posted
This one has troubled me for quite some time. Without getting into the mass to energy conversion controversies, if you "break down" someone to their constituate particles and reassemble them in a remate location, aren't you ending the life of the person on the transporter pad and creating a duplicate with the exact same memories of the person you just killed. We've seen the Transporter duplicate people on several occasions, which just confirms this in my mind. Wasn't this the reason for McCoy's anxiety about using the Transporter in the early episodes and TMP?
-------------------- Never fear... Sargon is here.
Registered: Jul 2003
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posted
I suggest that you find a copy of "Is Data Human?: The Metaphysics of Star Trek" by Richard Hanley. He goes into very good detail and covers that difficult philosophical issue from several interesting angles. (And interestingly for me, the author is also my Philosophy professor at the University of Delaware!)
Basically, it comes down to the question as to whether or not the "duplicate" subject that's created by the transporter is truly identical or not -- and whether it really matters. For if the person who is left on the planet after beaming down is literally identical to the original down to the last subatomic particle, is there truly any difference of consequence? Ultimately, the question relies on whether you believe in an ethereal "soul" that cannot be duplicated by a matter transporter.
However, I think that you are mischaracterizing Doctor McCoy's transporter phobia. He's not having philosophical issues -- he's just afraid that the damn thing will break down.
-------------------- “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” — Isaac Asimov Star Trek Minutiae | Memory Alpha
Registered: Nov 2000
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quote: after beaming down is literally identical to the original down to the last subatomic particle, is there truly any difference of consequence?
Yes, there is a consequence. You have a duplicate. If we used the Tranporter to duplicate me on the surface of a planet, leaving the original on the ship, then that is not "me" on the planet. He is the same as me, but not me.
It would be a great Sci-Fi concept for stories: Your ship warps up to an unexplored planet, beams down duplicates of your best people, then if anything goes bad, like the disease in Miri or Omega Glory you don't beam them back up. Tough luck dupe', thems the breaks. Locals overwhelmed your 3 Redshirts? No problems, beam down a hundred.
In fact, no matter how well a mission goes, you never beam them back up; they just stay on the planet as ambassadores or colonists or for further scientific study. After all, you don't want any of the messiness that comes from having a ship with 9 Kirks, a dozen Spocks, etc.
-------------------- Never fear... Sargon is here.
Registered: Jul 2003
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posted
In recent years there's been loads of SF written about recorded consciousness, the soul, is a copy 'me' etc. You might want to look at Greg Egan's stuff which looks particularly at the latter question. Also, Richard Morgan and Iain M. Banks seem to go along the lines of you remining you regardless of whatever medium you find your consciousness in or the means you took to get there, and I think that we're unlikely to ever see Trek ask these sorts of questions because it would open too many cans of worms. No doubt someone'll emntion the TOS novel "Spock Must Die" at some point. . .
posted
Whether this is a philosophical issue to us, or not, it's obviously not one in the Trek universe. To the people using it, the transporter is just a means of getting from point A to point B. It has the possibility of killing you or misplacing you in several odd ways... but it's just a means of transportation. They obviously don't feel that they're existance is being terminated every time they use it.
Registered: Oct 1999
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Just discovered him; Altered Carbon was in a 2 for �10 sale . damn good, i thought, as was the second. Although the bookshops can't seem to make up their minds as to whether AC is sci-fi or crime.
-------------------- "I am an almost extinct breed, an old-fashioned gentleman, which means I can be a cast-iron son-of-a-bitch when it suits me." --Jubal Harshaw
Registered: Feb 2002
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posted
I also think that this point has been mentioned to the tech people behind the show.
Basically, the transporter doesn't kill you, and then reassemble a duplicate of you. It somehow manages to move the exact same molecules that you are made up of across subspace and reassemble them, at the same time as somehow freezing the mind so that the person doesn't die. A person using the transporter is teleported, not killed, cloned, and assembled.
The dublication process would then mean that SCARY SCIENCE STUFF has caused a persons atoms to actually be cloned during transport. In the case of the Rikers, this means that one of them HAS to be the original, and one a copy.
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
Registered: Mar 1999
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quote: after beaming down is literally identical to the original down to the last subatomic particle, is there truly any difference of consequence?
Yes, there is a consequence. You have a duplicate. If we used the Tranporter to duplicate me on the surface of a planet, leaving the original on the ship, then that is not "me" on the planet. He is the same as me, but not me.
Doesn't work. The general concept of a transporter is that it beams the energy of you down and then makes that energy you again.
Look at it this way: If I remove your arm and then reattach it, is that still your arm?
Okay, now imagine that I do the same thing to a cell of yours, then an individual molecule, then a particular atom. Seems to me that they would still be yours just as much as the arm would.
Now, if I take that atom, whip out E=mc^2, and convert the atom to energy, and then convert it back into its atomic, matter form, and *then* reattach it to you . . . what then? Is it a mere copy? I don't think so. Seems to me that it is the same thing.
In a magnetic storage medium like a floppy disk, information is stored as a series of charges. A copy is made by having one disk head read the original charges that store information, while the head on another disk writes that same information on the other disk, with new energy. A transporter would be more akin to actually converting all of the original magnetic charge to electricity and then using that same energy to write to the new disk. Is that a copy merely because the charges are now at a different spot and didn't move directly there, or is that the new location of the original?
-------------------- . . . ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
posted
In "The Physics of Star Trek" by Lawrence Krauss, he proposes the idea of informational transport, that is, the transport of your "pattern" to be reduplicated on the surface with new atoms. The old body is destroyed.
This wouldn't work because you have to wonder where the new atoms came from. Do all planets have the Carbon neccesary to rebuild you? Do all places have the correct elements? No. So it has to be as it is described in the TNG: TM.
And, MM, your philosophy proffessor wrote the Metaphysics of Star Trek. Cool.
-------------------- "Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind."
posted
My favorite story along these lines is "Ginnungagap" by Michael Swanwick.
Anyway, we can put aside the thorny continuity-of-consciousness problem for this one. Accurate, believable, or otherwise, we know for a fact that a transportee is conscious throughout their entire trip, and thus are firmly the same person on both sides of the event. (The Wrath of Khan goes so far as to suggest one can maintain a conversation during it, but let's not go there.)
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
This sort of topic bugs me almost as much as the notion of lightsabers somehow being optical phenomena. From TOS on, it's been quite clearly the intention that the person after transport is the same person as before transport. No cloning involved, except in unusual story-driven events. No destruction of old body in favor of new. No imprinting of pattern on local matter. Where do these ideas come from?
--Jonah
-------------------- "That's what I like about these high school girls, I keep getting older, they stay the same age."
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Registered: Feb 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Guardian 2000: Doesn't work. The general concept of a transporter is that it beams the energy of you down and then makes that energy you again.
Hmmmm... But what about Tom Riker? Was he half as massive as Will Riker? What about the good and Evil Kirks? Each had half of Kirk's atoms> And Tuvik...was he the equivalent mass of Tukov and Neelix?
Oy...the transporter always makes my head hurt. No wonder McCoy hated using it!
-------------------- "Well, I mean, it's generally understood that, of all of the people in the world, Mike Nelson is the best." -- ULTRA MAGNUS, steadfast in curmudgeon
Registered: Feb 2001
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posted
Peregrinus, these ideas sprung from the futile attempt to explain the transporter phenomena using modern 20th and 21st century scientific knowledge. I personally am inclined to take the TNG:TM as canon and use its explanation as such.
-------------------- "Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind."
posted
I've been watching Star Trek all my life, and even as a six-year-old I never thought the person stepping into the transporter was disintegrated and copied at the destination. I've been studying physics since age seven, and I always, always knew most of the tech in Trek was based on principles that were theoretical or wildly conjectural for where we were at the time. I had no problem saying "in the future, they have learned how to do this, and any attempt by me to figure out methods using contemporary technology is foolish and against the spirit of the show".
Person steps into transporter at point A and gets zapped straight to point B without passing 'Go' -- got it, that's what it does, don't know how, doesn't matter, let's move on and enjoy the story.
--Jonah
-------------------- "That's what I like about these high school girls, I keep getting older, they stay the same age."
--David "Woody" Wooderson, Dazed and Confused
Registered: Feb 2001
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![[Smile]](smile.gif)
. damn good, i thought, as was the second. Although the bookshops can't seem to make up their minds as to whether AC is sci-fi or crime.
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