This is irrelevant nitpicking of the details of thought experiment instead of the concept. But if we really must ratchet the nerd up to 11, how about this:
You’re standing on the transporter pad, and it’s constantly doing full scans of you, multiple times per second. No copies are being made anywhere; only scans.
Now I hand you the gun and tell you after you shoot yourself in the head, we’ll go ahead and recreate the very last healthy scan of you, just before the bullet entered your skull.
Is this meant to be a serious statement, or just a goofy throw-away one-liner?
I find it interesting that as a staunch atheist I wouldn’t go near such a device, but as a believer in souls you’d be fine with it. I think, as far as these debates usually go, we’re expected to be on the opposite sides than we are.
Given your stance, would you be fine eating a bullet in my thought experiments? If not, why not Why Not? (I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist.)
Now, if you could change it to: Blink your eyes you’ll be dead for twenty seconds, after which I’ll turn this transporter thingy on and bring you back.
I would be fine with that.
If copy #2 is indistinguishable from the original copy, including ones own self awareness, I don’t see what the inherent value of being the original copy is.
ETA: Oops, I quoted the wrong person. But you get the jist.
It’s not your own self-awareness, though. Your self-awareness dies, irrevocably. A wholly unrelated (yet extremely similar) self-awareness is created somewhere else right after you die, and that copy will think it’s you, but you personally will never experience it. Because you died and are dead.
EDIT: Someone upthread mentioned wormholes. That I’d be all over, since that’s merely traveling through shortcuts. Dematerializing is what I have a philosophical objection to.
Why? What gain is there for me in this thought-experiment?
How about: I get into a transporter and can go to Lisbon, Portugal, for a total round-trip cost of $75. I can zip over there, close a business deal, see the sights, and come back, for less than an airplane ticket, with no jet-lag. Now that’s a great deal! Why all this obsession about guns?
It’s a valid point. Your body is constantly discarding matter. In the last few seconds, billions of your personal molecules have been broken up. You aren’t “the same” as you were even that short a time ago.
You don’t have to agree with it, but you cannot participate in this discussion on a competent or informed basis without comprehending it.
I think you’re being a little coy here. If I told you, you can shoot this drug into your arm, get a little sleepy and then die.
Or…
You can pour gasoline on yourself, then light yourself on fire.
You don’t see the difference between those two?
Who cares? The dead me has no regrets, and the alive me is completely oblivious to the “dead” me. I’m still just me as far as the alive me is concerned.
In that case you should care a whole lot, before you step into the suicide machine.
Just because someone else in the world believes they’re you doesn’t mean that your life is now worthless.
Of course I agree with the reality that cells die and are replaced by new cells all the time. (NOT brain cells, though; they are never replaced by new cells, ever.) This has nothing to do with my point, though.
I’m not saying a transporter changes you. I’m saying it kills you, and creates a wholly unrelated copy of you somewhere else. Further, since every single person who transports dies during transportation, it’s perfectly possibly that this death could be in excruciating agony and could “feel” like it lasts an eternity. Nobody would ever know or be able to report this, though, because again, everybody who dematerializes is dead.
In the Stargate series, the Stargates use wormhole technology. But wormholes aren’t dimensional doors or insta-portals, although they appear to be.
Rather, it’s explained that the Stargate technology dematerializes you at the event horizon, converts you to energy and the Stargate on the other side rematerializes you. So it’s essentially a Trek teleporter that sends energy signals FTL.
The reason you can’t step into a wormhole without the conversion process is because wormholes are like black holes – they have loads of gravity and the effect of loads of gravity on a physical you is: you becoming spaghetti.
Ok there seem to be some wrong ideas about the transporter here(at least the Trek variety).
There is an episode of TNG where Riker finds out that due to a malfunction during a transport, the Riker on the planet was not zapped and was essentially left stranded. It seems like rather than converting you to energy and then back to matter on the ship, the transporter is just a giant replicator creating a duplicate you and then zapping the version of you on the planet to tie up loose ends.
You’re being duplicated and the original killed for essentially no reason(aside from people being existentially uncomfortable with duplicates running around).
There is also an Outer Limits(80’s) episode where some dude gets transported to the “Lizard people” planet.
Something went wrong, and like Riker, dude stayed on Earth while his duplicate went on to Lizard planet. The lizard man running the transporter on the Earth side demanded that the guy left on Earth be killed.
The rest of the episode was:
Human: Please don’t kill me. Why do I have to die?
Lizard man: Gah! You Earthlings are so primitive! I knew we shouldn’t have went into business with you guys! Just die already!
Actually, we would know that. The concept behind the transporter requires that the machine know the exact state of every particle in your body. We would, therefore, be able to tell if the pain receptors in the brain are firing or not. If they’re not active, the person isn’t feeling any pain.
This is wrong. If it worked the way you described, then criminals like Khan could easily disable part of the transporter and instantly clone an army of himself.
They explained during the Riker episode that it was caused by special, unreproducible conditions on a certain planet with a distortion field atmosphere. During transport there was a massive energy surge and the transporter chief compensated by initiating a second containment beam. So there were two transporters locked onto Riker and beaming him up. One of those got reflected back to the surface.
I think there’s a misconception that the Trek transporter scans you and turns you into information. If that were true, you could make copies as easily as you copy a file on your computer.
Actually, it converts you into a matter stream (or “beam”), transmits that through subspace and reassembles your original particles back into you.
But if that’s true, how do we explain what happened to Riker? Well, it seems the special conditions on that planet acts like a beam splitter. Half goes through, half gets reflected. And the transporter compensates for missing particles by filling them in with similar atoms. And maybe the energy surge amplified his beams.
So each Riker is like a swiss cheese mosaic of his original atoms. Apparently that’s okay, since both Rikers seem to walk and talk just fine.
“Disassembled…and reassembled” sounds an awful lot like destroyed and recreated.
Think of yourself, right now; what are you? Just a pile of molecules, in specific amounts? No, clearly that’s not enough. Nor is there anything special about the particular molecules in use in you at any moment–as has been noted, these are replaceable over time.
The thing that defines your existence is the informational relationship between your components. You are ‘the same person’ as your younger self not because you haven’t changed–you have, in most every sense of the word–but because there is an unbroken continuity of informational states going all the way back.
Disassembly would appear to break that continuity.
Now, ~maybe~ your soul or consciousness can leap across space and find its home again in the rebuilt pattern. But if so, why should it be attached to a fixed set of molecules, if it never has been before?
No, because I don’t know that my “soul” (I use the word because I don’t have a better one, but I don’t think that what I mean by soul is what Christians mean by soul) would find me after such a dramatic rearranging of my atoms and informatics. I don’t think a pre-shot me would be the same essential person as the after-shot me.
Ah…see, I agree with you about the informational states, but the transporter in my mind is keeping that unbroken, just…moving it. Recreating it, unbroken and unchanged, over there, and that’s why it’s still me. My “soul” isn’t attached to these molecules, but that informational relationship, no matter which molecules make it up.
The next question, of course, is what if the informational relationship here isn’t destroyed? Does my soul pick one? Does it split? Does it replicate? I have no idea. But these are questions to ponder around the bonfire with a good bottle of mead. If it appears to work in reality - if other people have used it safely and seem to be the same people with no regrets - I’m willing to try it. What’s the worst that can happen? I’ll die? Well, that’s going to happen sooner or later, whether I use the transporter or not. And if I don’t die, I get a whole lot more productive and recreational hours of life by saving all that time traveling by conventional means.
Onto the second page and no one has yet broached the subject of the transporter’s utility for pie-eating contests?
Ellis Dee’s thought experiment, if I’m reading it correctly, is focusing on the persistence of consciousness and, more generally, what gives rise to it. Intuitively, when the duplicate you (“Mr. Hyde”) shows up next to you with the gun, you don’t find yourself suddenly conscious in two bodies, aware of being in two places at once. So when Mr. Hyde shoots you, your consciousness is extinguished; what is left is Mr. Hyde, with all of your memories and experiences, and his own consciousness. “You” are no more; Mr. Hyde carries on quite like you, but you’re certainly not going to experience any of it.
Of course, we know very little about the nature of consciousness, so this is all just what seems intuitive, and may very well be wrong. But it’s fun to speculate about. Also, you could eat a whole lot of pie and not get fat. Just be sure to lock the transporter room door so Scotty can’t get distracted.
A non corporeal (pure energy*) being takes over a flesh and blood person. To get rid of the murdering entity, they transport his host body out into space, maximum range, maximum dispersion. It aired, so it’s canon. How does that fit in or alter anyone’s theories here?
I have a problem with seeing sleep, or drug induced unconsciousness as a “break” in consciousness equivalent to being perfectly duplicated and one killed.
I don’t see it as “duplication”, at all: There are never two of you (well, aside from one or two episodes where there are, but I prefer to ignore those on the grounds of not making sense). In fact, any sort of transporter where there was, at any time, two of you, would fall afoul of the Uncertainty Principle, in a way that a single-copy transporter need not. There is one of you in corporeal form, then there’s one of you in a different form, then there’s one of you in corporeal form again.
