Source Page. Credit is to SMBC-Comics and even more credit to @aperson@beehaw.org who noticed it was missing and found the credit in this comment. Sorry about that and thanks, you’re awesome aperson <3
I’m taking shuttlecrafts.
Anything that ever includes Galaxy Quest is an immediate win from me. Doesn’t help I’ve seen the movie so many times (it’s a movie version of my weighted blanket) that I can vividly hear that ‘exploded’ line in my head.
Fuck you I’ve gotta turn the damn movie on again now.
I’m still floored that Sigourney Weaver was 50 when she played that role. I’ve got 10 years before I hit that mark, and I already look like targ droppings.
Wow… I wonder why. Maybe the dimensions are too big or something? You’re not missing anything to be fair. It’s just a screenshot of my dual monitor set up showing your comment and then Galaxy Quest playing on the second monitor.
I’m terrified of transporters
You and a significant amount of individuals in Starfleet apparently. I can’t say I blame them too much. After all the shit that’s gone horribly wrong? They have a point.
You just know there is a software engineer in Starfleet who was repeatedly reminding their superiors that leaving the “safety protocol” feature as a user option would end in disaster.
They probably eventually got word of Picard’s debrief from First Contact too, and subsequently shut up about the matter. Innocents were one thing, the borg another, apparently.
Geordi: Reg, transporting really is the safest way to travel.
Barclay: Maybe you’re…wait a second. Didn’t it turn you and Ro into fucking ghosts like…2 weeks ago?
It’s funny that when it’s transporter people freak out at this idea, but technically every single person goes to sleep not knowing if the ‘them’ that wakes up was the same as the one that went to sleep.
We could effectively have individual consciousnesses dying each night and new ones picking back up the next morning.
Something to think about as you lie drifting off to sleep tonight.
The solution that clears up all of these issues and results in a fully consistent view of the self is the one people like the least. There is no “you” or “me”, the self is an illusion the brain creates to make sense of things.
The Illusionist theory of Consciousness is pretty solidly refuted. The emergent theory of consciousness is vaguely similar, and argued by some to be stronger, others to be weaker, than illusionism. I think it’s the most popular view among physicalist philosophers. For the arguments against emergentism, the most common seems to be the required presupposition of physicalism plus some handwaving to make it work. It’s noted, however, there are a vast number of permutations of the emergentism argument or what emergent mental states actually mean, which each one of those permutations a bit different.
Upon analysis, neither has demonstrated being “a fully consistent view of the self” with any success. Ultimately, both are just unsubstantiated attempts to fill the gaps in our understanding.
That’s about consciousness, which is a much larger claim than the self being an illusion. You can have consciousness without a self, that’s what we call ego death. In theory, a conscious being could exist that’s always in a state of ego death, and have no understanding of the self and be utterly confused by why people find anything unintuitive about the teleporter paradox.
I mean… video recording kind of shoots that theory in the foot, doesn’t it?
How so?
Do you think I’m taking about something related to the entire physical body like Dark City?
No - I mean the continuity of consciousness inside your brain.
That potentially the part of you that IS you, your subjective experience of existing, might in fact die each night never to return and simply be replaced by a different new one spun up with access to the hippocampus and a sense of having lived a whole continuous life, none the wiser to the many past yous that came before and will never be again nor its own impending doom in just a few short hours.
No, I mean if you record daily videos of who you are in your day-to-day, like, talking about what happened and your thoughts and feelings, vlog-style, then you went to sleep and woke up with a completely different consciousness, wouldn’t you know, by looking at the videos, that it was someone else seaking, not the conscious you are today.
Does that make sense. I’m having trouble explaining it well, I think.
There’s a great They Might Be Giants song about exactly this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSbEOZY7k20
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/teleporter-3
Source to give credit and so you can read the title text, the panel that was cropped off, and the bonus panel.
Weird, there’s a bonus panel? I don’t see anything except the cropped intro
The title text (click comic to reveal)
The good news is this is the same thing that happens whenever you fall asleep, even for a second.
The bonus panel (click the red button to reveal)
