Personally, as far as I’m concerned if there’s no break in mental continuity, the copy is me. If there’s multiple copies, then they are all me - at least until they diverge.
A few questions that come to mind:
[ul]
[li]If you lose your soul and you can’t tell a difference, is that a bad thing? Are souls actually desirable? Their main function appears to be to render you vulnerable to threats of torment in the afterlife.[/li][li]If you can lose your soul and not notice, was your soul ever “you” in the first place? Even if it has your memories and thinks like you, doesn’t that just make it a non-material version of the copies that a transporter makes? If one form of copying isn’t “you”, why is the other?[/li][li]If new versions of you get new souls, does this mean you can swamp the afterlife with copies of yourself? “Hi, I’m Kirk #3428.”[/li][/ul]
I wouldn’t hesitate. I know the argument has been done to death, but the Star Trek transporters don’t destroy a person’s body and recreate it at the other end. Your molecules are disassembled, physically sent to the other end, and reassembled. Think of the TNG episode “Relics.” Scotty had his pattern looping in the transporter buffer of his crashed ship for 75 years. When Geordi rematerialized him, it was the same Scotty who entered the transporter 75 years earlier, not a duplicate.
I do not believe in souls, and I still would not set foot into one. It would kill me, and create an unrelated simulcrum of me somewhere else.
Here’s a thought experiment:
You enter a transporter and you don’t get dematerialized, only scanned. An exact copy of you is then created, standing next to you.
I then hand you a gun and say “Shoot yourself in the head; your double will take it from here.”
Would you be all good with that? That copy is you, by your logic.
I believe that dematerializing the brain would, in fact, kill you, and the new copy of you would simply be a copy. Your friends and loved ones would never know the difference, but your consciousness would permanently cease to exist the moment you dematerialized, never to return. ie: Death. An unrelated copy would spring up somewhere else and live its life as if it were you, but you, personally, would be dead.
How do you KNOW either of those things? If I told you that you were really only a copy, and that the original you died in your sleep years ago and was replaced by a duplicate, could you prove me wrong?
That doesn’t matter to the present question. The copy’s interest in maintaining her own continuity going forward is the same as the original’s would have been.
I would in a heartbeat. Hopefully it has biofilters that could remove a few decade’s damage I’ve done to my lungs & assorted other organs. Remove all the plaque and tartar from my teeth too, while you’re at it.
If you are a main character with a good acting contract, it is pretty much infallible. No matter what happens, they’ll get you over. How many of you is a different matter.
I’d do it - but I’d check the OSHA records first.
Teleportation seems like it would be a medical cure all. It is like a biological version of microsofts system restore, if your body fucks up you just reload the oldest healthy copy.
I don’t believe teleportation could ever happen, but if it did and it had worked reliably for a long enough time I’d be okay with doing it. It’s no different to people being frightened of flying or driving a fast car - there are risks, but odds are against them happening.
I’d be much happier with Portals, or a Stargate. That seems like tech that would actually exist sometime.
The objections aren’t about the possbility of “botched” teleportation or that some kind of accident might happen. The objections are rooted in a philosophical question about the fundamental nature of identity. Saying “The transporter has a 99.9999997% success rate!” just means, to the objectors, that the transporter successfully kills you and creates a doppelgänger of you someplace else 99.9999997% of the time.
I don’t really think it’s a “religious objection”–“hilarity and shenanigans” aside, Ellis Dee’s thought experiment gets to the heart of the objections to a Star Trek-style transporter.
Except that I do believe in a soul, and I think it’s tied to my body, in this arrangement of atoms and at this point in time…but not in place, it can move, but will be drawn back to this body. If I am deleted and a doppelganger me created, I believe my soul will find it. I believe my thoughts are present in that atomic structure and charge of my neurons, so they’ll be identical, too. I believe my memories will be present in the neural network and hormone sea. The scent of my mother’s hair is encoded somewhere in the atoms of my body; I won’t lose that. I haven’t lost it in the last 38 years, although every atom of every cell in me has been replaced more than once. I believe the doppelganger will be me in every meaningful way.
So I’m not worried about the doppelganger effect. The only thing I would worry about is an injury or death, but not enough to keep me from doing it.
One of the things I always felt they got really right in the prequel series *Enterprise *was in the first season or so, even though the transporter was certified for biological use, everyone was afraid to use it and the used the shuttles instead (even though this lead to the classic ‘too many shuttles’ count which *Voyager *also suffered from). I also liked how once the Xindi arc began and they were essentially at war they just manned-up and started using it because they knew they had to. It made sense, war pushes new technology *and *people’s willingness to use it.
On the other hand I found the episode *Daedalus *incredibly disappointing. I knew it couldn’t be a fanboy jerk-feast but it should have been more than just a cheesy, rehashed melodrama. One line, when Erickson mentions the controversy about it at the Captain’s dinner, that’s was all the back story we got! :mad: