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I'm off the opinion that transporting is pointless from a selfish point of view: your duplicate will get to Jupiter or wherever, and think they're you, but your consciousness will stop so you will never get to experience it. I don't know what experiment you could do to prove this either way.
You can also apply the same argument Pre and post deep sleep or anaesthetic
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There is a long tradition in academic philosophy of using this model of teleportation as a device for investigating questions of personal identity. Derek Parfit's 'Reasons and Persons' is probably the best-known treatment [1]. I think there are good reasons to believe this is not generally how the writers of Star Trek thought the transporters in their stories were supposed to work, but they weren't always perfectly c…
i fail to see how this is an important philosophic subject, being based on absolutely no scientific data.
Thought experiments are often not intended to be carried out empirically (Schrodinger did not poison cats, Maxwell could not summon demons, Einstein did not throw people off buildings or construct clocks made of light, and so on), but they are nevertheless useful tools that can lead to insights about the real world, or serve as inspiration for actual experiments (Bell tests [6] are perhaps a good example of this, as they derive directly from Ian Bell's careful consideration of a famous thought experiment of Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen [7]).
Quantum teleportation is also of course a real phenomenon [8], and it does have some of the same properties as the imaginary teleportation device that Parfit and other philosophers consider in their work, albeit that it has only been demonstrated at the atomic scale for now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swampman
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_brain
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_test
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_Podolsky_Rosen_Parado...
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> I think there are good reasons to believe this is not generally how the writers of Star Trek thought the transporters in their stories were supposed to work, but they weren't always perfectly consistent on the subject. I remember one episode of one of the TV shows (I forget which one), they used a transporter to transport a bomb off the ship, so it detonated in space instead. If transportation is converting matter…
Furthermore, why not use the transporter as a weapon, creating bombs next to / inside enemy ships
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A colleague went on once about Star Trek transporters: what if they worked by "scanning" a person, sent that data over the airwaves, then, made a perfect copy of somewhere else (sourcing new molecules from wherever) — would this copy believe they were the original? He went on: suppose you kill the original — did you "transport" the person? Star Trek creeps me out a little now.
The person who wrote the Star Trek TNG Technical Manual mentioned this, and how - as described in the show - it's probably killing you and building a clone with your memories instead of transporting you. He thought about tweaking the lore so it didn't do that, using wormholes or the like, but decided to stay true to the show's established canon.
Star Trek: cloning takes seconds. You can have as many copies of a veteran warrior as you want. Dangerous mission? just send in the red shirts and a few highly trained veterans in the hope that nobody important dies (again).
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Metaphysics? What if I put you in a coma and wake you up a few days later and tell you a team of surgeons had replaced one of your internal organs with a lab-grown genetically equivalent version. Or maybe they just cut you open and closed you up again. Sure, there's a small scar left as evidence and some residual pain. But how would you be able to tell the difference? How does it connect to your perceptible self?
I think the "doing so" he said refers to the considering of our body parts as swappable, not the act of swapping them. By not feeling like they're important integral parts of our identity, we may be careless with their health.
Integral part vs. disposable is not a binary distinction.
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> That doesn’t make it actually the case To the best of our knowledge and experience with it comes to transplanting organs, it seems to be? > doing so has a lot of negative consequences for our actual embodied selves Can you elaborate? Organ transplants (and most likely other medical procedures) definitely throw wrenches into various spiritual & religious beliefs, but in the physical world (which we can observe & stu…
I think it’s definitely a complex topic and not one that can be hashed out in a HN comment. My thought is something like this: because we treat our “real selves” as just our heads/minds, we unintentionally or intentionally disregard the rest of our body. To me, this seems to be related to some specific negative things like obesity, for example. Many people don’t treat their body with the same level of respect as they…
There's not a single study to show this, so calling it 'probably wrong' is just disingenuous. All the current results simply say 'sensory data impacts our cognition', which people who think that the brain encompasses the whole of the mind also believe.
The real test would be whether 'faking' body parts by sending mock sensory data would lead to the same result as having the real body part.
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You are presupposing that there is a material difference between these two. Whenever you have a discontinuation of your conscious experience (for example, when you go to sleep and wake up), you can view that as one person disappearing, and a copy waking up in the morning. In fact, unless you believe in a transcendent soul as the seat of consciousness, it must be equivalent. So, when you step into the teleporter, you…
> unless you believe in a transcendent soul as the seat of consciousness, it must be equivalent. That is a big claim considering we have no idea what causes consciousness. It is however certain that the copy is not you. Whether the original gets destroyed on teleportation or not, the original you will not feel, see, hear etc anything that the copy does.
That's not certain at all, and depends on how we define "you". And, as you say, we don't know enough about consciousness to flesh out that definition.
If consciousness depends only on the layout of neurons in the brain (for example), then a teleporter that destroys your body and makes an atomically (quantum-ly?) identical copy at the destination actually does move "you" from one place to another. But if there's more to it than just that, perhaps it doesn't.
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I think it’s definitely a complex topic and not one that can be hashed out in a HN comment. My thought is something like this: because we treat our “real selves” as just our heads/minds, we unintentionally or intentionally disregard the rest of our body. To me, this seems to be related to some specific negative things like obesity, for example. Many people don’t treat their body with the same level of respect as they…
>It is also probably just conceptually wrong to think that our bodies are just a side accessory, especially when it comes to understanding how much of our actual intelligence comes from being embodied. There's not a single study to show this, so calling it 'probably wrong' is just disingenuous. All the current results simply say 'sensory data impacts our cognition', which people who think that the brain encompasses t…
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The person who wrote the Star Trek TNG Technical Manual mentioned this, and how - as described in the show - it's probably killing you and building a clone with your memories instead of transporting you. He thought about tweaking the lore so it didn't do that, using wormholes or the like, but decided to stay true to the show's established canon.
Star Wars: cloning takes ages, clones have to be raised and trained. Lets make a clone army to fight the mass produced robot army. Star Trek: cloning takes seconds. You can have as many copies of a veteran warrior as you want. Dangerous mission? just send in the red shirts and a few highly trained veterans in the hope that nobody important dies (again).
But instead we have "pattern buffers" that "degrade" quickly, and presumably keeping around copies of the full quantum states of many humans would require too much storage.
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Metaphysics? What if I put you in a coma and wake you up a few days later and tell you a team of surgeons had replaced one of your internal organs with a lab-grown genetically equivalent version. Or maybe they just cut you open and closed you up again. Sure, there's a small scar left as evidence and some residual pain. But how would you be able to tell the difference? How does it connect to your perceptible self?
This is a really complex topic, but just to throw out a few questions: - Why is our perceptible self the only thing that should determine our sense of identity? Aren’t there many aspects of our body and mind that aren’t we aren’t aware of on a conscious level? - Is there a point at which replacing your organs replaces You? This is called the Ship of Theseus and is a pretty deep problem. - Is the ability to be conscio…
Not really. Your molecules turn over in a matter of days to years anyway (depending on the tissue and compounds in question).
All that remains is information encoded in larger structures that are retained across that turnover. And the largest part of that is in the brain.
> - Why is our perceptible self the only thing that should determine our sense of identity? Aren’t there many aspects of our body and mind that aren’t we aren’t aware of on a conscious level?
By perceptible I meant observable in one way or another, even parameters that are only subconsciously noticeable such as hormonal balance, gut flora signalling, DNA methylation, immune memory or whatever is important to the stateful system of the body. These considerations add complexity if you want a high-fidelity replacement but they're still far fewer variables than the state maintained in your brain.
> - Is the ability to be conscious or communicate via language the sole determiner of a thing’s existence? If I put my head on your body, what is this new thing? Just me? My head on your body? Even if your cells and body continue to exist, with anything like tattoos or personal elements. Etc.
I would say it's mostly you, a little me. Consider it as an exercise in tallying the number of non-redundant bits persistently stored in something. Its kolmogorov complexity. The body carries a smaller fraction of that.