I’m terrified of transporters
Am I? Who knows
Submitted 1 year ago by Stamets@startrek.website to risa@startrek.website
https://startrek.website/pictrs/image/7d577842-ec6e-40e7-b62e-38909588c967.jpeg
Comments
bobby_hill@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Stamets@startrek.website 1 year ago
You and a significant amount of individuals in Starfleet apparently. I can’t say I blame them too much. After all the shit that’s gone horribly wrong? They have a point.
I_Has_A_Hat@startrek.website 1 year ago
At least they have a better safety history than the fucking holodecks.
The_Picard_Maneuver@startrek.website 1 year ago
Old McCoy in his TNG cameo was right.
jawa21@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
Youthe infinite molecular clones of you die every time.Telodzrum@lemmy.world 1 year ago
troydowling@lemmy.world 1 year ago
What a Barclay.
bobby_hill@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Proudly so, ha
triclops6@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Yup, I’m taking the stairs
someguy3@lemmy.world 1 year ago
From orbit to the planet? That’s at least a dozen flights of stairs.
RampantParanoia2365@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Geordi: Reg, transporting really is the safest way to travel.
Barclay: Maybe you’re…wait a second. Didn’t it turn you and Ro into fucking ghosts like…2 weeks ago?
Narrrz@kbin.social 1 year ago
consider how often the enterprise threatens to explode, compared with how often they encounter issues with the transporter, and Geordie isn't exaggerating. he just isn't telling the whole story.
kromem@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It’s funny that when it’s transporter people freak out at this idea, but technically every single person goes to sleep not knowing if the ‘them’ that wakes up was the same as the one that went to sleep.
We could effectively have individual consciousnesses dying each night and new ones picking back up the next morning.
Something to think about as you lie drifting off to sleep tonight.
spirinolas@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Well…if that’s true then I have died over 14,000 times so I must be used to it.
G’night
SnipingNinja@slrpnk.net 1 year ago
The original comic page mentions the sleep thing in the alt text
Hadriscus@lemm.ee 1 year ago
This thought has prevented my sleep for years now.
weedazz@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I wake up in the body of someone else with the same residue of Cheetos in my mouth as the other person ate? Seems like a lot of effort
Ultraviolet@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The solution that clears up all of these issues and results in a fully consistent view of the self is the one people like the least. There is no “you” or “me”, the self is an illusion the brain creates to make sense of things.
abraxas@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
The Illusionist theory of Consciousness is pretty solidly refuted. The emergent theory of consciousness is vaguely similar, and argued by some to be stronger, others to be weaker, than illusionism. I think it’s the most popular view among physicalist philosophers. For the arguments against emergentism, the most common seems to be the required presupposition of physicalism plus some handwaving to make it work. It’s noted, however, there are a vast number of permutations of the emergentism argument or what emergent mental states actually mean, which each one of those permutations a bit different.
Upon analysis, neither has demonstrated being “a fully consistent view of the self” with any success. Ultimately, both are just unsubstantiated attempts to fill the gaps in our understanding.
GoodbyeBlueMonday@startrek.website 1 year ago
There’s a great They Might Be Giants song about exactly this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSbEOZY7k20
Kolanaki@yiffit.net 1 year ago
I don’t subscribe to the Star Trek teleporters killing you. They turn you into energy on one side, shoot that energy across subspace to the other end, and recombine you back into matter.
Why do I believe this? Because of several episodes where transported crew members, including Barclay, describe the sensation and what they see as they stream through the energy/matter conversion field. If they can describe the feeling and visual stimuli from end to end, I don’t see how it’s 2 different entities. It’s the same one, converted from matter to energy and back again.
themeatbridge@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The problem is that transporters don’t actually exist, so there isn’t a “real” way in which they work. The show presented several different descriptions for how they worked, and the functionality had whatever feature the plot demanded.
So you get the ship’s doctor who avoids it because she thinks it’s basically as described in this cartoon, you get the copy of Riker from the time he Schrodinger escaped from that planet, you’ve got the autosaved DNA sequences that helped them reset after a virus was about to kill everyone, and you get teleported people perceiving their trip. All of that can coexist because it isn’t consistent. Star Trek has some excellent detail, and explores some interesting hard scifi topics, but it’s still just fiction.
evidences@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Not to poo poo on your theory because this is all fake anyways but to your point brains are weird and we make shit up all the time when we can’t or just don’t understand how something works.
aperson@beehaw.org 1 year ago
www.smbc-comics.com/comic/teleporter-3
Source to give credit and so you can read the title text and the bonus panel.
Stamets@startrek.website 1 year ago
Didn’t even realize that it was cropped out. I saved this from elsewhere, I wouldn’t intentionally deprive credit to the artist. I’ll edit it into the description and give you the credit for that too. Sorry!
wahming@monyet.cc 1 year ago
Weird, there’s a bonus panel? I don’t see anything except the cropped intro
ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.de 1 year ago
The title text (click image to reveal)
The good news is this is the same thing that happens whenever you fall asleep, even for a second.
The bonus panel
cheery_coffee@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
I’ve always wondered if your consciousness would transfer over.
There’d be a consciousness, it would have your memories and be indistinguishable to you, but I can’t understand where the chemical/physical parts of the brain turn into me perceiving and experiencing stuff.
Stamets@startrek.website 1 year ago
Well consciousness is just chemical and electrical impulses. If you manage to re-create everything down to the molecule in the right area then you could completely rebuild the consciousness. Also means you’d be able to completely manipulate memories, experiences, basically anything held in the brain. Provided you had an intense enough neural mapping and deep enough understanding of the human brain to accomplish that. Luckily in the Trek universe, at least at the time of the 24th/25th century, that isn’t possible.
4am@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Your current consciousness, the one you are thinking with right now, would end.
A clone of you would go on at the transport site, fully believing that it is you, and that everything was fine.
Reconstructive teleportation is just remote replicators with mind control.
Olgratin_Magmatoe@startrek.website 1 year ago
Also means you’d be able to completely manipulate memories, experiences, basically anything held in the brain.
That’s assuming you know which exact parts do exactly what. Kinda like an encrypted zip file versus an unencrypted one.
You edit whatever set of bits/bytes you want in both, but only in one of them will you actually know whats going on.
cheery_coffee@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
But we do know there’s quantum weirdness to the universe, so I personally think you would need more than just a molecular copy.
It’s really the question of why am I the brain in this body? Why do I perceive existence, and why isn’t it just a sequence of reactions in a brain which can adapt to highly complex phenomenon.
franklin@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It’s just a more complicated example of the ship of Theseus, and honestly it comes down to if you believe in the concept of a soul.
To illustrate mechanically is a computer with the same model of hard drive with a copy of the data the same?
pixeltree@lemmy.world 1 year ago
If you take the drive apart, ship its parts somewhere, and reassemble it, is it the same drive?
superb@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
I believe there have been numerous times where it’s confirmed that you are conscious and perceiving things while in the transport stream
NOPper@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Barclay got sweet tentacle hugs a few times during transport.
quams69@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Play the game SOMA
Diplomjodler@feddit.de 1 year ago
We don’t understand just how this works just yet. But I’m confident that some day we will.
mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Daniel Dennet: “Only a theory that explained conscious events in terms of unconscious events, could explain consciousness at all.”
Neato@kbin.social 1 year ago
Transporter accidents prove transporters work this way and are murder machines. To an outside observer a perfect clone is the same person, impossible to differentiate. But to the individual's experience, they die every time they are disintegrated in a transporter. It's a new consciousness being created when reassembled that thinks it's continuous. It's hand-waved away because it's how it's always been and transporters are a key part of the Star Trek setting.
DharkStare@lemmy.world 1 year ago
There was that one episode with Barclay that showed he was conscious during transport and also showed that people could exist inside the matter stream (or whatever the technobabble is).
aaaa@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yeah that whole episode had strange ideas. He grabbed a fish person from the master stream and it became a human person when he integrated, and that just makes no sense with how the transporter works. Even O’Brien couldn’t figure that one out
Neato@kbin.social 1 year ago
I haven't seen that episode. But it kind of defeats the traditional explanation of how transporters work. Unless we go with the "we can exist as beings made of energy" which is always a popular type of alien or alternate being in Star Trek. And the classic transporter accidents don't make sense, then. When a transporter clones someone, who is the real one and how would you figure it out? Most of the accidents only make sense if you treat a transporter as a digital device that moves data.
FfaerieOxide@kbin.social 1 year ago
People get way too worked up about this.
Be less "Guy Fleegman afraid he was a redshirt" and more "Guy Fleegman once he's realized he's comic relief".If a consciousness thinks it's continuous that consciousness is continuous.
The substrate your consciousness dances on also changes all the time. Molecules arranged around the galaxy or cells dying and being replaced pose the exact same quandary, and the solution to both would seem to be "who cares"?The arrangement of cells and neurons known as "You" goes in, the arrangement of cells and neurons known as "You" comes out.
Attachment: media.kbin.social ↗Sordid@beehaw.org 1 year ago
If a consciousness thinks it’s continuous that consciousness is continuous.
No, it’s simply mistaken.
The substrate your consciousness dances on also changes all the time. Molecules arranged around the galaxy or cells dying and being replaced pose the exact same quandary, and the solution to both would seem to be “who cares”?
The difference is that molecules and cells don’t all disappear at once. Consciousness is brain activity, and the brain has redundancy that allows that activity to continue uninterrupted even when small parts are swapped out. When you destroy the whole thing, though, the activity stops.
The arrangement of cells and neurons known as “You” goes in, the arrangement of cells and neurons known as “You” comes out.
Would you be okay with your child (or some other loved one) being forcibly taken away and replaced with a perfect clone? If what you’re saying is true, you should be, since according to you they’re not just a copy, they’re literally the same person.
Neato@kbin.social 1 year ago
Not quite. You're describing our brains as a ship of Theseus, which is fairly accurate. But our consciousness is always on while alive. Even asleep and in near-death or temporarily dead our brains don't fully stop or die. Though our brains don't actually replace neurons quite like they replace all other cells. When neurons are damaged, those pathways are lost. Our brain is redundant enough that rarely manifests as a total loss of ability. And when it does, our brains can eventually route new pathways. If enough of these are damaged at once, it can totally change a person's personality.
But transporters turn matter into energy, those patterns are transmitted elsewhere, and energy (or different energy if stored in a pattern buffer) is reassembled very much like replicators. In this case the entire brain and body is stopped, destroyed and re-created. This is, for all intents and purposes, death and cloning. People have trouble with this because to anyone NOT transported, it looks identical. But the person absolutely stopped being alive and a new one was borne that thinks it has always existed.
And Star Trek backs it up. The classic transporter accident that makes a clone of someone? If the transported person is still the same consciousness, what is the clone? Clearly that person isn't controlling 2 bodies with 1 consciousness. Which is the "real" McCoy? The answer is whichever wasn't disintegrated, or neither if they both were as part of the transporter process.
nymwit@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I think it’s more they are murdering the current instance of a pattern of matter and with it the biological implementation of the pattern of consciousness. Another instance of the same pattern is created near simultaneously. To flip it, aren’t they life creating machines as much as murder machines?
Sordid@beehaw.org 1 year ago
To flip it, aren’t they life creating machines as much as murder machines?
Yes, but having a baby doesn’t exonerate you from murder.
jaycifer@kbin.social 1 year ago
There is a chapter or two from a book by philosopher Derek Parfit that tackles the transporter issue pretty head-on. It draws what I feel to be a pretty compelling distinction between the continuity of your conscious mind, referred to as Relation R, and the personal identity that is lost when using the transporter. He then asks which is more important. Worth a read if this stuff interests you.
be_excellent_to_each_other@kbin.social 1 year ago
I look forward to reading it, and I will be able to enjoy certain kinds of scifi much more if it convinces me nothing is lost. Your phrasing makes me think it's just going to reinforce my general worry about that sort of tech though.
(I recognize that it's fictional, it just breaks stories with similar tech a bit for me.)
SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.net 1 year ago
There was an episode of The Outer Limits (7x08 Think Like a Dinosaur) that dealt with this exact question.
In that episode, humans are maybe-given a teleportation tech that creates a perfect copy somewhere else, but the aliens need to trust that we will ‘balance the equation’ (destroy the original) every time. That’s easy when the human in question is immobilized for transfer. Only one transfer goes wrong- the person being transferred is woken up before the transfer is confirmed, and then the transfer gets confirmed. So now you have the original human, who’s already been copied, and the transfer operator still has to ‘balance the equation’…
UlyssesT@hexbear.net 1 year ago
This is the struggle session that launches a million “a sufficiently high fidelity copy of a person is literally the same person” takes, which often conveniently require the original person to die to maintain that “literally the same person” take. If the person didn’t “go anywhere” and was told “congratulations, you teleported! Now kindly step into the biomass recycler because literally you is already at the destination” I don’t blame that original from not going quietly.
xusontha@ls.buckodr.ink 1 year ago
Does that mean transporter clones are when the transporter ACTUALLY worked?
Sethayy@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
OK I’m not even a Trekkie but I was doing some elecromag homework and I have a really cool theory on this:
The teleporter thingy actually acts more like a guitar pickup, in a more E=mc^2 type of way, entirely perfectly converting the person into energy - not matter. (This would require an analog encoding from matter to energy). The biggest difference is the pickup totally uses up the entire person, so like if you strum a guitar and it converts to a perfect electrical wave (but the guitar goes mute).
This energy is a lot easier to transfer than just matter, but the person encoded within it still only exists once in that energy. (for the guitar analogy a speaker at the other end that picks up the guitar wave, and turns it back into sound)
Its then entirely used up to power the ‘person builder’ in an analog way, much more accurately than were able to recreate digitally (aka why tape record are the truest form of music recording we have, it accutate to a way smaller scale than we can capture digitally.)
This would then mean that we can’t just duplicate the creation process, cause the energy only flowed into the machine one time in that exact fashion, and duplicating it would require knowledge of every single atom in a person; then a way to accurately recreate that energy waveform to power the machine.
This also opens the possibility of the transporter ‘missing’ if somehow they moved faster than the speed of light, while the person was still being transported, and them being just a flash of light endlessly propagating throughout the void.
Idk if the things have range in the series, but it could also be that the angle a transporter can accurately capture that energy is limited, and so really far away things are too large to be able to accurately capture (unless you have a massive radar dish or something alike)
Tofu_Lewis@hexbear.net 1 year ago
Okaaaay, just because you’ve brought it up…
Transporters in Star Trek are shown to definitely not be duplication machines. “Our Man Bashir” (DS9) is probably the most definitive proof of that.
Personally, I think transporter technology explains the staunch atheist (but still open-minded and sometimes spiritualist) Federation mindset: they know that their entire being can be reduced to a matter/energy stream. The transporter makes a devastating philosophical challenge to the idea of a “soul.” Which is, ironically, why so many Federation officers refuse to accept anything that challenges that assumption (VOY “Sacred Ground”).
kaput@jlai.lu 1 year ago
www.schlockmercenary.com webcomics has a very interesting story arc about teleporters and why they were replaced.
The_Picard_Maneuver@startrek.website 1 year ago
Transporters are death machines!
SpaceCadet2000@kbin.social 1 year ago
This is the plot of The Prestige, and to some extent of the survival horror game Soma.
jana@leminal.space 1 year ago
But what’s the difference really
HairHeel@programming.dev 1 year ago
I guess if he remembers the conversation he knows it’s not true. If he doesn’t remember the conversation, you get more amusement next time you tell him.
Kirkkh@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Actual teleportation is a legit property of quantum mechanics (e.g. in a real transporter you’re not killed/cloned – but “you” do cease to exist for some x period of time). Also a teleporter doesn’t need a ‘Heisenberg compensator’: you want the data to maintain its superposition.
The only caveat is the teleportation must be at or slower than speed of light.
fleabs@lemmy.world 1 year ago
EtherWhack@lemmy.world 1 year ago
You have to get materials for the replicators to make things some way, don’t you?
adam@kbin.pieho.me 1 year ago
Read the "The Punch Escrow". Not star trek but well worth it if you're into this sort of thought experiment.
Quentinp@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Always reminds me of one of my favorite books (part of a series) The Collapsium by Will McCarthy. A big part of the book is their version of teleporting which does involve destruction and recreation, but while you’re at it you could make more than one copy at the destination…
FfaerieOxide@kbin.social 1 year ago
If your consciousness exists right down to conversationally-induced existential dread, what do you care what or where the substrate it exists on is?
GreenTeaRedFlag@hexbear.net 1 year ago
If you stepped through a time-travel portal, your conscience would effectively not exist between the original time and the time the portal leads to, yet no one would call you dead. If you could somehow install your mind into a new body, let’s say you download it into a flashdrive and plug it into someone else’s brain while your original body lays without a mind, people may call our body dead but not you. So when there is a continuity of self between the person who steps inot the teleporter and the person who steps out, I will never call that a death, that’s silly.
emile@tacobu.de 1 year ago
Reminds me of that CGP Grey video elaborating on the same idea (youtu.be/nQHBAdShgYI)
chahk@beehaw.org 1 year ago
Just need to think like a dinosaur.
usualsuspect191@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
GreenMario@lemm.ee 1 year ago
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I’m taking shuttlecrafts.
aeronmelon@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Star Trek The Motion Picture’s transporter accident gave me nightmares.
Galaxy Quest’s transporter accident made me laugh so hard I almost pissed myself.
Stamets@startrek.website 1 year ago
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Anything that ever includes Galaxy Quest is an immediate win from me. Doesn’t help I’ve seen the movie so many times (it’s a movie version of my weighted blanket) that I can vividly hear that ‘exploded’ line in my head.
Fuck you I’ve gotta turn the damn movie on again now.
Now look what you’ve gone and done.
xusontha@ls.buckodr.ink 1 year ago
I like the “Gay” folder lol
GreenMario@lemm.ee 1 year ago
FYI your bottom image crashes Jerboa client 100% of the time lol
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GFGJewbacca@lemm.ee 1 year ago
By Grabthar’s hammer…what savings.
Xtallll@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
Enterprise… what we got back didn’t live long… fortunately. The fortunately was always the worst part of the line.