Yes, it only works if you have a home computer. Sorry.
I was thinking about this episode, and I believe it lends evidence to what I said above. The creation of a duplicate Riker was an accident, and no one even suspected it to be possible until they saw two William T Rikers standing in front of them. As the summary there says, the transporter chief on the Potemkin used a two-beam technique to facilitate Riker’s transport through heavy interference. In a total accident that no one intended, the second beam was split from the first and bounced back to the planet, thus creating a duplicate. That this was so unexpected is proof that duplication is not part of the normal transport process, at least on Federation starships.
FWIW, we just rented the last disc of the first season from Netflix.
The fact that it was possible proves that it is. That it was unexpected only proves that Starfleet engineers are idiots.
That looked like a voltmeter or something similar, to me. You can’t see it in that particular screencap, but if you go back and watch that scene, that box has four knobs on it. I can’t imagine why a timer would need more than 3, tops (days, hours, minutes), more likely just 2 (hours, minutes).
In any case, if you listen to the foley right before Topher stands and turns away from the bomb, you can hear him flip a switch, along with an electronic squeal that sounds like a machine powering up. That, to me, made it sound like the thing blew as soon as it had fully warmed up.
Besides, if he wasn’t going to use the timer, why attach it to the bomb?
That might work. I have a friend with Netflix. Is Epitaph I the final episode of Season 1?
It’s the last episode on the Season 1 discs.
(I hesitate to call it the last episode of the first season, since it was never aired. )
I think you misunderstand the word “normal”. It only happened to Riker because of an exceedingly unusual and very specific set of circumstances not present for 99.9999% of Starfleet transports. Ergo, the normal, common, customary, use of the transporter does not create duplicates.
If you die and get instantly reincarnated somewhere else, with no knowledge that you actually died, then you didn’t die.
It’s like saying you died on the operating table but they brought you back to life. In that case, you didn’t actually die.
But really your argument resembles one that I read in a book about 20 years ago – don’t ask me to remember the title, but i know one of the characters was an uplifted chimp, IIRC.
In the book they had ‘teleportation’ – except it just made a copy, sent on the ‘info’ and created a new person at the new location.
The person who went into the ‘booth’ at the original location walked out unchanged. Except if they were trying to teleport out of a dangerous situation, well, it didn’t quite work, and still got eaten alive or whatever.
The chimp got very upset about this, having teleported several dozen times, and knowing that each time he’d died and lived.
Everyone else accepted that the person they were was the one, the only real person, even if different versions of themselves had died, it wasn’t them.
Then again, the chimp was neurotic.
I think this was a major plot point of The Prestige.
How does the transportation of subatomic particles matter? My consciousness isn’t stored at the subatomic level - I live, so far as we can tell, in the unique arrangement of brain cells within my skull, a system many many many orders of magnitude larger than any subatomic particle. There is absolutely no continuity between that network of cells in my head, and the one that comes out of the transporter beam on the other end. Sure, they’re made of some of the same parts - but the arrangement of brain cells is brand new (albeit identical to the old). It’s a copy - a copy built of the same parts as the original, but a copy.
Let’s say I take your car, and melt it down completely. I’ve now got a vat of molten metal. Employing the ordinary tools of car manufacture, I then use this metal to build a car of the same make and model as your own. Is it the same car? No - it’s a new car, even if identical to the old on.
Saying someone “died” on the operating table, and was “brought back”, is far more melodramatic than it is descriptive. What people mean when they say that is that the person’s heart stopped beating. This is an old standard for “death”, and it once worked very well - until the 20th century, we had no good ways to restart a heard, and so a stopped heart would inevitably lead to death as soon as the brain was sufficiently starved of oxygen. Today, however, we have methods to restart a stopped heart (or more accurately, restore a useful heart rhythm) before oxygen deprivation damages the brain to the point a person dies.
No one actually “dies” on the operating table - suffers complete brain death - and then has brain function restored. We don’t have the ability to do that. People do recover from profound states of unconciousness that may include cessation of cardiac function - but that isn’t death, and it’s no greater an interruption of consciousness than anaesthesia.
Maybe the evil corporate clones don’t care about originals dying. They just want to propagate their own image.
Why do people have kids? Some of it has to do with keeping a bit of yourself around after you die. In that case, it is perfectly logical to want to take over a bunch of bodies and imprint them with yourself.
Two points:
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If your “new” arrangement of brain cells is absolutely identical to the “old”, identical enough to permit you to start a thought as the beaming cycle begins and finish it when you arrive (which has happened many times in Star Trek episodes), then for all practical purposes it is the exact same arrangement. Hence, the exact same consciousness.
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Even if you want to argue on philosophical grounds that the resulting car is new in some way, my original point stands. My original point, to wit, was that there was no copying or destroying of any part of anyone who undergoes teleportation as depicted in Star Trek. You can even say that being systematically dismantled at the subatomic level is tantamount to being destroyed, but then I’ll just direct you the “brought back to life” analogy you made. You weren’t destroyed during transport, you were transformed, moved, and untransformed. You weren’t copied during transport, hence there is no “other you” to be killed, as Ellis Dee claimed.
Paul’s sudden death gave me a flashback to last year on Terminator when they killed off Derek
The whole “bomb resetting everyone to before they were first wiped” thing didn’t really make sense, but pretty much nothing about the tech on this show ever made much sense in the first place, so I’ll just go with it.
As someone else said upthread, Echo’s little freakout was some damn fine acting on Ms. Dushku’s part. Best I’ve seen from her.
Victor, man, someone give that actor his own show. He’s great.
I would frame it differently. If you die and a doppelganger gets instantly created somewhere else, that has no effect on your death.
I was thinking of a different story. I believe it was a short story by a famous SF writer, though I don’t remember who. Teleportation is invented and its use becomes ubiquitous to the point that every human has teleported at one time or another except the inventor. He’s the only one who knows the truth, which is that teleporting kills the passenger and creates an exact replica at the destination. I believe the story ends with him being dragged kicking and screaming into the teleporter.
This is such a clear and obvious implication for teleprtation that I’m frankly stunned anyone could ever conceive of it working any differently. The replica wouldn’t think it had just been created, but the replica isn’t you. Your consciousness would end the moment you were dematerialized, never to be self-aware again. (Or you’d end up in the afterlife if your beliefs go that way.) Not only does the replica think it was still you, everyone else on earth would as well. Nobody would ever be able to prove it objectively. But to me it is patently obvious and undeniably true.
Imprinting your memories is even more obvious, and yet some in the thread have said that they believe they would be continuing on. To me that’s just nuts.
The idea of comparing to how people “live on” through their children is compelling and apt. I can get behind that one. But to my mind, it’s basically the exact same thing as living on through your children.
That sounds like a fun, cheery story - does anyone know the title?
Cylons do it. As Sharon put it “death becomes… a learning experience”.
That’s the fun part. If no one could prove it, and you can’t tell the difference, what makes your belief so undeniably true? What exactly makes us us?
Your afterlife thought is a crazy interesting one. What if those transporters do kill you each time you use them? Is the afterlife filled with less complete versions of people that were ‘killed’ each time they transported somewhere?
I couldn’t tell the difference in the sense that I would be dead. It’s my doppelganger who couldn’t tell the difference. heh.
The more interesting afterlife thought is the many worlds theory, where each decision sprouts two universes where both decisions occured. If that theory is true, then by definition no human can ever be good or bad and worthy of praise or deserving of punishment. And if there is an afterlife, there will be around a billion copies of you kickin’ around in it. Or maybe a half billion you’s hangin’ in heaven with another half billion frying in hell.
Not to derail a truly interesting discussion, but I feel like this whole business of “is a copy truly you?” is almost besides the point when we’re talking about Dollhouse.
The bigger question the show asks is: is that copy (or any other imprint, including the “blank” Dolls themselves) a separate person entirely? Is Whiskey a person, even though she’s just a blank slate inhabiting someone else’s body? Are Echo and Alpha people, even though they are amalgams of dozens of imprints?
BSG examined this theme through the Cylons and their ability to create multiple copies of a given base personality/ set of memories. Athena and Boomer share an entire lifetime of memories, up to the moment of Boomer’s last download prior to the miniseries. At that point, their lives diverge and they plainly become two different people. But were they unique individuals even at the moment of Athena’s creation, before any divergence had yet taken place? BSG (and Dollhouse) would argue that they were. It’s actually a very materialistic POV - the belief that a person’s “personhood” is wrapped up in the precise layout and arrangement of their brain, such that creating a perfect copy of a brain (or, in Dollhouse’s case, reshaping someone else’s brain into a copy) is effectively creating a new person.