easier replication scenario than the human brain. A functioning Intel Xeon E7-8890 v3 (18 cores, 5.6 billion transistors) is sent back in time so an electronics researcher from 1958 could examine it and try to replicate it.
He could try to examine the signals with an oscilloscope, but his equipment could not resolve the gigahertz-rate bus signals.
He could de-cap it and look at it the die with an electron microscope, but this would not reveal the underlying operational principles. He could make a photomicrograph of the silicon die, but this would reveal nothing about the hidden functional complexity. It would not reveal the microcode, or anything about the immense complexity of the instruction decoding – prefetching, dependency checking, branch prediction, hyperthreading, register scoreboarding. He could make a lithographic copy of that die and reproduce it to the degree 1958 technology allowed, but it would not function. It would be a child’s crayon drawing of a machine, and would have about equal success of working.
If his boss asked what direction should they pursue to replicate it, he would likely say he doesn’t know until he understands more about the internal function.
Wouldn’t chaos theory negate the actual use of the teleporter ? One very small minuscule difference at the start can cause a very large effect on the back end. Beam up The Donald and get Bernie upon the rearrangement. Scary.
Last time they beamed [del]up[/del] down The Donald [del]they[/del] we got Cthulhu, and nobody seemed to notice any difference.
It’s likely that, as a sort of random number generator, quantum effects are useful for thinking, but I don’t think that quantum effects are used for memory storage in any way. I suspect that the quantum state of all of the atoms of the brain could be swapped out with alternate (normal) quantum states and there would be no difference. You’d lose no memories and, while your future might change slightly from what it would have been otherwise - you might make slightly different choices - it wouldn’t change any fundamental part of your personality, memories, or anything else.