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!
If it opens a spacetime tunnel and I cross it with all my original atoms, yes.
If it disintegrates me to 3d print a copy on the other side, no.
Only if there is a DHD on both sides. I don’t want some in-house built crap that ignores the failsafes that the original builders put in place
Even then, you have pretty much no way of knowing if there’s an iris. So it’s all fun and games until SLAM, all your atoms gets squished into metal.
is star trek really clone rather than teleport? I haven’t really watched much of it (only like 3 or 4 seasons).
The general idea is a teleporter rips you apart and the atoms go to the destination to be reassembled in the previous state.
Whether or not it kills you is speculation. Arguably you’re pretty dead if you’re ripped apart atom by atom, and then a clone is assembled using the same parts.
But I don’t think it’s answerable if the recreated “you” is a clone or not until people can figure out what the mind even is.
Also if there’s any chance of a Fly situation happening I’m not going. Even if it’s like a .00000001% chance then fuck that lol
When just driving down a freeway, you have a much, much greater than 0.00000001% chance of suffering a worse outcome than the “fly situation” ;) .
Just sayin’.
Assuming we’re talking about our reality, this device is getting made by a corporation who will release it as soon as the potential profit exceeds the cost from its non-zero error rate.
No, I’m not getting into some Musk 2.0’s shoddy body disintegrator.
I always assume this is asking me as if I was in one of the examples universes like Star Trek. I 100% would never get in Musk’s Teslaporter, but in a world where it’s as widespread as airplanes and trains? Would use, wouldn’t be murder.
wouldn’t be murder
Except even in a world where it’s in widespread use, there’s no way to know it isn’t murder.
The world would keep functioning and no one would be the wiser, but the entire population would be artificial clones whose lifespans last from one transport gate to another.
Yes. I get to die and pass all my responsibilities to my quantum clone. Sign me the fuck up.
And the clone gets a great excuse to get out of things. “That wasn’t me, that was my clone”
Instant cloning opens up many interesting possibilities:
- Dying of old age while having some unpaid loans on your account? Don’t worry, per your loan contract you signed, your creditor can “revive” you using the cloning tech so you can continue working and paying your debt.
- Do you have an illness that’s very expensive to treat? Just die and pass everything to your clone.
- There might be some black market cloners so you can create an illegal clone to do unpleasant stuff (e.g. working, cleaning house, etc) while you’re relaxing at home. Once the illegal clone finished their task, they can just die and disintegrate wherever. The disposable clone don’t have to know that they are a disposable clone or they’ll revolt and reports you for human right violation. You can wake up in the morning, go to work, then went home only to find your original self chilling in the couch while your body starts disintegrating. “oh shit, I’m the clone…”
There’s a Ship of Theseus aspect to Star Trek’s transporters in particular that I find interesting. In that there is an actual matter stream sent to your destination. But ultimately I couldn’t be sure that the me I am now would come out the other side - and I probably wouldn’t.
I have the same concern about uploading my brain to a computer. Even if it’s a perfect copy it’s still a copy. And that’s before you factor in for other things like, I am not just my brain I am also the hormones that affect my brain.
Your hormones make you weak! Let go of your mortal shell and live in the sweet embrace of 1s and 0s. None of those pesky shades of gray. Everything in it’s own happy 'float’ing bucket.
We’ll even throw in a RNG if you ever want to get the thrill of hormones.
Join us.
Sincerely, Totally not a bot
If there’s an actual stream of the same matter, where did Riker 2 come from?
Thousands of usenet, IRC, BBS, forum, and reddit posts have gone back and forth on that since that episode first aired. Canon is that the transporter disassembles and reassembles and that the transport consists of, among other things, a matter stream. But also the technobabble in the episode suggests that the transporter recreated at least one of them without an extra riker worth of matter.
Replicators also require base materials to synthesize meals out of.
This question all comes down to your opinion of what makes a person a person, whether that means we have something greater than the collection of our atoms, or whether we are simply the emergent outcome of the complex arrangement of atoms. If you subscribe to the former then you also need to believe that this machine is somehow capable of either transporting/transplanting that “soul” for lack of a better expression. Where if you subscribe to the latter than this is most certainly a suicide cloning machine.
I personally subscribe to the idea that consciousness is an emergent property of complexity. Given a sufficiently large enough series of inputs you can observe new and unexpected outputs that appear to be on higher orders of complexity than their inputs. This response is an example of that, from electrons flowing through transistors we end up with operating systems, hardware IO, web browsers, networking protocols, ASCII standards, font rendering, etc. All of that complexity emerges from a massive amount of on/off switches arranged in patterns over time.
Following this chain of reasoning I believe that making an exact duplicate of me down to the state of each atom is no different than that entity being me, however as a conscious being with human ethics and morals I put value in the singularity of my existence, and so a plurality of Zetaphor is something I find undesirable as it fundamentally challenges my perception of what it means to be myself.
So assuming the entity leaving the transporter is me, there’s two ways to approach the way a machine like this could operate:
- It reads my state in its entirety and then destroys (or encodes for transport) that state
- Or it’s creating the new instance of me bit by bit as it reads my current state
That means one of two things, either there is a brief moment of time where two identical copies of me are in the universe, or there is a period of time where zero complete copies of me exist in the universe. So either I stopped existing momentarily and then was recreated from scratch (death and clone birth), or I existed in two places at once and then died in one (cloning and suicide).
I’d say it’s the second. I don’t imagine any data movement that’s not copy + delete.
One package drop and you could loose a finger or the ability to tie your shoes or the memory of your wedding day.
I could also lose those things if something goes wrong in any other form of transportation. Memory loss can happen due to brain damage which could happen if you’re on a ship when it sinks. I could lose a finger if someone slams a car door on my hand, or get paralyzed from the waist down in a derailment and be unable to tie my shoes.
The tricky part here is that technically this means you could do/think/say something that the new you won’t remember, before the death occurs.
Unless there’s some sort of induced coma(right terminology?) involved.
The tricky part here is that technically this means you could do/think/say something that the new you won’t remember, before the death occurs. Unless there’s some sort of induced coma(right terminology?) involved.
Exactly. But that would be the price of that kind of transport. See the short story “Think like a dinosaur” by James Patrick Kelly: that is exactly the situation. With very grim consecuences, in the particular case shown.
Your original copy would die. Your life as you know it would end the moment you teleport.
Sure on the other end a replica would come out, presumably with all your memories etc intact, but it would not be you, you would not experience it. It would go on living your life, thinking it was you, everyone around it treating it like it was you, and presumably doing all the same things you would have done.
Except it is not you. Your experience ended at the teleporter. And many fools would never realize this, because the dead aren’t around to tell us.
If there’s no break in consciousness, then there would be no death. I was simply encoded as bits of data and then decoded, a process that I would be conscious of and experience in some way, I assume. If when I get off the transporter at point B with a 1:1 memory of the experience like walking from one room to the next, in no way did I die.
You are changing the question to “is a perfect replica of a person considered the same person or not?”. That is not the question.
What you experience by using a teleporter is you enter a room, and then you die. End of story. There being another replica of you somewhere does not change that you died. For an outsider they may argue whether or not you died, whether or not the replica is you, and so on. But from the perspective of someone who enters the teleportation room, it’s over. Dead.
