Star Trek and Philosophy

So it's late. You know what that means.
I'm really tired. Lot's on my mind.

And I was debating what type of post this would be tonight.
An ambiguously emo, writing of (basically) the norm, or a philosophical, and slightly creepy post related to Star Trek.

Hmm.
I'll spare you guys tonight.
I found a bunch of stuff about this, and it fascinated me to hell. Well here goes.


So, in Star Trek the "Beam me up, Scotty" Transporter thing is supposed to be your atomic structure being transmitted from one place to another. However beneath the technical jargon invented to describe all this is the complete ordered disintegration of the human body in one place and its reconstruction in another place. This means that, basically, you're dead partway through this process.

There are episodes and official Trekkie canon that directly says you're being killed on one end and cloned on the other, the original is destroyed so the replica can become the next you.

If you look past the surface the use of transporters conveys the message that we're just dying and copying ourselves throughout life: a constant molecular and cellular recombination, nothing more. The presumption is that no soul exists and our death is meaningless if someone else resumes our life immediately as an exact replica.

See that's the point though. you step in a teleporter and get "copied" and then destroyed.
So you step into the teleporter, and boom you're vaporized. you're now dead. your existence has been snuffed out. but of course you don't realize this because you have ceased to exist. This is when you hope that there is indeed an afterlife.

Since you're destroyed, we can't ask you what you think of the process, but if we ask your copy, he will swear up and down that he is real, he will have memories of before he stepped onto the transporter, and he will have memories afterwords. you have no way of testing if he is a different person or the same person. he will just be made of different atoms.

If you have no way of proving a difference, then for all practical purposes, there is no difference.

In one body my consciousness will cease to be. but everything I am, will live on in the clone, and my family and friends will not be able to tell that anything has happened.

I will have become Schrodinger's cat. I will both be dead and alive at the same time.

Creepy.






"We can already teleport photons, but what gets teleported is the photon's properties, not the actual photons themselves. Personally, I don't think that there will ever be a conventional use for converting energy into matter because of the amount of energy contained in one human being. Think about it: if one human can produce thousands of hiroshimas bombs, then you would need thousands of atom bombs worth of energy to create a turkey sandwich. That just doesn't seem practical to me. If that amount of energy were to be released when turning a man into energy, well let's just say there wouldn't be much left of anything for a few thousand miles!

Such conversions of particles to energy are called annihilations, that is, they are like explosions: the explosive material is completely destroyed and no memory of its original form remains. Furthermore, the second law of thermodynamics tells us that in any conversion of matter, some energy is inevitably lost. However, you could compensate by disintegrating some rocks and adding in that energy too.

In my view, when your body is converted into energy, you're destroyed, hence, you die. End of story. What comes out of the teleporter is an exact copy, with all your memories etc, and no knowledge that it isn't you, but it isn't. No one would ever notice the problem, so it only affects you when it happens. Unless, if you believe in souls, there are "conservation of souls" problems to deal with - does the same soul follow the body around? While in an energy state, there is no consciousness, no heart to beat, hence the person who first underwent this form of teleportation has cease to exist and replaced with a replica. Even renowned science fiction writer Larry Niven expressed his views on the transporter:

"I don't believe in bending space to order, and I wouldn't ride in a machine that annihilates me here, then beams away data that allows me to be exactly recreated somewhere else."

-Renowned science fiction writer, Larry Niven