Upon reviewing Cronenberg's 1986 "remake" of The Fly, I realized there is more to the perennial discussion of how the Star Trek transporter works than is dreamt of in our philosophy. The 1958 version followed the original story very closely, including the "disappearance" of the cat to wander somewhere in the ether like a ghost. The matter transmitter was likened to TV and radio, and produced "magical" end results, such as the radical re-scaling of body parts between the different subjects—and having them remain viable when spliced in this way. (And Asimov did his best to correct the sins of the movie script when he novelized Fantastic Voyage.)
So, one of the things the 1986 movie did was "correct" the physics a bit by catering to our worldview and biases. That is, we view the world as a mechanical composite of atoms, and the remake added in a computer to analyze and buffer the state of each of these particles. The transformation into a fly also invoked another information buffer known as DNA, thus making the scenario more "credible." Copy the state of each "switch" from start to finish, and you have a teleporter!
Unfortunately, reality threw us curve balls in the form of quantum mechanics, epigenetic code, and artificial "intelligence." Quantum mechanics as a model isn't perfect, but is the currently accepted form of interpreting the bizarre behaviors observed in the atomic and sub-atomic realm. In short, it ain't the predictable, cause-and-effect billiard ball world imagined by earlier "natural philosophers." Nor is DNA the rigid and predictable code that computer binary is. Exact clones can look very different from each other, and have radically different behaviors (like CC the cat). This led to the discovery of the "epigenetic code," a vast repository of if-then statements that can alter a viable and existing organism—and leave effects on progeny for generations. I guess all that "junk" code ain't junk. But where did all that information come from?
Then there's the matter of AI (artificial intelligence). What we have today is basically pattern recognition, not self-awareness. The vaunted "Turing test" does not test the machine for self-awareness. Rather, it tests the gullibility of humans to distinguish another sentience vs a simulation. Some of the simulations are very good, although some experts deny that the unpredictable and creative behaviors of living creatures can ever emerge from the rigid, binary calculations of computers as they currently are. Something more is needed, something quantum mechanical and epigenetic.
I, Robot "Ghosts in the Machine"
The materialistic worldview constrains our science. In the 1986 The Fly the computer turned its first living subject (a baboon) "inside out" because it did not "understand" the poetry of life. (The scene was spoofed in Galaxy Quest.) Simply copying the state of particles from transmitter to receiver failed to reproduce the baboon because there was "more to life" than the mechanical worldview. So, the inventor set about teaching the computer the needed poetry—only to have it backfire on him when the computer got "confused" by two life-forms in the transmitter, and resolved the dilemma by fusing them at the molecular-genetic level. (See James P. Hogan's excellent novel The Two Faces of Tomorrow where scientists are confronted by "thinking" machines that nevertheless do not have "judgment.") In the Trek episode "The Enemy Within" the transporter was in a similarly confused state and produced a Jekyll and Hyde Kirk in the process.
It may be a long while before we understand how sentience ties in to matter, and if that sentience can be "teleported" with its matter.
So, one of the things the 1986 movie did was "correct" the physics a bit by catering to our worldview and biases. That is, we view the world as a mechanical composite of atoms, and the remake added in a computer to analyze and buffer the state of each of these particles. The transformation into a fly also invoked another information buffer known as DNA, thus making the scenario more "credible." Copy the state of each "switch" from start to finish, and you have a teleporter!
Unfortunately, reality threw us curve balls in the form of quantum mechanics, epigenetic code, and artificial "intelligence." Quantum mechanics as a model isn't perfect, but is the currently accepted form of interpreting the bizarre behaviors observed in the atomic and sub-atomic realm. In short, it ain't the predictable, cause-and-effect billiard ball world imagined by earlier "natural philosophers." Nor is DNA the rigid and predictable code that computer binary is. Exact clones can look very different from each other, and have radically different behaviors (like CC the cat). This led to the discovery of the "epigenetic code," a vast repository of if-then statements that can alter a viable and existing organism—and leave effects on progeny for generations. I guess all that "junk" code ain't junk. But where did all that information come from?
Then there's the matter of AI (artificial intelligence). What we have today is basically pattern recognition, not self-awareness. The vaunted "Turing test" does not test the machine for self-awareness. Rather, it tests the gullibility of humans to distinguish another sentience vs a simulation. Some of the simulations are very good, although some experts deny that the unpredictable and creative behaviors of living creatures can ever emerge from the rigid, binary calculations of computers as they currently are. Something more is needed, something quantum mechanical and epigenetic.
I, Robot "Ghosts in the Machine"
The materialistic worldview constrains our science. In the 1986 The Fly the computer turned its first living subject (a baboon) "inside out" because it did not "understand" the poetry of life. (The scene was spoofed in Galaxy Quest.) Simply copying the state of particles from transmitter to receiver failed to reproduce the baboon because there was "more to life" than the mechanical worldview. So, the inventor set about teaching the computer the needed poetry—only to have it backfire on him when the computer got "confused" by two life-forms in the transmitter, and resolved the dilemma by fusing them at the molecular-genetic level. (See James P. Hogan's excellent novel The Two Faces of Tomorrow where scientists are confronted by "thinking" machines that nevertheless do not have "judgment.") In the Trek episode "The Enemy Within" the transporter was in a similarly confused state and produced a Jekyll and Hyde Kirk in the process.
It may be a long while before we understand how sentience ties in to matter, and if that sentience can be "teleported" with its matter.
