Do transporters kill?

[SapphireFox]

Transporters do not kill you. If anyone has a copy of TNG Realm of Fear you can watch Barkley transport over from a first person perspective. There is no break in consciousness.

This. Despite all the other arguments, this has not been explained in the context of those arguments, nor been countered. It seems like it has been largely ignored.
Only Stark touched on it with his 'consciousness during the swirly parts' post. But that doesn't explain the episode away at all.

...Yeah. Assuming that we're tracking what happens to Barclay, and not "what Barclay perceives," that's a clincher. The catch is that if there's a five second period during which there is no conscious Barclay, then we're not going to see that period through his eyes, any more than we see the events passing around our viewpoint character when he's unconscious.

I have to agree with Simon_Jester on this, we see those events from the perspective of Barclay last I checked NOT from an external POV so how can you say we are seeing the whole perspective nessessary to make that call.

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I'm not arguing for souls here. I'm not arguing for any self-awareness that takes any form outside the electrical activity within the brain. What I am arguing for is the existence of programs as abstractions, in the sense that the C program "Hello, World!" exists. I can point to instances of "Hello, World!" I can even write out its code. But a copy of "Hello, World!" is not the same beast as the program "Hello, World!" itself. The instance of the concept is not the concept itself, any more than a falling rock is the law of gravity.

If I erase a copy of "Hello, World!" and write another copy, I have not destroyed "Hello, World," nor have I created it. All I've done is move it. The person who wrote it for the first time can be said to have created it, and the person who destroys the last extant copy (including copies that are stored in computer or human memory) can be said to have destroyed it, but so long as a copy of it exists, "Hello, World!" exists.

And how would you even know said hypothetical "program" was even the same before the transport? How would you go about testing this "intangible"? A brain scan would not tell you enough to make that determination.

If identity is to mean anything at all, there has to be a horizon of "sufficient similarity" within which identities converge to one for practical purposes. But that leads us right back to the problem of figuring out just how similar two people have to be before they count as the same person, rather than one original and one copy.

At no point are two seperate individuals the same person. One just has to look at the clones and identical twins (that share absultly identical DNA) to see that they are seperate individuals with seperate identities. Practical purposes is a useless concept in this argument I mean my step-brother is in all practical purposes my brother but that doesnt make him my actual blood brother.

This is not, however, evidence that what comes out always IS NOT who or what went in. If I beam Kirk up from the planet, something may go wrong and leave me with zombie-Kirk or evil-Kirk or six identical Kirks or Kirk from an alternate universe. The process is not without its bizarre and improbable risks. But I may also end up with a normal Kirk. The normal Kirk I get cannot be distinguished from the normal Kirk I started with; I see no reason to accuse this Kirk of being a fake and denying him access to the bridge on the grounds that he is not the captain.

That would only work if your Kirk truely IS indistinguishable from the previous Kirk. I have already mentioned that the transporter produces one bit errors and that these errors can build up to things like transporer psycosis. It would be VERY likely this would be easy to test for in universe. So I do believe it is posible to test for these things and distinguish between the two.(or more)

The only intangible thing being transferred is a name tag: "This is (a) Captain Kirk." That's not an essence or soul at all; that's just a description. It's like saying "this is a lump of granite" or "this is the script for A New Hope."

So this "program" thing of yours is BS huh nothing else intangable but a name?

But for some (bad) definitions of "death," or for a definition corresponding to "clinical death," a transporter brings about temporary "death." However, it does not bring about the permanent death of an individual, even though it brings about the permanent death of an instance of an individual.

But that instance of an individual IS an individiual in and of itself. We agree that it is permanently dead but think that someone else coming along that looks and acts simmilar somehow miraculausly changes that instance of an individual after it has died to someone who is alive.

I can point to the pile of ashes that was Captain Kirk and say "That Captain Kirk is dead" in the same sense that I say "That copy of the script has been destroyed." However, I am then obliged to point to the guy wearing a Starfleet captain's uniform who just beamed up to where I am and say "That Captain Kirk is alive," because he is in fact standing there going all William Shatner on me. That guy passes any "Is this or is this not Captain Kirk?" test I can devise, and therefore must be a genuine Captain Kirk.

And given the presence of a genuine Captain Kirk, I cannot say that "Captain Kirk is dead," because dead men don't smack me upside the head with a campy doubled-fist punch for calling them dead men. Nor do they reply that history considers them dead and ask who they are to argue, or any of the other things that (a) Captain Kirk might do in response to being told he's dead.

Granted, this Captain Kirk is not the original Captain Kirk, much as my copy of Hamlet is not Shakespeare's rough draft with all its beer stains and crossed out words. But my copy of Hamlet is still Hamlet, and this guy is still Captain Kirk.

So to you an individual who has been run through the transporter is really a string of individuals whom are given the label of a person because that is who they seem like. I can see how that view would become a legal and socitial view. (as shown in ST)
Would it seem to be effectively Kirk yes, but is he truly the Kirk that steped on the pad...no.

I laguhed good and hard at the image of the campy doubled-fist punch. Thanks

[Kamakazie Sith]

So what would 'not having a brain or eyes' look like to Barclay? Whether he's 'anti-fatal' and the same guy or a copy or whatever philosophical nonsense is irrelevant; he could by definition not percieve any break in consciousness (which is a major part of the whole 'no difference = the same' thing). He's not going to have flashes of hell or a few seconds of black screen while he's 'dead'. Since we know the swirly is the scanning process, all he sees is being scanned and being assembled. How does that 'prove' anything? He's canonically turned to gunk and stored in a computer - what would he 'see' then?

Because at 5:00 in the link I provided Barclay returns to the Enterprise and has his first encounter with one of the other trapped people in the transporter buffer, who also happened to be moving around.

[mr friendly guy]

If transporters work by breaking down a person and creating a whole new person on the other side it would kill.

Looking at the links KS provided it seem that it doesn't. It converts them into the swirly energy thing called "transporter buffer" and send that beam to the other side where you are changed back. While in the transporter buffer its possible to move - notice Barclay's different positions before and after the transport. Before he was in the stock standard pose of arms to the side waiting for beam out and after he had his arm to protect him from the creature he saw while being transported.

So while in transport a human can not only perceive things, they can still move. Doesn't seem dead to me. Even if you argue he was imagining the things he saw (considering those things turned out to be real, it would argue against it) the fact was he still moved while in transport because he appeared in a different position.

You could argue is he still human or has he become something else, but thats a philosophical question like if Q turned you into a dog for 5 seconds then turned you back were you dead for those 5 seconds (having been replaced with a different entity).?

The other question is how the hell a human would be able to perceive things after being turned into energy, but then ST has energy beings so its hardly out of the ordinary for Trek.

[Stark]

So what would 'not having a brain or eyes' look like to Barclay? Whether he's 'anti-fatal' and the same guy or a copy or whatever philosophical nonsense is irrelevant; he could by definition not percieve any break in consciousness (which is a major part of the whole 'no difference = the same' thing). He's not going to have flashes of hell or a few seconds of black screen while he's 'dead'. Since we know the swirly is the scanning process, all he sees is being scanned and being assembled. How does that 'prove' anything? He's canonically turned to gunk and stored in a computer - what would he 'see' then?

Because at 5:00 in the link I provided Barclay returns to the Enterprise and has his first encounter with one of the other trapped people in the transporter buffer, who also happened to be moving around.

The transporter buffer is a data area in a computer. What does this prove? That they give the transporter patterns a VR experience?

[Simon_Jester]

And how would you even know said hypothetical "program" was even the same before the transport? How would you go about testing this "intangible"? A brain scan would not tell you enough to make that determination.

Ah... could you expand on what you mean by "even the same before the transport?" I think I can answer this question, but I'm not sure what it is yet.

At no point are two seperate individuals the same person. One just has to look at the clones and identical twins (that share absultly identical DNA) to see that they are seperate individuals with seperate identities. Practical purposes is a useless concept in this argument I mean my step-brother is in all practical purposes my brother but that doesnt make him my actual blood brother.

Thing is, people with identical DNA have less in common than transporter copies. Among other things, they have different memories and experiences, because you didn't raise them under identical controlled conditions.

Whereas a transporter copy has identical memories and experiences to the pre-transport person. They don't just have the same genotype; they're identical down to the subatomic level. Unless say that there's some essential physical component of a person that isn't made out of atoms, then I'm not clear on how we can distinguish between two transporter copies except by saying "this one is over here, that one is over there." At least, not until they've had time to pick up different experiences and memories.

That would only work if your Kirk truely IS indistinguishable from the previous Kirk. I have already mentioned that the transporter produces one bit errors and that these errors can build up to things like transporer psycosis. It would be VERY likely this would be easy to test for in universe. So I do believe it is posible to test for these things and distinguish between the two.(or more)

Do we have evidence of such a test?

In addition, "transporter psychosis" isn't necessarily a cumulative effect; it seems to be just another thing that can go wrong during a given transporter jump- specifically something that goes wrong in the brain. Note that this may explain "The Enemy Within; the transporter hiccuped and produced two individuals, each with a few bits of the brain missing. The original was reconstructed by comparing the two brains and overlaying the bits that were there in one copy and not in the other. In this case, you can make a reasonable case that the new, reconstructed Kirk is NOT the original Kirk, or at least can't be proven to be, because there might very well be lingering brain damage that was not successfully reconstructed.

So this "program" thing of yours is BS huh nothing else intangable but a name?

What the hell are you talking about?

A program, or any other piece of information, is an abstract concept. I cannot point to "the play Hamlet" or "the program Hello, World!" I can point to individual copies, individual instances, but I cannot point to the thing itself. To ask "where is Hamlet?" is completely missing the point. The best you can do is point to a book and ask "Is this Hamlet?" If the answer is yes, then questions of "Which copy of Hamlet is this?" become far less relevant; the fact remains that what you've got is a copy of Hamlet and not, say, Macbeth.

Now, apply this concept to an AI. As our test case we use, say, Data from Star Trek. Data is an AI running on a powerful computer in an android body. The only thing about this android that is at all abstract is his name and his computer code. His name is abstract because, like all language, it's an arbitrary designation. We could equally well have decided to call Data "Betty" without changing the physical nature of Data. We cannot point to any object and say "this is the object that makes Data be named Data" in a causal sense.

His code is abstract because it can be represented in many ways, not all of which are contained in Data's brain. In theory, for example, we could write a very large book containing all the computer code Data needs to run; this would be a copy of Data's programming but would not itself be Data. Therefore, there is in some sense an abstract "Data AI program" that can exist in multiple instances. However, this code has physical instances; we can in fact point to objects and say "this is Data's code." The problem is that objects that match the description "Data's code" can exist in more than one place, just like objects that match the description "Hamlet" can exist in more than one place.
___________

Now, with sufficient knowledge of engineering and computer programming, we could easily take apart Data's body and the Data AI and analyze every last bit of it. Data is made entirely out of atoms, and can be completely described by a blueprint that tells us where to put those atoms. There is nothing else to see here. The only thing analyzing him won't tell us is his name, because that's arbitrary. But it's also irrelevant, because calling Data something else would not make him anything but what he is.

We can easily imagine building a second, identical body for Data with an identical computer and copying the AI to the new computer. We now have two Datas. You can hang extra labels on them, calling them Data-one and Data-two, if you like. But they will react identically to stimuli, will have the same set of memories, and so forth. You can examine them atom by atom and line by line of code, and they are exactly the same. If one of them is Data- that is, a Data AI running on a Data android body- then the other must surely also be Data. It may be Data-two instead of Data-one, but it is nonetheless Data.
__________

Now, what I just said is probably the point where you disagree with me, because the only remaining step after that point is trivial: instead of an android, use a human being.

Like the android, a human being is made of nothing but atoms. Like the android, the thing the human uses to think can be described in terms of a physical structure (the brain), or in terms of an abstract "code" to describe the contents of the brain: the attitudes, the decision-making process, the memories, the mind.

If we can copy an android, we can (in principle) copy a human being in the same way, creating an identical body that "runs" identical "code" (contains an identical mind). And this new human being is the same person as the original in the same sense that a copy of Data is still Data.

Finally, I point out that transporters do exactly this: create an identical copy on the subatomic level. Since people (and androids) are made entirely of atoms, that copies the body and the mind, and thus produces an instance of the original being: a Data, a Captain Kirk, whatever.

But that instance of an individual IS an individiual in and of itself. We agree that it is permanently dead but think that someone else coming along that looks and acts simmilar somehow miraculausly changes that instance of an individual after it has died to someone who is alive.

I'm going to use two separate words here. We have a person (an intelligent mind that matches a given description, has a certain personality, and whose presence can be tested for in certain ways by judging their reactions), and we have an individual: a specific body. The person is abstract, in the same sense that Hamlet is an abstract concept. The individual is concrete, in the same sense that a copy of Hamlet is concrete.

Transporters destroy an individual, and create a physically identical individual. Because the new individual is identical to the old one, it is still the same person, even though it is not the same body and is therefore not the same person. Beam up a copy of Hamlet and you get a copy of Hamlet; the play still exists. Beam up a copy of Captain Kirk or Data and you get a copy of Captain Kirk or Data; the person still exists.

[SapphireFox]

Ah... could you expand on what you mean by "even the same before the transport?" I think I can answer this question, but I'm not sure what it is yet.

If it was possible to test for the hypothetical "program" it would have to be tested on the original pre-transport and the clone post transport. How would you go testing for this "intangible"? Remember that a brain scan would not tell you enough to make this determination.

At no point are two separate individuals the same person. One just has to look at the clones and identical twins (that share absolutely identical DNA) to see that they are separate individuals with separate identities. Practical purposes is a useless concept in this argument I mean my step-brother is in all practical purposes my brother but that doesn't make him my actual blood brother.

Thing is, people with identical DNA have less in common than transporter copies. Among other things, they have different memories and experiences, because you didn't raise them under identical controlled conditions.

Whereas a transporter copy has identical memories and experiences to the pre-transport person. They don't just have the same genotype; they're identical down to the subatomic level. Unless say that there's some essential physical component of a person that isn't made out of atoms, then I'm not clear on how we can distinguish between two transporter copies except by saying "this one is over here, that one is over there." At least, not until they've had time to pick up different experiences and memories.

You seem to have missed the point I was trying to make. My point was that at no point are two seemingly identical individuals are the same person, it doesn't matter how identical they are. Practical purposes are also useless perspective determinations NOT absolute truths or facts.

That would only work if your Kirk truly IS indistinguishable from the previous Kirk. I have already mentioned that the transporter produces one bit errors and that these errors can build up to things like transporter psychosis. It would be VERY likely this would be easy to test for in universe. So I do believe it is possible to test for these things and distinguish between the two.(or more)

Do we have evidence of such a test?

In addition, "transporter psychosis" isn't necessarily a cumulative effect; it seems to be just another thing that can go wrong during a given transporter jump- specifically something that goes wrong in the brain. Note that this may explain "The Enemy Within; the transporter hiccuped and produced two individuals, each with a few bits of the brain missing. The original was reconstructed by comparing the two brains and overlaying the bits that were there in one copy and not in the other. In this case, you can make a reasonable case that the new, reconstructed Kirk is NOT the original Kirk, or at least can't be proven to be, because there might very well be lingering brain damage that was not successfully reconstructed.

I see no evidence anywhere that sensors that are capable of micro-cellular scans would not pick up the one bit errors if one tried to scan for them. Micro-cellular scanners were used in "The Quickening", the bio-beds on the Enterprise were also able to detect things on that level as well "Star Trek: The Motion Picture"

Where is your evidence that transporter psychosis is caused by a single transport any more than or opposed to a cumulative effect? Such an effect would more likely go unnoticed and untreated until it is too late as a cumulative effect than it occurring as part of a single transport and discovering your buddy has gone nuts. Remember such cases had not appeared officially until 2209, the transporter had been in use since at least the 2150's.

Exactly where in the episode did it say that the Kirks were MISSING parts of their brains I watched the episode recently and nowhere did it say they were missing part of their BRAINS only that they were split into "good and evil". If you say they were, I challenge you present your evidence from the episode.

So this "program" thing of yours is BS huh nothing else intangable but a name?

*snip*

All of that would have to presuppose that I accept and share your belief in that an abstract and ethereal spirit-like "program" is what defines a person, I obviously do not. To accept such a thing it would have to be a testable, confermable, and proven. Tell me EXACTLY how would you possibly test an abstract ethereal spirit-like "program".

But that instance of an individual IS an individiual in and of itself. We agree that it is permanently dead but think that someone else coming along that looks and acts simmilar somehow miraculausly changes that instance of an individual after it has died to someone who is alive.

I'm going to use two separate words here. We have a person (an intelligent mind that matches a given description, has a certain personality, and whose presence can be tested for in certain ways by judging their reactions), and we have an individual: a specific body. The person is abstract, in the same sense that Hamlet is an abstract concept. The individual is concrete, in the same sense that a copy of Hamlet is concrete.

Transporters destroy an individual, and create a physically identical individual. Because the new individual is identical to the old one, it is still the same person, even though it is not the same body and is therefore not the same person. Beam up a copy of Hamlet and you get a copy of Hamlet; the play still exists. Beam up a copy of Captain Kirk or Data and you get a copy of Captain Kirk or Data; the person still exists.

You seem to think the Label is the person and the instance of an individual is part of the whole rather than being a whole itself. That is like saying you transport a person twice and the individual between the two transports is not a person. Let's use your Hamlet as an example say I take your Hamlet and burn it (I know book burning is evil I apologize) and after I finish burning it I hand you a copy of Hamlet from by bag. Is this your Hamlet suddenly come unburnt and restored to you? No, your Hamlet is still burnt and you have been given a copy in compensation.

[Simon_Jester]

If it was possible to test for the hypothetical "program" it would have to be tested on the original pre-transport and the clone post transport. How would you go testing for this "intangible"? Remember that a brain scan would not tell you enough to make this determination.

You're not testing for "the presence of the program." You're testing for whether they act like the original. What you really need is a solid battery of personality tests and a chance to sit them down and get them to write up their autobiography.

The program is what determines how they behave; you can test for it by examining behavior. You don't really even need to check brain structure, though that would be helpful.

You seem to have missed the point I was trying to make. My point was that at no point are two seemingly identical individuals are the same person, it doesn't matter how identical they are. Practical purposes are also useless perspective determinations NOT absolute truths or facts.

This boils down to our mutually exclusive definitions of what makes a person who they are, so I suppose there's no grounds for me to argue with you.

I see no evidence anywhere that sensors that are capable of micro-cellular scans would not pick up the one bit errors if one tried to scan for them. Micro-cellular scanners were used in "The Quickening", the bio-beds on the Enterprise were also able to detect things on that level as well "Star Trek: The Motion Picture"

Bear in mind that one-bit errors would manifest on the atomic level, and that you'd have to sift the entire body looking for them. Depending on the reliability rate, the effect might be indistinguishable from spending a few minutes exposed to background radiation.

Where is your evidence that transporter psychosis is caused by a single transport any more than or opposed to a cumulative effect? Such an effect would more likely go unnoticed and untreated until it is too late as a cumulative effect than it occurring as part of a single transport and discovering your buddy has gone nuts. Remember such cases had not appeared officially until 2209, the transporter had been in use since at least the 2150's.

Well, Kirk was transported, and "Evil Kirk" was damn well psychotic... but that's based on a naive definition. My point being that I can imagine a lot of ways to end up with mental illness or damage resulting from transporters- catastrophic damage from a single failure; cumulative damage from a series of imperfect transports...

Exactly where in the episode did it say that the Kirks were MISSING parts of their brains I watched the episode recently and nowhere did it say they were missing part of their BRAINS only that they were split into "good and evil". If you say they were, I challenge you present your evidence from the episode.

I'm saying it seems like the most plausible explanation if you don't believe in souls (or don't believe transporters copy them). Something was seriously wrong with those guys, Evil Kirk more than Good Kirk.

All of that would have to presuppose that I accept and share your belief in that an abstract and ethereal spirit-like "program" is what defines a person, I obviously do not. To accept such a thing it would have to be a testable, confermable, and proven. Tell me EXACTLY how would you possibly test an abstract ethereal spirit-like "program".

Behavior. The nature of a man's mind governs their behavior. If the behavior is the same, and the body is the same... it's a new instance of the same guy.

You seem to think the Label is the person and the instance of an individual is part of the whole rather than being a whole itself.

No, the label is the name of the person, or if you go for long labels, the description of the person. To be that person, the individual must match the description. If they do, they are that person.

Let's use your Hamlet as an example say I take your Hamlet and burn it (I know book burning is evil I apologize) and after I finish burning it I hand you a copy of Hamlet from by bag. Is this your Hamlet suddenly come unburnt and restored to you? No, your Hamlet is still burnt and you have been given a copy in compensation.

Absolutely. But the book I have is still Hamlet, not some other book like Macbeth. I lost a copy of Hamlet, but Hamlet itself, the play, was not destroyed, and I still have a copy. Which is good enough for me, and for the Trekkers.

[SapphireFox]

If it was possible to test for the hypothetical "program" it would have to be tested on the original pre-transport and the clone post transport. How would you go testing for this "intangible"? Remember that a brain scan would not tell you enough to make this determination.

You're not testing for "the presence of the program." You're testing for whether they act like the original. What you really need is a solid battery of personality tests and a chance to sit them down and get them to write up their autobiography.

The program is what determines how they behave; you can test for it by examining behavior. You don't really even need to check brain structure, though that would be helpful.

Unfortuantely that doesn't make for an infallible test since you would need to make a judgement call (or rather a bunch of psychologists) on the issue. This kind of test is a can not prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that a persons behavior is identical. (like that of a math problem) However it does present strong evidence and most definitely SHOULD be done with both original and clone. If you are testing for behavior this is a good idea, however I was asking originally for proof of your hypothetical "program" not just behavior as indicator.

Bear in mind that one-bit errors would manifest on the atomic level, and that you'd have to sift the entire body looking for them. Depending on the reliability rate, the effect might be indistinguishable from spending a few minutes exposed to background radiation.

Possibly. That's why we test to determine things. We won't know if it is indistinguishable unless we can test to find out. Unfortunately we are not "in universe" so we can't test it for ourselves nor can we look at their medical reports on the matter, we can only determine that it is testable.

Well, Kirk was transported, and "Evil Kirk" was damn well psychotic... but that's based on a naive definition. My point being that I can imagine a lot of ways to end up with mental illness or damage resulting from transporters- catastrophic damage from a single failure; cumulative damage from a series of imperfect transports...

I agree that there is a number of possibilities for how or when the transporter might "screw you up". Lacking "in universe" medical records on the matter, it is useless to dismiss ANY theory for transporter medical failures like transporter psychosis. That being said it is possible that the damage could of occurred in either manner or perhaps neither method is the correct one and it occurs in some other manner.

I'm saying it seems like the most plausible explanation if you don't believe in souls (or don't believe transporters copy them). Something was seriously wrong with those guys, Evil Kirk more than Good Kirk.

That there was something MASSIVELY wrong with both Kirks will never be in question, but to make a call that they are missing part of their brain is pure guesswork with no concrete evidence to support it. Now putting out a guess is fine (in fact I approve of trying to hash out theory of why the Kirks were nuts) but you should put an indicator like possibly or maybe before that so no one thinks you are trying to pull "facts" out of your arse.

Let's use your Hamlet as an example say I take your Hamlet and burn it (I know book burning is evil I apologize) and after I finish burning it I hand you a copy of Hamlet from by bag. Is this your Hamlet suddenly come unburnt and restored to you? No, your Hamlet is still burnt and you have been given a copy in compensation

Absolutely. But the book I have is still Hamlet, not some other book like Macbeth. I lost a copy of Hamlet, but Hamlet itself, the play, was not destroyed, and I still have a copy. Which is good enough for me, and for the Trekkers.

I don't care what is "good enough for the trekkers" I care about the facts I see before me. I have destroyed your copy of Hamlet yes, no matter how many copies of the play there are they are all separate individual copies, they may still be called Hamlet but that does not diminish or negate any individual copy. EACH has it's own separate existence for example the copy of yours that I burned had a dedication note from a loved one in it. My copy that I handed you has line notes and a foul scrawl from the football captain saying that the lead cheerleader is his girlfriend not mine. Even if they had no distinguishing marks that would not mean that they were not individual copies. Just because someone is a clone or has been cloned does not make them invalid as an individual person. Just because we say Riker is a clone doesn't make him any less of an individual than the one that came before. Is it still a Riker yes A RIKER does this invalidate the Riker that died in any way NO.

In the end does the transporter kill? Yes.
Does the transporter leave a copy to carry on the original's life? Yes.
Does the copy invalidate the original's death? No.
Does the copy invalidate the original? No.
Does the original's death invalidate the copy's existence? No.
Does the transporter effectively kill then revive? No.

[Wyrm]

Unfortuantely that doesn't make for an infallible test since you would need to make a judgement call (or rather a bunch of psychologists) on the issue. This kind of test is a can not prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that a persons behavior is identical. (like that of a math problem) However it does present strong evidence and most definitely SHOULD be done with both original and clone. If you are testing for behavior this is a good idea, however I was asking originally for proof of your hypothetical "program" not just behavior as indicator.

I think Simon was thinking of the "brain program" (for want of a better term) as an abstraction for a set of specific physical brain features that generate the person. As such, copying the individual also copies these specific physical brain features and therefore generates the same person.

The program "Hello, world!", even written for a specific computer system with a specific configuration, still exists on two levels. There's the abstract program level, and a physical level. The program's physical level existence is what actually generates the text "Hello, world!" While the program is nothing more than an abstraction, it is an abstraction of a physical phenomenon: magnetic signals on disk, or a pattern of electrical charges in a silicon chip.

The crux of Simon's "program" point is that the person exists as long as it's being generated by a suitable individual(s). Since it is a product of physical stuff, if you copy the physical stuff with enough fidelity, the person generated is the same.

Possibly. That's why we test to determine things. We won't know if it is indistinguishable unless we can test to find out. Unfortunately we are not "in universe" so we can't test it for ourselves nor can we look at their medical reports on the matter, we can only determine that it is testable.

While testible, I don't see how that's any relevance to whether they generate the same person or not. If the person can survive thermodynamic jostling and the inherently-entropy generating process called "life", it can survive a few bit errors.

I agree that there is a number of possibilities for how or when the transporter might "screw you up". Lacking "in universe" medical records on the matter, it is useless to dismiss ANY theory for transporter medical failures like transporter psychosis. That being said it is possible that the damage could of occurred in either manner or perhaps neither method is the correct one and it occurs in some other manner.

A concussion can cause equal or more severe damage to someone's psyche as we've seen with transporters. Why does a transporter induce death instead of injury in these cases?

That there was something MASSIVELY wrong with both Kirks will never be in question, but to make a call that they are missing part of their brain is pure guesswork with no concrete evidence to support it. Now putting out a guess is fine (in fact I approve of trying to hash out theory of why the Kirks were nuts) but you should put an indicator like possibly or maybe before that so no one thinks you are trying to pull "facts" out of your arse.

No one is disagreeing that a malfunctioning transporter can cause injury, and some of these injuries prove immediately fatal. But then, so does a car. Why is using a normally-functioning car as transport does not cause death, while a normally-functioning transporter does?

I don't care what is "good enough for the trekkers" I care about the facts I see before me. I have destroyed your copy of Hamlet yes, no matter how many copies of the play there are they are all separate individual copies, they may still be called Hamlet but that does not diminish or negate any individual copy. EACH has it's own separate existence for example the copy of yours that I burned had a dedication note from a loved one in it. My copy that I handed you has line notes and a foul scrawl from the football captain saying that the lead cheerleader is his girlfriend not mine. Even if they had no distinguishing marks that would not mean that they were not individual copies. Just because someone is a clone or has been cloned does not make them invalid as an individual person. Just because we say Riker is a clone doesn't make him any less of an individual than the one that came before. Is it still a Riker yes A RIKER does this invalidate the Riker that died in any way NO.

Except Simon is clearly defining the person as something generated by the individual, not as the individual itself. As such two individuals can generate the same person. Please answer this point, not some strawman.

In the end does the transporter kill? Yes.
Does the transporter leave a copy to carry on the original's life? Yes.
Does the copy invalidate the original's death? No.
Does the copy invalidate the original? No.
Does the original's death invalidate the copy's existence? No.
Does the transporter effectively kill then revive? No.

Your rhetoric does not impress. Left hanging is the question of whether the person who you just transported can meaningfully called "dead". To me, "death" indicates a certain finality that it would take a miracle to overcome. Barring the Lazarus of the Week, being so casually and routinely "resurrected" from such a "death" is to rob the term of all practical and useful meaning, as as such, such a definition of "death" should be abandoned.

[SapphireFox]

I think Simon was thinking of the "brain program" (for want of a better term) as an abstraction for a set of specific physical brain features that generate the person. As such, copying the individual also copies these specific physical brain features and therefore generates the same person.

The program "Hello, world!", even written for a specific computer system with a specific configuration, still exists on two levels. There's the abstract program level, and a physical level. The program's physical level existence is what actually generates the text "Hello, world!" While the program is nothing more than an abstraction, it is an abstraction of a physical phenomenon: magnetic signals on disk, or a pattern of electrical charges in a silicon chip.

The crux of Simon's "program" point is that the person exists as long as it's being generated by a suitable individual(s). Since it is a product of physical stuff, if you copy the physical stuff with enough fidelity, the person generated is the same.

So what your saying is the term program here is merely a placeholder name for... whatever... in the brain that is generating or responsible for personality. Right? That it represents the whole of a person is a concept I personally can't accept but, if you mean personality (to use a computer term myself similar to an OS) then perhaps I can agree with it.

While testible, I don't see how that's any relevance to whether they generate the same person or not. If the person can survive thermodynamic jostling and the inherently-entropy generating process called "life", it can survive a few bit errors.

The test is not to determine that it is a person or that it is alive it's to see if there is a difference between to otherwise identical individuals.

Well, Kirk was transported, and "Evil Kirk" was damn well psychotic... but that's based on a naive definition. My point being that I can imagine a lot of ways to end up with mental illness or damage resulting from transporters- catastrophic damage from a single failure; cumulative damage from a series of imperfect transports...

I agree that there is a number of possibilities for how or when the transporter might "screw you up". Lacking "in universe" medical records on the matter, it is useless to dismiss ANY theory for transporter medical failures like transporter psychosis. That being said it is possible that the damage could of occurred in either manner or perhaps neither method is the correct one and it occurs in some other manner.

A concussion can cause equal or more severe damage to someone's psyche as we've seen with transporters. Why does a transporter induce death instead of injury in these cases?

I was agreeing with what Simon_Jester wrote last time and conceding a point. I wasn't trying to make some grand statement otherwise.

Except Simon is clearly defining the person as something generated by the individual, not as the individual itself. As such two individuals can generate the same person. Please answer this point, not some strawman.

I don't know if you have been reading the earlier posts, but Simon and I DON'T share the same definition of what makes a person. Now I will try and do my best to explain the point as I see it.

Now If we have X identical people where X is a whole number above 0 and 1.

Simon sees X and says because they are all identical they count as 1 whole person no matter what X is. Now if one individual of X dies he is not truly dead because there is still at lest one individual of X left so the person is considered alive. To use his book example he still has a copy of macbeth even though his original has been burnt.

I see X and say all of these individuals are people. If one individual of X dies he is truly dead and is not going to get up and do anything considered alive. The Whole of X is diminished but not destroyed by the death of the individual person.

Now I would define the "Whole of X" or Simon's one person concept as the "Super-Person" concept where the TOTAL identity of a multiple of identical individuals using the same personality is defined.

Your rhetoric does not impress. Left hanging is the question of whether the person who you just transported can meaningfully called "dead". To me, "death" indicates a certain finality that it would take a miracle to overcome. Barring the Lazarus of the Week, being so casually and routinely "resurrected" from such a "death" is to rob the term of all practical and useful meaning, as as such, such a definition of "death" should be abandoned.

In this case I would refer it as a form of energy suspension not disintegration. As for your second question yes I would define "true death" as as irreversible process.

If you had bothered to read all the posts you would have found that we do share similar views on the nature of death, normally final and permanent. It is Simon who claims that the transporter is pulling a "Lazarus/Jesus of the Week" in that it kills and and resurrects the subject.

I don't think there's an inconsistency between saying that a person who can punch me is not dead and saying that the question "who is this person?" is answered by looking at their mind.

The identity of any person or thing is going to be an answer to that question: Who is this person? What is this thing? For abstract things, like computer programs or plays, there's a clear difference between an instance of the thing and the thing itself. My copy of Hamlet is not the original copy created by Shakespeare, but it is still Hamlet. Shakespeare's copy would also still be Hamlet, if it still existed.

And you cannot remove a thing from existence simply by removing an instance of it. Burning a copy of Hamlet does not destroy the play itself. You have to get rid of all the instances, beyond the possibility of retrieval: so long as people can reconstruct Hamlet, the play has not been destroyed or lost in any but the most trivial, temporary sense.

When we beam Captain Kirk up from a planet to the Enterprise, we destroy an instance of Captain Kirk in the process of creating another instance. But the instance of Kirk is not the man himself; it is merely a Kirk. The old instance dies in the process. The identity "Captain Kirk" does not, because there is still a man passing all possible "Is this Captain Kirk?" tests afterwards. The man definitely exists (he can punch me), and he is by all evidence Captain Kirk. Therefore Captain Kirk is alive as far as I'm concerned.

The kind of death that you have during a five second span in which there is no you, sandwiched between two periods in which there is a you, is a very trivial sort of "death," death in the clinical sense. Not at all the kind of permanent thing we normally think of when we use the word.

Even Stark found this strange and confusing.

Uh, you just agreed with everyone that Kirk is dead, and another identical Kirk now exists. Without 'anti-fatal' events, this involves death. He can pass the 'is he identical' tests all he wants, it doesn't change this. The idea that because it appears the same to YOU means anything about HIM is stupid. The issue is whether or not the lights come back on.

[Simon_Jester]

So what your saying is the term program here is merely a placeholder name for... whatever... in the brain that is generating or responsible for personality. Right? That it represents the whole of a person is a concept I personally can't accept but, if you mean personality (to use a computer term myself similar to an OS) then perhaps I can agree with it.

This.

Since the brain is basically a big squishy computer, in principle you could analyze it and describe its operations in terms of what programmers call "machine language:" the dirty work of taking incoming information (from the eyes and ears and such) and converting it into actions (speech, movement, and such). If we were good enough at analyzing how intelligent minds work, which I suspect we never will be, we could even write up such a description in a book and have a truly complete picture of how the person thinks.

It wouldn't be simple. Brains don't work like digital computers, which were designed to be simple. Brains weren't designed at all in any human sense; they evolved. So they're a mess, and trying to describe them would be a mess. But if you could do it, you'd have the "program" that describes a human mind, a human personality, in full.

You could write that "program" down. You could set up a computer to emulate the brain and set it to follow that "program," and it could predict the person's behavior in advance. You could even, in principle, write that "program" onto an otherwise blank brain and create a brain that thinks as the original thinks.

Now, I can point to at least one example of my "program" in action: me. If there were several of me, I could point to any of them... though given time, the various individuals would diverge and self-modify until they were no longer all following basically the same program. My contention is that when we ask "Is this man James Tiberius Kirk?" what we really want to know is "Is this man running the 'James Tiberius Kirk' program in his brain, or is he running a different program that corresponds to a different person?" Everything about Kirk that makes him Kirk is contained within that program.

Interfere with the brain (and thus with the program), and you get something that's sort of like Kirk but not really Kirk as we know him (like Good Kirk from The Enemy Within). Or something that's not at all like Kirk (like Evil Kirk, same episode). But the program is not some ethereal spirit; it's just the operating system (and applications) the human brain uses to do all the things it does.

PS: By the way, I never really meant "they're two brain damaged Kirk copies" as a definite explanation. But it does seem to fit the data. Evil Kirk behaves animalistically, and seems to have trouble controlling his impulses; this is consistent with damage to higher brain functions. Good Kirk behaves rationally, but has trouble concentrating and making decisions, again consistent with low-level brain damage that leaves the victim more or less functional.

I don't know if you have been reading the earlier posts, but Simon and I DON'T share the same definition of what makes a person. Now I will try and do my best to explain the point as I see it.

Now If we have X identical people where X is a whole number above 0 and 1.

Simon sees X and says because they are all identical they count as 1 whole person no matter what X is. Now if one individual of X dies he is not truly dead because there is still at lest one individual of X left so the person is considered alive. To use his book example he still has a copy of macbeth even though his original has been burnt.

...More or less. However, I do not deny that individuals die. But if we have a process that destroys one individual and creates one identical individual, from a utilitarian standpoint we don't come out at a net loss. If you burn my copy of Macbeth in some sort of technobabble device that promptly creates a new copy identical to the one I had before, even down to the little nicks in the binding and the notes I scribbled in the margin... I'm satisfied that you haven't robbed me.

Destroying two individuals to create one would be questionable ethically, of course, but that rarely happens in transporter operations except by accident.

I see X and say all of these individuals are people. If one individual of X dies he is truly dead and is not going to get up and do anything considered alive. The Whole of X is diminished but not destroyed by the death of the individual person.

Fair enough. On the other hand, the Whole of X is really more important, in a philosophical sense, so long as we aren't losing valuable things unique to an individual member of the set X. Which, with transporters, we don't, because the new individuals are identical to the ones they replace. No memories, experience, or personal characteristics are lost in the course of normal transporter operations.

Even if X is a set of one member (such as "the set of all Captain Kirks") as opposed to a set with multiple members (such as "the set of all William Rikers"), this doesn't change.

If you had bothered to read all the posts you would have found that we do share similar views on the nature of death, normally final and permanent. It is Simon who claims that the transporter is pulling a "Lazarus/Jesus of the Week" in that it kills and and resurrects the subject.

Not quite. But it kills and then creates a living being, pretty much out of nothing. And the new living being is, by all available tests, the same person as the old one.

To a caveman, this will look very much as if a man stepped onto the pad, died, and was resurrected in another place. If your attitude towards death is the same as that of the caveman, then yes, transporters can be viewed as a Jesus of the Week. Mine isn't, so I don't see it that way.

Anti-fatal was a really lousy choice of words, but I couldn't think of any other name for it. Because the transporter's operation is entirely reversible; what it does as it disintegrates Kirk it undoes as it reintegrates Kirk. It assembles a new Kirk from nothing just as surely as it dissolved an old Kirk into nothing.

That is very different from the normal connotation of "fatal" or "death," which STRONGLY implies an irreversible change.

Even Stark found [my attempts to explain] strange and confusing.

I'm sorry about that. They seem perfectly clear to me. Maybe Wyrm can come up with a way to put it to you guys, since he seems to have a much better grasp of what I'm trying to say. Or maybe he just already figured it out on his own and doesn't need to navigate my attempts at explanation.

[Channel72]

You could write that "program" down. You could set up a computer to emulate the brain and set it to follow that "program," and it could predict the person's behavior in advance. You could even, in principle, write that "program" onto an otherwise blank brain and create a brain that thinks as the original thinks.

Now, I can point to at least one example of my "program" in action: me. If there were several of me, I could point to any of them... though given time, the various individuals would diverge and self-modify until they were no longer all following basically the same program. My contention is that when we ask "Is this man James Tiberius Kirk?" what we really want to know is "Is this man running the 'James Tiberius Kirk' program in his brain, or is he running a different program that corresponds to a different person?" Everything about Kirk that makes him Kirk is contained within that program.

I understand your point, but ultimately I disagree with your conclusion. For all intents and purposes, the transporter does kill you.

To build on your computer-program analogy, it might be helpful to borrow some terminology from the Object-Oriented Programming paradigm. In this paradigm, we have classes and then instances of classes, also known as objects. A CLASS is just a general, abstract description of a concept, while an INSTANCE is a particular incarnation of that concept. So, in your analogy, Simon_Jester is a class. Currently, there is only one instance of Simon_Jester running. However, a transporter or cloning device could potentially create additional instances. So your argument seems to be: If one Simon_Jester instance is transported, no information has actually been lost, and so a death has not occurred.

There are three things to consider here, which, to me, prove beyond a doubt that the transporter kills you:

1) Moving data is a destructive process.

We need to distinguish between "copying" data, and "moving" data. What a transporter actually does is to move data, not copy it. Now, moving data is an inherently destructive process. It actually involves two steps: copy the original data to a new destination, and then destroy the original data. So, if we have a single instance of Simon_Jester running, the transporter will copy the instance, creating a new instance of Simon_Jester. It will then destroy the original instance.

2) Each instance of a class has it's own identity.

In a computer program, if you create two instances of a class, both instances still have their own unique memory address, and both instances take up space in memory. So while both objects are instances of the same class, they are still both distinct, unique objects. So, if we have two instances of Simon_Jester, we have two unique conscious beings. They are both demonstrably unique because they both take up mass in the universe, and both exist at different locations in space-time. Therefore, any usage of personal pronouns such as "you", "him", "I", etc. must necessarily refer to a particular instance of a class - NOT the class itself. If there are two instances of Simon_Jester, each instance can refer to itself as "I" without including other instances under that definition. So each instance has it's own concept of self. Or to put it another way: identity is a property of an instance, not a class.

3) A death occurs when you permanently terminate any consciousness.

This is important: the word "death" does NOT necessarily describe loss of information. The most reasonable definition of "death" is the permanent termination of a consciousness. Notice the indefinite article there: A consciousness. In other words, any consciousness that is permanently terminated constitutes a death. Now, the Simon_Jester class includes a consciousness property, (because all Simon_Jesters are self-aware) so all instances of Simon_Jester have a consciousness. Now, remember that the transporter moves data, which involves a copy operation followed by a destroy operation. So the transporter must destroy an instance of Simon_Jester in order to move (transport) it. Therefore, the transporter is terminating a unique consciousness. It doesn't matter that it creates a new instance: it still destroyed the old instance. So in other words, the transporter kills you.

[SapphireFox]

This.

Since the brain is basically a big squishy computer, in principle you could analyze it and describe its operations in terms of what programmers call "machine language:" the dirty work of taking incoming information (from the eyes and ears and such) and converting it into actions (speech, movement, and such). If we were good enough at analyzing how intelligent minds work, which I suspect we never will be, we could even write up such a description in a book and have a truly complete picture of how the person thinks.

It wouldn't be simple. Brains don't work like digital computers, which were designed to be simple. Brains weren't designed at all in any human sense; they evolved. So they're a mess, and trying to describe them would be a mess. But if you could do it, you'd have the "program" that describes a human mind, a human personality, in full.

You could write that "program" down. You could set up a computer to emulate the brain and set it to follow that "program," and it could predict the person's behavior in advance. You could even, in principle, write that "program" onto an otherwise blank brain and create a brain that thinks as the original thinks.

Now, I can point to at least one example of my "program" in action: me. If there were several of me, I could point to any of them... though given time, the various individuals would diverge and self-modify until they were no longer all following basically the same program. My contention is that when we ask "Is this man James Tiberius Kirk?" what we really want to know is "Is this man running the 'James Tiberius Kirk' program in his brain, or is he running a different program that corresponds to a different person?" Everything about Kirk that makes him Kirk is contained within that program.

I think I understand what you are talking about. Its all the parts that make me act like me and not like someone else. Such examples are found in Sci-Fi and Fantasy all the time. For example I was watching an episode last night where a person had his mind transferred into another persons body. To use a ST example a doctor in TOS transferred his "program" into an android body. (I think it was because he was dying) Tho could we refer the "program" as an OS rather than a non specific program?(because that is what it seems to act like to me) For example my body is running SapphireFox ver 1.51 and your body is running Simon_Jester ver ???? I can understand an accept this.

Possibly Off Topic Question: What would happen if my OS and your OS were switched would we still be us in different bodies or would we be effectively different people?

PS: By the way, I never really meant "they're two brain damaged Kirk copies" as a definite explanation. But it does seem to fit the data. Evil Kirk behaves animalistically, and seems to have trouble controlling his impulses; this is consistent with damage to higher brain functions. Good Kirk behaves rationally, but has trouble concentrating and making decisions, again consistent with low-level brain damage that leaves the victim more or less functional.

No problem. The show doesn't give a proper explanation for the evil/good Kirks or perhaps rather the aggressive/passive Kirks anyway.
Your idea does fit the facts (however few there are) it's just I would like to have more data before calling any theory myself.

Now If we have X identical people where X is a whole number above 0 and 1.

Simon sees X and says because they are all identical they count as 1 whole person no matter what X is. Now if one individual of X dies he is not truly dead because there is still at lest one individual of X left so the person is considered alive. To use his book example he still has a copy of macbeth even though his original has been burnt.

...More or less. However, I do not deny that individuals die. But if we have a process that destroys one individual and creates one identical individual, from a utilitarian standpoint we don't come out at a net loss. If you burn my copy of Macbeth in some sort of technobabble device that promptly creates a new copy identical to the one I had before, even down to the little nicks in the binding and the notes I scribbled in the margin... I'm satisfied that you haven't robbed me.

I see X and say all of these individuals are people. If one individual of X dies he is truly dead and is not going to get up and do anything considered alive. The Whole of X is diminished but not destroyed by the death of the individual person.

Fair enough. On the other hand, the Whole of X is really more important, in a philosophical sense, so long as we aren't losing valuable things unique to an individual member of the set X. Which, with transporters, we don't, because the new individuals are identical to the ones they replace. No memories, experience, or personal characteristics are lost in the course of normal transporter operations.

So then regardless of how we see people in this context we can agree that if there is at least 1 of X the "Whole of X" has survived.
So then we agree that the transporter kills the individual of X but not the "Whole of X"

If you had bothered to read all the posts you would have found that we do share similar views on the nature of death, normally final and permanent. It is Simon who claims that the transporter is pulling a "Lazarus/Jesus of the Week" in that it kills and and resurrects the subject.

Not quite. But it kills and then creates a living being, pretty much out of nothing. And the new living being is, by all available tests, the same person as the old one.

To a caveman, this will look very much as if a man stepped onto the pad, died, and was resurrected in another place. If your attitude towards death is the same as that of the caveman, then yes, transporters can be viewed as a Jesus of the Week. Mine isn't, so I don't see it that way.

Anti-fatal was a really lousy choice of words, but I couldn't think of any other name for it. Because the transporter's operation is entirely reversible; what it does as it disintegrates Kirk it undoes as it reintegrates Kirk. It assembles a new Kirk from nothing just as surely as it dissolved an old Kirk into nothing.

That is very different from the normal connotation of "fatal" or "death," which STRONGLY implies an irreversible change.

Even Stark found [my attempts to explain] strange and confusing.

I'm sorry about that. They seem perfectly clear to me. Maybe Wyrm can come up with a way to put it to you guys, since he seems to have a much better grasp of what I'm trying to say. Or maybe he just already figured it out on his own and doesn't need to navigate my attempts at explanation.

Don't worry about it. I was just trying to explain to Wyrm that my concept of how the transporter works doesn't involve any return form the grave concepts or that my idea of death wasn't permanent and final.


Does this mean we have come to enough of an agreement to answer the original poster that (Yes, but the transporter kills the individual of X not the "Whole of X" as there is still 1 of X) as it were? If you place emphasis on the "Whole of X" or not it doesn't change the fact that the individual has been killed and is "truly dead".

[Wyrm]

The test is not to determine that it is a person or that it is alive it's to see if there is a difference between to otherwise identical individuals.

So? What difference does "original" and "copy" make other than to an academic?

Except Simon is clearly defining the person as something generated by the individual, not as the individual itself. As such two individuals can generate the same person. Please answer this point, not some strawman.

I don't know if you have been reading the earlier posts, but Simon and I DON'T share the same definition of what makes a person.

This was obvious. But I fail to see why Simon's definition is wrong. It seems to work better than your definition, after all.

I see X and say all of these individuals are people. If one individual of X dies he is truly dead and is not going to get up and do anything considered alive.

Which, in the case of well-functioning transporters in ordinary circumstances, can be trivially reversed at the end of the process. Something is wrong with this definition of "death" if we were to treat it as something serious. If you want to treat the death of an individual as something trivial, fine, but I don't think that's the intent of the OP (remember that) and does nothing to answer the question therein.

Now I would define the "Whole of X" or Simon's one person concept as the "Super-Person" concept where the TOTAL identity of a multiple of identical individuals using the same personality is defined.

Simon is trying to define "person" in a way such that "the death of person X" is something nontrivial, while avoiding saying the same of the casual destruction and then reintegration of individuals that make up X, as it seems to qualify as pretty damn trivial.

If you had bothered to read all the posts you would have found that we do share similar views on the nature of death, normally final and permanent. It is Simon who claims that the transporter is pulling a "Lazarus/Jesus of the Week" in that it kills and and resurrects the subject.

Oh? Then explain this statement:

In the end does the transporter kill? Yes.

That seems to me a pretty clear statement that you think a transporter kills when it transports. On the other hand, you do not think that a death can be recovered from, while for Simon, it can (under specialized circumstances) .

1) Moving data is a destructive process.

Already your argument is in trouble. While moving around data in a computer is destructive, moving around matter in the universe isn't.

2) Each instance of a class has it's own identity.

In a computer program, if you create two instances of a class, both instances still have their own unique memory address,

This is a peculiarity of data in computer store and does not apply to matter. There is no unique way of describing the position of matter in space.

and both instances take up space in memory.

Indeed, they take up exactly the same amount of space in memory. But then, they are identical.

So while both objects are instances of the same class, they are still both distinct, unique objects. So, if we have two instances of Simon_Jester, we have two unique conscious beings.

The underlined part is a significant sticking point. Is the new instance of Simon_Jester a unique conciousness? I submit that they aren't unique; they are indistinguishable. They may be quietly exchanged with no one the wiser (unless they were to have different experiences after copying). To use your analogy, you may be able to tell that you have two data structures in memory, separated in memory address space, but just after copying they are identical in every way: if you put them into the same function, you will get identical results.

They are both demonstrably unique because they both take up mass in the universe, and both exist at different locations in space-time.

Fallacious argument as being able to take up mass in the universe and exist in different locations is not sufficient for uniqueness. We know this because otherwise, the Pauli Exclusion Principle would not exist — if fermions had a unique identity, then they can stack atop each other like photons, and chemistry would be a boring subject. The universe itself is proof that this particular principle is wrong.

Therefore, any usage of personal pronouns such as "you", "him", "I", etc. must necessarily refer to a particular instance of a class - NOT the class itself. If there are two instances of Simon_Jester, each instance can refer to itself as "I" without including other instances under that definition. So each instance has it's own concept of self. Or to put it another way: identity is a property of an instance, not a class.

Only because language evolved in the absence of this particular form of class having multiple instances. The fact that spoken human languages do not handle this case gracefully should not be at all surprising, and as such reveals nothing about whether some amazing tech kills or not.

3) A death occurs when you permanently terminate any consciousness.

This is important: the word "death" does NOT necessarily describe loss of information. The most reasonable definition of "death" is the permanent termination of a consciousness. Notice the indefinite article there: A consciousness.

What? More linguistic-proof bullshit?

In other words, any consciousness that is permanently terminated constitutes a death. Now, the Simon_Jester class includes a consciousness property, (because all Simon_Jesters are self-aware) so all instances of Simon_Jester have a consciousness.

How do you know this is not a class-wide property?

Now, remember that the transporter moves data, which involves a copy operation followed by a destroy operation. So the transporter must destroy an instance of Simon_Jester in order to move (transport) it. Therefore, the transporter is terminating a unique consciousness. It doesn't matter that it creates a new instance: it still destroyed the old instance. So in other words, the transporter kills you.

Only if the conciousnesses are unique to each individual, and not a property shared by the class as a whole. Destroying an individual instance does not destroy a class property. Your proof fails.

[Wyrm]

I think I understand what you are talking about. Its all the parts that make me act like me and not like someone else. Such examples are found in Sci-Fi and Fantasy all the time. For example I was watching an episode last night where a person had his mind transferred into another persons body. To use a ST example a doctor in TOS transferred his "program" into an android body. (I think it was because he was dying)

TNG episode "Schizoid Man."

Tho could we refer the "program" as an OS rather than a non specific program?(because that is what it seems to act like to me) For example my body is running SapphireFox ver 1.51 and your body is running Simon_Jester ver ???? I can understand an accept this.

You know version numbers come for ordinary applications, right?

Possibly Off Topic Question: What would happen if my OS and your OS were switched would we still be us in different bodies or would we be effectively different people?

Depends on a lot of things, but first guess is that you both will be immmoble, insensual, and very unhappy. Remember you had to learn how to walk, speak, and see — very easy as you had little to do otherwise as a baby. There would be much "driver incompatability", as each body is a unique creation that the resident mind learns to control.

So then regardless of how we see people in this context we can agree that if there is at least 1 of X the "Whole of X" has survived.
So then we agree that the transporter kills the individual of X but not the "Whole of X"

You're using "kills the individual" as if everyone understands what it means, and assuming such a phrase makes sense. I can think of several meanings of "kill" that only apply to the "Whole of X"/person level, and never to the individual level — although the same action may both destroy the individual and kill the "Whole of X"/person. Also, I think you're using 'individual' to mean 'person' when that equivalence is one of the very things under dispute.

Don't worry about it. I was just trying to explain to Wyrm that my concept of how the transporter works doesn't involve any return form the grave concepts or that my idea of death wasn't permanent and final.

Not very well, I'm afraid. You can return from the grave if and only if death wasn't permanent and final. That's what "can return from the grave" means.

Does this mean we have come to enough of an agreement to answer the original poster that (Yes, but the transporter kills the individual of X not the "Whole of X" as there is still 1 of X) as it were?

No. Because you clearly don't mean "the transporter kills" (by which you mean non-permanent disassembly) the same way that the OP means "the transporter kills" (permanent death, no takebacks). The OP diagrees with Mike about whether the transporter is a "person annihilation clone assembly machine".

[Simon_Jester]

1) Moving data is a destructive process.

Already your argument is in trouble. While moving around data in a computer is destructive, moving around matter in the universe isn't.

However, moving around matter via a transporter IS, so Channel72's argument is still valid, as far as it goes.

The real issue is that given C72's argument, all we've proven is that the process of moving Captain Kirk via transporter is equivalent to the process of cut-and-pasting a computer program... which most people agree is morally neutral.

They are both demonstrably unique because they both take up mass in the universe, and both exist at different locations in space-time.

Fallacious argument as being able to take up mass in the universe and exist in different locations is not sufficient for uniqueness. We know this because otherwise, the Pauli Exclusion Principle would not exist — if fermions had a unique identity, then they can stack atop each other like photons, and chemistry would be a boring subject. The universe itself is proof that this particular principle is wrong.

I'm afraid you've taken your counterargument a bit too far, because there's a difference between Captain Kirk(s) and fermion(s). Fermions are, as you say, indistinguishable. There is no way, even in theory, to tag two fermions. Captain Kirks, on the other hand, can be tagged quite easily, and these tags can be used to distinguish between otherwise identical members of the set, as illustrated by the Rand-Spock experiment in The Enemy Within.

Therefore, Captain Kirks are distinguishable (collections of) particles, whereas fermions are indistinguishable particles. Therefore, the fact that there are two Kirks in different locations is evidence that each is unique, though they need not be structurally unique. But they probably are structurally unique; if they have been physically separated for even a few microseconds, they will not be exactly identical, though it will take quite a lot of time and experience for these differences to diverge to the point where they can no longer both be said to be Captain Kirk.
_____________

3) A death occurs when you permanently terminate any consciousness.

This is important: the word "death" does NOT necessarily describe loss of information. The most reasonable definition of "death" is the permanent termination of a consciousness. Notice the indefinite article there: A consciousness. In other words, any consciousness that is permanently terminated constitutes a death. Now, the Simon_Jester class includes a consciousness property, (because all Simon_Jesters are self-aware) so all instances of Simon_Jester have a consciousness. Now, remember that the transporter moves data, which involves a copy operation followed by a destroy operation. So the transporter must destroy an instance of Simon_Jester in order to move (transport) it. Therefore, the transporter is terminating a unique consciousness. It doesn't matter that it creates a new instance: it still destroyed the old instance. So in other words, the transporter kills you.

I do not deny this.

However, the type of death a transporter causes is not a type of death that I fear the way I would fear, say, dying in a fire. If we are to call it "death," then "death" loses a certain amount of its profound meaning, because the death in question is not detectable by outside parties or by the person-class that experienced it. The person-class gets a new instance identical to the old one, and thus does not percieve that anyone has truly died, unless they have a strong philosophical conviction that this is so. To outsiders, the new instance is indistinguishable from the old one, so, again, they do not perceive the person as dead in the sense of "dearly departed." Of the set of people I know, they're all still somewhere to be found. Unless I have a strong philosophical conviction that drives me to treat the transporter-copy of my friend as a stranger even though he still remembers everything about our relationship and has the same personality as my transporter-disintegrated friend did.

So the key here is that while you can make a very good case for the transporter killing a specific, discrete individual, this form of "killing" is not equivalent to the sort of death someone who gets zapped by a phaser dies. If you get zapped by a phaser, no one will ever see you again. You are gone, and that's a very profound and unpleasant thought.

If you get zapped by a transporter, everyone who knew you can still, in a real sense, call you and ask you how you're doing. You, in the sense of all the quirks and virtues and flaws that make you who you are, are not gone. So calling that "death" cheapens the more conventional type of death, in my opinion.
_____________

I think I understand what you are talking about. Its all the parts that make me act like me and not like someone else. Such examples are found in Sci-Fi and Fantasy all the time. For example I was watching an episode last night where a person had his mind transferred into another persons body. To use a ST example a doctor in TOS transferred his "program" into an android body. (I think it was because he was dying) Tho could we refer the "program" as an OS rather than a non specific program?(because that is what it seems to act like to me) For example my body is running SapphireFox ver 1.51 and your body is running Simon_Jester ver ???? I can understand an accept this.

Yes, you have it completely right. I remember the ST episode you cite, and it's a good example of what science fiction calls "personality upload:" transferring your mind into a computer. This trope has become far more common since the days of TOS, because computers are now powerful enough that we can plausibly expect it to be possible within the next century. The real sticking point is finding a way to scan your brain and figure out how your mind works; programming the computer to emulate your mind will be the easy part by comparison.

And yes, that is exactly my point. The things that make you SapphireFox are properties of your mind and body, and another individual could theoretically have all those same properties. And thus, in my eyes, be (another) SapphireFox. Of course, we're still talking about two separate, discrete bodies, two individuals who are not physically the same even though they are physically identical. But when we embrace the idea that there can be more than one SapphireFox, the prospect of a SapphireFox dying is not the same as the prospect of SapphireFox dying. The body I am now pointing to is gone, but the distinguishing characteristics that make you an individual still exist, and are still represented by a surviving body.

Possibly Off Topic Question: What would happen if my OS and your OS were switched would we still be us in different bodies or would we be effectively different people?

This is a very interesting question. A lot depends on how much physical change in the brain is done to go with the OS-switch, because many aspects of how we think are determined by physical structures within the brain.

The closest example to this happening in real life is with transsexuals, whose gender identity is flipped compared to the biological sex of their body. According to some research, this is because there are parts of the brain that look different in each sex... and transsexuals literally have a man's brain in a woman's body, or vice versa. The sex-linked parts of their brain are the ones normally seen in the opposite biological sex. And (the researchers believe, because of this) transsexuals believe on a very deep level that they are whichever sex their brain is, even though they have the "wrong" body for that sex... which causes tremendous psychological distress.

I suspect that if you could switch the "OS" of a man and a woman, you'd end up with two transsexuals, neither of whom would be comfortable with their body. Doing it between members of the same sex would not cause that problem, obviously, but might cause other smaller problems. Those problems would, over time, tend to alter the personalities involved until they were no longer the people they were before the switch.

But I digress even more than usual...

So then regardless of how we see people in this context we can agree that if there is at least 1 of X the "Whole of X" has survived.
So then we agree that the transporter kills the individual of X but not the "Whole of X"

Precisely. And I believe that the death of one member of the set X is small potatoes compared to the death of the entire set. In all real deaths that occur in real life, killing one member of X kills all of X, because real people are unique and cannot be copied using any known technology. If the Simon_Jester typing this dies, there will never be another Simon_Jester. Which is really bad if you like Simon_Jester.

But if there were three or four Simon_Jesters, all identical, the death of one of them would not be such bad news, especially if it didn't have any bad implications for the survival of the others. Still bad, but not as bad.

And if there were a process that could destroy a Simon_Jester and replace him with an identical Simon_Jester, I argue that this process would NOT be a net bad thing, because the size of the set would not be reduced. And because no unique characteristics that I, Simon_Jester, value would be lost. So I'd totally step into that transporter, though I might get occasional moments of being weirded out when I think "Wait, am I really the same person?" before answering the question "Yup."

Does this mean we have come to enough of an agreement to answer the original poster that (Yes, but the transporter kills the individual of X not the "Whole of X" as there is still 1 of X) as it were? If you place emphasis on the "Whole of X" or not it doesn't change the fact that the individual has been killed and is "truly dead".

I feel that this is true, but add that the death of an individual of X is relatively inconsequential when we're dealing with a process that replaces that individual with a new one, thus preserving the size and "biodiversity" of the set X.

[SapphireFox]

So? What difference does "original" and "copy" make other than to an academic?

It makes a great deal of difference in that should we consider what has been tansported to be part of the "Whole of X" person concept or considered to be a seperate person entirely.
If they are the same absolutely than they are part of the "Whole of X"
If they are not then we can consider them to be seperate people in their entirety.

Which, in the case of well-functioning transporters in ordinary circumstances, can be trivially reversed at the end of the process. Something is wrong with this definition of "death" if we were to treat it as something serious. If you want to treat the death of an individual as something trivial, fine, but I don't think that's the intent of the OP (remember that) and does nothing to answer the question therein.

Exacty how am I treating death trivialy when I am trying to explain that the person that gets into the transporter gets disintigrated dies the data gathered from the death is used to constuct a clone at the transit site that having copied the memories of the one that died carries on beliveing that it is the same one that walked into the transporter.
At no point is the death of the one that walked into the transporter trivial.

Simon is trying to define "person" in a way such that "the death of person X" is something nontrivial, while avoiding saying the same of the casual destruction and then reintegration of individuals that make up X, as it seems to qualify as pretty damn trivial.

*Sigh* First of all X is NOT a place holder for a name. X is a number place holder which makes your sentence look damn stupid if you are going to comment on a statement that uses X as a number.

Now If we have X identical people where X is a whole number above 0 and 1.

What is even dumber is the fact that I posted this after your first post on this topic so you have no excuse for not having read this.

Simon sees X and says because they are all identical they count as 1 whole person no matter what X is. Now if one individual of X dies he is not truly dead because there is still at lest one individual of X left so the person is considered alive. To use his book example he still has a copy of macbeth even though his original has been burnt.

I see X and say all of these individuals are people. If one individual of X dies he is truly dead and is not going to get up and do anything considered alive. The Whole of X is diminished but not destroyed by the death of the individual person.

Now I would define the "Whole of X" or Simon's one person concept as the "Super-Person" concept where the TOTAL identity of a multiple of identical individuals using the same personality is defined.

The rest of the "Math Problem" post area.

SappireFox wrote:
If you had bothered to read all the posts you would have found that we do share similar views on the nature of death, normally final and permanent. It is Simon who claims that the transporter is pulling a "Lazarus/Jesus of the Week" in that it kills and and resurrects the subject.
Wyrm wrote:
Oh? Then explain this statement:

SapphireFox wrote:
In the end does the transporter kill? Yes.
Wyrm wrote:
That seems to me a pretty clear statement that you think a transporter kills when it transports. On the other hand, you do not think that a death can be recovered from, while for Simon, it can (under specialized circumstances) .

Its pretty fucking self explanitoy Wyrm. I was refering to your view ie Wyrm's view on death that being permament and not recoverable. Simon and I don't nessessisaly share the same view on death but this statement

To me, "death" indicates a certain finality that it would take a miracle to overcome.

is simmilar to my own that death is a permament thing.

1) Moving data is a destructive process.

Already your argument is in trouble. While moving around data in a computer is destructive, moving around matter in the universe isn't.

The matter that is destroyed by the transport is not used in the making of the copy thus his statement is still valid.

SapphireFox wrote:
I think I understand what you are talking about. Its all the parts that make me act like me and not like someone else. Such examples are found in Sci-Fi and Fantasy all the time. For example I was watching an episode last night where a person had his mind transferred into another persons body. To use a ST example a doctor in TOS transferred his "program" into an android body. (I think it was because he was dying)
TNG episode "Schizoid Man."

I was refering to the TOS ep "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" but thank you for finding another ep that has that premise.

You know version numbers come for ordinary applications, right?

No I didn't I just rememberd Windows 3.1, 3.1.1, and 2.0 as version numbers for those OS.

No. Because you clearly don't mean "the transporter kills" (by which you mean non-permanent disassembly) the same way that the OP means "the transporter kills" (permanent death, no takebacks). The OP diagrees with Mike about whether the transporter is a "person annihilation clone assembly machine".

No you clearly dont understand what Im talking about. The disassembly is NOT a non-permanent thing which is why I refer to it as disintigration which is a form of permament death. What comes out is a clone copy it would only not be a clone if it used the same matter from the original.

[Simon_Jester]

Exacty how am I treating death trivialy when I am trying to explain that the person that gets into the transporter gets disintigrated dies the data gathered from the death is used to constuct a clone at the transit site that having copied the memories of the one that died carries on beliveing that it is the same one that walked into the transporter.
At no point is the death of the one that walked into the transporter trivial.

...Because of what I said in my post? Death of an individual member of a set of multiple individuals who are all the same person is not the same as death of the entire set of individuals who are that person. In real life, we use "death" to describe what happens to people who are wiped out entirely, and much of its significance comes from the fact that once a person dies, no one will ever see them again.

Whereas when we beam up Captain Kirk, people will see Captain Kirk again. If Captain Kirk "died" when we beamed him up, he died in a sense less significant than the sense in which he would have died by more normal means. Say, being disintegrated by a phaser or eaten by a monster. If Kirk gets vaporized or eaten, that's the last campy double-fist punch and the last Very. Overemphasized. Dialogue. We'll ever see. Green-skinned space babes throughout the galaxy will miss his passing, and will be left to seek consolation in the arms of green-skinned space dudes. Spock and McCoy will be at each other's throats in days, and Scotty will feel that his inability to violate the laws of physics is so obvious that it doesn't need to be said.

If Kirk gets beamed up, none of those consequences hold, and life proceeds as usual.

*Sigh* First of all X is NOT a place holder for a name. X is a number place holder which makes your sentence look damn stupid if you are going to comment on a statement that uses X as a number.

I started this. I started using X as a set (as in set theory) of size equal to, well, your number X. You may not have noticed; sorry.

But no, Wyrm's statement is not made stupid by his choice of X, because algebra doesn't work that way: I can reassign a variable when I set up a new problem.

[SapphireFox]

Yes, you have it completely right. I remember the ST episode you cite, and it's a good example of what science fiction calls "personality upload:" transferring your mind into a computer. This trope has become far more common since the days of TOS, because computers are now powerful enough that we can plausibly expect it to be possible within the next century. The real sticking point is finding a way to scan your brain and figure out how your mind works; programming the computer to emulate your mind will be the easy part by comparison.

Sweet! We finally understand each other. Tho this does open up some interesting "Ghost in the Shell" type of discussions in the future.

And yes, that is exactly my point. The things that make you SapphireFox are properties of your mind and body, and another individual could theoretically have all those same properties. And thus, in my eyes, be (another) SapphireFox. Of course, we're still talking about two separate, discrete bodies, two individuals who are not physically the same even though they are physically identical. But when we embrace the idea that there can be more than one SapphireFox, the prospect of a SapphireFox dying is not the same as the prospect of SapphireFox dying. The body I am now pointing to is gone, but the distinguishing characteristics that make you an individual still exist, and are still represented by a surviving body.

Yes the whole "Whole of X" concept. True the individual is dead but something of him is represented in the others remaining.

Precisely. And I believe that the death of one member of the set X is small potatoes compared to the death of the entire set. In all real deaths that occur in real life, killing one member of X kills all of X, because real people are unique and cannot be copied using any known technology. If the Simon_Jester typing this dies, there will never be another Simon_Jester. Which is really bad if you like Simon_Jester.

Yes that would indeed suck.

But if there were three or four Simon_Jesters, all identical, the death of one of them would not be such bad news, especially if it didn't have any bad implications for the survival of the others. Still bad, but not as bad.

And if there were a process that could destroy a Simon_Jester and replace him with an identical Simon_Jester, I argue that this process would NOT be a net bad thing, because the size of the set would not be reduced. And because no unique characteristics that I, Simon_Jester, value would be lost. So I'd totally step into that transporter, though I might get occasional moments of being weirded out when I think "Wait, am I really the same person?" before answering the question "Yup."

Well it would depend on your own personal values and beliefs if you step on that pad. Even though there will still be a me somewhere I would still not get on that pad, I will be on that shuttle with Bones and Barclay thank you very much.

Does this mean we have come to enough of an agreement to answer the original poster that (Yes, but the transporter kills the individual of X not the "Whole of X" as there is still 1 of X) as it were? If you place emphasis on the "Whole of X" or not it doesn't change the fact that the individual has been killed and is "truly dead".

I feel that this is true, but add that the death of an individual of X is relatively inconsequential when we're dealing with a process that replaces that individual with a new one, thus preserving the size and "biodiversity" of the set X.

Sweet! You hear that Buritot you have your answer. I enjoyed this discussion very much thank you Simon_Jester.

[Wyrm]

So? What difference does "original" and "copy" make other than to an academic?

It makes a great deal of difference in that should we consider what has been tansported to be part of the "Whole of X" person concept or considered to be a seperate person entirely.
If they are the same absolutely than they are part of the "Whole of X"
If they are not then we can consider them to be seperate people in their entirety.

I find it very odd that a difference that is less than would be induced by normal living would somehow force a distinction between "original" and "copy".

Exacty how am I treating death trivialy when I am trying to explain that the person that gets into the transporter gets disintigrated dies the data gathered from the death is used to constuct a clone at the transit site that having copied the memories of the one that died carries on beliveing that it is the same one that walked into the transporter.
At no point is the death of the one that walked into the transporter trivial.

You don't get the right to bang your head here, cupcake. You keep insisting that disintegration is a form of death as if we all accepted this as an axiom, when it is in fact one of the very points under dispute. Bodily disintegration is, at best, a trauma, not a death. There is a gaping difference between the two. Dying is a process by which a body goes from a state compatible with life to a state where recovery to a state compatible with life is impossible. By hypothesis, this absolutely not what a well-functioning transporter does. Like I said, it's a strange definition of death to be so trivially reversed.

This is how you're treating death trivially. You may insist that stepping into the transporter is "dying", but it doesn't mean a damn thing. It lacks the emotional gravitas that normally accompanies a death, and has none of the physical consequences of death save that a body has disappeared from A and appeared at B. Actually, maybe I was a little inaccurate saying you're treating death trivially — I should have said you were treating a trivial thing as if it were death.

Now If we have X identical people where X is a whole number above 0 and 1.

What is even dumber is the fact that I posted this after your first post on this topic so you have no excuse for not having read this.

It was completely unnecessary for your argument. So I skipped it as cruft. Sorry.

Simon sees X and says because they are all identical they count as 1 whole person no matter what X is. Now if one individual of X dies he is not truly dead because there is still at lest one individual of X left so the person is considered alive. To use his book example he still has a copy of macbeth even though his original has been burnt.

I see X and say all of these individuals are people. If one individual of X dies he is truly dead and is not going to get up and do anything considered alive. The Whole of X is diminished but not destroyed by the death of the individual person.

Now I would define the "Whole of X" or Simon's one person concept as the "Super-Person" concept where the TOTAL identity of a multiple of identical individuals using the same personality is defined.

The rest of the "Math Problem" post area.

Its pretty fucking self explanitoy Wyrm. I was refering to your view ie Wyrm's view on death that being permament and not recoverable. Simon and I don't nessessisaly share the same view on death but this statement

To me, "death" indicates a certain finality that it would take a miracle to overcome.

is simmilar to my own that death is a permament thing.

Your explanation is NOT self-explanitory. Here,

If you had bothered to read all the posts you would have found that we do share similar views on the nature of death, normally final and permanent. It is Simon who claims that the transporter is pulling a "Lazarus/Jesus of the Week" in that it kills and and resurrects the subject.

I thought "we" was referring to you and Simon, not you and myself. Don't assume that I know what you mean when you say "we", especially when in a three-way argument.

No. Because you clearly don't mean "the transporter kills" (by which you mean non-permanent disassembly) the same way that the OP means "the transporter kills" (permanent death, no takebacks). The OP diagrees with Mike about whether the transporter is a "person annihilation clone assembly machine".

No you clearly dont understand what Im talking about. The disassembly is NOT a non-permanent thing which is why I refer to it as disintigration which is a form of permament death. What comes out is a clone copy it would only not be a clone if it used the same matter from the original.

If you'll forgive the strange phrase, the raw matter is immaterial, as it's all identical anyway. When you break things down this far, the question of whether the original matter is used in the reconstruction is meaningless.

And again, disintegration is not any form of death but a form of trauma, although unremedied, death is the usual outcome.

[Wyrm]

The real issue is that given C72's argument, all we've proven is that the process of moving Captain Kirk via transporter is equivalent to the process of cut-and-pasting a computer program... which most people agree is morally neutral.

Okay.

I'm afraid you've taken your counterargument a bit too far, because there's a difference between Captain Kirk(s) and fermion(s). Fermions are, as you say, indistinguishable. There is no way, even in theory, to tag two fermions. Captain Kirks, on the other hand, can be tagged quite easily, and these tags can be used to distinguish between otherwise identical members of the set, as illustrated by the Rand-Spock experiment in The Enemy Within.

The point, Simon, is that being spatially separated masses is not sufficient to demonstrate uniqueness, and therefore arguing that distinctness based solely on that criterion is fallicious.

Furthermore, these tags you speak of are, of course, physical objects or alterations in their own right, and make a physical difference in the makeup of the two objects that are otherwise identical. In the case of The Enemy Within, the tags can easily be explained by physical differences in Kirks' brain — different brain chemistry or wiring causing different behavior. These two Kirks are NOT otherwise identical, which violates the premise of the argument.

[Simon_Jester]

I'm afraid you've taken your counterargument a bit too far, because there's a difference between Captain Kirk(s) and fermion(s). Fermions are, as you say, indistinguishable. There is no way, even in theory, to tag two fermions. Captain Kirks, on the other hand, can be tagged quite easily, and these tags can be used to distinguish between otherwise identical members of the set, as illustrated by the Rand-Spock experiment in The Enemy Within.

The point, Simon, is that being spatially separated masses is not sufficient to demonstrate uniqueness, and therefore arguing that distinctness based solely on that criterion is fallicious.

Being spatially separated is not sufficient to demonstrate uniqueness... unless it is blindingly obvious that the objects in question are not bosons or fermions. Which, in this case, it is.

Now, strictly speaking, Channel72 should have said "They are both demonstrably unique because they both take up mass in the universe, and both exist at different locations in space-time, and they are not bosons or fermions." But assuming C72 had the physics background to realize the need, he would probably also have the background to assume that anyone else with the same background would realize that the case of indistinguishable subatomic particles does not apply here.

[SapphireFox]

Exacty how am I treating death trivialy when I am trying to explain that the person that gets into the transporter gets disintigrated dies the data gathered from the death is used to constuct a clone at the transit site that having copied the memories of the one that died carries on beliveing that it is the same one that walked into the transporter.
At no point is the death of the one that walked into the transporter trivial.

You don't get the right to bang your head here, cupcake. You keep insisting that disintegration is a form of death as if we all accepted this as an axiom, when it is in fact one of the very points under dispute. Bodily disintegration is, at best, a trauma, not a death. There is a gaping difference between the two. Dying is a process by which a body goes from a state compatible with life to a state where recovery to a state compatible with life is impossible. By hypothesis, this absolutely not what a well-functioning transporter does. Like I said, it's a strange definition of death to be so trivially reversed.

This is how you're treating death trivially. You may insist that stepping into the transporter is "dying", but it doesn't mean a damn thing. It lacks the emotional gravitas that normally accompanies a death, and has none of the physical consequences of death save that a body has disappeared from A and appeared at B. Actually, maybe I was a little inaccurate saying you're treating death trivially — I should have said you were treating a trivial thing as if it were death.

I will bang my head whenever I need to, to get my point across fishbait. Whether you want to refer to it as trauma or not it is still the Cause Of Death. Most people understand this without needing it explained to them that is why I was using the terms death and killed in the manner I was. It does not change that the COD is still disintegration.

Your argument is because it lacks emotional impact? I'm not sure whether to bang my head, piss myself laughing or to keep staring at the post with a what the fuck image on my face. Emotional impact....what the hell does the FEELING evoked by the death have anything to do with weather someone has died? I didn't feel anything when Saddam Hussein died does that negate his death? NO! Feelings have nothing to do with the physical nature of death.

I thought "we" was referring to you and Simon, not you and myself. Don't assume that I know what you mean when you say "we", especially when in a three-way argument.

Usually when I see people referencing someone else in a quote here they seem to understand that they are speaking to the one quoted. I will be sure to remember that not everyone can spot from a to b from now on and try to be more specific in the future. I apologize for the confusion.

If you'll forgive the strange phrase, the raw matter is immaterial, as it's all identical anyway. When you break things down this far, the question of whether the original matter is used in the reconstruction is meaningless.

And again, disintegration is not any form of death but a form of trauma, although unremedied, death is the usual outcome.

Again the use of the word trauma does not change the fact that disintegration is the CAUSE OF DEATH.

[Simon_Jester]

Your argument is because it lacks emotional impact? I'm not sure whether to bang my head, piss myself laughing or to keep staring at the post with a what the fuck image on my face. Emotional impact....what the hell does the FEELING evoked by the death have anything to do with weather someone has died? I didn't feel anything when Saddam Hussein died does that negate his death? NO! Feelings have nothing to do with the physical nature of death.

Let me put it this way:

According to the interpretation you're applying, if we beam Saddam Hussein to an orbiting starship, Saddam Hussein dies. If we hang Saddam Hussein in a stairwell, Saddam Hussein dies.

Are those deaths equivalent? Remember the big difference between them: if we beam Saddam Hussein up, there will still be a very convincing Saddam Hussein double running around and remembering how awesome it was to be the tyrannical ruler of Iraq. Even if he's "dead," he sure won't be acting dead. The world will go on much the same as it would if he had not "died" at all, and his influence in the world will not be changed.

If we hang Saddam Hussein in a stairwell, there will never be another one, and that's the end of the guy. He isn't going to come back and start taunting us for our incompetent counter-insurgency tactics the way he might if we beamed him up.

So there's a substantial difference between "death" in the sense that normal people use it in real life (to indicate the permanent destruction of something that cannot be replaced) and "death" in the sense that a Star Trek transporter kills (which permanently destroys something, but then recreates a strikingly similar copy of the something).

[SapphireFox]

Your argument is because it lacks emotional impact? I'm not sure whether to bang my head, piss myself laughing or to keep staring at the post with a what the fuck image on my face. Emotional impact....what the hell does the FEELING evoked by the death have anything to do with weather someone has died? I didn't feel anything when Saddam Hussein died does that negate his death? NO! Feelings have nothing to do with the physical nature of death.

Let me put it this way:

According to the interpretation you're applying, if we beam Saddam Hussein to an orbiting starship, Saddam Hussein dies. If we hang Saddam Hussein in a stairwell, Saddam Hussein dies.

Are those deaths equivalent? Remember the big difference between them: if we beam Saddam Hussein up, there will still be a very convincing Saddam Hussein double running around and remembering how awesome it was to be the tyrannical ruler of Iraq. Even if he's "dead," he sure won't be acting dead. The world will go on much the same as it would if he had not "died" at all, and his influence in the world will not be changed.

If we hang Saddam Hussein in a stairwell, there will never be another one, and that's the end of the guy. He isn't going to come back and start taunting us for our incompetent counter-insurgency tactics the way he might if we beamed him up.

So there's a substantial difference between "death" in the sense that normal people use it in real life (to indicate the permanent destruction of something that cannot be replaced) and "death" in the sense that a Star Trek transporter kills (which permanently destroys something, but then recreates a strikingly similar copy of the something).

That's fine, but my point is but how one "feels" about an event has no impact or relevance to the event itself. Feelings would effect how WE act toward the event but not the event itself. To give an example say my TV breaks and I have to replace it. Now I can feel depressed, angry, happy or ambivalent toward the TV breaking but how I feel about it doesn't change the event of the TV breaking. The TV is permanently destroyed and is replaced with another of the same model, how I felt about it doesn't change a thing about the event. From the external perspective I still have a TV and life goes on.