You know those sci-fi teleporters like in Star Trek where you disappear from one location then instantaneously reappear in another location? Do you trust that they are safe to use?
To fully understand my question, you need to understand the safety concerns regarding teleporters as explained in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQHBAdShgYI
spoiler
I wouldn’t, because the person that reappears aint me, its a fucking clone. Teleporters are murder machines. Star Trek is a silent massacre!
I am with Bob Johansson (Bobbyverse) on this one. Star trek is utterly inconsistent with how transporters work. They only ever play up when it’s convenient for the plot line, but the rest of the time they’re totally fine and no one worries about it.
Transporters are supposed to move the atoms by converting them into energy, moving that energy through subspace, and then converting them back to atoms on the other side, the only energy in the system is the energy that was created when the atoms were converted, so it shouldn’t be possible to create a transporter clone, no matter how many “confinement beams” you have, as where would it’s atoms come from?
If we talking time tested technology that’s been around for a couple centuries (i.e. Star Trek), sure.
Brand new tech? No thanks.
If we’re talking exactly like star trek I’m 90% on board with it. Yeah, yeah, so I’m a clone now, big whoop.
You wanna know the 10% that really fucking haunt me?! Mother fucking Tuvix. Everyone you know can turn into a Tuvix situation real fast, that’s the real nightmare.
I love Star Trek, but using the transporter as a plot device led to some really bs situations. Tuvix. The time it made everyone children. The time Picard fucked off to be an energy being so they just used last week’s pattern to rematerialize him… Thomas Riker… I could keep going.
I mean think about what would need to happen for Tuvix to exist. The computer would somehow have to do some really complex genetics work to create a hybrid species and somehow merge the 2 very different brains into one stable and coherent organism.
An IRL tuvix situation would be a dead blob of body horror on the transporter pad. They’d be like, fuck clean-up on isle 5, data corruption and pull the last good backup. Because keeping literally just the most recent copy would be criminally negligent. Then they’d rematerialize you but it was you from 2 days ago and you get to wonder for the rest of your life what the other version of you did in the 2 days.
I don’t buy the idea that disintegrating my molecules and reconstructing new ones is tantamount to murder or suicide.
If all I experience is being one place one moment and another place the next, then it’s me. It’s isn’t some fucking clone, it’s me. You’re just being turned into some other form (energy, if we’re using Star Trek rules) and then being turned back.
I’m pretty sure that at 26, I’m already a completely different person than the baby I was born as, literally. My cells have all died and been replaced. The horror. ./s
I don’t buy the idea that disintegrating my molecules and reconstructing new ones is tantamount to murder or suicide.
I definitely don’t think teleportation in science fiction is meant to be killing the person using it and making a clone of them. Like unless a story is specifically about that, I don’t think any given sci-fi author is trying to set up some sinister background plot where everyone is unknowingly killing themselves all the time.
But I do still have to wonder if that’s how it would end up working out in real life. Sure all our cells have died and been replaced since we were born, but that typically doesn’t happen with all your cells at the same time lol. imo it’s probably less about cells and more about like… Consciousness or “the soul” or whatever, I don’t know. Whatever it is, I accept that teleporters in fiction have some way to store and transport it, whether it’s stated in the narrative or not. But in real life I have no idea how we’d be able to tell if such a thing could even work.
Of course I would.
Everything that makes you -you- is contained in the physicality of your brain. Even fairly small changes in your brain will create large shifts in cognition and personality. So anything that replicates your body and brain, down to the last atom, is going to be creating -you-. As far as you are concerned, nothing happened; you ceased to be in one place, and immediately sprang into existence in another.
“As far as you are concerned”
Correction: “as far as anyone else is concerned.”
Consciousness IS continuity. If you are disentigrated and a perfect clone pops up somewhere to replace you… you died. Your current stream of consciousness ended and a perfect copy replaced you.
As far as all external observers are concerned it’s still you. But from your own perspective? Well you won’t have one anymore, you’ll be dead.
If automobiles were invented, would you use them instead of horses?
