Sorry about that ridiculous watermark.
I think I’ve explained this too many times to do it again, but: teleportation doesn’t have to be “destroy and reconstitute” any more than going through a door necessitates killing you and reconstituting you on the other side of the door. The key is establishing continuity of your mind across the intervening space, which is mostly an engineering problem.
Star Trek transporters are “destroy and reconstitute” though. They are explicitly described as such. The whole Thomas Riker situation even requires it to be the case.
Star Trek just throws all its rules out from one episode to the next. The Star Trek franchise is the McDonalds of sci-fi; you don’t choose it because it’s good, you choose it because it’s available.
I think we are still in the realm of a physics problem for teleportation lol
Fusion is an engineering problem. the sun does it. We’ve done it. We just suck at it.
Teleporting is not possible as far as we know …unless I missed something huge in science news
It’s not all that different to a fax machine, the way it’s described in st.
You just need to be able to accurately scan and place atoms to achieve the ‘teleportation’ being discussed here.
Thinking about it even that is probably not possible, as you’d need to know both the position and momentum and state of every sub atomic particle in the body.
It’s definitely not because the more you know about an electrons position, the less you know about it’s speed and vice versa.
I felt like they hinted in some episodes that there was some rule of nature they were exploiting to get it to work. Like imagine trying to tell someone in the 11th century that humans made machines that can fly, they imagine some mechanical thing flapping wings. They imagine it because they don’t know what air does when it passes over a fast moving surface. It isn’t like the transporter really stores your pattern down to every particle, there was something that they found that made it a lot easier problem to solve.
Does quantum entanglement count? Probably depends on your definition of “teleportation”, I’d assume.
The real problem with all of this is that people can’t get away from the idea of a soul. Something intangible unmeasurable that is really “us” riding around in a meat-robot. It’s hard for people (me included) to realize that the meat packaging is all that we are. If you destroy My body and recreate it, nothing will have been lost. The continuity within the meat computer in my head is all that I am. There is no “me” outside of that… And that’s a really hard concept to accept and internalize.
If you destroy My body and recreate it, nothing will have been lost. The continuity within the meat computer in my head is all that I am.
If you perfectly recreate your body without destroying the original, the original doesn’t start seeing and hearing through the clone. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, there’s no difference between the you that steps into the transporter and the you that steps out of it, but you do actually die when you’re “transported.” You don’t get to see what’s on the other side of the transporter, another being that shares your exact memories does.
I dunno even if there is no you in a metaphysical sense the deconstruction method still ends your personal subjective experience of being you which sucks. Sure the next you might be just as much you as the first one but you don’t get to be around to enjoy that.
I dunno even if there is no you in a metaphysical sense the deconstruction method still ends your personal subjective experience of being you which sucks. Sure the next you might be just as much you as the first one but you don’t get to be around to enjoy that.
But it doesn’t and that’s the point. You are not the collection of atoms that make up your body, YOU are the software program that is running on your brain-computer. The software program can be transferred (or copied) and you are still you. There is no “you” outside of that software.
I would be hesitant to get on a teleporter even if they were proven “safe”. It could be possible that from my point of view, that’ll be the last thing I ever see. But from everyone else’s point of view Im alive and I walked out the other end without breaking a sweat. But this is a different instance of “me”. From my point of view, would I be “dead” forever or would I be able to witness myself going out for drinks later that day?
Maybe it turns out that if you make an exact backup of a brain, reconstruct and restore the biologic equivalent of ram and system registers back to their original state (sort of how operating systems do multitasking), then it all works out. But maybe turning the brain completely off or whatever is enough to put the “system” in an “off” state and when it restarts, it’ll be a new instance. Maybe you don’t remember the part where you stopped existing so it doesn’t matter.
Really makes you wonder if humans had a soul and an afterlife what exactly happens when the last copy of you finally dies naturally.
Like you go to heaven and meet some version of you that lived for a fifteen minute coffee run, and boy is he missed that from his perspective he died at 19 years old because you just had to beam down and try the new Starbucks drink. All the other teleported yous are there.
Shit what about your spouse? There could be like 900 of you but only 400 of her. Now you all have to spend eternity together.
But the mind does not have continuity. You mind ends and a new copy starts and thinks it has continuity.
Yes? How does that break continuity in your mind? You go “unconscious,” but the chemical reactions that make up your mind are still going
Putting aside the whole problems with maintaining continuity in a civilization that laughs at all the problems of FTL and relativity why is continuity important?
Because I want to see where I’m going, and if my consciousness ends, I don’t get to see it
I just don’t understand why a gap matters. I had to get knocked out for surgery once and I woke up the same person, sans appendix.
