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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?
> The biggest conundrum of all is the fact that pretty much everyone understands that consciousness is a physical state of the brain
Bullshit.
The shared Out-of-Body experiences proves that assumption false.
There's a great animated short by John Weldon that explores this topic. It's called To Be and can be found at this URL: http://www.nfb.ca/film/to_be/
I raised this very question (Star Trek, transporter experiment) to my daughter when she was a teenager. Her response was, what's the difference? Our atoms have already largely completely changed over many times by now anyway. I recall reading years ago, I think it was a Time Life book or perhaps an educational movie, that we're all breathing, and thus by implication incorporating, some fraction of the actual atoms that Leonardo da Vinci breathed; a matter of statistics. Of course, that still leaves the question of whether your consciousness this very instant is already a different "thing" that it was a second ago, and only your current state of your memory leads you to believe that it is the same.
A scientific view of consciousness would state that if you could find a way to duplicate a physical body, then you could build a transporter as our consciousness is just the chemical and atomic state of our brain.
If we really have a metaphysical "soul", then just how would that re-attach to the physical form you transport elsewhere?
I liked how Dark Matter handled this better, where they created a clone at the destination while you were cryogenically stored at the origin, then if the clone made it back to the transmitter without dying you would get all of the memories of what happened.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They also engaged a second beam in that instance fearing the one wasn't enough. When they realized the one was fine, they shut the beam down. Normally, that copy of the signal would have been lost. However, the unique atmosphere of that planet enhanced the beam, reflected it back and another Riker materialized.
It's not the same as saying there is or isn't an original.
They beamed him twice at the same time and in a fluke accident got down data and matter.
I'm saying that they truly are two different things: one is a file on computer A, the other is a file on computer B (where A is not the same computer as B). The fact that their contents are equivalent doesn't change the fact that IN REALITY they actually are two different things.
Now, you could argue that this doesn't matter at a certain level (e.g. - digital copies of a movie are indistinguishable) and at those certain levels I would agree. However, here I was talking about people and people absolutely do have a "privileged viewpoint" of themselves (i.e. - their current sense perceptions).
That is, if you put me in a room with a new perfect copy of myself, I will still be me (on this side of the room) and the copy will still be the copy (on that side of the room). The copy might think the exact same thing too, but in opposite terms, but neither of us will be confused about which of the us is "me." We will each think of ourselves as "me" and the other as the "other." Nor will we have our perception suddenly flip into the other's body on the other side of the room.
If someone walks into the room and shoots one of the copies, then the other will not suddenly fall over dead as if it were shot too or anything bizarre like that.
I'm not claiming that "the original" is somehow superior or has more intrinsic worth or anything like that. I'm saying that each copy will view itself as an independent entity, because that is what they are. They are different things.