The chances of getting cancer would skyrocket, using the transporter ... surely. All of that ... that radiation can't be doing a body good! I'd never trust it - out of my sight ... or in it!
Would you use a transporter?
- Thread starter Romulan_spy
- Start date
First, Yarn, what a thoughtful response. Much of this hinges on what a person is, and whether there is a soul. Once one of us has taken a step in one direction regarding those presuppositions it might be near impossible to communicate with someone who differs. Esp. on the "soul" question, with "soul" being more than personality, but an eternal essence that lives on after the carbon-based shell breaks down.
If the ship were remade with every blemish in every board and every idiosyncrasy in functioning; e.g. if board 72-x-31 still squeaks a certain way when Lt. Doofus steps on it, then it is the same ship, even if it was blown up into sawdust and reconstructed. This is the magic we ascribe to the transporter: exact reconstruction.
Yes, I think that is the most accurate way of thinking of "me"; but encoded in DNA rather than silicon switches, and executed via carbon and water rather than pixels and plastic.
If the ship were remade with every blemish in every board and every idiosyncrasy in functioning; e.g. if board 72-x-31 still squeaks a certain way when Lt. Doofus steps on it, then it is the same ship, even if it was blown up into sawdust and reconstructed. This is the magic we ascribe to the transporter: exact reconstruction.
Yes, I think that is the most accurate way of thinking of "me"; but encoded in DNA rather than silicon switches, and executed via carbon and water rather than pixels and plastic.
YARN
Fleet Captain
Here's a thought experiment I offered in the other thread: Imagine, that you have a precious family heirloom. A painting of one of your ancestors painted by a true master. Now one day a magician shows up in your town to perform a magic show. He sees your fine painting and asks if he can make it disappear in his act. The day of the show comes and he shreds your painting, then pours motor oil on it, and then lights it on fire. You're aghast, but despite the versimilitude of the trick, you sit patiently in the knowledge that it is only a clever trick. After the show, the magician returns your painting to you and you breathe an inward sigh of relief.
After the show you have drinks with the magician and ask how he did it. A few rounds and much cajoling later, the magician finally reveals his trick with impish glee. When he arrived at your home he secretly took high resolution photographs of your painting and had a friend, a master forger, create an exact enough copy to fool the audience. "Ah, so you destroyed the copy. But when did you make the switch?" At this the magician smiles, "I didn't switch them! I burned your original painting, so I wouldn't have to! And I gave you a perfect copy in return!"
Now I suspect that were this to happen to you (e.g., you found out the magician cut an actual woman in half, dumped her back stage and brought out a perfect copy as a substitution) you would not be impressed but horrified. What gives a painting its value is its provenance. Unlike a poem which can be replicated infinitely, a painting is one of a kind. You can make copies (tokens), but there is only one original type those copies can be based on.
Provenance arguably matters in the identity of paintings in much the same way that it matters in the identity of people. That is, we are not all merely like computer files in being infinitely iterable, but rather unique in that there is only one person who will ever have your "inside view" - your qualia. You are one of a kind. You may not be particularly interesting or valuable, but you are unique in that you will be the only one of you that will ever exist, regardless of any copy that might be made.
At the very least, we would want to settle these sorts of issues before we steamed ahead under a functionalist account of identity.
Also, we might also resist on the nature of our functionality (i.e., gradual and continuous). That is, we are like the ship of theseus, but we have identities that change gradually. You are not much different from the person you were 5 minutes ago, but you are very different from the person you were 10 years ago. There is change, but identity seems to hinge on a slow rate of change. If in the next five minutes you became someone else entirely, you might very well be regarded as possessed, or insane, or traumatized, etc. in a way that you were no longer "you." If you slowly replace parts of your car over a process of several years, we would say you are driving the same car (i.e., it has been functioning continuously as a system). If, however, you completely smashed your car, extracted the information from it, and then built a new car from the blueprints 500 miles away, no one would say that that is the same car. The transporter violates this continuity of functionality. Is this a criterion worth respecting? I don't know, but I don't know why I should disregard it in favor of an equally arbitrary criterion of functionality.
And prudence would seem to demand that falling under the shadow of doubt, the proper course of action would be to err on the side of caution by NOT beaming up. If I were about to be killed by a lava flow with no hope of rescue, I might transport, but not in any circumstance in which it would make sense to atomize (in the words of Better Off Dead) "a perfectly good white boy like that."
A very interesting analogy, thank you, and one that explains much better than I can why I'd balk at using a transporter outside exceptional circumstances. The 23rd and 24th century mindsets may, on the whole, think nothing of being ripped apart and duplicated, but it's not something that appeals to me at all.
Or a visiting ambassador, like the first Trill we saw, he insisted that the transporter process would "kill him."
Maybe he (rationally or not) believe that the true him would be destroyed and replace by a copy.
A belief not held by the majority of the Trill (like Jadzia).
If you truly believe that the transporter process create a soulless golum, how would the copy that you permitted to be created feel about themselves?
They would possess all of your personal beliefs, would they subsequent to their own creation experience psychological problems, perhaps even a eventual breakdown?
Yes, I'd use them. I have no time for "metaphysical" mumbo-jumbo. Just give me cool science.
It's the social sciences major in me. I can't help but go metaphysical, because I overanalyse everything.
I don't recall YARN saying they would have NO soul, only that they wouldn't have the soul of the original. "Soul" being an emergent property, presumably they would have their own soul. I suffer no psychological problems from the idea that I do not have my predecessors' souls (those of my parents): I have my own. So why would Thomas Riker be worried about not having one?
But here's some consolation: What they get back wouldn't live long. Fortunately.
If you truly believe that the transporter process create a soulless golum, how would the copy that you permitted to be created feel about themselves?
They would possess all of your personal beliefs, would they subsequent to their own creation experience psychological problems, perhaps even a eventual breakdown?
Frankie mouse: "No [they] wouldn't. [They]'d be programmed not to."
I think your def of soul is different from the traditional one. You, I think, see soul as an emergent is-ness of the person. The traditional view, I beloeve, is that soul is the real thing, temporarily lodged or associated with a human animal; but also separate, in that the soul will live on when the body breaks down.
YARN
Fleet Captain
I have not committed to the proposition that transporter copies are soulless golums.
They would be people. Once created, they would have rights like anyone else, but they would not be me. This is similar to how a new human being has rights as soon as they arrive at personhood. Once they're here, once we've created them and they've developed enough they have rights, but NOTHING obligates us to arbitrarily create children. Ditto for the transporter. My copy has no rights until my copy is actually created and exists as a person.
They would possess all of your personal beliefs, would they subsequent to their own creation experience psychological problems, perhaps even a eventual breakdown?
I don't think so. I think there would be some existential nausea that comes with the realization that you are copy of an original person, but that funk would also come with a subjective sense of being "real person" (i.e., having goals, having a sense of self, having feels, etc.) which is just as strong for anyone else. The situation is probably similar to finding out you're adopted or that you have an identical twin.
What would you do, how would you feel if you found out you were a clone of someone else?
Interesting question, but probably not unless it was a life or death situation. Simply because I even if you could get around the horrendous energy expenditure involved in creating and destroying matter (E=mc^2) (energy equals mass times the speed of light squared) could be surmounted, I firmly believe the uncertainty principle would put a stop to any transporting (it's impossible to know both the location and the momentum of a subatomic particle at the same time, so it goes without saying that they can't be replicated exactly).
But even if some weird physics might make transporters possible, I don't think I'd voluntarily use them, simply because I can't trust technology that far.
But even if some weird physics might make transporters possible, I don't think I'd voluntarily use them, simply because I can't trust technology that far.
I think it more being converted into a energy state, than being destroyed and remade seconds later, you in some fashion remain a life form the entire time.
There is evidence that people on the show, during the transporter process, remain conscious and aware.
^ Yep. In ST II, Kirk and Saavik carry on a conversation while being transported. And we see the process, uninterrupted, from Barclay's point of view in TNG ("Realm of Fear").
That's where the Heisenberg Compensators come into play.
YARN
Fleet Captain
You can't have 50% of the matter of a person in one place and have that person engage in a conversation in another place. When you hear a voice on the other end of the transporter, there must be 100% (or very nearly so) of that person already on the other side of the pattern buffer.
It looks cool when a person fills in slowly, but in truth transportation process would have to occur very very quickly or body parts would fall on the floor, tissue cells would slide around, and so on (e.g., you'd have goop). The light and sound effect would have to be a distortion effect or a sort of illusion.
