Right. And it is the same thing with people. Same person, not a copy.
Is the Transporter still 'killing' people in Discovery?
- Thread starter Sci-fi fan
- Start date
Actually, please ask it its opinion, and let me know what it thinks.
If you dematerialize every atom, feed the data into a 3D printer, and print it, it's a different bike.
Even if every atom is built exactly as they were, down to the quantum level? You reassemble it exactly as it was.
Yes. The atoms are identically assembled down to the quarks and gluons, but the waveforms they are built from in spacetime are completely new.
By your claim, I could reassemble all your atoms into a completely new inanimate structure and it would still be you - even if all the atoms that made up the brain were reused to paint my living room.
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What is 'waveform' in this context?
So how you know it is not the same waveform?
Particles are "little ripples moving through the cosmic energy fields that fill all of [spacetime]." Their value is detected and beamed via an apparatus to a different location where the energy stream produces new ripples. If you don't destroy the first copy in the process, you get two Rikers. If it helps you feel better, I'm talking real world physics. The fiction can say whatever it wants. Maybe that's a valid point. But then again, Star Trek prides itself for being more in touch with real physics than other fictions, where fans rebel at the mention of scientific things like midichlorians, so invoking magic - I mean, more than it already does - wouldn't quite be an honorable exercise. In our world, you're dead while your facsimile with its rebuilt emergent consciousness believes all is well. It paints a huge selfless picture of anyone willing to use a transporter, but it's really Section 31 that is behind all the empty reassurances that your soul survives the process.
"As Mr. Spock would say: 'A difference that makes no difference IS no difference.'"
- Scotty, 'Spock Must Die' (James Blish), 1970 [And on this very same damn argument with Bones!]
- Scotty, 'Spock Must Die' (James Blish), 1970 [And on this very same damn argument with Bones!]
Nah, it would just pull a Chakotay.
This. People have conversed while beaming, such as in TWOK. It was a plot point back in TOS "That Which Survives" that you could be conscious and recall observations of your surroundings while at least partially dematerialized in a transporter beam.
http://tos.trekcore.com/hd/thumbnails.php?album=81&page=3
Maintaining continuity of consciousness while beaming would be a straightforward way of sidestepping the "problem" of being "killed" at the source and "resurrected" at the destination.
Right. And why would this be a different particle? Because it is using 'different energy'?
Transporters are not replicators. So they really cannot work just by reading the data, deconstructing the object and the reconstructing that object using that data. If that is how that worked, it could be used to copy people, and it can't (except via freak accidents.) Furthermore, storing that sort of about of data is flat out impossible. Transporter pattern must be something else than just stored data. (And I know what they did in that one DS9 episode, but that made no sense, there cannot be any coherent framework that could even semi-plausibly explain all weird transporter shenanigans that have happened over the years.)
What soul? Whilst I agree that consciousness is quite real and currently badly understood phenomenon, it is still pretty safe assumption that it is produced by the matter of you brain. So if you put that material substratum perfectly together again, you also put the 'soul' together again.
I only included that patronizing and pandering reference to avoid the wrath and persecution from those offended by claims that they are superstitious, gullible, and willing to be part of a "celestial dictatorship" that exists in a culture of death that longs for the Apocalypse.
Oh, oops.
