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?

Comments

To Be

[tomtom]

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/

Opposite Take

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re: Bullshit

[PopeRatzo]

There are no cooberated (sic) out of body experiences in science

See, I didn't think so either, until I checked the scientific literature. There most certainly are examples of corroborated out of body experience. It's most often found in studies of near-death experience cases, especially of blind subjects.

Let me remind you that skeptics base their opinions on evidence, not on what some TV magician tells them is true.

Re:Double Bullshit

[jschultz410]

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.

Re: Bullshit

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Nobody knows shit about consciousness, and no physical model has ever explained it, despite some 150-200 years of scientific work on the problem – years which yielded countless discoveries in dozens of other fields, many presumably directly related.

How matter produces "awareness" is a question, not understood any better now, than in the time of Aristotle, or the dark ages.

Nor shall it ever be, I expect. Not as long as assumptions about the physical nature of the universe continue to remain as they have, from those ancient days, through the era of quantum mechanics. I'd wager consciousness is still a problem, unresolved, 150 years hence.

I do think that the work by Dr Donald Hoffman at UC Irvine is very interesting, at least in explaining how we are fundamentally wrong about consciousness and perception, because a real understanding of our environment can be demonstrated as evolutionary unfitness.

Re: Bullshit

[Immerman]

There is an alternative to the problem matter producing awareness: awareness might be an inherent property of matter. 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.

In that case the awareness of an organism need not be a is not a fundamentally new feature, but an emergent structure from the interactions of more primitive consciousnesses. Much as the life of an organism emerges from the structured functioning of the life of its cells. Or the wisdom of crowds (and insanity of mobs) emerges from the interaction of large groups of people.