Slashdot Mirror
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?
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/
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".
. . . beaming down while wearing a red shirt does NOT seem to be a good idea.
Folks dressed like that never seem to last too long.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
"... 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.
... 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.
It's been established that ST transporters have Heisenberg compensators, so checkmate actual physicists.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Hasn't "BeauHD" ever heard of Heisenberg Compensators?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
No sig today...
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.
Since we are talking Star Trek, this has all ready been directly answered. Riker beams up, but leaves a copy. Years later, he is rediscovered by the enterprise crew. Dr. Crusher and Jordi agree they are identical and equally "Riker" so it must be true. Eventually the duplicate wanders off to lead a life of his own. Glad I could wrap that up for everyone scientifically, once and for all.
"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 Outer Limits did an interesting episode on this topic: s07 e08 Think Like a Dinosaur.
That's sleep paralysis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It's very common and nothing to worry about.
That's what the Heisenberg compensator are for: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/...
Try it! Library of Babel
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
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.
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.
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.
But why is the copy in the Mirror Universe ALWAYS Evil and has a Beard?
Come again?
Don't mind if I do.
The other day somebody stole everything in my apartment and replaced it with an exact replica... When my roommate came home I said, "Roommate, someone stole everything in our apartment and replaced it with an exact replica." He looked at me and said, "Do I know you?"
- Steven Wright
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
In my dreams I am a supermodel starship captain.
Well then. I'll see you tonight ...
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.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
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.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.”
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.