this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Doesn't Star Trek's transporter solution involve converting your atomic structure to Energy, beaming that energy to another place, and reconstitution your body using the same atoms? If so, that's not really dying anymore. Just re-arranging your original atoms.
Isn't it still kind of the same thing though?
Star Trek calls that "matter stream" energy your "pattern". Pattern sounds a lot like Information. Data. Which is very easy to transmit and duplicate. Data can also be lost or corrupted.
So it's as if they convert all your atoms to a file, then FTP your file to somewhere else where the technology turns your pattern back into matter.
"You" can't exist as just data, so at that point you're already dead. I think...
There are episodes where your pattern is stuck in the pattern buffer. You're only information being stored at that point.
Just because they can un-burn you at the end doesn't mean your body isn't destroyed when you leave. Even if the atoms were just re-arranged and not converted to energy, you're still getting pureed and then reconstituted. Hard to argue you're not dead when your brain has been completely disassembled.
Maybe it is dying, but not in the medical sense.
Like, if you're resuscitated using a defibrillator, then by all accounts, your heart stopped for a moment there. Without intervention from a machine that at one point in history didn't exist, tou were indistinguishable from a corpse. So, a teleporter would just be the same but taken to an extremely abstract degree - you are dead, but your body exists in a state and within range from a machine that can resuscitate that body, so no doctor can yet declare you dead.
Let’s put it this way: if you stepped into a teleporter, the last think you’d ever experience is being disassembled. Doesn’t matter if it hurts or whatever. It just goes black. You die. You, YOU, will never see the other side. You won’t be the one to come out; it’s a clone of you.
Even if it is the very same atoms, the very same dendrites and synapses, reassembled perfectly.
Your clone will think it’s you and it will go “oh wow, it DOES work”. It’ll know your mother. It’ll bang your wife. It has your degree in Computer Science or whatever. And it even has all your experiences up to and including the moment the teleporter turned on.
But it’s not you. You blinked out of existence, your experience ended. You ended the self, and a new self was born at the other end, endowed with everything that encapsulated you previously.
Nah, I’m good.
But what if my matter stream gets all mixed with someone else’s matter stream? Gross. What a mess.
Correct. The thought experiment where it's like "ooh but what if it disintegrated you and 3d printed a copy of yo-" like that's not what a fucking teleporter is. You've just made some other science fiction device that I wouldn't use, I'd use the teleporter.