Is beaming down in Star Trek a death sentence?

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/is-beaming-down-in-star-trek-a-death-sentence/

by Tomte • 9 years ago

32 68 9 years ago

arstechnica.com

mannykannot2• 9 years ago

If Chalmers is right, it would seem that a transporter would be a machine for making p-zombies.

k__• 9 years ago

Why? Just you beging copied and your first instance dying doesn't make the copy a p-zombie.

mannykannot2• 9 years ago

Chalmers believes in the metaphysical possibility of p-zombies and argues that this necessarily implies that physicalism is false. If a transporter recreates the physical structure of a person, but physicalism is false, then this recreation must be without any of the subjective qualia of the original. Under the premise that the transporter works, however, the re-creation acts as if it has these qualia, so therefore it must be, by definition, a p-zombie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie#Zombie_ar...

sillysaurus3• 9 years ago

Related: CGP Grey's "The Trouble with Transporters"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQHBAdShgYI

adjkant• 9 years ago

Related: "What Makes You You?"

https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/12/what-makes-you-you.html

Smaug12317• 9 years ago

There's a whole section in here about how people do stuff while being transported, and then about energy beings. This is just fiction, people! The philosophical issues from the start of the article are just made unrealistically complicated if you also posit that teleportation has to obey the demands of the plot. Make sure to be clear about the difference between "is teleportation in Star Trek a death sentence" and "is teleportation in principle a death sentence". [As has been rightly pointed out, I really mean "teleportation by beaming". There are other possible means of teleportation which don't require disassembling one's self and reassembling it elsewhere: for example, travel through wormholes.]

Teleportation in principle is not a death sentence if (like me) you're a reductionist who believes that the mind is a pattern which happens to be encoded on a physical substrate. To copy the substrate perfectly implies copying perfectly the pattern encoded on it, and hence (since I'm a reductionist) copying perfectly the self.

No comment from my end about teleportation in Star Trek being a death sentence.

TomMarius• 9 years ago

What if someone made an exact copy of you? Would your consciousness gain a second body?

Smaug12317• 9 years ago

Yep. Both are me; they start diverging as soon as the copy is made.

nathan_f77• 9 years ago

You would have an identical twin.

gnaritas8• 9 years ago

Teleportation in principle is not a death sentence if (like me) you're a reductionist who believes that the mind is a pattern which happens to be encoded on a physical substrate. To copy the substrate perfectly implies copying perfectly the pattern encoded on it, and hence (since I'm a reductionist) copying perfectly the self.

A copy of you is not you, one need only not destroy the original for you to quickly admit that the copy is not you. If I copy you, and ask you if the copy over there is you, you'll say no. If I then kill you, you have just been sentenced to death. The copy will live on feeling as if it is you, but it isn't you, it's a copy of you. That is unless you believe there can be any number of you; but the second they're created they are by definition no longer you, they are them, and your experiences are no longer identical, you are instantly separate beings so they are instantly no longer you.

Smaug12317• 9 years ago

Here we go :)

Your fundamental misunderstanding of my viewpoint is that there can only ever be one of me. The "copy", as you put it, is also one of me. The two are different people by the time you come to threaten one of them with death, but at the instant of creation of the second, they were the same. They diverged since (just as identical twins would, immediately after their brains began to form in the womb). The question of "which one is me" is meaningless: they are both me, in the sense that they have a common "ancestor" (i.e in the sense that I am who I was five minutes ago), and they are both not me (in the sense that I am not who I was five minutes ago).

usjehshksish2• 9 years ago

A lot of fiction that deals with consciousness copies finds that copies are far more willing to "die" knowing that another instance of the pattern will live on.

Ultimately our desire for self-preservation itself only comes from our evolutionary history. That desire itself is mutable, and you could expect that the portion of it that cares about being the original would slowly evolve away if transporter use were a significant component of the fitness function.

hacking_again3• 9 years ago

the mind is a pattern which happens to be encoded on a physical substrate

Why do you believe you can differentiate between mind and substrate?

Copying the mind is not like copying a hard drive at rest. It's more like copying a hard drive while somebody is actively writing to it at random, inserting new sectors, shaking it, etc.

I believe that to perfectly copy the mind, you have to make an instantaneous perfect copy of the entire human.

Smaug12317• 9 years ago

Sure, I'm happy to believe that. This is only a thought experiment, so we are allowed to do things instantaneously if it makes the issues clearer; and I never actually said that the physical substrate was necessarily the brain. It could just as well be the body more generally.

Someone2• 9 years ago

”To copy the substrate perfectly implies copying perfectly the pattern encoded on it, and hence (since I'm a reductionist) copying perfectly the self”

But if yo copy a living being, you end up with two living beings, each (presumably) with their own self. Some people would argue getting rid of the original is murder (if you assume the original and the copy share a self, it would be mutilation)

I think the way out of this is to not call it copying but moving (you move a body from atoms a pattern buffer and from there back to atoms)

Smaug12317• 9 years ago

Yep, it would be murder - except that in this thought experiment, I stepped into the transporter of my own free will, and thereby expressly consented to the destruction of one of my selves in the immediate future. It becomes much more interesting if someone is forcibly transported; then I think the moral answer depends on what the transportee believes about their consciousness. Do they believe they'll be murdered, or not? Then I think there's a fair argument to say that the forcible transport is morally evil, or neutral, depending on the two cases.

yazaddaruvala2• 9 years ago

I agree with all of your points about "beaming" it just wasn't clear from your statements that you were considering alternate implementations of teleportation.

is teleportation in principle a death sentence

If we were to harness folds in spacetime, or other dimensions to teleport, we would have no philosophical questions around it being death, because locomotion through any dimension is a "solved philosophy".

rcarmo• 9 years ago

Statistically, yes, if you're wearing a red shirt.

At least until they re-did all the wardrobe so that Security wore gold or navy blue :)

guscost• 9 years ago

Teleportation is a fiction and you can just invent the necessary details to decide whatever you want, but I still like this webcomic treatment:

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/1

aswanson• 9 years ago

No way in effing hell I'd teleport, even with tech 1000000 years advanced from today.

Smaug12317• 9 years ago

No way in effing hell am I getting into a car, even with tech advanced 100000 years from today ;)

Not saying I'd ever get into a teleporter willingly. But remember that people have said this about most inventions at some point.

yazaddaruvala2• 9 years ago

There is another.

Teleportation in Star Trek is "beaming", but worm holes are the alternate means of teleportation. There is no notion of death when traveling through a worm hole.

krapp3• 9 years ago

There was a Star Trek species called the T'Kon who used something like wormholes to create dimensional gates that let them just walk to other planets as easily as walking across the room. That was presented as a technological feat "sufficiently close to magic" even to the Federation. Wormholes in that universe seem to be rare and unstable and weird, though not nearly so much as in Farscape, where they seem to be able to access all of space and time, IIRC.

lend000• 9 years ago

It comes down to the philosophical question -- are you better defined by the pattern of matter and energy that represents you, or are you the matter and energy that represents you?

I personally believe it's the former. I.e. if I had a terminal illness and I made a copy of myself (the same except healthy), I like to think I would be happy to let it carry on my life and work.

dagenleg• 9 years ago

If you've played "Soma" it explores this concept a lot.

dghf• 9 years ago

No mention of the accidental creation of two William Thomas Rikers?

If, however, we destroy the ship but mail its blueprints somewhere else and then build a new, identical ship, it’s not the same ship. It’s a separate ship built from the same blueprints. It doesn’t even matter whether you use the same planks or not. [Emphasis added.]

The last sentence implies that something designed to be repeatedly disassembled and reassembled is a different object on each assembly. That doesn't sound right.

del_operator• 9 years ago

Polyopic heatuscopy is just an odd hallucination where you are split into multiple copies of yourself. You and your forks are aware of each others thoughts, but you may not be able to distinguish the real you.

aaronblohowiak• 9 years ago

If you like these ideas, read the Altered Carbon series :)

nly• 9 years ago

If "you" are the product of your experiences (environment) acting upon your corporeal components (atoms, your "blueprints" etc), then isn't it true that the "me" from 1 nanosecond ago ceased to exist and a "new me" is actually being created in every new frame in time?

If you think of it this way, I don't see why being demolecularized by a transporter, and being reconstructed on a ship in orbit, is any different to walking across a room.

In both transitions the state of trillions of atoms in my body change, and I gain and lose atoms, the difference is only one of magnitude.

lisper2• 9 years ago

The real irony here is that Gene Roddenberry did not invent the transporter because he thought it was a good idea from a dramatic point of view, but because he was forced into it by budgetary constraints. Back in the 1960's it was way beyond the financial means of a weekly TV show to produce a special effect of a shuttlecraft landing on a planet or in the shuttle bay for every episode, so they invented the transporter as a way of getting people to and from planetary surfaces with reasonable production costs. That real-world reality has shaped the face of science fiction for fifty years.

Nowadays we have the technology to fly spaceships around on screen pretty much at will, which actually presents a dramatic opportunity: someone could write a Star Trek episode where they actually take seriously the possibility that the transporter is a bad idea and ban it in favor of shuttlecrafts. I think this could make a really good premise for a novel and/or movie. It could even re-shape the face of science fiction for the next fifty years the way the original transporter did for the last fifty.

krapp3• 9 years ago

Someone could write a Star Trek episode where they actually take seriously the possibility that the transporter is a bad idea and ban it in favor of shuttlecrafts.

Star Trek Enterprise kind of did that, because it was set in a time when transporters were new technology and deemed unfit for anything but cargo. Unfortunately because it's a franchise staple to see the away teams beaming down to planets, they took the coward's way out and quickly forgot it.

lisper2• 9 years ago

"The Orroville" is also a (very good IMHO) Trek knockoff that dispenses with the transporter.

grue2• 9 years ago

Is sleep a death sentence?

To boil it down, "I" am made of two things: qualia and memories.

During unconscious sleep, those mysterious qualia disappear, except for brief chaotic flashes which we call dreams. Meanwhile a physical process takes place in the brain: those memories are reorganized, reformatted, and reconstituted.

In this view, there is a very literal sense to the idiom "I woke up feeling like a brand new person." Yet, few people go to sleep at night worrying that "they" will no longer exist in the morning, even though that is quite arguably the case.

I would worry about biological sleep long before I worried about teleporters. While any OSHA-compliant teleporter can (we would assume) preserve the continuity and integrity of one's memories, sleep doesn't even have that feature.

krapp3• 9 years ago

What would likely happen is that a society that invents a transporter would be forced to redefine their cultural parameters for concepts like "death" and "self" because the device is just too useful to ignore, despite any existential ramifications it may present.

So the answer to this perennial Trek puzzle depends, ironically, on a certain point of view.

Is beaming down in Star Trek a death sentence?

Related Stories