Would you step into a transporter?

In My Humble Opinion
41

Ah, but there’s the rub! You don’t KNOW, nor can you PROVE, that your consciousness is transported to the newly-created, better-constructed collection of molecules I’m calling you-prime. Sure, you can say it’s a given in the question as you’ve interpreted it, but I don’t accept the premise because there can be no hard evidence that it is true.

The way I see it, you stop being and you-prime comes into existance. Like I mentioned in an earlier post, you’re just as dead as if I put a gun to your head and pulled the trigger. It’s irrelevant to you that there’s now an exact copy of you (or a more shaplier you with a built-in pushup bra, long legs and really good teeth) roaming the streets, cashing your checks, and kissing your kids.

42

I, for one, am absolutely convinced that I have done this.

About three years ago I had knee surgery, and was put under general anesthesia. I had recently read a thread here on just this subject that mentioned that general anesthesia, in at least some instances, stops all electrochemical activity related to consciousness.

Common sense shows that personal identity doesn’t depend on material continuity (having the same atoms. The transporter thought-experiment shows that identity doesn’t depend on subjective continuity (thinking and remembering that I’m me), since I wouldn’t voluntarily submit to being murdered if the transporter worked on the far end, by creating a me there, but failed to disintigrate me on this end.

The only plausable alternative short of eliminativism (there is no me) is that identity depends upon continuity of process–that the electrochemical processes that make up my consciousness must occur as an unbroken chain in order for me to maintain my identity.

It is posssible that this stops every night when I go to sleep. It is even possible (and I believe some neurologists would argue) that it happens continuously throughout the day. But it seems undeniable (if the claim about the way anesthesia works is true) that it happened when I had knee surgery (and again last year when I had back surgery). If the technology existed, they could have taken me apart cell-by-cell and put me back together in the next room, and it wouldn’t have mattered because nothing was going on in my brain (besides basic life-support functions). To me, that means I died. I stopped existing.

When I recovered, I had all the memories I’d had before, and felt like exactly the same person, but there is no way to prove that the person who entered the hospital didn’t stop existing and that I didn’t wake up for the first time hours later, having the feeling that I was the same person only because I had neurons in mostly the same places.

(Of course, I know that in at least some cases, general anesthesia doesn’t stop all higher brain activity. Sometimes it only eliminates the formation of memories and/or causes paralysis. So I have no way of knowing if I’m the same person I remember being.)

Having read about all this, I was actually quite uncomfortable going into surgery, and told several of my friends afterward that I was qhite sure the person they had known had died. But the fact is, neither I nor they were that concerned after the fact. Society says I’m the same person, I feel like the same person, and no one is around to complain.

The same will be true of transporters, if the technology is possible. Philosophical concerns will be dropped for social ones. As long as most people coming out feel and act normal, and hardly anyone survives on the wrong end to complain about it, I have no doubt we would all be zooming around the aether to our hearts’ content. No one existing at any given moment in time will have any reason to feel that everything isn’t normal.

43

In precisely the same way you currently think you’re you.

So what? The ‘me’ that existed yesterday doesn’t exist any more, because yesterday doesn’t exist any more.

If your life is over, you don’t have a POV.

44

One of the pieces I wrote for Teemings was entitled “Teleportation Angst”. (I can’t look it up here at work to gibve you the cite, because for some reason the filters block Teemings, although not the Dope itself. But you can find it easily enough)

Ever since the first teleportation story appeared back in the 19th century, people have written teleportation stories in which the punch line is what horrible, awful thing can happen if it goes WRONG!

Why?

Certainly there’s plenty of risk in riding acrocket to the stars. It’s an explosive! The damned thing can blow up on you! But very few stories about rockets, even back in the early days of science fiction, depict rockets blowing up. (Jules Verne mentions it as a distinct possibility in From the Earth to the Moon, but his launching goes off without a hitch). If you build a flying machine, you cal fall and get killed. But, since Icarus’ flight, almost no early stories about flying feature people being killed by failure of the lifters. Any new technology carries a risk, but literature about new technologies, although they might mention the risk, are generally optimistic and have things turn out well.

Except for transporters. The first teleportation story has the machine fail after telweporting only the guy’s head. The second teleportation story, as well, is about the grisly thingas that happen when things go bad. and then there was LAngelaan’s story “The Fly”. And the movie. And its sequel. And itssequel. And The remake, and its sequel. And the movie “The Projected Man”. And Michael Crichton’s “Timeline”. And the Stephen King story referred to above. Andd a lot of episodes of “Star Trek” (who, as science fiction folks themselves, shoulda known better). And even the first Star Trek movie.
Science fiction literature has been a great deal more forgiving, after the initial qualms. There’s been a lot of good non-ick SF on teleportation. But the prevailing image in the public mind with teleporters has been – “Ick!”

If you ever get a teleportation device working well enough to get a coherent item from point A to point B, then things coming through inside-out, or scrambled together withother things is going to be so far from an issue that it would be like worrying that the speed of your train is going to suck all the air out of your compartnment (which some people did, back in the early days).
As I’ve said before, if I ever went on a teleporter, I’d be certain to take a fly with me. Heck, I’m already carrying eyebrow mites and intestinal flora. How much more of a risk of scrambled creatures would it make?

45

Atheist that I am, I still wouldn’t like a copy of me to go on instead of me. If I was going to die horribly at one end of the transporter connection unless I went ahead, then yeah, I’d go. But otherwise no.

46

I’ll give this my standard Lasik response: when insurance companies back up the technology, I’ll take part.

Not that I put any faith in the insurance companies, but presumably by the time they approve it, they’ll have sunk beaucoup bucks into risk analysis studies, saving me the trouble to do so.

Until that time, I’ll happily push my buddy into the transporter and press the large red button. :smiley:

47

I’d almost trust one if it was more of a wormhole than a data-transportation mechanism. If half of my molecules were transported and it still felt like I was a whole being, it would be more believeable.

If all the molecules of my body were to be able to communicate with the rest of my body while it was being transported, the process of my consciousness would continue uninterrupted.

Of course, that doesn’t rule out the possiblity that you are being fooled into thinking it was seemless by a sly teleportation firm (what? No, I swear your legs are really there on the other side! No, it really is warm and slightly muggy on the surface of Uranus!)

48

I would not get into a transporter pod because doing so would be to commit suicide. The newly born “me” emerging from the arrival pod would be a charlatan intent on sleeping with my wife. As the cuckold looking down from heaven (or up from…eh, who knows where), I couldn’t blame either party since both “me” and the wife would be convinced that “me” was me.

We discussed this subject quite thoroughly in this short :wink: thread a while back. I believe discussion of transponder pods began around post # 260 or so.

Dr.Poopie AKA Tibbycat

49

“How about a night of efficient German lovemaking?”

(There’s a Simpsons quote for everything)

50

But I’m not sure that was it…

Anyway, I realized that I never actually answered the OP’s question. And the answer is yes.

After all, I’d have surgery again.

Think about it this way–If the old me DID “die” when I had anesthesia, then I remember everything up to the point at which I (he) lost consciousness. So I “remember” dieing (or what there is of it to remember, anyway). It wasn’t so bad.

Death qua death CAN’T be bad: it’s just nothingness. It’s the perception of death, the anticipation of it, and the knowledge of what could have been, that is bad. I don’t avoid death because I want not to die, but because I want to live. That’s one reason killing animals is considered morally acceptable–animals, even if they suffer, have at most a very limited conception of the future, so they cannot mourn the loss of their future lives. They can fear death, but they cannot experience it as the loss of a future.

What does this have to do with transporters? Just that they take the sting out of death (if death they be). As with anesthesia, I can convince myself philosophically that it equals death, but I can’t bring myself to mourn for each friend or family member who has surgery, knowing that from my perspective, they’ll be fine afterward. Nor do feel the loss of my own future accutely, knowing that others will still see me do all the things I hope to do in the future, and that all those experiences will happen to a future being who will think and remember as I would.

51

Cars yes, cabs no, though that’s due to being cheap. That was poor phrasing on my part; I wouldn’t participate in something that I knew had the forseeable, potential, and unavoidable possibility of obliterating my consciousness. I know that I risk my life every time that I step into my car; however, whether a particular car ride is going to end my life is a function of skill and chance. Whether using a Star Trek-style transporter is going to obliterate the “me” that exists now regardless of accidents is a yes-or-no proposition.

I don’t think the risks are comparable, and I think it’s silly to suggest that they are. If I were worried about horrific transporter accidents. . .well, that would be different :).

52

One big question - Can I take a carry on or do I still have to check my luggage & wait 45 minutes on the other side?

53

Your luggage, clothing, wallet, and watch all go alongside you, pretty much instantaneously.

The only reason you wait for luggage at an airport carousel is because someone has to unload it from the belly of the plane and get it to you. No such wait with teleporters.

54

but would that Prada be the original hand-sewn article that you paid an arm and a leg for, or would it just be a cheap atomic level imitation one?

55

For those who question whether the person on the other end of the transporter beam is your original self, as it relates to the Star Trek transporter, it is. The Star Trek Encyclopedia states that the transporter “briefly converts an object or person into energy, beams that energy to another location, then reassembles the subject into its original form.”

Cite

Instead of disassembling your molecules at one end and rearranging a completely different set of molecules at the other, the transporter essentially converts you to energy and back to matter, as the laws of physics state that neither matter nor energy can be created or destroyed, but only converted into one form or the other. Therefore, your soul, or whatever defines you as an individual, makes the trip with you. You are not a carbon copy at the other end. You are indeed you. This has been Star Trek canon for as long as I’ve been a fan of the show. (40 years :cool: )

Of course, since the transporter is a hypothetical invention, this would not necessarily apply to all transportation devices depicted in science fiction. YMMV. But as the transporter relates to Star Trek specifically, one’s worries are groundless.

56

You can have your luggage transported with you. But be aware that every once in a while you will be transported to San Diego and your luggage will be transported to Honolulu.

57

That’s a HUGE – and unprovable – logical leap.

I will accept canon as canon, for factual, provable details. However, I won’t accept faith as canon, which that statement basically amounts to. Until someone comes up with a way to prove that *you * and you-prime are the same person/soul/consciousness, I won’t accept it as fact, be it canon or not.

58

What is the difference, if any, between one hydrogen molecule and another hydrogen molecule?

59

Plenty, if the hydrogen molecule is self-aware. :smiley:

Dammit, I swore I wouldn’t get dragged into this debate again. :smack:

60

It’s also demonstrably untrue. Remember the two Kirks? Remember Thomas Riker? Remember Tuvix?

I understand if you don’t want to remember Tuvix. I’m ashamed of myself for bringing it up and recalling the horror was that ST:Voyager to everyone’s mind. Pleaes excuse me while I go beat myself with this ice cream cone.