Would you use a transporter beam?

[Umbran]

(which in computer science terms, may be energy, not matter).

Mr. Spock's "pure energy" does not exist. Energy is a quality that *things* have. The energy of your brain is associated with the particles that make it up. For the copier to work and get you a living being, rather than a lump of dead meat, it must be catching not just the matter and position, but energy states as well.

 

[delericho]

Why is it better? You materialize the duplicate, take the organs, and then dematerialize the remains. What's the problem?

Oops. Good point.

 

[Janx]

Mr. Spock's "pure energy" does not exist. Energy is a quality that *things* have. The energy of your brain is associated with the particles that make it up. For the copier to work and get you a living being, rather than a lump of dead meat, it must be catching not just the matter and position, but energy states as well.

fair enough. Anyway, do you step into the machine to go on your vacation or not?

 

[Hand of Evil]

You have to ask, what are you? Soul/energy or physical? I think we are talking about transcendence, where our society has moved beyond the material. Transportation could be seen as an early step, use of equipment to help us perform a task that one day we would be doing at will.

 

[Umbran]

fair enough. Anyway, do you step into the machine to go on your vacation or not?

I gave an answer earlier, but... thinking more....

If it works the way I said... probably not.

If it works the way Morrus said... I have issues with considering hypotheticals that run contrary to how I know the universe actually works. If it can work the way Morrus originally states, some rules are getting broken - in order to answer I'd need to know which. I am *not* throwing myself into a machine that's going to disintegrate my body unless I understand how it works! I think this is a rational position to take

 

[Morrus]

I gave an answer earlier, but... thinking more....

If it works the way I said... probably not.

If it works the way Morrus said... I have issues with considering hypotheticals that run contrary to how I know the universe actually works. If it can work the way Morrus originally states, some rules are getting broken - in order to answer I'd need to know which. I am *not* throwing myself into a machine that's going to disintegrate my body unless I understand how it works! I think this is a rational position to take

You're really not entering into the spirit of the thread! It's a philosophical question, not a technical one. It doesn't matter how it works - just that it does.

We all understand that it's fiction. Nobody is claiming it's anything other than pure sci-fi.

 

[tomBitonti]

As we understand it today, quantum mechanics answers the question for us, through Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. You *cannot* be copied *exactly*, as the information about your original body cannot be known *exactly*. There *will* be differences. So, yes, you got disintegrated, and there's a very close copy of you walking around. Star Trek had to invoke gobbledigook (the "Heisenberg Compensators") to get around this

I think this is close to the answer, but, I thought that state could be transported without it being determined?

But, there is another problem: Quantum mechanics apparently doesn't allow copying. See "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem".

If transporting consciousness requires copying of quantum state, it would seem that a transporter must destroy the initial state in order to transport it to another location. Personhood / identity / the essence of consiousness seems to be preserved.

On the other hand, if consciousness does not require copying of the full quantum state, which is to say, if a lower fidelity copy is sufficient, then maybe both a transporter and a copying transporter are possible. But, that seems to bring up a different question: If a person goes into a coma, and their brain function is largely disrupted, then they recover, are they the same person, or a new person who has acquired another's memories? This could be taken further: How much is a person, today, the same as the person, yesterday? Conscious state might arise in the morning, pieced together from the memories of past days, and then dissipate every evening.

Thx!

TomB

 

[Umbran]

You're really not entering into the spirit of the thread! It's a philosophical question, not a technical one.

I say that is a false dichotomy.

 

[Morrus]

I say that is a false dichotomy.

Meh. If you don't want to play along, don't. It's all just a bit of fun. :shrug:

 

[Janx]

I gave an answer earlier, but... thinking more....

If it works the way I said... probably not.

If it works the way Morrus said... I have issues with considering hypotheticals that run contrary to how I know the universe actually works. If it can work the way Morrus originally states, some rules are getting broken - in order to answer I'd need to know which. I am *not* throwing myself into a machine that's going to disintegrate my body unless I understand how it works! I think this is a rational position to take

I'll consider this as playing along. Your previous answers questioned the science of a philosophical question. This answer gets down to something reasonably definitive about the question itself.

Consider that for the rest of us, we don't know how stuff works and we use it anyway.