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I’m taking shuttlecrafts.
Star Trek The Motion Picture’s transporter accident gave me nightmares.
Galaxy Quest’s transporter accident made me laugh so hard I almost pissed myself.
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 like the “Gay” folder lol
Gay just looked a little nicer than “Porn” lol
That makes it 10 times funnier lol
What can I say, I’m a polite degenerate.
Stamets by name. Stamets by nature.
FYI your bottom image crashes Jerboa client 100% of the time lol
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.
Yeah it’s weird and never happened before. I wouldn’t worry too much about it.
In my experience, Jerboa crashes Jerboa 100% of the time. Can’t make that app stay open for more than ten seconds. It’s why I use Liftoff on mobile.
By Grabthar’s hammer…what savings.
Alan Rickman played the “proper actor surrounded by scene-stealing hacks” so well in that movie, I wouldn’t be surprised if he wasn’t really acting in those scenes, merely letting his emotions flow.
Enterprise… what we got back didn’t live long… fortunately. The fortunately was always the worst part of the line.
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.
His head is on… backwards!
Why didn’t anybody tell me my ass was this big?
We ain’t found shit!
Tuvok: “We have been unsuccessful in locating fecal matter.”
Oh shit, I forgot he’s in that! So good.
Or that pig that turned inside out and exploded.
Or that Vulcan science officer that turned inside out.
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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.
“Fucking holodecks” is redundant.
Choo Choo time.
Old McCoy in his TNG cameo was right.
Youthe infinite molecular clones of you die every time.What a Barclay.
Proudly so, ha
Yup, I’m taking the stairs
From orbit to the planet? That’s at least a dozen flights of stairs.
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?
consider how often the enterprise threatens to explode, compared with how often they encounter issues with the transporter, and Geordie isn’t exaggerating. he just isn’t telling the whole story.
Tbf Ro thought they were dead, Geordi never accepted that.
Reg can be hyperbolic.
Reg also caught transporter monsters with his bare hands, just to prove everyone he wasn’t that crazy.
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.
Well…if that’s true then I have died over 14,000 times so I must be used to it.
G’night
The original comic page mentions the sleep thing in the alt text
Great, I needed more existential dread. Thanks!
I gotchu fam. Anytime - happy to help.
I wake up in the body of someone else with the same residue of Cheetos in my mouth as the other person ate before bed? Seems like a lot of effort
This thought has prevented my sleep for years now.
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.
This is the concept of external validation of internal processes, which is part of the problem with the inherent solipsism of the question.
There’s no way to externally validate that the you inside is the same.
Just as if you were copied in the teleporter with one destroyed and the other created, your friends and family and videos of you would match the before teleporter and after teleporter versions, even though the old one was dead and the other hadn’t existed.
You just kind of have to just go on belief that the you inside is continuous. There is no way to measure it to validate, as there’s currently no agreed upon measurement of consciousness in neuroscience even.
Then does it even matter? What’s the point of even considering the question if the end result has no detectable difference either way?
Exactly. Duplicating a person and destroying the original or truly transferring every atom from one location to another by teleportation results in the same level of continuity of consciousness as just going to sleep and waking up later.
So why does the cloning version seem so, so much worse?
Because of the difference is that there’s a hard cut in continuity with the teleporter. The body is destroyed. In normal life, our body does get replaced, but the continuity remains equal through that time. With the teleporter, everything gets replaced at once, which is a hard continuity cut.
For this reason, sleep doesn’t affect continuity, just its potency and what can be accessed during sleep. If we turn a microwave off by unplugging it, whatever continuity it has ceases, this is in no way equal to sleeping. The functions, information, and mind are still present and functional.
“Personality drift” while you sleep probably does happen, but in small degrees. You don’t think exactly the same as you did 10 years ago. People have been knocked unconscious and woken up with different personalities, so it’s not like people always wake up with conscious continuity.
Sleep and unconsciousness are more accessible means of exploring these thought experiments than fantasy teleportation devices, but many of the considerations apply. If you’re a strong materialist, then the notion that “consciousness” is special is silly: any body that has your thoughts is “you” and multiple “yous” is fine, they should diverge as each copy has unique experiences.
On the other hand, many people are not materialists at all. Many believe either explicitly in a supernatural soul, or in a more ineffable “higher consciousness” that science has yet to reliably demonstrate. For these people, continuity of consciousness has severe implications.
If a person has a brain injury and wakes up as a totally different person, what happens to their soul? (I’m a materialist, so I dunno. Just pointing out that the question does have meaning to people.)
I guess my question is more directed at those people who are not materialists. To distill it into a philosophical question: why worry about something you cannot know?
Its a total hypothetical designed to make you look smart, and scare people. Whoever thought of it probably squeezes hamsters for fun.
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.
That’s about consciousness, which is a much larger claim than the self being an illusion
I don’t agree. Care you defend this claim? Your assertion that you can have consciousness without a self (ego death) seems more personal spiritualism than argument.
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.
In theory like modal possibilities, or in theory like you genuinely believe such a person can exist? I’d love to hear why.
There’s a great They Might Be Giants song about exactly this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSbEOZY7k20
I’ve always wondered if your consciousness would transfer over.
There’d be a consciousness, it would have your memories and be indistinguishable to you, but I can’t understand where the chemical/physical parts of the brain turn into me perceiving and experiencing stuff.
Well consciousness is just chemical and electrical impulses. If you manage to re-create everything down to the molecule in the right area then you could completely rebuild the consciousness. Also means you’d be able to completely manipulate memories, experiences, basically anything held in the brain. Provided you had an intense enough neural mapping and deep enough understanding of the human brain to accomplish that. Luckily in the Trek universe, at least at the time of the 24th/25th century, that isn’t possible.
Also means you’d be able to completely manipulate memories, experiences, basically anything held in the brain.
That’s assuming you know which exact parts do exactly what. Kinda like an encrypted zip file versus an unencrypted one.
You edit whatever set of bits/bytes you want in both, but only in one of them will you actually know whats going on.
But we do know there’s quantum weirdness to the universe, so I personally think you would need more than just a molecular copy.
It’s really the question of why am I the brain in this body? Why do I perceive existence, and why isn’t it just a sequence of reactions in a brain which can adapt to highly complex phenomenon.
It’s just a more complicated example of the ship of Theseus, and honestly it comes down to if you believe in the concept of a soul.
To illustrate mechanically is a computer with the same model of hard drive with a copy of the data the same?
If you take the drive apart, ship its parts somewhere, and reassemble it, is it the same drive?
Yes. But that’s not what’s happening in teleportation. It doesn’t use the same parts, but different ones arranged in the exact same way.
Depends on the teleportation system. In star trek you are comprised of the same physical material, just converted to energy and back. I could be wrong though, I’m no expert. I think a more interesting question is, would you be more ok being killed in one place, having your body be transported mundanely and being revived at your destination, or being cloned perfectly and then having the original killed? Theoretically the same to you either way
Not the same to you. As soon as the same tech can be used to clone, it feels fundamentally different.
You die in one place, and a consciousness that thinks it’s you starts in another place. Does the order really matter?
Yes. Doing it in a different order means there’s a version of me with different experiences. But even if you do it in the same order, that it can be used to clone means there is a me that dies and doesn’t come back to life. Whereas if it can’t be cloning, then it’s just me.
I believe there have been numerous times where it’s confirmed that you are conscious and perceiving things while in the transport stream
Barclay got sweet tentacle hugs a few times during transport.
Daniel Dennet: “Only a theory that explained conscious events in terms of unconscious events, could explain consciousness at all.”
We don’t understand just how this works just yet. But I’m confident that some day we will.
I don’t subscribe to the Star Trek teleporters killing you. They turn you into energy on one side, shoot that energy across subspace to the other end, and recombine you back into matter.
Why do I believe this? Because of several episodes where transported crew members, including Barclay, describe the sensation and what they see as they stream through the energy/matter conversion field. If they can describe the feeling and visual stimuli from end to end, I don’t see how it’s 2 different entities. It’s the same one, converted from matter to energy and back again.
This also explains how Tuvix was created because of some plant getting mixed in with them. The weirder, harder to explain things, are the straight up transporter clones.
Not to poo poo on your theory because this is all fake anyways but to your point brains are weird and we make shit up all the time when we can’t or just don’t understand how something works.
Transporter accidents prove transporters work this way and are murder machines. To an outside observer a perfect clone is the same person, impossible to differentiate. But to the individual’s experience, they die every time they are disintegrated in a transporter. It’s a new consciousness being created when reassembled that thinks it’s continuous. It’s hand-waved away because it’s how it’s always been and transporters are a key part of the Star Trek setting.
There was that one episode with Barclay that showed he was conscious during transport and also showed that people could exist inside the matter stream (or whatever the technobabble is).
Yeah that whole episode had strange ideas. He grabbed a fish person from the matter stream and it became a human person when he integrated. That just makes no sense with how the transporter works! Even O’Brien couldn’t figure that one out
I haven’t seen that episode. But it kind of defeats the traditional explanation of how transporters work. Unless we go with the “we can exist as beings made of energy” which is always a popular type of alien or alternate being in Star Trek. And the classic transporter accidents don’t make sense, then. When a transporter clones someone, who is the real one and how would you figure it out? Most of the accidents only make sense if you treat a transporter as a digital device that moves data.
Transporters are inconsistent in how they work in Star Trek. The transporters work however the writers of the episode need it to work for the plot. Sometimes it’s a clone machine and sometimes it’s something else.
The Barclay episode I was referring to was Realm of Fear.
I think it’s more they are murdering the current instance of a pattern of matter and with it the biological implementation of the pattern of consciousness. Another instance of the same pattern is created near simultaneously. To flip it, aren’t they life creating machines as much as murder machines?
There is a chapter or two from a book by philosopher Derek Parfit that tackles the transporter issue pretty head-on. It draws what I feel to be a pretty compelling distinction between the continuity of your conscious mind, referred to as Relation R, and the personal identity that is lost when using the transporter. He then asks which is more important. Worth a read if this stuff interests you.
I look forward to reading it, and I will be able to enjoy certain kinds of scifi much more if it convinces me nothing is lost. Your phrasing makes me think it’s just going to reinforce my general worry about that sort of tech though.
(I recognize that it’s fictional, it just breaks stories with similar tech a bit for me.)
Nothing of value is lost.
Dunno, I value my continued existence pretty highly. Maybe I’ll change my mind when I read the PDF.
Your continued existence isn’t in question. Continuity of consciousness is an illusion. If you would put your brain state in stasis and resume it later, you wouldn’t feel any different. Neither would a copied version of you. That feeling of continuity is all there is to consciousness.
The copy wouldn’t feel any different, but I’d be dead. The process as described in OP (and most fiction) is inherently destructive, IMO.
No you wouldn’t be any deader than you will be a fraction of a second from now. You only live in the moment. In the next you are replaced by someone who is almost, but not exactly you. Continuous consciousness is an illusion, or a concept. There’s no magic piece that makes you you.
It’s a trick of perspective.
Ok, thanks for your input!
There was an episode of The Outer Limits (7x08 Think Like a Dinosaur) that dealt with this exact question.
In that episode, humans are maybe-given a teleportation tech that creates a perfect copy somewhere else, but the aliens need to trust that we will ‘balance the equation’ (destroy the original) every time. That’s easy when the human in question is immobilized for transfer. Only one transfer goes wrong- the person being transferred is woken up before the transfer is confirmed, and then the transfer gets confirmed. So now you have the original human, who’s already been copied, and the transfer operator still has to ‘balance the equation’…
Not surprised Outer Limits has an episode on it. Definitely gonna try and watch it later. Sounds fascinating.
How have I not heard of this series? Looks twilight zone-ish? Is it worth a watch?
Yeah Twilight Zone is an apt comparison. It’s been a long time since I saw it but I remember there were a few pretty good ones. I’d give it a watch…
And that was based on a short story of the same name.
This is the struggle session that launches a million “a sufficiently high fidelity copy of a person is literally the same person” takes, which often conveniently require the original person to die to maintain that “literally the same person” take. If the person didn’t “go anywhere” and was told “congratulations, you teleported! Now kindly step into the biomass recycler because literally you is already at the destination” I don’t blame that original from not going quietly.
Uhhh, excuse me? My takes are totally original. T’Pol told me so.
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The “magic law” is just the consequence of what it means to be the “same” person. To be the same person, you have to, among other similarities, take up the same spatial-temporal space. This is why if we ask “is Bruce Wayne the same person as Batman” one of the first thoughts is “you know, I’ve never seen them in the same room before.”
Maybe what you’re getting hung up on here is the split. Let’s imagine there is one river (river A) which goes for a bit before it forks and becomes river b and river c. In some sense, we could say that both river b and river c are river a. But if you’re river b, then river c is not the same as you, and vice versa.
In the moment of copying, they’re the same, after that, they’re diverging through different experience. The difference in atoms/location is irrelevant from the perspective of that person’s consciousness. They both are the original in any sense that counts for them or others.
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The same is true for two Rikers. That’s the entire point of the episode; that despite them diverging at the point of the cloning into two different people, they are still the same person and need to live with that.
I don’t think that as the point of the episode. As their lives diverged their interests and desires did so as well. They were similar, yes, but still different people. Will was promoted after successfully evacuating the people of Nervala IV and he became focused on his career. Thomas was stuck on Nervala IV thinking of the woman he left behind, and when he’s rescued he wants to rekindle that relationship whereas Will let it fizzle.
To say nothing of Thomas eventually choosing to join the Maquis. That is not something we’d ever see from Will.
Will: Good luck, Will.
Thomas: I actually thought I might go with the name Thomas.
Troi: Your middle name.
Will: I guess we really are different. I never really cared for that name.
Thomas: Well, I sort of like it. I guess I’d better get going.
Sure, if your totally-not-magic society has 100% fidelity printed people and is totally fine with someone with officer clearance printing a few hundred of themself to collectively pull rank in every part of a Star Trek ship at once and demand interchanging legal presence as if the same person was everywhere at once at all times no matter what individually differentiating experiences those 100% fidelity copies start picking up to distinguish themselves. Totally not a magic system. Totally not just your hangup and contempt for the idea of an individual existing outside of crude reductionistic principles.
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There’s actually a book series I enjoy, the Bobiverse series, that does an interesting take on it. In it a human, the eponymous Bob, gets digitized and becomes the AI of a Von Neumann probe. He’s given the mission to make copies of himself, explore the galaxy, and build colonies for humanity.
Later on in the series...
As he makes more copies of himself, it’s found that the personality of the copies diverge more and more the farther from the original that they descend, and they eventually devise a statistical way to measure this divergence. No two extant Bobs are ever the same person, even though they’re identical copies.
However, it’s also discovered that if a Bob makes copy of himself, shuts down his original AI matrix, and only then the copy is turned on, that Bob will have no measurable divergence from the one he was cloned from. It’s measurably the exact same individual, and it implies that in-universe there’s some fundamental, tranferable property of identy. Arguably some kind of “soul”.
Not only that, if the original AI matrix is turned back on then that one starts displaying the divergence that was expected of the copy. This is used in one case to transmit the data of a Bob to a waiting, empty AI matrix around another star to avoid physical travel and side step the teleporter problem.
There’s a lot of sci-fi hand waving in it, but I thought it was a fun way to approach the question.
Does that mean transporter clones are when the transporter ACTUALLY worked?
What’s that? I was right? Time to go talk to FNN then
Sidenote, love the FNN reference. Picard had some rough spots but it did some amazing world building.
runs faster
Thanks tho
I’ve got the Section 31 power walk, you’ll never catch me!
I’m still just impressed his hips and spine could actually do that.
Transporters are death machines!
OK I’m not even a Trekkie but I was doing some elecromag homework and I have a really cool theory on this:
The teleporter thingy actually acts more like a guitar pickup, in a more E=mc^2 type of way, entirely perfectly converting the person into energy - not matter. (This would require an analog encoding from matter to energy). The biggest difference is the pickup totally uses up the entire person, so like if you strum a guitar and it converts to a perfect electrical wave (but the guitar goes mute).
This energy is a lot easier to transfer than just matter, but the person encoded within it still only exists once in that energy. (for the guitar analogy a speaker at the other end that picks up the guitar wave, and turns it back into sound)
Its then entirely used up to power the ‘person builder’ in an analog way, much more accurately than were able to recreate digitally (aka why tape record are the truest form of music recording we have, it accutate to a way smaller scale than we can capture digitally.)
This would then mean that we can’t just duplicate the creation process, cause the energy only flowed into the machine one time in that exact fashion, and duplicating it would require knowledge of every single atom in a person; then a way to accurately recreate that energy waveform to power the machine.
This also opens the possibility of the transporter ‘missing’ if somehow they moved faster than the speed of light, while the person was still being transported, and them being just a flash of light endlessly propagating throughout the void.
Idk if the things have range in the series, but it could also be that the angle a transporter can accurately capture that energy is limited, and so really far away things are too large to be able to accurately capture (unless you have a massive radar dish or something alike)
That’s a really cool theory, probably the best I’ve heard! It’s established that there is a limited range, and that transporting during warp is possible, but extremely difficult, have to match the other ships exact speed etc., though they technically aren’t traveling faster than light but existing within a warp bubble.
Yeah, that really depends on how they define warp bubbles in the universe then, cause it’d imply the transmission occurs between ships faster than light
Maybe something like the receiving ship trails behind the sending, exact same course just at a distance where light leaving the warp bubble would ‘fall’ that exact y distance over the time it takes to travel the distance between them in the x distance. It’d also still limit their distance even within their own space bubble
Then it’d make sense cause any course deviation would cause them to ‘miss’ and again travel through the infinite cosmos as energy.
Thinking about it it also describes those thematic sparkles that happen when they teleport, cause what were seeing is essentially the existence of that person as light.
edit: forgot to say thanks for the comliment! I definitely am gonna have to watch the show(s) soon!
I’d definitely recommend them, though sometimes you’ll need to power through some dry bits. All the 90’s trek started out rough and only got better.
It’s not hard sci-fi, so the technology sometimes works the way the story needs it to work, but generally it’s pretty consistent.
They addressed this in startrekng, it was called the 'Hisunberg compensator ’
and duplicating it would require knowledge of every single atom in a person
I think that’s how a replicator works when you ask it for a dish.
I was also thinking about that, maybe they can do some simple proteins and such enough to trick our taste buds, but something as complicated as a conscious human would be out of their control.
So IG it also describes replicators?
As far as I know that’s pretty much on point on how transporters work. There is an episode of TNG where someone was stuck in the energy state and conscious and saw energy beings living there. Of course then there is also the case of the two Rikers which seems to show that copying a person is indeed possible under very specific circumstances (I think there was some interference with exotic energy or something).
https://www.schlockmercenary.com/ webcomics has a very interesting story arc about teleporters and why they were replaced.
Okaaaay, just because you’ve brought it up…
Transporters in Star Trek are shown to definitely not be duplication machines. “Our Man Bashir” (DS9) is probably the most definitive proof of that.
Personally, I think transporter technology explains the staunch atheist (but still open-minded and sometimes spiritualist) Federation mindset: they know that their entire being can be reduced to a matter/energy stream. The transporter makes a devastating philosophical challenge to the idea of a “soul.” Which is, ironically, why so many Federation officers refuse to accept anything that challenges that assumption (VOY “Sacred Ground”).
Adding to your examples in the cannon of Star Trek the teleporter is not a murder machine, except for all those transporter accidents. In “Daedalus” (ENT) the creator of the teleporter somehow proved it, even if not every officer believes that yet.
Real life though, I’d never set foot in a transporter. A real life, Star Trek like transporter would definitely be a murder machine though.
The real life version wouldn’t even make a copy somewhere else, it would just be that phone booth from Futurama.
