2y ago

Am I? Who knows

Source Page. Credit is to SMBC-Comics and even more credit to @aperson@beehaw.org who noticed it was missing and found the credit in this comment. Sorry about that and thanks, you're awesome aperson <3

174 comments

I'm taking shuttlecrafts.
- Star Trek The Motion Picture's transporter accident gave me nightmares.
  Galaxy Quest's transporter accident made me laugh so hard I almost pissed myself.
- Enterprise... what we got back didn't live long... fortunately. The fortunately was always the worst part of the line.

I'm terrified of transporters
- Old McCoy in his TNG cameo was right.
- ~~You~~ the infinite molecular clones of you die every time.
  
  nah
- What a Barclay.
  
  Proudly so, ha
- Yup, I'm taking the stairs
  
  From orbit to the planet? That's at least a dozen flights of stairs.

Geordi: Reg, transporting really is the safest way to travel.
Barclay: Maybe you're....wait a second. Didn't it turn you and Ro into fucking ghosts like...2 weeks ago?
- Tbf Ro thought they were dead, Geordi never accepted that.
  
  Reg can be hyperbolic.
- consider how often the enterprise threatens to explode, compared with how often they encounter issues with the transporter, and Geordie isn't exaggerating. he just isn't telling the whole story.

It's funny that when it's transporter people freak out at this idea, but technically every single person goes to sleep not knowing if the 'them' that wakes up was the same as the one that went to sleep.
We could effectively have individual consciousnesses dying each night and new ones picking back up the next morning.
Something to think about as you lie drifting off to sleep tonight.
- Well...if that's true then I have died over 14,000 times so I must be used to it.
  G'night
- The original comic page mentions the sleep thing in the alt text
- Great, I needed more existential dread. Thanks!
  
  I gotchu fam. Anytime - happy to help.
- I wake up in the body of someone else with the same residue of Cheetos in my mouth as the other person ate before bed? Seems like a lot of effort
- This thought has prevented my sleep for years now.
- The solution that clears up all of these issues and results in a fully consistent view of the self is the one people like the least. There is no "you" or "me", the self is an illusion the brain creates to make sense of things.
  
  The Illusionist theory of Consciousness is pretty solidly refuted. The emergent theory of consciousness is vaguely similar, and argued by some to be stronger, others to be weaker, than illusionism. I think it's the most popular view among physicalist philosophers. For the arguments against emergentism, the most common seems to be the required presupposition of physicalism plus some handwaving to make it work. It's noted, however, there are a vast number of permutations of the emergentism argument or what emergent mental states actually mean, which each one of those permutations a bit different.
  Upon analysis, neither has demonstrated being "a fully consistent view of the self" with any success. Ultimately, both are just unsubstantiated attempts to fill the gaps in our understanding.
- I mean... video recording kind of shoots that theory in the foot, doesn't it?
  
  How so?
  Do you think I'm taking about something related to the entire physical body like Dark City?
  No - I mean the continuity of consciousness inside your brain.
  That potentially the part of you that IS you, your subjective experience of existing, might in fact die each night never to return and simply be replaced by a different new one spun up with access to the hippocampus and a sense of having lived a whole continuous life, none the wiser to the many past yous that came before and will never be again nor its own impending doom in just a few short hours.
- There's a great They Might Be Giants song about exactly this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSbEOZY7k20

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/teleporter-3
Source to give credit and so you can read the title text, the panel that was cropped off, and the bonus panel.
- Weird, there's a bonus panel? I don't see anything except the cropped intro

I don't subscribe to the Star Trek teleporters killing you. They turn you into energy on one side, shoot that energy across subspace to the other end, and recombine you back into matter.
Why do I believe this? Because of several episodes where transported crew members, including Barclay, describe the sensation and what they see as they stream through the energy/matter conversion field. If they can describe the feeling and visual stimuli from end to end, I don't see how it's 2 different entities. It's the same one, converted from matter to energy and back again.
This also explains how Tuvix was created because of some plant getting mixed in with them. The weirder, harder to explain things, are the straight up transporter clones.
- The problem is that transporters don't actually exist, so there isn't a "real" way in which they work. The show presented several different descriptions for how they worked, and the functionality had whatever feature the plot demanded.
  So you get the ship's doctor who avoids it because she thinks it's basically as described in this cartoon, you get the copy of Riker from the time he Schrodinger escaped from that planet, you've got the autosaved DNA sequences that helped them reset after a virus was about to kill everyone, and you get teleported people perceiving their trip. All of that can coexist in just one of the mamy shows because it isn't consistent. Star Trek has some excellent detail, and explores some interesting hard scifi topics, but it's still just fiction.
- Not to poo poo on your theory because this is all fake anyways but to your point brains are weird and we make shit up all the time when we can't or just don't understand how something works.

There was an episode of The Outer Limits (7x08 Think Like a Dinosaur) that dealt with this exact question.
In that episode, humans are maybe-given a teleportation tech that creates a perfect copy somewhere else, but the aliens need to trust that we will 'balance the equation' (destroy the original) every time. That's easy when the human in question is immobilized for transfer. Only one transfer goes wrong- the person being transferred is woken up before the transfer is confirmed, and then the transfer gets confirmed. So now you have the original human, who's already been copied, and the transfer operator still has to 'balance the equation'...
- How have I not heard of this series? Looks twilight zone-ish? Is it worth a watch?
  
  Yeah Twilight Zone is an apt comparison. It's been a long time since I saw it but I remember there were a few pretty good ones. I'd give it a watch...
- And that was based on a short story of the same name.

This is the struggle session that launches a million "a sufficiently high fidelity copy of a person is literally the same person" takes, which often conveniently require the original person to die to maintain that "literally the same person" take. If the person didn't "go anywhere" and was told "congratulations, you teleported! Now kindly step into the biomass recycler because literally you is already at the destination" I don't blame that original from not going quietly.
https://www.existentialcomics.com/comic/1
- Uhhh, excuse me? My takes are totally original. T'Pol told me so.
- There's actually a book series I enjoy, the Bobiverse series, that does an interesting take on it. In it a human, the eponymous Bob, gets digitized and becomes the AI of a Von Neumann probe. He's given the mission to make copies of himself, explore the galaxy, and build colonies for humanity.
  
  There's a lot of sci-fi hand waving in it, but I thought it was a fun way to approach the question.

Does that mean transporter clones are when the transporter ACTUALLY worked?

OK I'm not even a Trekkie but I was doing some elecromag homework and I have a really cool theory on this:
The teleporter thingy actually acts more like a guitar pickup, in a more E=mc^2 type of way, entirely perfectly converting the person into energy - not matter. (This would require an analog encoding from matter to energy). The biggest difference is the pickup totally uses up the entire person, so like if you strum a guitar and it converts to a perfect electrical wave (but the guitar goes mute).
This energy is a lot easier to transfer than just matter, but the person encoded within it still only exists once in that energy. (for the guitar analogy a speaker at the other end that picks up the guitar wave, and turns it back into sound)
Its then entirely used up to power the 'person builder' in an analog way, much more accurately than were able to recreate digitally (aka why tape record are the truest form of music recording we have, it accutate to a way smaller scale than we can capture digitally.)
This would then mean that we can't just duplicate the creation process, cause the energy only flowed into the machine one time in that exact fashion, and duplicating it would require knowledge of every single atom in a person; then a way to accurately recreate that energy waveform to power the machine.
This also opens the possibility of the transporter 'missing' if somehow they moved faster than the speed of light, while the person was still being transported, and them being just a flash of light endlessly propagating throughout the void.
Idk if the things have range in the series, but it could also be that the angle a transporter can accurately capture that energy is limited, and so really far away things are too large to be able to accurately capture (unless you have a massive radar dish or something alike)
- and duplicating it would require knowledge of every single atom in a person
  I think that's how a replicator works when you ask it for a dish.
  
  I was also thinking about that, maybe they can do some simple proteins and such enough to trick our taste buds, but something as complicated as a conscious human would be out of their control.
  So IG it also describes replicators?
- They addressed this in startrekng, it was called the 'Hisunberg compensator '
- That's a really cool theory, probably the best I've heard! It's established that there is a limited range, and that transporting during warp is possible, but extremely difficult, have to match the other ships exact speed etc., though they technically aren't traveling faster than light but existing within a warp bubble.
  
  Yeah, that really depends on how they define warp bubbles in the universe then, cause it'd imply the transmission occurs between ships faster than light
  Maybe something like the receiving ship trails behind the sending, exact same course just at a distance where light leaving the warp bubble would 'fall' that exact y distance over the time it takes to travel the distance between them in the x distance. It'd also still limit their distance even within their own space bubble
  Then it'd make sense cause any course deviation would cause them to 'miss' and again travel through the infinite cosmos as energy.
  Thinking about it it also describes those thematic sparkles that happen when they teleport, cause what were seeing is essentially the existence of that person as light.
  edit: forgot to say thanks for the comliment! I definitely am gonna have to watch the show(s) soon!
- As far as I know that's pretty much on point on how transporters work. There is an episode of TNG where someone was stuck in the energy state and conscious and saw energy beings living there. Of course then there is also the case of the two Rikers which seems to show that copying a person is indeed possible under very specific circumstances (I think there was some interference with exotic energy or something).

https://www.schlockmercenary.com/ webcomics has a very interesting story arc about teleporters and why they were replaced.
- Jeezus I forgot about that for like 20 yeara

Transporters are death machines!

Okaaaay, just because you've brought it up.....
Transporters in Star Trek are shown to definitely not be duplication machines. "Our Man Bashir" (DS9) is probably the most definitive proof of that.
Personally, I think transporter technology explains the staunch atheist (but still open-minded and sometimes spiritualist) Federation mindset: they know that their entire being can be reduced to a matter/energy stream. The transporter makes a devastating philosophical challenge to the idea of a "soul." Which is, ironically, why so many Federation officers refuse to accept anything that challenges that assumption (VOY "Sacred Ground").
- Adding to your examples in the cannon of Star Trek the teleporter is not a murder machine, except for all those transporter accidents. In "Daedalus" (ENT) the creator of the teleporter somehow proved it, even if not every officer believes that yet.
  Real life though, I'd never set foot in a transporter. A real life, Star Trek like transporter would definitely be a murder machine though.
  
  The real life version wouldn't even make a copy somewhere else, it would just be that phone booth from Futurama.

But what's the difference really
- It would arguably be safer XD
  With the traditional method if something goes wrong you're screwed, but with this one there's some time to confirm everything went smoothly before doing any damage to the original
  That being said, the whole plasma-inator thing would be extremely dangerous
  
  Would be safer to keep both until the mission is over in case one of them gets killed. After that, safer to keep the original and dismantle the away team member so they don't become supervillains bent on revenge.
- I'd be cool with it as long as I didn't know it worked that way

Probably my favorite Schwarzenegger film.

I guess if he remembers the conversation he knows it’s not true. If he doesn’t remember the conversation, you get more amusement next time you tell him.
- How does he know it’s not true? The copy is supposed to remember it
  
  Hmmm, ok I misread it. I was thinking the duplicate had already been printed before the conversation started, and they were waiting to destroy the original. But he does say the duplicate has been printed "complete with memory of this conversation".

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

You have to get materials for the replicators to make things some way, don't you?
- Replicator exist in this setting, which are seemingly capable of making everything from food to weapons, so presumably the original material isn't needed.

If you stepped through a time-travel portal, your conscience would effectively not exist between the original time and the time the portal leads to, yet no one would call you dead. If you could somehow install your mind into a new body, let's say you download it into a flashdrive and plug it into someone else's brain while your original body lays without a mind, people may call our body dead but not you. So when there is a continuity of self between the person who steps inot the teleporter and the person who steps out, I will never call that a death, that's silly.
- Downloading to a flash drive - I don't think this is actually transferring consciousness. Flash drives are just copies.
  To survive the process, you would have to initially be plugged into something that is capable of acting as a full extension of your brain. You would then become simultaneously "one" with the device, as well as your current brain. Then somehow, your current brain functions would need to cease working, and you would be fully reliant on the new "brain."
  From there, that process in reverse would bring you to a new body.
- In the time travel instance, there is still two of a person if they happen to visit the same place at the same time. They have different perspectives and experiences at that point and are different people even if they are from the same origins. They don't share a consciousness; there are now two consciousnesses.
  Same deal with the transporter struggle session if it just so happens that matter was replicated (like in the comic) but the person that was to be disintegrated simply wasn't disintegrated.
  
  I was specifically talking about forwards time travel to distinguish between someone's mind existing in the world and them being alive as two separate states. In teh backwards timetravel example, what makes them different people? I would say legally they are the same person, and the same ethics and morals apply to them, and many people who know the version of them in the past would probably recognize them as the person they know albeit a bit different. Are you not the same person you were yesterday? Or a minute ago?

Read the "The Punch Escrow". Not star trek but well worth it if you're into this sort of thought experiment.

Always reminds me of one of my favorite books (part of a series) The Collapsium by Will McCarthy. A big part of the book is their version of teleporting which does involve destruction and recreation, but while you're at it you could make more than one copy at the destination...

Just need to think like a dinosaur.

Reminds me of that CGP Grey video elaborating on the same idea https://youtu.be/nQHBAdShgYI

To be
A cute little animation exploring the transporter problem.

There is a chapter or two from a book by philosopher Derek Parfit that tackles the transporter issue pretty head-on. It draws what I feel to be a pretty compelling distinction between the continuity of your conscious mind, referred to as Relation R, and the personal identity that is lost when using the transporter. He then asks which is more important. Worth a read if this stuff interests you.

Transporter accidents prove transporters work this way and are murder machines. To an outside observer a perfect clone is the same person, impossible to differentiate. But to the individual's experience, they die every time they are disintegrated in a transporter. It's a new consciousness being created when reassembled that thinks it's continuous. It's hand-waved away because it's how it's always been and transporters are a key part of the Star Trek setting.
- I think it's more they are murdering the current instance of a pattern of matter and with it the biological implementation of the pattern of consciousness. Another instance of the same pattern is created near simultaneously. To flip it, aren't they life creating machines as much as murder machines?
- People get way too worked up about this.
  Be less "Guy Fleegman afraid he was a redshirt" and more "Guy Fleegman once he's realized he's comic relief".
  If a consciousness thinks it's continuous that consciousness is continuous.
  The substrate your consciousness dances on also changes all the time. Molecules arranged around the galaxy or cells dying and being replaced pose the exact same quandary, and the solution to both would seem to be "who cares"?
  The arrangement of cells and neurons known as "You" goes in, the arrangement of cells and neurons known as "You" comes out.

I teleported home one day, With Ron and Sid and Meg.
Ron stole Meggies heart away, And I got Sidney's leg.

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