Because teleportation is murder. Whatever comes out on the other side may look and act like you, but isn’t you, because you’re now dead for having been disassembled by the teleporter.
No the fuck it isn’t. Dualism is clearly true in Star Trek’s universe and even if it weren’t we see consciousness is maintained while beaming but is normally too brief to be perceived. (TNG: “Realm of Fear”)
Beaming is no more death than sleeping, or existing for longer than a single Planck unit of time is.
This is refuted by in-universe POV accounts. We have traveled through the transporter with several characters, and not once is their stream of consciousness or even vision broken.
Barclay even observes creatures slightly out of phase in the transport stream and manages to pull them in. (TNG, “Realm of Fear”)
I know it’s described as disassembling and reassembling, but in practice it looks more like they’re being adjusted out of phase, pushed to their location using the annular confinement beam, and resequenced into phase with the rest of the universe. This is what happens with Geordi and Ro in TNG, “The Next Phase.”
It doesn’t explain transporter clones or most transporter accidents, or even TNG, “Relics” but the transporter as a whole is kinda sorta space magic anyway.
If our consciousness is just a series of electrical impulses, as long as the transporter keot those impulses intact, makes sense that we would still be us at the other end. But I’d think nearly any transporter accident would kill the person being transported since it would mess that up.
Dr. McCoy famously hated the Transporter. He always complained that his atoms were being scattered, but never once did he voice the opinion that the transporter killed the transportee. Also, I don’t believe even with Badmirals abounding, that Starfleet would allow such a death machine to be in regular use.
Teleporters are interesting because when you think about it long enough, you realize the person on departure end died.
You think about it more… and if the person that comes out the arrival end is an exact replica – down to the atom – and, further, has internal continuity of experience… You realize that if you accept they died then you kind of also have to accept that the “you” of any given instant is constantly dying and giving way to the “you” of the next instant. That person living that experience at that exact moment will never exist again; they’re dead.
So you’re kinda back to transporters being business as usual again, but with a fun new existential crisis on the side.
Are stargates cloning devices? Aren’t they wormholes? I haven’t watched a lot of SG-1 so forgive me if they covered that
The real question is why they wouldn’t use the transporter buffers effectively as backups for away teams. Have an away team member killed? No problem, rematerialize them from the buffer.
In practice, I agree with you. The transporter scans, disintegrates, and reconstructs the thing being transported. But when the thing being transported is reconstructed at a subatomic level it is effectively identical.
I can imagine the society we see in startrek having already worked through the moral and philosophical implications. I would have loved to see that addressed in an episode tho.
Outside of measure of a man-type episodes, I don’t think they’ve ever had a super in-depth discussion on selfhood and the soul as characters see it in universe. , but it seems like materialism is the generally accepted philosophy. Post Enterprise, people who have hangups on the transporters (perhaps more based in dualism) are treated as weirdos.
More evidence for materialism: Q, the godlike being who might be able to tell the difference, treats Golem-Picard the same entity. And last I checked nobody’s going around saying that Thomas Riker and William Boimler are p-zombies.
(I guess Gray Tal is the odd man out, since there was some consciousness that got somehow ceremonially split off before shoving it in a golem. Maybe that’s just trill symbiont weirdness though).
Is one carbon atom the same as another carbon atom, philosophically? Can you keep your identity when all your atoms are replaced by other atoms of the same kind? It’s the ship of Theseus problem
