I don’t know.
Cars (and airplanes, and every other form of transport) don’t intentionally destroy the occupant first. 
But before it does that it stores you in a pattern buffer. If that is readable, then a replicator should be able to make a copy of you.
They are quite inconsistent about this. When Mr. Scott was stored in the pattern buffer for decades, his friend died because his pattern did not get regenerated enough during the loop. That sounds like a repeater to me, and implies information. On the other hand, there was a show about the guy with the crush on Troi sitting in the middle of a transport for a long time when he saw the “ghosts” of missing scientists. I don’t see any implementation of a transporter where this would be possible. (And Mr. Scott didn’t seem to have be conscious for all that time.) But if you are, then that gets rid of the soul question because you have some sort of continuous consciousness during beaming.
And don’t forget Redjak from post 58
No problem. They clearly have to transmit all the molecules and reassemble them in the right relative position. Why there would be a setting not to do this is another interesting question.
Equipment on starships must be like Batman’s utility belt - designed to meet the need of future plots.
This is an old theme in sci-fi, whether we are talking about clones or transporter duplicates.
How much is the copy “me”? Does he/she have legal rights to my stuff? What if my wife likes him better than me? etc.
I don’t think Star Trek really attempted to answer these philosophical questions. They seemed to ignore them. 
It seems to me that there is no reason why the transporter couldn’t create a clone army of Kirk’s or Khan Signh’s, by bypassing the subroutine that decontructs the original. I don’t recall the canon explanation for this.
The replicator of TNG uses transporter technology to create stuff from a stored template in the database. There was no “original” stored in a “pattern stream”, so the “pattern stream” can’t be an absolute hard requirement.
I do believe in a soul, and I think it makes it easier to accept Star-Trek-style teleportation, not harder, because it’s possible that your soul will transfer into your new body. But I’d still never actually step into a transporter, because I’m not that confident my soul will go along for the ride, or that the “me” that steps into the machine will be the same “me” that steps out of it.
Kirk steps into a transporter, and suddenly finds himself at the Gates of Heaven. After he realizes where he is, he asks St. Peter what went wrong with the transporter. “Nothing did,” Peter replies. “That happens every time somebody transports. Didn’t you ever realize that the human body isn’t supposed to be converted into energy?” Kirk then turns around, and see hundreds of clones of himself standing around in a huge crowd 
So what? The “totally unrelated” me can’t tell the difference, and neither can anyone else.
I’ll ask the question that no one answered in the GD thread: your best friend uses a transporter to go on vacation to the Bahamas. He comes back. Do you say, “Hi, welcome back, how was it?” Or do you say, “Go away. You are dead. I do not talk to dead people. Never come near me again?”
grude: there isn’t a single answer. The Star Trek transporter is given different properties in different episodes on TV and in different books, too.
James Blish, in the first Star Trek novel, said it was like quantum tunneling: the person’s particles are induced to perform a Dirac Jump.
The Old Trek episode “Wolf in the Fold” duplicates Kirk…partially. Where did the extra matter come from? In the New Trek episode where Scotty is beamed back from the pattern buffer, where did the matter come from? None of this is ever made clear.
Wow. Why does he/she have to be dead to me?
I don’t know what the answer to these deep philosophical questions are, so I’ll pretend nothing changed.
“Hi. Have fun? Get laid? Tell me all the nitty gritty.”
Great question! Dead and soulless or not, I guaran-damn-tee “you” will still have to pay the other you’s taxes. And child support. And…
Read Greg Egan’s short story “Learning to Be Me” for an angle on how such an informational duplication might feel. Then read his novel Permutation City for a different angle (and some other cool ideas). Buy the books if you have to, I’m willing to bet they’ll tingle your brain (if not, PM me and I’ll buy them from you).
Exactly, the plot needed it to be so.
But, the question still remains about the two “people.”
The consciousness of the energy being Redjak was tied to the physical body of Hengist. When they beamed out Hengist, set to disperse, it took along and rendered ineffective the energy being (and presumably its consciousness) Redjak.
The result was that Redjak was in whatever they beamed out in Hengist’s body. So, the implication to this thread is that the transporter seems to transport the “person” and not just its molecules.
IANScotty, ymmv
“Wolf in the Fold?” I think that is the Jack the Ripper story by Bloch. I suspect you mean the one by Matheson in the first season.
When Blish was just starting on his versions he tried hard to make sense out of things. By the end he pretty much gave up. In any case, he knew of “Rogue Moon”
by Budrys the classic of this genre.
To add another factor, I’m pretty sure that by TNG time they could fiddle with what is in the pattern buffer, for instance removing contaminants. TOS did not have this capability.
There’s another short story that fits. I can’t remember the name, tho. (!!!)
It involved a system that could transport duplicates of people thousands of light years. The Dupe would remember all of his life up to the present, where the the Original would still be back on Earth, not knowing anything of the trials or experiences of his duplicated selves. The story followed a Dupe as it re-emerged at each next place. The last Dupe realized he was expendable.
Anyone?
Wolf in the Fold is the Redjak/Hengist story.
Not wrong. We see this kind of transporter malfunction a couple of times throughout Trek (doesn’t it happen to Picard at least once?) It would appear that there’s no inherent reason why the original person must be detroyed.
This could actually make a fascinating movie. The crew of the Enterprise finally realizes that there’s no reason why they can’t make a backup copy of themselves, just in case. Before long, this leads to them beaming clones down into all manor of horribly dangerous situations. Because who cares if your clone gets torn limb from limb by the slime monsters, when you get to stay on the ship safe & sound?
Fast forward a few years. A clone of Dr. Crusher finally escapes after spending the last two years as the prisoner of a rape gang on some shithole planet. She vows revenge on the crew of the Enterprise which left her at the mercy of a bunch of barbarians. She travels to Risa, where she finds the original Dr. Crusher on shore leave. Clone Crusher vaporizes the original with a phaser (so there won’t be a body), and then beams back to the Enterprise in her place…
That would be the gist of Rogue Moon, mentioned upthread.
Leaving her clone of a clone to take the fall for a murder charge? Sounds like a never ending story of betrayal and mayhem!
That’s the problem. If the clone survives and has gained useful experience and intel and perhaps made themselves eligible for medals, promotions, etc, what good is the lazy original just sitting around on ship?
I am of the opinion that the a Star Trek type teleporter (or any teleporter really) probably DOES kill the original copy, but that it really doesn’t matter either way. I’d use it, even though I’m pretty sure “my” consciousness would end, and another one that believes it is “me” and is identical to “me” in every way starts somewhere else. To the new me, and the universe as a whole, it doesn’t really matter. There are no tests you can perform to determine whether the new me is really me or just a copy. He will believe he is me, and have the memory of transporting and everything, so, yay.
So yes, sign me up. And I honestly think that my consciousness will end when they flip the switch, and a new one somewhere else exactly like me will begin. And I am ok with that.
For that matter though, to make it clear, I believe that I am constantly being replaced by a copy, possibly every single moment in time the old “me” is dying and a new “me” is taking over in his place. I don’t see the teleporter issue as any different.