Star Trek chats: transporters and the new you.

Author: secularmerlin

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So here's the thing. If there is no cloning for the reasons in the above article and if the transporters can make duplicates of our favorite Starfleet officers as shown in the below article


Then all your favorite star trek characters were dead right away. First episode you gotta assume they have already been disintegrated by a disintegration box and replaced with a clone by an clone making box at least a few times by then.

What are your thoughts?
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@secularmerlin
My first thought isthat this belongs in philosophy...

The trick for seeing that teleporting ok after all is to be steadast in one's monistic physicalism!

What am 'I'?  'I' am not the atoms in my brain; 'I' am the information manifest in patterns of activity in my brain. 

That is to say my memories, hopes and fears, everything that makes me 'me' is encoded as patterns in the 'dancing of my brain atoms', I am not my brain atoms; I am what they are doing.

When I sleep dreamlessly or am put into a coma that dance stops.  I'd have no hope or fears when I am comatose even though all my atoms are present ; but they aren't dancing in the right way.

Unless you believe in ghosts there is only ever matter and its activity.  A teleporter only has to extract enough information to recreate an arrangement of atoms so they will do the same dance as before because that is all we are - the dance of atoms.  You and I are a dance of atoms that thinks it's a person.

The teleporter cannot kill you because the you you think you are is an illusion.  We are each of us just a pattern of dancing atoms.



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@keithprosser
[I]t is impossible to create an identical copy of a quantum state without destroying the original – in fact, you HAVE to destroy the original arrangement in order to extract all the necessary information from it to construct the new, teleported, state.

Quoted from my source material.
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@secularmerlin
Yet in the world of star trek people teleport routinely without any apparent trauma or philosophical debate.   If you enter into the spirit of star trek then teleporting is probably less harmful a long-haul jet flight.  How can that be?  Why aren't they worried about dying?

That teleporting destroys the original is a given.  The interesting question is how teleporting can be acceptable even so.  The answer is that something about the original is not destroyed - information.  If what 'I' am are my tastes, loves, fears, hopes etc then 'I' am not destroyed - 'I' am preserved by the teleporter, stored as information about the configuration of my atoms, all ready to be given a new material presence.

Teleporting is fine once you let go of the big-headed notion that 'you' are anything more than the complex interaction of atoms.

As long as the teleported has the same information content as the teleportee then that is enough - at least it is for the inhabitants of star trek, and they should know!

Seriously,  I think this tell us something very important about the nature of self.





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@secularmerlin
I think you forgot to switch on your quantum dampeners and make sure the chroniton stabilizers are up to spec. What kind of engineer are you, anyway?
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Indeed fire up the McGuffin device. That will solve everything.
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@keithprosser
Seriously,  I think this tell us something very important about the nature of self.
This actually only tells us something important about the beliefs of the writers of Star Trek on the subject of self.

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@keithprosser
It isn't a teleporter.

It's a transporter.

You damn nerd...
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@Discipulus_Didicit
So strictly speaking the process is teleporting but the machine is a transporter?

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@keithprosser
Correct... athough I don't think they ever call the process teleporting either except possibly once or twice in Star Trek: Enterprise just because in that series the technology is relatively new in-universe.
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@Discipulus_Didicit
Let me check...is there anyone here who would not use a transporter?  If not, why not?
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@keithprosser
I would not for the reasons I have already stated.
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@secularmerlin
i am not aware of any statement of your reasons.  You wrote:

Then all your favorite star trek characters were dead right away. First episode you gotta assume they have already been disintegrated by a disintegration box and replaced with a clone by an clone making box at least a few times by then.
But what is it about that you find unacceptable? Cap'n Kirk is ok with it.  Tell him why he shouldn't be!

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@keithprosser
Let me check...is there anyone here who would not use a transporter?  If not, why not?

Aw, hell with that. Transporters kick ass. I would love to have a transporter.
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@keithprosser
The current clone of the original captain Kirk (funnier because of the new timeline) is welcome not to think about the existential nightmare. I find the idea of the transporter to fill me with a creeping dread.
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@secularmerlin
Tell me: do you believe in the existence of the soul (or maybe something like the soul)?
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@keithprosser
I have no evidence to support the idea of a soul/spirit. I have yet to even get a sensible definition including the one I used to believe in.
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@secularmerlin
Then what is it that sees the world through your eyes?
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@keithprosser
I do not see the world through my eyes. I see it through my brain. The picture my brain makes is partially informed by my eyes. I have no evidence that this experience is anything in particular.


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@secularmerlin
'I see the world through my brain'.
So what sees the world through your eyes is 'I'.  


What is 'I'?  It's not you brain, because - as that 'I' said - 'I' is what uses the brain to see.




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@keithprosser
I do not know. Science can only evaluate the physical properties of "I" however and so if it is more than physical properties it is indistinguishable any give "I" that acts identically but has no more than physical properties. "I" am only verifiably a series of poorly understood brainstates.

In short if the default in belief is skepticism then believing in a metaphysical self is logically incoherent unless one can be demonstrated. The only thing my past, present and future self verifiably have in common is physical continuity. I do not think it wise to break this very tenuous connection. 
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@secularmerlin
The only thing my past, present and future self verifiably have in common is physical continuity.
Did you sleep last night at all? I suggest that your self - the thing that sees with your brain - is not continuous at all but has big gaps in it - 'I' stops and starts.

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@keithprosser
As I said only physical continuity and that is very tenuous. 
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@secularmerlin
If I said the self/'I' is virtual, what would you think it means? 
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Im not sure I can say it is virtual or personal or spiritual or snything else. All I can say is that I am the only one ecperiencing my "self". This is the same as saying that I cannot prove that I have one.
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@secularmerlin
Not quite what I was asking... I'm not asking you to agree or disagree that self is virtual - I want to know what you think I mean when I say self is virtual.
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@keithprosser
No but it would be wicked awsome if you told me. When I say I it is just a convenient placeholder for referencing my personal subjective experience. I enjoy eating avacados. See.
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@secularmerlin
Ok.  I mean virtual in the way it used in 'virtual reality' or 'virtual image' in optics.  Somethig is virtual when it is only 'seems to be', when there is no physical object corresponding to it - a virtual object is a perception only.

if i use a VR headset and see a football there is no actual football - smike and mirrors have fooled me intoperceving something that isn't there.  But even though it isn't there, it is in many ways 'as if' it was there, as if it was real.

The self, then, is virtual.  I'd avoid saying it's an illusion because that might suggests it is purely figmentary, but a 'virtual football' isn't purely figmenary; it is a perception brought about by the cunning use of light from LEDs and LCDs.

The operation of the brain is such that it produces a perception that we label 'self', or sometimes 'I'.  Just as it wouldbe possible to be fooledby a top-range VR that a virtual football is a real obect, we are fooled that the self is a real object.  But just as with a virtual football therre is nothin that is really round and made of rubber in the world, the self/I we perceive is no where in the world.  It is a perception conjured up by the activity of our brain.  

The upshot is that when abody is disintegrated by a transporter the self is not destroyed because there is no self.  The idea we have that 'I' is something that is real, that exists is an error induced by the vividness of the perception induced.  All that exists in the world is the structured activity in our brains that generates a virtual self.

When the body is reconstructed the production of a virtual self restarts, but it's not the same self nor is it a differnt self because there is no self - it is virtual! 

We are all - however much we feel otherwise - the production of a configurartion of atoms.  In the 23rd century people have come to terms with being virtual, that their self doesn't actually exist.  Not everyone in the 21st century is convinced, however!



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@keithprosser
Perhaps suspecting there is no self is alarming enough without climbing in a transporter and removing alk doubt. 
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@secularmerlin
What do you think the self is, or isn't?