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Here is a little thought experiment:

Due to some fluke involving time travel (possibly brought about by the events of Futures End) we in the 20th century get access to some 29th century federation technology. The scientists involved have been trying to reverse engineer the tech for decades and have only been able to release a useful product now.

The tech they have reverse engineered includes the standard replicators and subspace sensors but in particular they have an extremely advanced version of the Star Trek transporter. This transporter can move people or objects anywhere on Earth or with the addition of a subspace device it can even transport to anywhere in our solar system or even intersteller distances! The range on their super transporter lets them reliably send people to about four of our closest neighboring solar systems. It can trasport large objects the size of buildings or even other transporters to create a network to extend our total range. The transporter beam is obviously faster than light although not instantaneous. It takes about ten seconds to transport a person across continents and up to four days or 96 hours to transport across interstellar distances (they can probably cut down that time with more advanced equipment). The person transported does not notice any time passing during their transport, no matter how much time they spend inside the beam.

There are transporter accidents, during normal operation with a well maintained transporter there is about a one in a thousand chance of having bit errors cause cancer in some of the persons cells (advanced medical technology and medical transporters can remove the cancer easily) there is a one in ten thousand chance of something weird like switching genders or becoming older or younger, and about a one in a hundred thousand chance of extreme changes like creating a duplicate or dying horribly. Extreme conditions or improper maintenance can increase the odds of malfunctions. The energy requirements for operating these things are very high but are not a problem for a civilization that actually wants to use them.


People in this scenario don't know if the "actual person" is transported or if the transporter merely creates an exact duplicate on the other side. There have been arguments on either side with scientists proposing evidence of one sort and various religious factions saying another ("Dismantling the human body kills the person and replaces them with a soulless shell!", "God protects the souls of the righteous and sends them to the completed body, this machine merely proves that resurrection is possible.", "The cessation of awareness is the very definition of death.", etc..).

Despite all the tests and arguments back and forth, nobody has a definite answer to the question and its simply been proposed that nobody can be forced against their will to use a transporter. Humans have been able to set up colonies on other planets and solar systems and thanks to advanced power generation and replicators these colonies are growing and thriving and there are jobs for pretty much anyone who wishes to visit them.


So here is the question: If you could use a Star Trek transporter to travel to colonies on other planets or solar systems and there was no other way to do so... would you use it?

Rossum wrote:People in this scenario don't know if the "actual person" is transported or if the transporter merely creates an exact duplicate on the other side. There have been arguments on either side with scientists proposing evidence of one sort and various religious factions saying another ("Dismantling the human body kills the person and replaces them with a soulless shell!", "God protects the souls of the righteous and sends them to the completed body, this machine merely proves that resurrection is possible.", "The cessation of awareness is the very definition of death.", etc..).

Despite all the tests and arguments back and forth, nobody has a definite answer to the question and its simply been proposed that nobody can be forced against their will to use a transporter. Humans have been able to set up colonies on other planets and solar systems and thanks to advanced power generation and replicators these colonies are growing and thriving and there are jobs for pretty much anyone who wishes to visit them.


So here is the question: If you could use a Star Trek transporter to travel to colonies on other planets or solar systems and there was no other way to do so... would you use it?

Oh Hell No!

My duplicate may not be able to tell if he's a duplicate, but I for one don't want to take any chances.

Christ, this again?

The first thing to point out is that a transporter is a game changer. It takes intuitive concepts like "death", "original", "duplicate", "same", "self" and all that and blasts them completely to pieces. If we can indeed verify that what comes out of the transporter is indistinguishable to what goes in, then objectively there is no basis at all for calling what comes out a "duplicate" because there is no coherent way to define the term in a way that doesn't exclude supposed "originals". Also, while the particular implementation is not a perfect copy machine/matter transmitter, the magnitude of error does not seem sufficient to disqualify the arriving object from originality. Even in accidents, the object is altered from what was formerly, but nothing that should interrupt my personhood sans transporter — people can get cancer, and get older all the time without 'em. Switching gender and getting younger are more unusual, but why the fuck would it mean I wasn't the same person?

I have seen no satisfactory argument for the case of "transporter death." Such arguments either are founded on incoherent concepts, concepts that break under ordinary circumstances (and as such are quite useless for any purpose), confuse "contradiction" with mere symmetry breaking, or straight out appeal to consequences (re: gut feeling)/ignorance fallacies. Or dualism, which has no evidence for support whatsoever.

That said the accident rate of the OP's well maintained transporter does seem quite high for a supposed routine form of travel. I would wait for a safer implementation before using. I would also not like to be the first one on a strange planet, or even the millionth. I'm a tourist, not a colonist.

Rossum wrote:So here is the question: If you could use a Star Trek transporter to travel to colonies on other planets or solar systems and there was no other way to do so... would you use it?

The hell? Didn't we get an answer for this already?

First off weather it kills the user or not is irrelevant. There will be people will use the thing weather it kills or not. There will also be people who will adamantly refuse to use the thing no matter what. It truly all boils down to an individuals preferences and beliefs regardless of empirical data. Not unlike smoking some people will choose to go through the process regardless for how much potential damage could be done to their bodies.

As for me FUCK NO! For two reasons, first of all I would rather not be deconstructed for the sake of movement. To me that is like someone offering to ship me to Hawaii but having to cut me apart to fit inside the box for shipment. Even if the offer happens to include being sewn back together perfectly with no effective damage having been sustained, it is not an experience I would care to go through.

Second is the rather high rate of accidents that your system has. Even if I were to somehow suspend my disquiet and discomfort about the process the number of accidents would still be deeply concerning me. Your transporter version seems to have a few new screw up methods then the original like changing genders. For some that would be deeply frighting and a definite turn off others may want you to research that to do it on purpose. As for myself I would just switch my name from Kevin to Karen Michelle Saotome after it happened and move on. Others like turning older/younger people will definitely want researched to try to find an effective "fountain of youth" type of thing.

In the end as I said earlier it just comes down to belief and preference than truth and hard data.

Destructionator XIII wrote:One in one thousand is too high of a failure rate to use regularly. Other than that, it is good stuff.

I admit I kind of pulled those statistics out of nowhere but it I figure that it would be at least plausable for a technology derived from 29th century tech made by 21st century scientists. Though the exact fatality rate is a bit lower than one in a thousand.

One in a thousand get cancer. (Which can be easily cured with advanced medical technology like selectivly beaming out the cancer tissue)
One in ten thousand get weird nonlethal changes like changing age or gender (there was that episode in Next Generation where Picard and the others turned into kids... changing gender should make as much sense though it seems like it would be go male-to-female more often than the reverse. The effects of those could likely be reversed with enough study).
One in a hundred thousand results in either creation of a duplicate or death of the person being transfered.

So, I figure the actual risk of death on a well maintained transporter would be a bit less than one in a hundred thousand with a higher risk of minor or major nonlethal deformity or illness. Considering that this thing can send people across intersteller distances in a manner of days then an accident rate like this is alot better than anything we have right now or in the forseable future (aka, we can't send anybody across intersteller distances at all).


Myself, I figure we could use the transporter to send machinery and supplies to make a colony on other planets and then send people over there to colonize. Considering that this transporter can send people or objects anywhere in the world then they WILL be heavily monitored and guarded (Any military organization that has access to a transporter could use it to send troops or bombs anywhere in the world. Nobody would like it if an enemy could do that.) so I figure the colonization plan would consist of building colonies on other planets and then beaming people over once without really planning to bring them back.

It would be less "using the transporter to go to work every morning" and more "Get on the transporter at the emigration department and start a new life in the New World." People would leave the Earth and start new lives on new planets and not really plan on going back unless its important. So, you use the transporter once in your life and get a high chance of starting a new life on another world and something like a one in a hundred thousand chance of dying instantly in transit.

As for the question about "does the transporter kill you and replace you with a copy" I don't think it really matters in this case. Would you give your life to help humanity colonize the stars? Would you give your life to have children who could enjoy a future on a virgin world and have opportunities you never could dream of? The fact that you would likely be having your children after you step off the transporter and that all that worry about copies could in fact be all for nothing may or may not change anything.

Plus, once you get on the other side, the only people you would be with are those who decided that colonizing the stars are more important than whatever risks of 'souls' and 'copies' there are in regards with transporters.


Actually, I'm not sure how good that would be... the Transporter Test could keep alot of religious fundamentalists from leaving the Earth through fear for their immortal souls or it could result in a new bunch of people who are certain that God looks out for their immortal souls and that He is the one that lets transporters work. If the only people who could willingly travel across interstellar distances are ones who have to make a philosophical leap of faith then the ones who cross could have some interesting viewpoints.

I'd gladly use a transporter just like I would happily have my mind uploaded into a computer.

What I consider to be "me" is my mind and intelligence. My brain and body are what bring that about. If my mind can continue to exist in other forms then I'm perfectly happy.

Also over time (nearly?) every cell in our us is replaced. So the idea of it happening all at once does not bother me.

Destructionator XIII wrote:One in one thousand is too high of a failure rate to use regularly. Other than that, it is good stuff.

You know, by that logic, general anesthesia and many other medical procedures used in hospitals have too high a fail rate, because they've got complications (even fatal ones) that occur more regularly than 1 out of a 1000. Heart bypass surgery, for example, has serious complications 15% of the time, with the patient dying during surgery 1.5% of the time and non-fatally going into cardiac arrest 4.5% of the time.

That statistic strikes me as transporters being more dangerous than airplanes and someone less safe than automobiles, to be honest.

Anyway:
The argument that the transporter kills someone in the process of transporting them is a purely philosophical argument unless a corpse comes shooting out the other end of it, because it assigns special meaning to a bit of discontinuity in the persons existence. That is, if they aren't physically in a material and living state at all given moments, then they are dead. That doesn't necessarily hold water, because their body is just in another state, which if the transporter works is entirely recoverable from.

Wyrm wrote:Christ, this again?

The first thing to point out is that a transporter is a game changer. It takes intuitive concepts like "death", "original", "duplicate", "same", "self" and all that and blasts them completely to pieces. If we can indeed verify that what comes out of the transporter is indistinguishable to what goes in, then objectively there is no basis at all for calling what comes out a "duplicate" because there is no coherent way to define the term in a way that doesn't exclude supposed "originals". Also, while the particular implementation is not a perfect copy machine/matter transmitter, the magnitude of error does not seem sufficient to disqualify the arriving object from originality. Even in accidents, the object is altered from what was formerly, but nothing that should interrupt my personhood sans transporter — people can get cancer, and get older all the time without 'em. Switching gender and getting younger are more unusual, but why the fuck would it mean I wasn't the same person?

I have seen no satisfactory argument for the case of "transporter death." Such arguments either are founded on incoherent concepts, concepts that break under ordinary circumstances (and as such are quite useless for any purpose), confuse "contradiction" with mere symmetry breaking, or straight out appeal to consequences (re: gut feeling)/ignorance fallacies. Or dualism, which has no evidence for support whatsoever.

That said the accident rate of the OP's well maintained transporter does seem quite high for a supposed routine form of travel. I would wait for a safer implementation before using. I would also not like to be the first one on a strange planet, or even the millionth. I'm a tourist, not a colonist.

As far as I can see, the transporter appears to be destructive copying. I don't see that it destroys concepts such as "death" - the problem is that if it can duplicate you, then how do you know it's not creating a duplicate and then destroying the original?

If there is at any point two instances of my mind, and then one instance ceases to exist, I can't call that anything but death. Duplicating myself would be fine, but destroying a copy of myself would be as tragic as any other death.

Incidentally, if I could use the transporter to stay here on Earth but create a duplicate on the colony, I'd do that in a second.

If the transporter destroys one copy, what happens to the remains?

Because anyone who has watched half an episode of Star Trek knows that when someone's beamed up from a planet there's no residue whatsoever,which means all the original matter that comprised that individual has been transported, which means there's no reason to think of transportation as a system of destructive copying.

Not that the mere fact that substances can be transported without being replicable isn't proof enough that the original object is being shoved through subspace rather than destroyed and rebuilt.

Bounty wrote:Not that the mere fact that substances can be transported without being replicable isn't proof enough that the original object is being shoved through subspace rather than destroyed and rebuilt.

Now this is just wrong. We know that this can't be the mechanism, because of the occasion when Riker was transported to his ship and left a duplicate behind on the planet he was transporting from. If the transporter used the mechanism you described, then he would either have transported or not, as opposed to the "both" result

They use terms like "matter stream" to describe what happens to the contents of the thing or person to be transported, under normal circumstances: the original seems to get dissolved into particles of some sort and directed to the destination where it is re-integrated for the convenience of everyone. Destructive copying.

Molyneux wrote:As far as I can see, the transporter appears to be destructive copying. I don't see that it destroys concepts such as "death" - the problem is that if it can duplicate you, then how do you know it's not creating a duplicate and then destroying the original?

If you don't/can't know, why is it important?

=========

SCRawl wrote:

Bounty wrote:Not that the mere fact that substances can be transported without being replicable isn't proof enough that the original object is being shoved through subspace rather than destroyed and rebuilt.

Now this is just wrong. We know that this can't be the mechanism, because of the occasion when Riker was transported to his ship and left a duplicate behind on the planet he was transporting from. If the transporter used the mechanism you described, then he would either have transported or not, as opposed to the "both" result

Bullshit. This is like saying that because you wrecked your car when you hit a cow on the freeway, that driving down a freeway is inherently destructive to your car (and cows). That particular result was that of the transporter operating under abnormal circumstances, specifically with an environment that was interacting with the matter stream and thus able to exchange energy and matter with it (that's why they were having trouble transporting Riker). Under normal operation, the transporter doesn't do that.

Your assertion is based on the assumption that your atoms are yours, but they're not. Atoms are the ultimate fungible commodity, such that you cannot even label them individually without screwing up your physics. As such, it doesn't matter what matter you're made of, only that the proportions are right and the atoms are in the right place.

SCRawl wrote:They use terms like "matter stream" to describe what happens to the contents of the thing or person to be transported, under normal circumstances: the original seems to get dissolved into particles of some sort and directed to the destination where it is re-integrated for the convenience of everyone. Destructive copying.

Again, do you have any materialistic basis for saying what comes out isn't original other than the fact that it came out of a transporter?

Wyrm wrote:

SCRawl wrote:

Bounty wrote:Not that the mere fact that substances can be transported without being replicable isn't proof enough that the original object is being shoved through subspace rather than destroyed and rebuilt.

Now this is just wrong. We know that this can't be the mechanism, because of the occasion when Riker was transported to his ship and left a duplicate behind on the planet he was transporting from. If the transporter used the mechanism you described, then he would either have transported or not, as opposed to the "both" result

Bullshit. This is like saying that because you wrecked your car when you hit a cow on the freeway, that driving down a freeway is inherently destructive to your car (and cows). That particular result was that of the transporter operating under abnormal circumstances, specifically with an environment that was interacting with the matter stream and thus able to exchange energy and matter with it (that's why they were having trouble transporting Riker). Under normal operation, the transporter doesn't do that.

That's a silly argument. You seem to be saying that during that episode the transporters were operating on a completely different principle from every other time. This is from the transcript of the episode in question:

Second Chances wrote:11 INT. OBSERVATION LOUNGE

Geordi is reporting his findings to Picard, Commander
Riker, Data, Beverly and Troi.

GEORDI
(to Riker)
... apparently there was a massive energy surge in the distortion field around the planet just at the moment you tried to beam out. The Transporter Chief tried to compensate by initiating a second containment beam.

DATA
An interesting approach. He must have been planning to reintegrate the two patterns in the transport buffer.

GEORDI
Turns out he didn't have to. Commander Riker's pattern maintained its integrity with just the one containment beam -- he made it back to the ship just fine.

BEVERLY
What happened to the second beam?

GEORDI
The Transporter Chief shut it down, but somehow... it was reflected back to the surface.

PICARD
And another Wil Riker materialized there.

RIKER
How could the second pattern have maintained its integrity?

Geordi's tone indicates he's making his best guess.

GEORDI
The containment beam must have had the exact same phase differential as the distortion field.

Ignoring the treknobabble, the only thing the distortions on the planet did were (a) make transport impossible most of the time, and (b) reflect the superfluous second containment beam back to the surface, where it re-materialized as Thomas Riker. If the transporter operated as some sort of subspace portal, which I said could not be the case, then how does that agree with the above passage?

Your assertion is based on the assumption that your atoms are yours, but they're not. Atoms are the ultimate fungible commodity, such that you cannot even label them individually without screwing up your physics. As such, it doesn't matter what matter you're made of, only that the proportions are right and the atoms are in the right place.

No, that first part is just nonsense. Not in my response you quoted, nor in any other post I've made have I suggested that it's the atoms that are important. Whoever writer thought up the basis for the process seemed to think so, though, since they added that level of complication. We know that the transporters can create copies of people from a pattern and energy, so I really don't know why they need a matter stream at all.

SCRawl wrote:They use terms like "matter stream" to describe what happens to the contents of the thing or person to be transported, under normal circumstances: the original seems to get dissolved into particles of some sort and directed to the destination where it is re-integrated for the convenience of everyone. Destructive copying.

Again, do you have any materialistic basis for saying what comes out isn't original other than the fact that it came out of a transporter?

Experience tells me that I don't have one that you'll accept.

Destructionator XIII wrote:The Second Chances thing could have opened a subspace portal to an alternate universe. For all we know, there's a separate universe that lost their Riker to a transporter accident.

It isn't like mirror universes are a new thing to Star Trek, and the transporter has connected to them before.

Do you really need me to bring up the concept of parsimony? Besides, the two Rikers were declared to be the same person by Dr. Crusher in the previous scene, using their brain patterns to make that judgment.

Actually, my original question isn't so much "Do you believe that using a transporter kills the original and creates a copy?" it more "Even if the transporter kills the original and creates a copy, would you sacrifice yourself for a 99.9% chance of spreading humanity to the stars?"


For example, the Earth government is able to use the transporter tech to establish a self-sustaining colony on a distant solar system and they want to spread humanity there in case something happens to the Earth. They want to assemble a few thousand colonists who can then establish a safe gene pool of humanity on the other planet. The ethical implications of the transporter system have not been officially sorted out but most scientists say "It probably kills you and makes a copy" just to play it safe. If you had a chance to join those colonists to guarantee that the the new colony would have your DNA and your skills to help the next generation of humanity (even if using the transporter might mean your "death") they would you do it?


Or, if humanity developed a way to grow human beings from embryos in artificial wombs, and they set up a colony on another planet with equipment to grow people from frozen embryos, and they need someone to take a case full of human embryos through the transporter to install them in the machine and make sure everything is working, would you have any objections to doing it?

Or, suppose a rogue Black Hole has suddenly been spotted on the outskirts of Earths solar system. This black hole is on a direct collision course with our sun and once it collides it will cause the sun to go nova and destroy the solar system. Scientists have idea how they could possibly prevent that collision (who knows, they might whip up something at the last minute). Earth has five years before the collision and the governement has dedicated its resources to moving humanity and the other species of earth to other planets in distant solar systems. In five years, the sun will explode and destroy all life in the solar system... your only chance to 'survive' is to take a transporter to another planet where at the very least an exact copy of yourself could go about their life and assist with humanities survival. Would you take the transporter out, or would you stay behind and watch the fireworks?

Or, scientists have experimented with the transporters 'pattern buffer' and devised a way to change peoples DNA, their age, their gender, and revert them to a perfect state of health. The Transmogrifier as they call it can take people who are either nearing death (or even shortly after clinical death, for example people who undergo cryonics) and bring them to perfect health with a new body of their choice. There are risks involved in addition to the normal philosophical implications, being Transmogrified carries the risk of serious defects arising with more drastic changes being more dangerous. Also, the closer to death you are (or being frozen after clinical death) the higher the chance that you would not survive the process. Being revived after being frozen only succeeds about 20% of the time while being revived shortly after clinical death without freezing is about 50% possible while being transmogrified while nearing death is about 75%... if you are transmogrified while moderately healthy then you have about a 95% of being restored to the prime of your life. Further 'cosmetic' transformations can be done slowly over a period of numerous visits and are about 99.999% likely to leave you perfectly healthy at the end (barring the normal philosophical implications of being disassembled and reassembled by a machine). Would you go through a transporter if it meant that you could leave a copy of yourself who is perfectly healthy and younger than yourself?

Also, on the transmogrification device, lets say that the scientists involved are constantly modifying and improving the machine and hope to one day be able to revive a person who has been cryonicaly frozen after death with 100% success rate. If you had the option to live out your life to the fullest, die, be frozen quickly after clinical death, spend X number of years or decades frozen, and potentially have your body brought back to life, would you do it? Or, considering that such a treatment would likely be fairly expensive (or not, it could be pretty reasonable with a decent payment plan) and pretty much by definition you would 'die' and cease all consciousness for several years before being 'resurrected' as a copy based on the configuration of your frozen remains, would you instead just keep all the money would would have spent on the treatment and buy yourself something nice before you die?

SCRawl wrote:Ignoring the treknobabble, the only thing the distortions on the planet did were (a) make transport impossible most of the time, and (b) reflect the superfluous second containment beam back to the surface, where it re-materialized as Thomas Riker. If the transporter operated as some sort of subspace portal, which I said could not be the case, then how does that agree with the above passage?

Geordi was abridging the explanation for ease of understanding. Things in subspace are affected by things in normal space. Otherwise, warp engines would be useless, trying impotently to affect a part of the universe that cannot be affected by matter in normal space. Bounty said that the matter stream was shoved through subspace, and while I don't see how that works, it does not follow that it makes matter streams immune to normal space phenomenon.

SCRawl wrote:No, that first part is just nonsense. Not in my response you quoted, nor in any other post I've made have I suggested that it's the atoms that are important. Whoever writer thought up the basis for the process seemed to think so, though, since they added that level of complication. We know that the transporters can create copies of people from a pattern and energy, so I really don't know why they need a matter stream at all.

Because you need to conserve the baryon and lepton numbers in the universe. The baryon and lepton numbers used to make things like Rikers has doubled, and no amount of energy will get around that (unless they're working with the energy densities present near the Big Bang, which I highly doubt). Matter is needed, period.

SCRawl wrote:Experience tells me that I don't have one that you'll accept.

Because you don't have one.

Wyrm wrote:

Molyneux wrote:As far as I can see, the transporter appears to be destructive copying. I don't see that it destroys concepts such as "death" - the problem is that if it can duplicate you, then how do you know it's not creating a duplicate and then destroying the original?

If you don't/can't know, why is it important?

I'm going to say this simply and slowly, so I can be sure you understand:
YES.

If it is destroying the original, then it is killing me. End of statement. Another instance of my mind still exists, in the new destination, but the original instance is DEAD. I have no problem with creating a non-destructive copy of myself, but I don't want to die in the process, even if a perfect clone of my mind is created.

It remains a clone - a copy - and one that diverges from the original as soon as it is created

Destructionator XIII wrote:Awesome, bolding and big letters suddenly makes a non-falsifiable statement beyond retort. I'll have to remember that next time I'm trolling as a creationist.

Crap, truly sorry there. I misread the question as "Is it important", not "why is it important".
I still stand by the rest of my post, though.

There may be no way to tell from outside the transporter, but if it destroys the original then it does kill me - even if there is a living copy of me standing on a planet thirty lightyears away.

Destructionator XIII wrote:That kind of thing is non-falsifiable though: there is no experiment you can do to prove it is not the case. The person at the other side is identical in every way to you; if you scan, you'll see that, if you ask him, he'll agree, etc. It cannot possibly be disproven without arguing about metaphysics, which doesn't have an objective answer either.

It literally comes down to "I say it is" vs "I say it isn't" with no way to win or lose.

The problem is that if you go in and get transported without destroying the original...you find yourself on the new world. Good.

If you go in, are destroyed and a copy is made on the new world...your copy believes it is you, and has no way of knowing that the original was destroyed. The only person in a position to know that it is indeed destructive is the person who was just killed - your original.

Given that, I cannot justify ever trying something like that unless it can be verified that it is safe. If you don't know either way, it's not safe to transport.

P

Molyneux wrote:

Destructionator XIII wrote:That kind of thing is non-falsifiable though: there is no experiment you can do to prove it is not the case. The person at the other side is identical in every way to you; if you scan, you'll see that, if you ask him, he'll agree, etc. It cannot possibly be disproven without arguing about metaphysics, which doesn't have an objective answer either.

It literally comes down to "I say it is" vs "I say it isn't" with no way to win or lose.

The problem is that if you go in and get transported without destroying the original...you find yourself on the new world. Good.

If you go in, are destroyed and a copy is made on the new world...your copy believes it is you, and has no way of knowing that the original was destroyed. The only person in a position to know that it is indeed destructive is the person who was just killed - your original.

Given that, I cannot justify ever trying something like that unless it can be verified that it is safe. If you don't know either way, it's not safe to transport.

By what criteria are you distinguishing between an original and a copy? If you cannot provide some testable quality, then you're spinning philosophy in place of science.

The problem is that when it comes down to it we really have no fucking clue WHAT the transporter does (or, more precisely, we have any number of clues, most of which are mutually contradictory).
The 'who cares if the original is destroyed' argument breaks down the moment the thing copies you (resulting in the you Riker that was destroyed, they you Riker that thinks he is the real Riker assuming transport had failed, and the you Riker who assumes he got beamed back up)
or splits you in a good and evil half or drops you in a parallel universe.

Lancer wrote:P

Molyneux wrote:

Destructionator XIII wrote:That kind of thing is non-falsifiable though: there is no experiment you can do to prove it is not the case. The person at the other side is identical in every way to you; if you scan, you'll see that, if you ask him, he'll agree, etc. It cannot possibly be disproven without arguing about metaphysics, which doesn't have an objective answer either.

It literally comes down to "I say it is" vs "I say it isn't" with no way to win or lose.

The problem is that if you go in and get transported without destroying the original...you find yourself on the new world. Good.

If you go in, are destroyed and a copy is made on the new world...your copy believes it is you, and has no way of knowing that the original was destroyed. The only person in a position to know that it is indeed destructive is the person who was just killed - your original.

Given that, I cannot justify ever trying something like that unless it can be verified that it is safe. If you don't know either way, it's not safe to transport.

By what criteria are you distinguishing between an original and a copy? If you cannot provide some testable quality, then you're spinning philosophy in place of science.

There is no outwardly-testable quality. The ONLY viewpoint that can tell the difference is the viewpoint of the original...and in the case of a destructive copy, the original suffers from the slight disadvantage of being dead afterward.

A steps onto the pad.
Either:
A is instantaneously transported to the other side, and is fine; he walks off into an alien world, and is promptly eaten by an iguana.

OR:

A is destroyed and perfectly scanned. The "receiver" pad constructs a perfect copy of A, to be designated A'. As far as A' is concerned, he IS A; he has all of the same memories, right up until the moment of transport. However, the viewpoint of the original A terminated when he flicked the switch; he's dead, and a perfect copy is running around the new planet.

If the transporter could be rejiggered to not destroy the original somehow:

A steps onto the pad.
A' is instantly created on the new planet.
From A's point of view, he just stepped onto the pad and stayed there.
From the point of view of A', he just stepped onto the pad and instantly teleported across the galaxy.
However, once A' comes into existence, the two diverge; they are distinct viewpoints, with differing experiences after the point of divergence.


Given the difficulty of determining precisely which scenario is at play, I would advise against any transporter travel. Even if the perfect copy THINKS he's me, the original me may still be dead.

If using a transporter is the only way for humanity or other types of organic life to leave the planet then would you use it? Would you mind of other people used it if they knew the (unverifiable) risk?

I'm just going to say "It kills you and makes a copy on the other side." because the question is non-falsifiable and if someone walks through it and it turns out that magically the 'soul' is transferred then it would be a pleasant surprise instead of a horrible shock if people found out.

The question is... given that humanity has to find a way off the earth to guarantee our survival as a species, and if scientists had a transporter that could spread the human species to other planets (or at least make sure that humans with pure genomes and a head full of knowledge and skills show up on another planet even if their 'origional' died in the transfer) would you consider it ethical to use?

Would you be willing to use it if it meant that a copy (however you define copy or whatever) of yourself could arrive on a distant colony somewhere and start a new life for themselves and their potential children? If someone you knew decided to take the transporter and colonize another planet (while knowing the potential risk or ethical paradox) then how would you react? If they took the trip and their exact copy in every way down to the subatomic level arrived on a distant planet a solar system away and sent back letters about how things were going then how would you treat them?

Or, if the guys working on the transporter built in a filter making it not only 100% likely to end the person to the other side (with the whole copy thing a concern) but the transfer removed all disease, effects of old age, and genetic damage in the process, would that change anything? If a 90 year old bedridden man on life support could go through the transporter, get their atoms sorted out in transit, and step out onto a new colony world light-years away in a healthy young body and a few more decades if not centuries to live... would that make it any better?


I'm not so much asking "do you think the transporter kills you?" as I am asking "Are there any possible benefits for your transporter copy, potential grandchildren born post-transport, or for the human race in general that would make stepping though a transporter seem worth it?"

Even if a whole line of people with protest signs were standing outside the buildings shouting "Transporters Kill!" or "No transporter beam to heaven. Only a highway to hell!" or other such things?