The Trouble With Transporters



Enjoy. >_>
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The last couple seconds were the best.
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Reginald was right to fear transporters.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/tv/a19793/the-trouble-with-the-star-trek-transporter/
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Sleep well tonight ;)
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Wooooo that was great.
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Someone made a rebuttal
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But the question is, if the real me is dead, and the new creature has all my memories, experiences, and personality, why wouldn't it be me? Hell if I'm dead this new me could take over in my life no problem as far as I'm concerned.
The issue is that the initial iteration of you is dead. You Prime ceases to be the instant you transport, and You¹ is created wherever you are beaming to. The last thing You Prime would remember is a swirl of light, and then you would be dead. That iteration of you is finished, and You¹ is just a copy. Beam back, and You¹ dies and You² is created.

Now imagine that this was accomplished without killing you. You Prime stays alive on the ship while You¹ is created on an alien planet. You¹ experiences the planet while You Prime have a nice lunch on the ship. When You¹ finishes the mission they beam a copy of themselves, You², to the ship. You¹ is stranded on the planet forever, and now there are two Yous on the ship, one with memories of a fantastical alien world, the other with memories of a pastrami on rye.

Which one is you? The one that stayed on the ship? The one stuck forever on the alien planet because the transporter didn't mercy kill them once their mission was completed? Or the you that is pretty sure they lived your life, saw a strange new world, and then came back to their ship to find themselves with crumbs on their jacket? By virtue of their unique experiences each one is a distinct You, but there is no continuity between iterations.

You Prime would cease to exist the instant they beamed down. You¹ only has your memories. Every time you step into a transporter, the You that you are would cease and a new You would come into being. Every time you beam out you know, rationally, from the nature of the technology, that 'energize' will be your last words and that the You that has lunch with the captain will not be the You that made the plans with them. It gets heavy.

...Buuuuuuut presumably Star Trek fixes that with the Heisenberg Compensator, or something. '>_>
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See, but, as brought up in one of the videos, there's no actual proof that there's continuity between the you that falls asleep each night and the you that wakes up every morning. Same concept.
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Right, but we can be reasonably certain that your molecules aren't being converted from matter to energy and back while you're asleep, and that is where most of the contention lies.

Assuming that any level of true continuity is possible under normal conditions, the abnormal conditions of matter transportation prove a definitive stopping point.
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Davin, that's what William Riker is there for... And William Riker.

I am just mucking about.
wrote:
The issue is that the initial iteration of you is dead. You Prime ceases to be the instant you transport, and You¹ is created wherever you are beaming to. The last thing You Prime would remember is a swirl of light, and then you would be dead. That iteration of you is finished, and You¹ is just a copy. Beam back, and You¹ dies and You² is created.

Now imagine that this was accomplished without killing you. You Prime stays alive on the ship while You¹ is created on an alien planet. You¹ experiences the planet while You Prime have a nice lunch on the ship. When You¹ finishes the mission they beam a copy of themselves, You², to the ship. You¹ is stranded on the planet forever, and now there are two Yous on the ship, one with memories of a fantastical alien world, the other with memories of a pastrami on rye.

Which one is you? The one that stayed on the ship? The one stuck forever on the alien planet because the transporter didn't mercy kill them once their mission was completed? Or the you that is pretty sure they lived your life, saw a strange new world, and then came back to their ship to find themselves with crumbs on their jacket? By virtue of their unique experiences each one is a distinct You, but there is no continuity between iterations.

You Prime would cease to exist the instant they beamed down. You¹ only has your memories. Every time you step into a transporter, the You that you are would cease and a new You would come into being. Every time you beam out you know, rationally, from the nature of the technology, that 'energize' will be your last words and that the You that has lunch with the captain will not be the You that made the plans with them. It gets heavy.

...Buuuuuuut presumably Star Trek fixes that with the Heisenberg Compensator, or something. '>_>
Yeah that's quite a dilemma. I don't have an easy answer for it. But if the No Cloning Principle is in fact real, then we may have to never worry about it.

Oh and all the Heisenberg Compensator does is, well compensate for the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle where it's stated, we can't know a particle's position and speed at the same time, two things we need to know at once for transporters to work.
The only real difference is that it's an abrupt stop. You have nearly none of the same matter in you as you did as a child; almost literally none of the same brain cells.
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The only real difference is that it's an abrupt stop. You have almost none of the same matter in you as you did as a child; almost literally none of the same brain cells.

I don't know, some people would say that's all the brain cells I've got.
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