I wouldn’t use a transporter that created a clone and destroyed the original… Why bother? I wouldn’t be going anywhere even if I did. Look at it this way. Let’s say my original wasn’t destroyed straight away, perhaps they have to wait to verify the copy is in Alpha Centauri or wherever. I while away the time by drinking coffee and chatting with the technicians. The word comes through and the techs smilingly inform me that I’m on Alpha Centauri at this very moment enjoying the sights of the new world.
A troubling thought strikes me. “Wait a moment, actually I’m not on a far off world, I’m here. And you’re just about to disintegrate me. Are you telling me that when you do that I’ll wake up in my clone?”
“We-e-e-e-ll, not exactly.”, the tech replies nervously.
“I will, in point of fact, simply die, won’t I?”
“If you want to be picky about it, yes. But think of the fun your twin will be having!”
If this is future transport I’ll stick to the train, thank you very much.
Hell, yes I would use a transporter. No traffic jams.
The kill the extraneous copies of you is a little different. What if an erro gets introduced into my resquenced “clone”. I could die several iterations later.
Exactly, and it’s absolutely unprovable that the me that comes out the other end is the Me that went in. I think it’s highly unlikely that the consciousness that is Me would survive the trip.
All right; say that we’re not teleporting to another planet; we’re teleporting to a room down the hall. Say that this is done by transmitting data about the individual being teleported–everything down to every quantum state–and that this data is used to assemble the person in the other hall.
Now, either the original pile of flesh and neurons survives the scan of the quantum data, or it doesn’t. If it does, then that pile of flesh and neurons has a separate consciousness from the new pile of flesh and neurons down the hall. If they both go for a bathroom break, they will see each other; they will not experience each other’s new experiences. They will have separate consciousnesses.
Now, if the original pile of flesh and neurons is, say, shot in the head, it dies. The other survives. But the original died. Its consciousness stopped. To me–and, honestly, I believe to everyone else–this is obvious.
If it doesn’t, then, to the outside world, the two piles of flesh and neurons are the same; the person vanished in one place and appeared in another. But we’ve established in the previous example that the two consciousnesses are separate; whether the original one dies immediately before or after the creation of the new one is completely irrelevant. From the perspective of the original pile, they stepped into the device, and their consciousness stopped. This is death to the original person–unless, of course, you’re wanting to posit that there’s some kind of continuing connection between the two. Like a soul.
IMHO, saying it’s the same person is more in line with the idea of a mystical immortal soul than saying that it’s not.
No. You’re, in effect, faxing a human. The person on the other end is as much “me” as the faxes I receive at work are the original documents that my customers printed off in Colorado and sent to me in Tennessee.
Big T, just because I have two copies of me in one plane of existence wouldn’t mean I’m in control of both at the same time. It’s not as if I’m viewing life from both perspectives at once. If one dies, I simply only receive from the other. They are obviously independent.
It seems that I would indeed be in favor of the transporter from ST.
I don’t…think so. I have the admirable (?) trait of being able to re-read books all the time without realizing I’ve read them before, so I can’t say for certain. It was an older story, I’m pretty sure of that. That does sound like an interesting book, anyway.
Well, let me fanwank that away. Scotty was in a 75 year old transporter. The ship was failing, Scotty cobbled together a loop that had a longshot of keeping him and the other officer alive until they could be rescued. The tranporter Barclay was using was of a more recent vintage. kept in good condition by Geordi’s engineering team. Perhaps it was capable of keeping people conscious through a transport, while the transporter on Scotty’s ship wasn’t.
Also, let me say people are talking about apples and oranges here. The OP specifies a Star Trek style transporter. The transporters in ST have been specifically described as beaming a specific set of molecules through space. It does not (except in rare instances, I know, the two Kirks, the two Rikers) create a new set of molecules identical to the original. And even in the two special cases, there was no destruction of the two original people. Any transporter that destroys the original and creates a duplicate is not one used in the Federation, or by the Romulans or Klingons, or probably even the Cardassians. It may be true in some of the other cultures in Star Trek that don’t care about splitting hairs so much. It can be true in other works by other writers. But what we are talking about here are Star Trek transporters, which has the specifically designated effect of transporting the original person or object intact. Any other workings of a transporter would put it firmly out of the boundaries of the way they work in the ST universe. At least in my humble opinion as a Star Trek fan of some 44 years who has read all I can get my hands on since the first episode. Some of what I read was that long ago and may not be as sharply remembered, and not even citeable by myself.
Well, if we’re talking about things we’ve read instead of seen, this was actually raised by McCoy in the very first Star Trek novel, Spock Must Die!. It’s non-canon, of course, and isn’t even a part of the Pocket Books universe, either, but it’s at least been hinted at since near the beginning.
I should have been more clear. Of course I’ve read plenty of fiction, including Spock Must Die. But I’ve also read books such as The World of Star Trek and The Making of Star Trek, which gave you background information on the show and its overall workings, which I no longer have to refer to now, but I’m sure must have mentioned that the transporters beam objects and people intact without destroying them. None of this may have worked its way into an episode or been mentioned to the casual TV audience, but I take it as source material or well-researched and accept it as if it were canon.
No. Because you’re destroying ME. The copy is just a copy. It’s not me, even if it thinks it is. I’m still the guy who has to stand and die on the front end. So no thanks.
No, I would think the same thing about anything that was destroyed/replicated by this method.
If we sent the original 200+ year old U.S. Declaration of Independence through this device, I would consider the article at the other end to be a perfect copy (and not the original). It never had a soul, but it is still a copy.
So, would you say that some sort of continuity is a necessary part of the definition of the identity of an object, in addition to its physical attributes? Personally, I’m not sure I can imagine a definition of that continuity that isn’t completely arbitrary. IMHO, a more practical way to define identity is that if there is no possible way to distinguish between two things, they are the same thing.
But as has been mentioned, we as humans don’t have physical continuity. The various particles of our bodies are replaced many times over during our lives. We don’t have continuity of consciousness either, since we regularly indulge in periods of unconsciousness and sensory deprivation. So in what way does destroying one body while constructing a perfect copy of it elsewhere destroy the individual? My identity isn’t stored in the specific atoms that make up my body; rather, it is inherent in their precise arrangement in a way that constructs my consciousness and my memories. At no point in this process is that information destroyed.
Suppose we have a system where the distant “copy” is created (for verification, say), before killing the “original.” I step into a device in Seattle, and another me pops into existence in New York. At this point, there are two of me, and we both have identical memories right up until the moment of transfer. We might both even have a “continuous” experience; the me at the other end just remembers a moment when the room shifted suddenly, but otherwise he can trace his consciousness all the way back to breakfast that morning.
Then the sap in Seattle gets dumped into the incinerator. Obviously if you asked his opinion on that course of action, he would object, possibly violently. Thus, it would probably be best to perform the procedure under sedation. But if you look at the process as a whole, the individual that is me undeniably continues existing.
But if you look at the process as a whole, the individual that is me undeniably continues existing.