Well yeah, that’s the assertion being made by one, mostly incorrect, side of the debate.
Alternatively one can argue that I am me, regardless of where my corporeal being happens to locate.
I wouldn’t do it, because even if my current state is equivalent to dying and being replaced with a clone every instant of every day, I can believe that maybe it isn’t.
I wouldn’t be able to believe that about the transporter.
I think this debate (as much as I enjoying reading about it) is one of those issues where the ‘correct’ answer seems intuitively obvious to each side and after much discussion they both end up looking at each other with a perplexed expression and no agreement or understanding of the opposing viewpoint.
Personally I agree with the OP and wouldn’t use the transporter. But then I don’t believe in hypothetically possible mental ‘backups’ either, as seen in much science-fiction, for much the same reasons.
I am not Trinopus but I agree with everything he/she has posted so far. And I will answer that question.
I do not kill myself because it would negatively affect my friends and family. And it would irrevocably and irretrievably end my existence as a living human being, which I believe is a net positive to the world.
If you said, “here is a gun that if you shoot yourself with, it will produce a perfect replica of you in your place but will end your stream of consciousness and begin a new one within the duplicate” I’d have no qualms about using that gun on myself (if there was a good reason for it, like teleporting). If the new person starts off right where I left off, then he is me and I have no problem with that.
This is happening every single moment in time from one to the next. This magic gun would be no different than the normal progression of time.
A real gun with a real bullet is in NO way the same thing. I am a new and duplicate person than I was when I first started this post. And I will be an even different person by the time you read this.
Exactly and yes! Why the hell should I shoot myself, when I’ve got so much to live for. I have friends and family and a great life. Death will come for me in his own good time; why should I hasten to it, for no good reason at all?
It’s a titanically stupid question!
The particles don’t matter. Make me out of whatever electrons and quarks you choose; they’re all indistinguishable. What matters, and what is transported, is the information.
And it is not the same thing to transport information as it is to duplicate it. Classical information can be duplicated fairly easily, but we’re not talking about classical information, but quantum information.
As an amusing (?) side-note, suppose there were an anti-matter planet, with a civilization we’d like to visit. One could (?) reverse the polarity of all of the particles in a person’s body, and beam down their anti-matter image. The person would still be “the same person,” just made up of CT (“contra-terrene”) matter.
Just be sure to remember to reverse the polarity again when beaming them back up!
So what if you had no friends and family, and you believe that your existence is a net negative for the rest of the world, would you end your life then? Can you imagine some other reason you might not want to, like you would like to keep having experiences?
Good Lord, man! That’s crazy talk.
No because your stream of consciousness is continuing to have experiences. If you define consciousness as existing in a single point of time, you’ve missed the point. Hence the word “stream”.
It is the same from the perspective of the original you. In both cases, the original you’s brains are splattered against the wall.
A person whose brains are spattered over a wall has no “perspective.” You keep making this mistake.
That’s what we’ve been saying! But you still want to get in the transporter. Don’t do it, Trinopus!!
Oops double post
Well, I will certainly meet you half way on this: I will not be one of the first – nor the first thousand – nor likely the first hundred thousand! – people to give it a try. I was one of the last people I know to move up from a typewriter to a word-processor, and I got my first smart-phone only this spring. I’m always a late adopter of technology.
So…if the transporter kills people…it will likely have killed a good many of my friends and family before it gets its shot at me!
The very premise of a transporter means that quantum foam must be a non-issue, otherwise it won’t work.
Duplication is exactly as complicated as reconstitution. There is no difference between them. They are one and the same.
This guy nailed it in one. Exactly.
It’s not a mistake. The non-existence of the POV is the problem. That POV has ended.
I know a lot of people say this, but they’re wrong. Here, I’ll demonstrate it: I’ll reconstitute myself. There, done. And now I’ll transport myself: OK, I just transported myself over to the kitchen and back. Neither was at all difficult, because I remained in a form that was very easy to reconstitute and to transport.
There are other ways I could change my form, that are a little more difficult to reverse: I could diet and then gain weight again, or I could let my hair grow or cut it. I could even wound myself and then let myself heal. All of this is possible, and none of it violates quantum mechanics.
As technology improves, the range of reversible transformations possible expands. With a sufficiently-skilled surgeon, we could nowadays even reverse a transformation as severe as an amputation. And the premise of the Star Trek transporter is that, by that time, it’s even possible to reverse a transformation of a person into a batch of subatomic particles. This still doesn’t violate anything about quantum mechanics: Transform the person into particles, move the particles (or equivalently the information encoded by them) from place to place, transform them back: All fine. You only get a problem when you start trying to duplicate that information: That’s what quantum mechanics says you can’t do, and what transporters in general don’t do.
There’s actually an episode of Babylon 5, by the way, that’s relevant to this discussion. An alien family goes to Dr. Franklin and asks for his help; their son is dying of a disease, and their own doctors can’t help him. Dr. Franklin examines the boy, and tells them that there’s good news: He knows exactly what’s wrong with him, and he can fix it with a simple surgery: He’ll be as good as new within a day. The parents are horrified: They explain that they know of this surgery, and that their people perform it routinely on their farm animals (which also get this disease), but that it couldn’t possibly be done on a person, because breaking the skin lets the soul out. Well, Dr. Franklin tries what non-surgical techniques he can, to no avail, and finally goes ahead and does the surgery anyway, against the parent’s wishes, because he’s not going to just sit back and let the kid die. When the parents see the kid smiling at them from the hospital bed, they kill the demon that’s taken up residence in their son’s body, and go through funeral rites for him.
Was the parents’ response there rational? Because when people argue against the transporter on the grounds of “Well of course it kills you”, that’s what it looks like to those of us on the pro-transporter side.
Do you believe that the posters here who are arguing against using the transporter are all doing so on religious grounds?
As they are all using the soul as the basis for their objections, I do consider it religious in nature.
Call it “inherent sense of self”, or “consciousness”, or “identity”, or whatever, instead of “soul”, if you like, but the argument is the same.
He’s basically just admitting that his opposition is based on a failure of the imagination. Are you sure you want to claim that as a perfect exemplar of your argument?