And if you can’t identify a real difference between the me that was here a minute ago, and the me that’s over there now, all you’ve got is bull-headed dogma and narrow-minded intransigence.
Actually, deconstructing grief is a really good way to think about this.
When a loved one dies, and you grieve, there are 3 different things you have lost:
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You grieve because you will never experience that loved one again, other than memories.
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You grieve because others who you care about have also lost the shared experiences with that love one.
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And finally, you grieve on behalf of the loved one themselves, for all of the experiences they didn’t get to have, since their life has ended.
Now with the transporter scenario, if a loved one were to use it, I wouldn’t be grieving the first two things, because those haven’t changed. But the third one is still very real. A loss has been experienced.
So why would I inflict that upon myself?
Why on earth would that possibly matter to the you who stepped INTO the transporter (the same you who is having this conversation)? So what if the copy is absolutely perfect in every possible way, the pre-teleported you will never know it. You’ll never know if you became a human fly either, because you’re dead.
No I’m not. I’m right there. See? I’m waving at you.
Let me ask you this. You go swimming, get caught in a wave, and drown. A lifeguard pulls you out. You’re not breathing. He gives you some CPR, you cough up some pool water, and you’re okay. You’re still the same person you were before you went in the pool, right?
Let’s say you have a heart attack. Your heart stops dead. But the paramedics rush in, zap you with those paddles, and your heart kicks in again. Still the same person, right?
Okay, let’s say you have a heart attack, and it’s an hour before anyone finds you. Significant brain death sets in. But this is SCIENCE FICTION! They rush you to the med center, and run a brain reconstituter over your head, that fixes you right up. Also, they put a bionic heart in to fix your ticker. Are you a different person than you were before the heart attack?
Let’s step it up a notch. In a horrible dirigible accident, your head is severed from your body, which is subsequently incinerated. But it’s still SCIENCE FICTION! Your brain is saved and cryogenically stored, while a new body is grown for you in a vat. When the body is ready, they scoop out your brain, stick it in the brain reconsistituter, and plop it in your new body. Still you, or are we in “different person” territory yet?
Okay. So. In a terrible industrial accident, you’re hit with a disintegration ray, and reduced to your component atoms. Luckily, the ray has a “reverse” switch. They fire it at the pile of dust that used to be you, and you’re fully reconsituted, just like you used to be. Why is this, now, no longer you? At which step in our serious of increasingly unlikely lifesaving technologies have we stopped saving people’s lives, and started just making new ones?
LOL I enjoyed that post immensely, and they are good questions.
Obviously the drowning and heart attack victims are still the same people.
But then we get into science fiction territory with “significant brain death” and then later somehow the person comes back. For all of those scenarios, the only possible answer is “I don’t know, unless I happen to experience one of them myself.” And even then, I suppose I’d never know. I’d either suddenly just end and know nothing, or suddenly come back with all my memories.
If I had to guess, I’d say in the first 2 scenarios, since the brain has been preserved in some form and then re-animated, the consciousness would be intact. What’s the big difference between an intact consciousness and our teleported guy, you may ask? It’s all about experiencing those future events after the accident. Can you say the pre-accident person is the same consciousness who experiences those post-accident events? If so, they survived – no new person.
But the disintegration ray scenario? No way. But there’s really no way to know definitively, even about the first 2 scenarios. What exactly is that brain reconstituter doing? Just zapping it back to life? Or recreating matter & energy from a previous copy? It could end up as a doppelganger, there’s no way to know.
Yep, this is one of the standard arguments for psychological continuity. However, just trivially saying that the resulting person is you is problematic too.
Let’s say we have a transporter/reconstructor/whatever that has an error rate of X%. IOW the new person will be X% different to the original, and let’s say the errors won’t be random noise, they will still make a viable human.
Where do we draw the line between the process “moving” you, imperfectly, and creating a new human?
There is no such thing as continuity of consciousness.
In one sense, there cannot be, because time itself isn’t meaningfully continuous in any physical sense (you always have that 5.39 × 10[sup]−44[/sup] s gap to bridge - you are always a series of stuttering discontinuities).
But in another, unitary consciousness is an illusion anyway, as is its continuity - it’s a post hoc story we repeatedly tell ourselves, as Dennett explains in his work.
I’d step into the transporter.
As for the “you’d get shot with a disruptor” hypothetical, the difference there is the time lag - the me that gets shot has already diverged from the me that got sent, of course I’m not going to commit suicide. The perception of divergence is what matters to me.
So is it your claim that when you say “Tomorrow, I will experience breakfast.” and when you say, “Tomorrow, I will be vaporized and recreated on another planet and will experience breakfast there.” there is no meaningful difference?
I think the about-to-be-vaporized-version of you might beg to differ. If not, he’s an utter fool or willing to commit suicide.
But regardless of the time delay, there is already a divergence. That’s our whole point in bringing up the scenario. It doesn’t matter if the duplication occurs before, after, or at the precise moment of your disintegration. In all cases, you have diverged because your experiences stop while the other’s keep going. That’s a divergence – a pretty important one.
I think the most amazing thing about this debate is that the presence of a working transporter would do nothing to resolve it. Some people would use it and afterwards say, “See? I’m fine! You’re just being silly.” But the rest of would still say, “No way, I am not stepping into that thing no matter what you doppelgangers claim.”
There was a time when people took it as obvious that “you get your belly cut open, you die”. Early versions of the Hippocratic Oath forbade doctors from even attempting abdominal surgery, because with the technology of the time, it really was that simple: If you get your belly cut open, you die. Today, however, technology has advanced, and it is now possible, routine even, for surgeons to cut a patient’s belly open, and for the patient to not die from it.
Today, if you get disintegrated, you die. With current technology, disintegrating someone would indeed be murder. But in Star Trek, the technology has advanced. They have the technology to disintegrate someone without killing them.
This makes no sense. If he is I, then I am he. That’s the way that “is” works. Identity is commutative.
Sterling Archer, there can be just one possible explanation for posters to be so willing to step into a transporter—they must be zombies. :eek:
The important thing to keep in mind, yet continuously gets ignored in these discussions, is “point of view”. The only POV that matters in this thought experiment is the person in the departure pod. Everyone else’s POV is irrelevant, even the POV of the person in the arrival pod. Everyone who is not the person in the departure pod will believe the person in the arrival pod, including the person in the arrival pod, is the person who was in the departure pod, and in most ways they are correct, but, not in all ways.
This discussion really needs to be broken down into two parts to have meaning:
A) As a person not entering a transporter, do I have a subjective future in my body at a later time?
B) As the person in the departure pod, do I have a subjective future in the person in the arrival pod?
There are 4 possible answers:
- I have a subjective future in both A and B
- I have a subjective future in neither A or B
- I have a subjective future in A, but not B
- I have a subjective future in B, but not A
I think we can agree that answer 4 is pretty dopey, so let’s throw that one out.
If #1 is correct, then, by all means travel by transporter. If #2 is correct, then it really doesn’t matter if you travel in a transporter or not, because you will be subjectively dead either way. If #3 is correct, then only travel by transporter if you are suicidal.
What is this subjective feeling we’re discussing? It’s simply self-awareness (or personal identity, or self-consciousness). We all know instinctively that self-awareness exists, because we all feel it (let’s not, for the moment, muddy the waters with Matrix type scenarios, or the like). I think the current belief is that human awareness (or lower order consciousness) begins in the third trimester, while self-awareness (or higher order consciousness) begins ~2 years post-partum. Our sense of self emerges from the neocortex of the brain. Nothing woo about that. No need to bring a soul into this equation.
So, what properties do you instinctively feel are inherent to your sense of self? If you’re like me, you feel that it is always attached to your body. Barring dissociative disorders, where you go, so goes your sense of self. I’m confident I won’t go to work one day, leaving my consciousness in bed by mistake.
So, when considering having a “subjective future”, it means that you right now are betting that your current sense of self will continue in a body in the future (but, which one?). And, this is where the confusion begins. Anti-transporters, such as myself, believe our current sense of self will continue in our current body through time, but not in a copy (or re-assembled body); pro-transporters believe their current sense of self will continue in both their current body, or any exact copies (perhaps some believe their sense of self does not persist at all, no matter what body it’s in).
For simplicity sake, let’s consider a single freeze-frame configuration of you and a copy of you at a moment when your particles are in perfect sync. You are at location A, your copy is at location B. Properties that we can assume are the same between you and your copy include: there are no measurable differences between you two physically or mentally; you are both conscious and have a sense of self; you are both valid people, each having a legitimate claim to be you. I believe we all agree on these points.
Differences that we can assume exist between you and your copy include: the particles that comprise your brains are at different locations, they are separated by space; there are two sets of particles, not one; there are two brains, not one; there are two consciousnesses, not one. Equal, but separate. Again, nothing metaphysical, or woo involved.
Is there any information being shared between the two brains telepathically? I doubt it. So, believing you can have a subjective future in multiple copies is wishful thinking (hmm, my copies and I will bonk 5 women at the same time and experience multiple simultaneous orgasms), but paradoxical.
So, all things being equal, there is no measurable difference between you and your copy, so that satisfies the materialist model. You both have physical brains that are identical, although they are not the same brain because there’s two of them and they are at separate locations. So, why is it problematic to take the next logical step? If you have two identical but separate brains, you should have two identical but separate senses of self. If it were possible to ask either one of the freeze-frame yous to point to themselves, they would each point to one person—themself! In that instant, they understand that they are separate beings and that they share no thoughts or perceptions. Likewise, if you time-shift the two frames, it’s easy to understand that one does not have a subjective future in the other. Therefore, realizing that there is no real difference between this freeze-frame copy of you and a particle re-assembled transported you, the only logical conclusion is that you have no subjective future in the guy in the arrival pod.
Now, we just have to deal with non-transported person over time. Do I have a subjective future in my body? I believe I do. I believe I do primarily because I feel a passage of time. I feel continuous and I don’t believe my brain would delude me like that for no good reason (besides, it’s not smart enough to construct such an elaborate a ruse ;)). And, just to be clear, I believe my copy has a subjective future in his body, too (and yes, I realize he has a deluded past because he stole my memories, but that’s another story).
I see no physical reason why consciousness cannot be as persistent as it feels to be. Pro-transporters typically cite exchange or replacement of atoms over time as being the game-stopper with regard to persistent consciousness (“you’re not the same person you were yesterday”). I don’t think that’s a problem because all the neocortical atoms don’t exchange at the same time (and a good number of them don’t get replaced at all). But, more importantly, the vast majority of CNS neurons persist for the entire life of the person. Self awareness emerges from neuronal circuitry; if neuronal circuitry persists over time, self awareness should, too—it would be kind of odd if it didn’t (the substrate persists, but the emergent property of that substrate does not persist; that doesn’t make sense). There is no need to go down to the level of elemental particles. Consciousness emerges from brain matter at the cellular level.
Sure. But for a teleported person, it feels to be completely persistent, just like it does for anyone else. Why should teleportation be assumed to introduce a discontinuity? It’s not discontinuous if I walk from point A to point B, or if I’m carried there in a car. Why is it discontinuous if I’m carried there in a stream of particles?
Well, unless your transporter is like the the Futurama Tube transport, I believe my neurons would find having their atoms disassembled into a particle stream to be a rather discontinuous bump in the road. 
I disagree that identity is commutative. You are making it clear that you are missing the significance of the statement. The time factor here is distorting the nature of the word “is”. We would be more accurate using terms like “was” and “will be”.
Consider the Hugh Jackman character in Prestige. He duplicates himself. Just after duplication, both copies ARE him. They have his memories and a stream of consciousness that goes back unbroken to before the zap from the machine.
Conversely, can you say his pre-zap character is now experiencing the events of BOTH of the copies? No, it is impossible for one stream of consciousness to suddenly be experiencing dual realities simultaneously. He only gets to experience one set of events. Or, more accurately, “he” experiences both of the sets of future events, but now there are two “he’s”. His consciousness has been duplicated.
And neither of those “he’s” wants to be dropped into a tank and drowned after the trick is over. Just as neither of the copies in the transporter at the moment of duplication wants to be the one who gets disintegrated.
Thing is, Trek canon shows that consciousness continues even while dematerialized during transporting. That was the basis for the Broccoli episode Realm of Fear.
From the wiki synopsis of that ep:
“In order to cure him, the transporter’s biofilter is modified and he is dematerialised for around 30 seconds. While in the beam he observes the creatures and grabs onto one of them just before materialising. On the pad a crewman from the Yosemite materialises along with Barclay. He deduces that the creatures were actually the missing crewmen of the science ship when he realized the number of creatures equaled the number of missing crewmen. They had been trapped inside the beam after an explosion occurred on their vessel during the transport. Worf and two other security officers transport after Barclay and successfully rescue the other crew members trapped in the beam.”
How rude! You know his name is Barclay!
Old habits…
That ep does conflict with other transporter issues brought up both before and after it, notably from TOS and ENT. But, still, if it aired, it’s canon.
But, if consciousness does indeed continue, EVEN WHILE TRANSPORTING, would that change anyone’s thoughts in this thread?
Even in the ep, The Schizoid Man, an interesting thing happens during the high warp transport at the beginning of the show. Dr Selar said it felt like they were inside the rock wall. Data said that for a moment, they were. Did they feel that as being conscious during transport, or as they were re-materializing? Based on the wording of the exchange, it could go either way.
Yeah, come to think of it, I remember in on of the ST movies (OS), two characters, (One of them Kirstie Alley I think) were carrying on a conversation while in transport.