Tractor beams and "startrek" type transportation

Dustin said:
It seems to me that compairing sedation to being DEATOMIZED doesn't make any sense. Being sedated just means your brain is resting in particular places of consciousness. However since your brain never stops working you're still alive.
Being deatomized would mean in effect you're dead in any sense of the term. The fact you get put back together at some time in the future isn't relevant. You're still dead. Meaning your consciousness ends.

It seems to me your line of consciousness would be done with the second you're deatomized and the only possible way to have the same "line of consciousness" is if there is some abstract thing that monitors your consciousness apart from your body. Which would be of course supernatural. Which seems unlikely.
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For the purposes of the present discussion, does it really matter if your brain is still working at a low level of activity or was completely deconstructed? You are not consciouss when sedated, at coma or at a deep dreamless sleep. Your consiousness is inexistent at these states. Every night our selves cease to exist, only to (hopefully) reappear every new morning when we wake up. And yet, we experience our selves as being continous. From a materialistic view, one could say the sensation of continuity of a self is nothing but the integral of several discrete consiousness states.

As soon as the teletransporter builds a "new you" a consioussness or self will appear, since it is the product of several not yet fully understood brain functions. Not unlike when you awake in the morning. To the particular point of view of this "new you", there will be no difference, no apparent discontinuity. He/she will actually be you. And if copies are built, they all will be you.
 
Correa Neto said:
For the purposes of the present discussion, does it really matter if your brain is still working at a low level of activity or was completely deconstructed? You are not consciouss when sedated, at coma or at a deep dreamless sleep. Your consiousness is inexistent at these states. Every night our selves cease to exist, only to (hopefully) reappear every new morning when we wake up. And yet, we experience our selves as being continous. From a materialistic view, one could say the sensation of continuity of a self is nothing but the integral of several discrete consiousness states.

As soon as the teletransporter builds a "new you" a consioussness or self will appear, since it is the product of several not yet fully understood brain functions. Not unlike when you awake in the morning. To the particular point of view of this "new you", there will be no difference, no apparent discontinuity. He/she will actually be you. And if copies are built, they all will be you.
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Okay, so let's say it is like going into a deep sleep or coma, when you arrived at the other end wouldn't you at least go through a "waking" period where your mind reconstructs consiousness just like when you wake up in the morning? Seems like while your brain "fired back up" again you'd be disoriented for a few moments.

On a side note, I do remember Geordi talking about Heisenberg Compensators, and the doctor mentioning that it can filter out bacteria, viruses, and other critters and even mend broken bones. They were also able to heal someone by putting them through a pattern buffer based on a transport that took place before someone got sick (althought I think that was a book). So appearently you can store someone's pattern. And don't forget Scotty survived for something like 75 years by stepping into a transporter and looping it over and over.
 
Ziggurat said:
It's not really about which one is real, but what does identity mean if you can duplicate a person. Let me try another set of hypotheticals to try to illuminate why I think this isn't a trivial question. Suppose I duplicate your body. Now you've got a double, and per your statements, both are real people. The next day, after having lunch with the original body, I destroy it, and not in some reversible manner. I've done something terrible, haven't I? I've killed a person, right? There's still A tsg walking around, to be sure, but I still killed someone, haven't I? Suppose I don't wait another day, but destroy the original body only an hour after duplication. That's still murder, isn't it? What about a second after duplication? What about as part of the duplication procedure? Is it always murder? Is it less of a murder if I don't wait as long after duplication? If you've been duplicated, is the moral importance of your life reduced because of the redundancy? And can you imagine the lawsuits over property rights?
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If we're talking about duplication, then killing the "original" is murder regardless of how long you wait or if it's done instantly. But I don't see how this applies to teleportation.
 
To further muddy the waters, in Lonely Among Us Picard was possessed by some kind of space consciousness, which forced him to beam himself out into space. Dead, of course. The crew used the pattern recorded by the transporter to rematerialize him alive.

But yet, they couldn't do something similar to bring holocharacters to life...
 
tsg said:
If we're talking about duplication, then killing the "original" is murder regardless of how long you wait or if it's done instantly. But I don't see how this applies to teleportation.
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Well, suppose the teleportation consists of disassembling all your atoms, and reassembling identical but different atoms elsewhere. Is that murder?

What if instead we disassemble all your atoms, move them to the new location, and reassemble them - is that murder?

You've essentially said yes to the first one. If you say yes to the second one, then star trek-like teleportation as we've been discussing it looks an awful lot like murder. If you said no to the second one, then you need to be able to draw some distinction between the two, but the most obvious distinction (the origin of the atoms in question) can get muddied.

For example, what if the teleportation consists of disassembling all your atoms, putting all the atoms in storage boxes with other atoms of the same kind (so you've got, for example, a box with all oxygen atoms), and then picking out the appropriate number of each atom to reconstruct you - now some of these atoms are your original ones and some aren't. Is that murder?

Or to get even messier, suppose that the storage box keeps the atoms in a Bose condensate. In this case, there is no physical possibility to distinguish your original atoms from replacement atoms - the origin of each atom becomes an undefinable property. Is that murder?
 
Starthinker said:
Okay, so let's say it is like going into a deep sleep or coma, when you arrived at the other end wouldn't you at least go through a "waking" period where your mind reconstructs consiousness just like when you wake up in the morning? Seems like while your brain "fired back up" again you'd be disoriented for a few moments.
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Yep, I would say some disorientation or dizzyness would be expected, even if the deconstruction and reconstruction are instantaneous. Heck, I would expect at the very least some disorientation, since you are, say relaxing drinking bloodwine at K7 station and a split second later you find yourself are at a transporter pad aboard a Romulan vessel... But the technology called "plot requirements" avoids those effects.

Starthinker said:
On a side note, I do remember Geordi talking about Heisenberg Compensators, and the doctor mentioning that it can filter out bacteria, viruses, and other critters and even mend broken bones. They were also able to heal someone by putting them through a pattern buffer based on a transport that took place before someone got sick (althought I think that was a book). So appearently you can store someone's pattern. And don't forget Scotty survived for something like 75 years by stepping into a transporter and looping it over and over.
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Yep, and Scotty seemed confuse, thinking Kirk was the one who came to rescue him. Too many time in the buffer or plot requirement?:D
 
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Ziggurat said:
Well, suppose the teleportation consists of disassembling all your atoms, and reassembling identical but different atoms elsewhere. Is that murder?
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That's not teleportation, that's duplication. It's like sending a fax. In order for it to be teleportation then the atoms themselves have to be moved from one place to another. Otherwise I don't see how it could possibly work.
 
tsg said:
That's not teleportation, that's duplication.
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Fine. But that doesn't get to the question of what happens to your identity in the process, and whether it's murder to disassemble a body to an atomic level even if you can or do reconstruct it later. My point about the Bose condensate is that the distinction between using the same atoms and using different atoms to reconstruct the body cannot in the end be a meaningful distinction (because there are scenarios under which it's an impossible distinction to make). So if "faxing" a person by deconstructing them and duplicating them with another set of atoms is murder, then teleporting them by deconstructing them and rebuilding them with the same atoms looks like it is too.
 
I less than three logic said:
It's just a clone of yourself, I see no problem here. Identical twins are just clones as well, yet they seem to have their own awareness, and don’t argue over which one developed first to decide who the awareness belongs to. Both of the entities will believe it is you, both will believe the other is not you, and both will be right.
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What I'm asking is which one of the clones am I going to be? Who's eyes am I, personally, going to be seeing out of?
 
Ziggurat said:
Fine. But that doesn't get to the question of what happens to your identity in the process, and whether it's murder to disassemble a body to an atomic level even if you can or do reconstruct it later. My point about the Bose condensate is that the distinction between using the same atoms and using different atoms to reconstruct the body cannot in the end be a meaningful distinction (because there are scenarios under which it's an impossible distinction to make).
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I disagree. That they are indistinguishable doesn't make them the same. Two identical cars (toasters, whatever) are indistinguishable but nobody would argue they were the same car.

So if "faxing" a person by deconstructing them and duplicating them with another set of atoms is murder, then teleporting them by deconstructing them and rebuilding them with the same atoms looks like it is too.
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I don't see why as long as the original components (atoms or whatever base unit we're working in) are reconstructed in the same order they left in. If you dissasemble a car to transport it and rebuild it on the other end is it not the same car? Have you destroyed one car and made another?
 
Speaking of Star Transporters and duplication, has anyone else read The Price of the Phoenix and/or The Fate of the Phoenix by Myrna Culbreath and Sondra Marshak?

These books deal with a character who developed a way to use the transporter and ESP in order to make duplicates of people when they died, or who were in imminent fear of death. He was going to use this technology to destroy the Federation and the Romulan Empire. It was a pretty scary concept all right.
 
Ooo Ooo Ooo, this reminds me of "The Jaunt" by Stephen King. Anyone read it? I think it's in a short story collection called Night Shift. It's great. Chap invents a transporter machine that works fine with inanimate objects, but live subjects come through the other end a little bit, erm, affected. Serioulsly good story, even if you don't like King that much.
 
Crossbow said:
Star Trek Geek Alert!

The book The Physics of Star Trek discusses how the transporter technology proves that humans do not have a soul since the transporter converts the matter of the body into energy, then reassembles that matter in exactly the same way but in a different place. Since it only functions with matter (and not anything intangible like a soul), and the person is the exactly same at the other end, therefore, humans do not have a soul.
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At last someone is talking some sense! (or at least the book is). Yes, if it were possible to teleport someone this would necessitate that some materialist based metaphysic is correct. It would indeed prove that we are not souls.

But if teletransporting is possible, and therefore a materialist metaphysic is necessarily correct, then the recreated you would be you in the fullest sense of the word. This is so even if the original were not killed.
 
Timothy said:
What twaddle! Who's to say that a "soul" isn't an inherent property of the particular combinations of subatomic particles that makes up a body? That is, if anywhere in the universe there exists the exact arrangement of particles that represents your body, a soul will spontaneously generate to inhabit it.

Since no one has (and by some people's definition, no one can) measure the properties or characteristics of the soul, putting arbitrary constraints on when and where souls exist is nonsense.

(A lot of other things are nonsense, too, in my opinion. Can you guess oneof them?)

- Timothy
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I'm assuming that "soul" does not equate to a substantial self. That is to say a brain can create a non-physical self, but people wouldn't consider that a soul unless this self could exist independently of the brain.
 
tsg said:
You have to distinguish between actually transporting matter and just making a copy. Your example is making a copy and not actually transporting matter. Whatever happens to the copy in the new location will be experienced by the copy and not by you whether or not the original is destroyed. That is a different person. A real transporter would have to actually move the matter from one place to another, not simply create a different one. That is, the actual atoms (or whatever fundamental units we're breaking transported people down into) have to be transmitted and reassembled.
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No. All elementary particles of a particular type are absolutely identical. Therefore the atoms composed of such particles are identical too.

A copy would be you in the fullest complete sense.
 
Unless the "soul" isn't somehow encoded in the physical matter of the being. Like a zip file.
 
I also owned the book "Spock Must Die!", and it scrambled me pretty well, too. That orange-red cover made it all the more eerie.
 
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