would you use teleporters?

In My Humble Opinion
21

This just threw me for a loop. So basically, we’re operating under the assumption that the teleporter isn’t transporting someone from one place to another, but instead transports a clone of you with all your memories to that place? Three wouldn’t be much point to transporting if you actually wanted to do something there. Unless it was mundane work like grocery shopping.
About the OP’s second question…the immortality machine. How would you know it would be “you”? I mean…there would be someone with your memories/experiences in their head, but would you feel like you were that person after you died?

Sorry if the questions sound rendundant. But this is a fascinating thread which I am enjoying. Only on the SDMB!

22

Oh, yes I would! Even with the death/deconstuction aspect of it. Knowing how the process works, I still wouldn’t care, because the ME that steps out at the other end won’t be able to tell the difference. I take it on blind faith when I go to bed that I will wake up in the morning. If the technology were proven, I would use it. If something were to go wrong, and my atoms were dispersed into the ether, I would have no knowledge of the impending catastrophe. There are worse ways to die.

Besides, I’m lazy as Hell.

23

The “when you go to sleep” analogy is flawed. Your brain remains intact and continues to function while you are asleep. With the transporter, your brain (and body) cease to exist for some measurable time.

I normally wouldn’t use it… but if I was on a crippled starship being pulled inexorably into the mouth of a planet-eating doomsday machine, I’d figure “What the heck, I’m dead anyway, beam me up!”

24

I’d do it just on the off chance that something cooler than mere teleportation might happen.

My molecules (and perhaps consciousness) could never reassemble and I could become a formless entity free to travel the cosmos.

I could merge with a creature a la The Fly and be the new and improved soulmurk, able to digest food with my saliva!

I could answer once and for all the question of what happens after you die.

Or, I could just save a bunch of time and be able to sleep in an extra hour each morning.

25

OOooH, I remember that one.

“longer than you THINK dad, longer than you THIIINNNK!!”

26

Also, maybe they could assemble about 15 pounds FEWER Of my molecules, specifically the ones in my butt and thighs!!! :smiley:

27

Now see, that’s why I’m not allowed near any lab dealing with human cloning. My big idea was you (the hideously wealthy customer) come in, have a clone made, but tweaked, genetically speaking.

Say you always wanted blue eyes, or mebbe ya wanna be a foot taller, or somesuch. (Any aftermarket modification you like, we’ll do it for you!) That’s done with careful genetic manipulation of the growing clone. (While you wait!)

Then comes the brain transplant.

With the addition of an extremly accurate teleporter, you won’t even have surgery scars, now. We’ll just beam your brain straight into the new body. It’s the “New You” immortality clinic!

28

Friedo pointed out a story by Larry Niven in which teleportation is common. Niven’s teleportation uses the “tunnel diode” method, which basically puts you in ONE place and spits you out ANOTHER without covering the intervening space.

It’s a Californian’s greatest dream. Less pollution, no cars, all the roads get turned into street markets…

…but in Niven’s excellent essay, “The Theory And Practice Of Teleportation,” he covers the “death chamber” model pretty well.

On “Star Trek,” basically, what the machine does is disassemble you, on an atomic level, even down to the point of mapping the exact location of every particle you have…

…and then annihilates you, turns you into plasma, and uses it for energy.

It then transmits that energy, reconverts it into matter, and reassembles it at a new location.

…so, yes, it destroys you and rebuilds you. You could make a pretty good case for the idea that Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock were dead in the very first episode, and we were seeing totally different people every time they beamed from point a to point b.

…and I’m inclined to agree with Niven. I wouldn’t ride in one of the damn things. Furthermore, it opens up the can of worms that says: what if you simply save the pattern and create multiple copies of me? Are they clones? Are they ALL me?

And what if I beam… say… Scylla, for example… from here to there… but instead of rematerializing him, I simply turn the machine off? I have destroyed Scylla! Am I guilty of MURDER? Am I still guilty of murder if I reconstitute him during a break in my trial? Or am I only guilty if I erase the machine’s “memory” that would allow Scylla to be reconstructed?

(post stolen largely from Niven’s excellent essay, included in his collection, “All The Myriad Ways.” Required reading for proper argument on this particular topic.)

29

All this reminds me of a cartoon I saw on Cartoon Network when they use to show Oh-Canada a collection of Canadian cartoons.
A scientist created a two teleport devices that would make a copy in teleporter B of whoever entered in teleporter A.
He demonstrated it to a lot of people but after a while this one woman decided that there were ethical problems with the idea, so she had the scientist make a copy, but not kill it. Whichever scientist could prove that he was the original would win, and the other would have to be destroyed. So both scientists argued, and in the end, I think they played a chess or checkers game, and the winner was the original (well, actually, the scientist used the machine several times himself, so he wouldn’t be the “original”, but close enough) and the “clone” was destroyed.
The woman got disturbed over the fact that she took part in killing someone and didn’t know what to do, until she decided to use the machine herself. Her copy came out and was happy now because she wasn’t the one who was guilty of having scientist kill his copy, that was the original her, and she was now an innocent copy.

30

Oops, at the beginning of that last post, I ment to say that after a copy of a person was made, the orgional was then destroyed, not the copy. Obviously.

31

It isn’t an analogy, merely an observation; there is no way to be sure that ‘you’ are anything more than a conscious entity that merely remembers being ‘you’ yesterday. Continuity of physical existence doesn’t nail it down because we’re talking about consciousness.

32

Skeezix, you’ve got to be kidding. What if the drugs to put you to sleep don’t work?

Also, I don’t know about the whole transporter thing … not sure I’d trust the technology. They all have a failure rate, and it sure would be a shame to end up like Jeff Goldblum in “The Fly.”

But I would consider tesseracting, like Meg and her family in A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. Or maybe not. I could end up on Camazotz.

Sigh … guess I’ll just DRIVE.

33

Yes.

I die every minute. Every breath I take replaces the old, old cells die off and new ones are born. My skeleton is replaced every 10 years. I am a creature of the moment. My memory of 5 seconds ago is already fading and the sights, sounds, smell and pressures of the NOW have already replaced the old ones. I am not the same person I was a year ago. I have learned new things. I have changed, the old me is dead and this is the new me. I think I am, I must be. There is no other possiblity. When the days pressures and stresses fatigue me, I sleep. In the morning when I wake up It is a new day. The things that happened yesterday were to another person, one that wasn’t armed with what I know now. Today is a new day, full of possiblities for this new me. I have died and been reborn.

Worry about a teleport killing this old me and creating a new me? Nah, I die every moment and am reborn a new, wiser, me.

34

Given how many things we do now which would be mind bogglingly frightening to people of ages past, I think it would really be a non-issue once it got around. People who refuse to teleport would be like people who are afraid of escalators now.

35

True, Shalmanese. I’m not afraid of escalators or elevators, so I guess as long as there was NO chance that I’d end up with insect DNA, I’d do it. It would save me about 7.5 hours a week just driving to and from work …

The philosophical angle doesn’t really bother me. As long as I have my memories and personality, I’m me.

36

As mentioned earlier there was in fact an episode of Star Trek:TNG where they took you (the viewer) along for the transporter ride. In the ‘matter stream’ some beastie was living and going after the people when they transported.

From a technical sense the Star Trek transporter does indeed seem to annihilate the original and re-form a copy elsewhere. From a science fiction “we can do pretty much anything we please because we’re making it all up anyway” the Star Trek transporters seem to preserve consciousness through the process.

One has to wonder about the sense of a passage of time in there if you were conscious. The one episode seems to show time passing for the traveller as the watch the monster-thing ‘swim’ towards them. In another episode Scotty saves himself from certain death by putting himself in a transporter set on ‘repeat’ so he ‘lived’ in the transporter stream for years till someone comes along and re-materializes him. He comes out with no clue how much time has passed. I guess this is a good place to mention that consistency in science fiction also gets sidelined in favor of a nifty script.

As to making copies of yourself without being destoyed (as mentioned in the OP) the Star Trek transporters seem to need the original to ‘decompile’ and can’t just copy the person and leave them be. The whole thing is an ongoing process and if interupted it’s bad news for the person transporting. Presumably the information detailing a person/object is so large nothing can store it. If they could then having someone die would be no biggie…just take some mass, turn it into energy and reassemble as the ubiquitous guy in the red shirt who always dies. The nice thing is he’ll have no memroy of the trauma leading to his death. Of course, Star Trek isn’t reality but in this case I can see this as reasonable (despite everything else being unreasonable). The amount of information needed to record ‘you’ in ever respect is staggering. Think of it like trying to move the water from one side of a damn to the other. Doing it all at once is impossible but you can handle it through pipes over a given time period.

I think I mentioned this before in an earlier thread but don’t recall anyone replying to it so I’ll try again. What theological implications does a teleporter/transporter have if it is of the destroy/re-build kind? Put anopther way…can your soul be transported? Would any religious organization view something essentially put together out of raw materials (energy) and not ‘born’ as having a soul?

37

That’s the problem. You don’t have your memories and personality; someone else does.

Let’s look at this from another angle: Let’s say that I make a clone of myself. I use artificial aging technology to make the clone a perfect copy of myself. I then use a mind reading device to copy all of my knowledge, memories, and personality traits over to the clone. What I have created is an exact duplicate of myself. There are now, for all practical purposes, two Dicemans.

Has my consciousness transferred to the clone? No, because I’m still here and I’m clearly a seperate being. The clone will think that he is me, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s still a different person.

The transporter is basically the same thing, except that I’m destroyed during the cloning process. Hence, I’m no longer around to tell everyone that the other guy is just a clone.

Yeah, it’s really creepy when you think about it.
However, I still might use the transporter under certain circumstances. If I had children to support, and I was faced with imminent death, I’d probably teleport so that the kids would still have a dad. But that dad wouldn’t be me, just a good replacement for me.

38

Yeah, it can be creepy thinking about it. Especially when there is nothing to really compare it to. If somebody created an exact copy with all my memories right next to me would I for a nano second be split minded and have two conciousness? That is where we get into problems on a philisophical level that cannot be proven by anybody until that person does them.

If a person is his memories and his genetic imprint, nothing more than neurons firing and memories stored, then sure, teleporting makes absolute sense. If he thinks he is him, and has the memories and exact thinking processes he MUST be him, in every regard.

If 99.9% of a person is his memories and etc, and 1% is the special force of conciousness some refer to a soul, then transfering that part of a person may not occur. That “soul” dies and some souless automotan goes on living thinking it is that person. Little does he know he is nothing more than a thinking rock. Pretty soon we have a bunch of souless biological robots running around causing havoc thinking they are real people. Only a few special people would go on living knowing they are the same people that they were when they were born. (this is where they are wrong btw)

Now all kinds of thought experiements can be construed about teleporting somebody without destroying the body. Both would be identical for a split second (or less) and would slowly become their own identity, slowly but surely becoming two entirely different people. Of course the difference between them would be paled by the difference between him and say his twin brother if such a sibling existed.

The whole thing can be thrown either way, and both have interesting mind bending paradoxes to contemplate. I personally lean towards the personality=memories rather than some nebulous “Me” cloud that permeates my body, but really it doesn’t matter. Both contain paradoxes that would lead one to simply hold the belief that we will never be able to teleport or by the time we get to the technological level to transport in this fashion we will no doubt have mastered the ability of preforming two or more cognitive tasks at one time anyhow and such paradoxes will seem juvenile. Just a thought.

39

I wouldn’t want to teleport for fear of having happen to me, what happened to the two crew members in Start Trek The Motion Picture

40

As James Blish pointed out in “Spock Must Die”, the soul is immortal by definition, so it cannot be destroyed. Presumably, the soul can either ride the beam to the new body, skip off to the afterlife, or hang around and haunt the transporter room.

Since a soul cannot be created by anyone other than God, the new body is only a “person” if the soul moves into it. Otherwise, you can kill all the transporter replicas you like! :wink:

This begs the question: which of Kirk’s bodies had the soul in “The Enemy Within”? Given the way the episode was written, we’re clearly supposed to assume it was “good Kirk”. I doubt anyone will accept that an immortal soul can be split in two by mere human technology.

Even though I don’t believe in souls, I still wouldn’t use the thing. I’m inclined to think that whatever continuity of identity I have is a matter of continuing processes in my brain–as long as my brain is functioning, I’m still there.

But the transporter not only stops those processes…it destroys the physical structure that houses them. The guy who steps off that platform may be Vlad, but he’s not THIS Vlad.