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Ask Slashdot: Is Beaming Down In Star Trek a Death Sentence?
Artem Tashkinov writes: Some time ago, Ars Technica ran a monumental article on beaming of consciousness in Star Trek and its implications, and more importantly, whether it's plausible to achieve that without killing a person in the process.
It seems possible in the Star Trek universe. However, currently physicists find the idea absurd and unreal because there's no way you can transport matter and its quantum state without first destroying it and then recreating it perfectly, due to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. The biggest conundrum of all is the fact that pretty much everyone understands that consciousness is a physical state of the brain, which features continuity as its primary principle; yet it surely seems like copying the said state produces a new person altogether, which brings up the problem of consciousness becoming local to one's skull and inseparable from gray matter. This idea sounds a bit unscientific because it introduces the notion that there's something about our brain which cannot be described in terms of physics, almost like soul.
This also brings another very difficult question: how do we know if we are the same person when we wake up in the morning or after we were put under during general anesthesia? What are your thoughts on the topic?
It seems possible in the Star Trek universe. However, currently physicists find the idea absurd and unreal because there's no way you can transport matter and its quantum state without first destroying it and then recreating it perfectly, due to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. The biggest conundrum of all is the fact that pretty much everyone understands that consciousness is a physical state of the brain, which features continuity as its primary principle; yet it surely seems like copying the said state produces a new person altogether, which brings up the problem of consciousness becoming local to one's skull and inseparable from gray matter. This idea sounds a bit unscientific because it introduces the notion that there's something about our brain which cannot be described in terms of physics, almost like soul.
This also brings another very difficult question: how do we know if we are the same person when we wake up in the morning or after we were put under during general anesthesia? What are your thoughts on the topic?
Is the transporter killing people by ripping them apart atom by atom, and then creating a new person?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
"... which brings up the problem of consciousness becoming local to one's skull and inseparable from gray matter. This idea sounds a bit unscientific because it introduces the notion that there's something about our brain which cannot be described in terms of physics, almost like soul."
No, all it says is that a copy of a brain is not the original brain.
If you make a perfect copy of an orange, all the way down to the subatomic level, then that copy is still not the original orange. It's the copy.
If you make a perfect copy of me, down to the sub-atomic level and that copy walks into my room, then I will not suddenly confuse that copy with myself.
The universe is entirely static, a four dimensional object where everything that has or will happen exists simultaneously in an eternally unchanging state.
Our perception of it dynamically changing over time is an illusion of senses only perceiving a single "slice" of that object.
Furthermore, our consciousness is not continuous, but rather a disconnected multitude, each trapped forever in a specific moment of our lives. Each convinced it has a history because of the illusion of memory. Each convinced it has free will because of the illusion of action.
"shared out-of-body experience" is also a new-age farce.
Conversations like this are being had all over the Internet by amateurs who don't know nearly enough about the relevant subjects to speak intelligently on them, and of course consider themselves experts nonetheless.
"Soul" is a religious concept, zero actual evidence of the existence of any such thing, and it is not a concept that should be included in such discussions.
"Consciousness" is only meaningful when people don't abuse it by using it as a modern synonym for "soul." Consciousness is NOT a magical floaty part of yourself that is really you but isn't made out of matter. It's a high-level abstraction of everything necessary for a complex nervous system to be responsive. The word loses all usefulness when it is polluted with superstitious tripe!
The philosophical problem of personal identity is important and relevant, but it is also technical, has a long history, and there is a lot more to know about it than what you can infer from its name and common sense! If you are not educated you cannot participate in the debate!
"Identity" is an abstract concept, not a concrete thing, and the brain arrives it by a very fuzzy cognitive process. All of our "oh its is so mysterious" responses just come from a simple, and ignorant, expectation that this abstract concept should behave more like a physical object. It is why people try to bend your brain with questions like:
if you chop a person's arm of, and attach a different arm, is it still the same person? What if you pull three neurons out of that person's brain, and replace them with three new neurons? What if you pull 300 nerouns out and replace them? 3 million? What if you just swap the whole brain out with a totally different brain that has the same memories? Where is the specific line at which it becomes a different person?
These questions don't point out a problem of reality, nor do they point out a problem of "the mystery of consciousness" or anything stupid like that. They demonstrate that the concept of self that we are using is not clearly defined. That's ALL they demonstrate!
I realize I am ranting. So I will stop. Have fun remaining blind while being led by the blind, on this one.
The Star Trek Transporter is a device invented to facilitate telling a story. There was 50 minutes. Obviously they could get in their space shuttle and land on the planet, get from the clear place they chose to the town, and then start the story. Or they could beam in.
There is also the fact that the way the communicators work is elided in the story. Obviously the channel can't be open until you say the name of the person you're calling, and even with some speeding up of the original audio it's going to take a second or two for them to catch up and respond. But nobody waits for the phone to ring on Star Trek.
And of course the data transfer method of the future is to give someone your tablet :-)
These are story devices. We can speculate about matter transmission being applied to conscious entities and copying people, but we should be clear that the reason these are used in Star Trek is not because they think that is how things will be in the future. It's because they made telling the story in the present easier to do.
Bruce Perens.
The biggest conundrum of all is the fact that pretty much everyone understands that consciousness is a physical state of the brain, which features continuity as its primary principle; yet it surely seems like copying the said state produces a new person altogether, which brings up the problem of consciousness becoming local to one's skull and inseparable from gray matter. This idea sounds a bit unscientific because it introduces the notion that there's something about our brain which cannot be described in terms of physics, almost like soul.
Consciousness is a physical state of the brain. It is a section of the brain which is 'reading' what's happening in other areas of the brain (more like the 2nd informational hub of the brain, similar to a large rest stop on a superhighway.) You can damage/turn off those other areas without losing consciousness. Continuity is not a primary principle. There are many ways to break continuity. Your unconscious mind don't break continuity during most of those instances. You can watch that on brain scanners.
Sleeping doesn't break continuity. It blocks short-term memory storage of the events happening during sleep. You can slowly train your brain to not do that. When you do so you become a lucid dreamer.
Exactly copying something means you have a second copy. So the second brain has its own consciousness exactly identical to the first until they start experiencing different inputs. In what way does any of that imply a soul? It doesn't, You just made up that statement because you've confused yourself. The summary makes an invalid argument so this shouldn't have been approved to Slashdot.
My thoughts on this topic are meaningless and so are yours. God is a human invention. You can see it time and time again by studying history, how humans react, and the areas of your brain which turn off during meditation/prayer (the section which lets you know where all yours parts are when you're not looking at them, so turning it off gives you an out-of-body experience). It doesn't matter if you're a new person when you have a gap in memory or not. Since it's trivial to demonstrate you don't go under any abnormal physical changes during such periods, the answer to such a question is meaningless no matter the answer.
Maybe this is the wrong question to ask...
Obviously, given the transporter doesn't exist yet, this is all hypothetical. However, assuming that a transporter had been developer for inanimate objects and your question preceded a decision to use it to attempt to transfer a living organism, then a different question becomes relevant:-
What is the mechanism by which the human brain achieves consciousness?
Because, I would argue, you can only answer the second question ("Is Beaming Down In Star Trek a Death Sentence?") when you know (1) How the Beaming Down process works; and (2) How the brain acts as the "container" for the mind [assuming it does].
Digging a little bit deeper... If it can be shown that consciousness is achieved merely from the result of a truly massive scale of parallel chemical processes that are taking place in the cells of the brain, then well, it might be possible. It would require technology that could scan the body not to a cellular resolution, but to an *atomic*, or possibly even sub-atomic resolution, instantaneously... then transmit that information to a remote location and reconstitute all that organic matter, with all those chemical "transactions", all synchronised to exactly the same point in time...
On the other hand, if consciousness exists through other means [I'm making this up, but, say quantum super-positioning] then the act of scanning the subject at the point of origin might in fact destroy the "data" before it could be "beamed" anywhere.
This is why my answer is that the OP asks the wrong question. It's not the beaming you need to consider first, it's to understand how consciousness functions at a materials science level. Only then can you start to understand the functional design requirements of the transporter.
The materialist argument is that a copy of you is also "you," you've basically just been "forked."
If the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory is correct, there are an infinite number of you anyway, so what's one more?
The sticky problem is that even with a materialist explanation, it still doesn't explain what conscious awareness actually IS, just that it's an aspect of certain arrangements of matter. The problem of qualia is not solved, in fact it's a total mystery.
It's a high-level abstraction of everything necessary for a complex nervous system to be responsive.
Please describe an objective repeatable test that a "conscious" entity would pass, but an entity without "consciousness" would fail.
"I know it when I see it" is not an objective test.
The word loses all usefulness when it is polluted with superstitious tripe!
"Consciousness" is superstitious tripe.
Astral travel is nothing more than a lucid dream with self imposed limits on the experience. You see yourself as travelling around on the astral plane because that's what you want to see. You can also have sex with a supermodel or captain a star ship if that's what you want. It's all in your head. There is just as much evidence of shared OOBEs as there is of telekinesis and telepathy...that is: none.
That article reflects an outdated understanding. Adult neuron growth is known and studied. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Why don't you just admit that there is no evidence you would believe, and that until Penn & Teller tell you it's OK, there is no amount of peer-reviewed research you will ever accept? It would save us a lot of time with me providing citations and you not looking at them and deciding they're BS.
https://bioethics.georgetown.e...
http://www.resuscitationjourna...
There's lots more where that came from. I just picked this off the top.
Did you read your own link? Because neither link support the idea of OBE or consciousness existing outside the brain.
Let me summarize them for you since you took the assertion that I wouldn’t read it: there’s evidence of consciousness after clinical death. The brain does things we don’t fully understand yet. But it’s a huge leap to say that our consciousness exist outside your brain. Here’s a movie analogy, you believe consciousness is like “Dr. Strange” while existing evidence says it’s more like “Jacob’s Ladder.”
I don't imagine an atom or electron has a particularly sophisticated awareness, but if it has even the smallest fleck of "I am!" to build upon, then it fundamantally changes the nature of the questions we should be asking.
He references Donald Hoffman who, amongst other rather goofy ideas, suggests something along those lines; the idea that "consciousness" is infinitely subdivisible, right down to the subatomic particles.
The thing is, once you start defining concussions or "awareness" in those terms, it loses all useful meaning and becomes indistinguishable from just saying "there's magic stuff everywhere". It's not science, it's barely philosophy, and it's certainly not useful. That doesn't mean that it's wrong, per say, but it's not even wrong. It's unfalsifiable, and so meaningless that it provides nothing of value to consider or discuss. It's essentially religion dressed up as philosophy, which is why Donald Huffman sounds a lot like a more eloquent Deepak Chopra.
It's not currently testable, but considering it's damn near impossible to test whether a fellow human is actually aware of anything that's not surprising. It's not a symptom of magical thinking, but rather of trying to find the source of something we have no reliable method of detecting in the first place. We're putting the cart miles in front of the horse.
And it's not at all a meaningless concept - it's a completely objective and deeply relevant one: either fundamental particles are conscious, or they're not. If they are, then that changes they way we should look for the source of our awareness - not for a mechanism that creates it, but for a path that allows it to emerge from lower levels. (presumably in a more sophisticated form)
Heck, you don't even need to assume it originates from fundamental particles for that to be a useful perspective - anyone who has watched an amoeba hunt will get the impression that it has some spark of awareness in it's single-celled body, and it's no great leap to assume our individual cells may possess such awareness as well. So how is it that the awareness of your neurons combines to form the gestalt awareness of "you"? It should be clear that starting from that assumption suggests an entire realm of research avenues that are overlooked by the assumption that awareness is something somehow produced by mechanistic "bio-transistors"
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
And your evidence for this is?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.