Okuda has since come out and said that both the TNG and the TOS writers accidentally wrote themselves into a corner with transporter technology (it's a murder xerox). If he was to rework the technobabble, he's basically leaning in the direction of something that ensures continuity of self.
They do establish that people are conscious during transport and can even communicate with each other.
They have, but that still doesn't jive with how it would actually work if you could build one which is the problem the writers recognized. They put that in to try to demonstrate that they didn't have murder xeroxes in mind.
I have no trouble pushing this to the back of my mind to enjoy something like Star Trek, but I just don't see how transporter technology isn't fundamentally disintegrating someone, then using the energy from the subatomic particles to build an exact replica at the target destination. Like, the fact you can just buffer the data and end up with a duplicate (Tom Riker) shows that the breakdown & transfer of energy is entirely superfluous to what's actually being done. It's just using replicator technology to make people. They only disintegrate the scanned template to avoid over-population.
I'm sure someone will try to make arguments referring to the ship that gradually has all its parts replaced or how "well you know, we're a different person every time we lose & subsequently regain consciousness", but that's all a wash. When you sleep or go under, the conscious part of your brain continues to function in an altered state (dreaming), so there is a contiguous first-hand experience. But there's no contiguous first hand experience in transportation*, so it's only 'the same person' from the outside perspective of others.
Of course, there's other ways to achieve the same story-telling goal that side-step this issue, such as portals through space-time.
*
Which is also true of most depictions of another popular sci-fi trope, the 'digital brain upload', for that matter.
Or hell
That would circumvent one of the issues they ended up coming across in TNG.
"Captain, I'm seeing weird stuff in the transporter beam"
"We'll just blind you before hand. After all, Lt. Barclay, where you're going, you won't need eyes to see."
I don't think rick would actually care unless morty was going to use it
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I do like the teleporter like technology they introduced in Dark Matter.
Your consciousness is duplicated and sent into a clone body on the other end. The clone lives as you while your original body is left unconscious at the origin point. When you've had enough time as the clone, it gets into the pod on the other end and any new experiences or memories the clone has are transmitted back to the original.
Of course, if the clone dies (as tends to happen on shows about wanted space criminals) the original wakes up under the impression that little to no time has passed since they got into the pod.
It seems like an elegant solution to the teleporter problem. Though it does limit teleporting to established locales where there are already pods.
I think this is the first conversation I've seen about teleportation actually being referred to as murder xerox's instead of a bunch of people coming out of the woodwork to say 'what no it isnt','nah you dont die', 'its still you....', and 'what actually holds our conscious 'selves' together moment to moment anyways?'. The last one bugs me as its sort of valid, but it's not enough to step inside a classic sci fi teleporter. Existing in those moment changes isn't choosing to step into a machine to be destroyed.
I know it's typically a verboten show to talk about in nerd circles, but I recall an episode of The Big Bang Theory where Sheldon also realised that a classic sci-fi transporter was making a perfect copy on the other end, but disintegrating the original. The guy who arrived at the destination looked like him, behaved like him, had all his memories, everything, but he was a new guy; the original was dead and blown up into his constituent atoms. His actual original consciousness was not transferred.
It's not a new criticism/factoid about Star Trek teleporters. It's a minor plot point in a China Mieville novel and there's even a video game whose plot sort of revolves around an analysis of that conceit, sort of becoming a sci-fi first person exploration of "where is our consciousness, can it transfer from one place to another, and is all this a lie anyway and, if it is, what does that mean for our humanity?". That comes in as kind of a crazy reveal, though, and not an up front premise, so mentioning the title is itself a spoiler:
It is, in fact, a debate that goes back at least 50 years to the original transporters from TOS, if not further in other SF, and people keep tiptoeing around it and trying not to look directly at it.
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
Oddly I spent a lot of time thinking about this when reading the otherland series by tad Williams and eventually came to the conclusion I would happily use a murder box teleporter. I'm my current stream of consciousness, if that's sent somewhere else and the original destroyed at the same instant, whatevs that continuing stream of consciousness is still me.
I can also imagine technical difficulties in the transporter room.
Picard: "Mr. Obrien, 3 to beam up!"
PIcard: "Mr. Obrien, do you read? 3 to beam up!"
Obrien: "Sorry sir, technical difficulties. We've already got you up here but the death beam's experiencing a 3 to 4 minute delay."
Picard: "Death what?"
It’s a quantum transition. It literally is you, just displaced by position. It no more kills you than walking through a door kills you. Thinking that it should kill you is just classical mechanics thinking. There’s absolutely no difference between it and any other motion.
Oddly I spent a lot of time thinking about this when reading the otherland series by tad Williams and eventually came to the conclusion I would happily use a murder box teleporter. I'm my current stream of consciousness, if that's sent somewhere else and the original destroyed at the same instant, whatevs that continuing stream of consciousness is still me.
But that's my whole point, it isn't the same because you would end. You're letting philosophical concepts obfuscate the 'reality' of the situation. You, the person who wrote the post I am quoting would cease to be (you will experience no more, because you are dead), and a new person who merely has your memories of writing the post and entering the machine would come into existence. If the philosophical notion that that person is fundamentally you just because they have the same knowledge and memories makes you okay with it, then more power to you I guess. But the fact that you and they could just as easily coexist as separate individuals with shared "data" (for lack of a better word) up to that point, but diverging experiences going forward, disproves any attempt to rationalize it as being the same person.
It's like a bad statistical model; you're abstracting things (What am I? What is the essence of a person?) to a degree that you end up with junk answers.
It's not a new criticism/factoid about Star Trek teleporters. It's a minor plot point in a China Mieville novel and there's even a video game whose plot sort of revolves around an analysis of that conceit, sort of becoming a sci-fi first person exploration of "where is our consciousness, can it transfer from one place to another, and is all this a lie anyway and, if it is, what does that mean for our humanity?". That comes in as kind of a crazy reveal, though, and not an up front premise, so mentioning the title is itself a spoiler:
It's SOMA
it's actually the plot of one of the TNG graphic novels (Forgiveness) wherein the guy who invents holodeck/ transporter tech has his test run sabotaged by fanatics because he's invented a soul destroying/ body cloning murder machine.
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ChimeraMonster girl with a snek tail and five eyesBad puns, that's how eye roll. Registered Userregular
Personally I like mine with extra butter and Tabasco on it, what about you guys?
Oddly I spent a lot of time thinking about this when reading the otherland series by tad Williams and eventually came to the conclusion I would happily use a murder box teleporter. I'm my current stream of consciousness, if that's sent somewhere else and the original destroyed at the same instant, whatevs that continuing stream of consciousness is still me.
But that's my whole point, it isn't the same because you would end. You're letting philosophical concepts obfuscate the 'reality' of the situation. You, the person who wrote the post I am quoting would cease to be (you will experience no more, because you are dead), and a new person who merely has your memories of writing the post and entering the machine would come into existence. If the philosophical notion that that person is fundamentally you just because they have the same knowledge and memories makes you okay with it, then more power to you I guess. But the fact that you and they could just as easily coexist as separate individuals with shared "data" (for lack of a better word) up to that point, but diverging experiences going forward, disproves any attempt to rationalize it as being the same person.
It's like a bad statistical model; you're abstracting things (What am I? What is the essence of a person?) to a degree that you end up with junk answers.
When your body moves around, especially when you pass through an aperture like a doorway, you experience diffraction like a wave of light does. Every single atom, particle etc in your body becomes a fuzzy probability distribution simply by passing through the aperture. You remain a fuzzy probability distribution, with every atom in your body delocalized until someone observes you. Now, this effect happens more strongly with say, protons through a slit 10 nm wide or something, but it absolutely happens to you too and causes you to experience the collapse of your waveform when the cluster of atoms which is you stops being a Gaussian probability distribution around a point distribution in space and collapses to have a precise position. You teleport to the extent that a star trek transporter would kill you whenever you walk through a door.
"That is cool" - Abraham Lincoln
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H3KnucklesBut we decide which is rightand which is an illusion.Registered Userregular
edited October 2017
Uh, what? If you walk through a door and no one and no thing is there to observe you, you still have a contiguous experience of consciousness. You don't remain a 'fuzzy distribution' until you enter someone else's line of sight. Quit being a silly goose, this is exactly what I'm talking about with regards to losing sight of any meaningful assessment of things, you're just coming at it from a different angle with a pseudo-scientific gloss to your argument. I said as much in my first post about this, but arguments along the lines of "whenever [mundane event x] happens, you're not really the same person anymore, so it's all relative" is the same kind of nonsense as "because they perceive themselves to be me, then they are me".
Uh, what? If you walk through a door and no one and no thing is there to observe you, you still have a contiguous experience of consciousness. You don't remain a 'fuzzy distribution' until you enter someone else's line of sight. Quit being a silly goose, this is exactly what I'm talking about with regards to losing sight of any meaningful assessment of things, you're just coming at it from a different angle with a pseudo-scientific gloss to your argument. I said as much in my first post about this, but arguments along the lines of "whenever [mundane event x] happens, you're not really the same person anymore, so it's all relative" is the same kind of nonsense as "because they perceive themselves to be me, then they are me".
Actually you absolutely do. That's how quantum mechanics works. Sometimes you might work as an observer, sometimes you might not. You absolutely 100%, no questions, no doubt, if it's not true then the universe cannot be explained experience collapsing waveform events where you switch from being a probability distribution to a collection of point particles all the time. The only difference is that you only do so over short time like distances. For most star trek style transporters the only change from that is that you do so over long time like distances. Which mathematically is no problem.
Quantum mechanics seems absurd from a classical perspective. But it's the way the universe works, and it means that all kinds of crazy stuff like this happens.
"That is cool" - Abraham Lincoln
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H3KnucklesBut we decide which is rightand which is an illusion.Registered Userregular
Except what you're describing is not how they work. Between things like Tom Riker's existence, Scotty buffering himself in a transporter's databanks for decades, etc, transporters are clearly working from a different basis.
Uh, what? If you walk through a door and no one and no thing is there to observe you, you still have a contiguous experience of consciousness. You don't remain a 'fuzzy distribution' until you enter someone else's line of sight. Quit being a silly goose, this is exactly what I'm talking about with regards to losing sight of any meaningful assessment of things, you're just coming at it from a different angle with a pseudo-scientific gloss to your argument. I said as much in my first post about this, but arguments along the lines of "whenever [mundane event x] happens, you're not really the same person anymore, so it's all relative" is the same kind of nonsense as "because they perceive themselves to be me, then they are me".
Do you? Do you remember laying still for 8 (or however many) hours every night? Or do you remember going to sleep, then waking up? There's no gap in your memory, you just mentally stitch the events together and decide to normalize it without even considering what happened. Same thing with anesthesia and a whole host of other things. Memory isn't some ironclad recollection of events, it's just a brain's tenuous grasp on what it think might have happened (and false memories are shockingly easy to create).
Not to mention that your body today is an almost totally different organism from what it was a decade ago: most cells are constantly being refreshed.
I have no trouble pushing this to the back of my mind to enjoy something like Star Trek, but I just don't see how transporter technology isn't fundamentally disintegrating someone, then using the energy from the subatomic particles to build an exact replica at the target destination. Like, the fact you can just buffer the data and end up with a duplicate (Tom Riker) shows that the breakdown & transfer of energy is entirely superfluous to what's actually being done. It's just using replicator technology to make people. They only disintegrate the scanned template to avoid over-population.
I'm sure someone will try to make arguments referring to the ship that gradually has all its parts replaced or how "well you know, we're a different person every time we lose & subsequently regain consciousness", but that's all a wash. When you sleep or go under, the conscious part of your brain continues to function in an altered state (dreaming), so there is a contiguous first-hand experience. But there's no contiguous first hand experience in transportation*, so it's only 'the same person' from the outside perspective of others.
Of course, there's other ways to achieve the same story-telling goal that side-step this issue, such as portals through space-time.
*
Which is also true of most depictions of another popular sci-fi trope, the 'digital brain upload', for that matter.
Uh, what? If you walk through a door and no one and no thing is there to observe you, you still have a contiguous experience of consciousness. You don't remain a 'fuzzy distribution' until you enter someone else's line of sight. Quit being a silly goose, this is exactly what I'm talking about with regards to losing sight of any meaningful assessment of things, you're just coming at it from a different angle with a pseudo-scientific gloss to your argument. I said as much in my first post about this, but arguments along the lines of "whenever [mundane event x] happens, you're not really the same person anymore, so it's all relative" is the same kind of nonsense as "because they perceive themselves to be me, then they are me".
Do you? Do you remember laying still for 8 (or however many) hours every night? Or do you remember going to sleep, then waking up? There's no gap in your memory, you just mentally stitch the events together and decide to normalize it without even considering what happened. Same thing with anesthesia and a whole host of other things. Memory isn't some ironclad recollection of events, it's just a brain's tenuous grasp on what it think might have happened (and false memories are shockingly easy to create).
Not to mention that your body today is an almost totally different organism from what it was a decade ago: most cells are constantly being refreshed.
You're just bringing up the exact same tired rhetoric I mentioned when I started this whole tangent last page. Like, I have to think you did that on purpose.
I have no trouble pushing this to the back of my mind to enjoy something like Star Trek, but I just don't see how transporter technology isn't fundamentally disintegrating someone, then using the energy from the subatomic particles to build an exact replica at the target destination. Like, the fact you can just buffer the data and end up with a duplicate (Tom Riker) shows that the breakdown & transfer of energy is entirely superfluous to what's actually being done. It's just using replicator technology to make people. They only disintegrate the scanned template to avoid over-population.
I'm sure someone will try to make arguments referring to the ship that gradually has all its parts replaced or how "well you know, we're a different person every time we lose & subsequently regain consciousness", but that's all a wash. When you sleep or go under, the conscious part of your brain continues to function in an altered state (dreaming), so there is a contiguous first-hand experience. But there's no contiguous first hand experience in transportation*, so it's only 'the same person' from the outside perspective of others.
Of course, there's other ways to achieve the same story-telling goal that side-step this issue, such as portals through space-time.
*
Which is also true of most depictions of another popular sci-fi trope, the 'digital brain upload', for that matter.
Uh, what? If you walk through a door and no one and no thing is there to observe you, you still have a contiguous experience of consciousness. You don't remain a 'fuzzy distribution' until you enter someone else's line of sight. Quit being a silly goose, this is exactly what I'm talking about with regards to losing sight of any meaningful assessment of things, you're just coming at it from a different angle with a pseudo-scientific gloss to your argument. I said as much in my first post about this, but arguments along the lines of "whenever [mundane event x] happens, you're not really the same person anymore, so it's all relative" is the same kind of nonsense as "because they perceive themselves to be me, then they are me".
Do you? Do you remember laying still for 8 (or however many) hours every night? Or do you remember going to sleep, then waking up? There's no gap in your memory, you just mentally stitch the events together and decide to normalize it without even considering what happened. Same thing with anesthesia and a whole host of other things. Memory isn't some ironclad recollection of events, it's just a brain's tenuous grasp on what it think might have happened (and false memories are shockingly easy to create).
Not to mention that your body today is an almost totally different organism from what it was a decade ago: most cells are constantly being refreshed.
You're just bringing up the exact same tired rhetoric I mentioned when I started this whole tangent last page. Like, I have to think you did that on purpose.
But that was last page. Maybe you've slept or walked through a door since then?
Are you sure you're the same you as the you that started the tangent? Or does this you merely share the memories of that other, past you?
If there's one thing that bugs me slightly, and it is only slightly, it's that Isaac's voice performance is so close to Data as to practically be an impression of him. But that's probably intentional.
If there's one thing that bugs me slightly, and it is only slightly, it's that Isaac's voice performance is so close to Data as to practically be an impression of him. But that's probably intentional.
The design of the Orville bugs me a bit. Having the central drive bar (loop? thingy? whatever...) right in front of the shuttle bay seems like it's just asking for a wounded (or inexperienced or drunk) pilot to ram into it and disable the ships FTL capability. Seems like it'd be smarter to put the shuttle bay on the side or the front of the ship.
Oddly I spent a lot of time thinking about this when reading the otherland series by tad Williams and eventually came to the conclusion I would happily use a murder box teleporter. I'm my current stream of consciousness, if that's sent somewhere else and the original destroyed at the same instant, whatevs that continuing stream of consciousness is still me.
But that's my whole point, it isn't the same because you would end. You're letting philosophical concepts obfuscate the 'reality' of the situation. You, the person who wrote the post I am quoting would cease to be (you will experience no more, because you are dead), and a new person who merely has your memories of writing the post and entering the machine would come into existence. If the philosophical notion that that person is fundamentally you just because they have the same knowledge and memories makes you okay with it, then more power to you I guess. But the fact that you and they could just as easily coexist as separate individuals with shared "data" (for lack of a better word) up to that point, but diverging experiences going forward, disproves any attempt to rationalize it as being the same person.
It's like a bad statistical model; you're abstracting things (What am I? What is the essence of a person?) to a degree that you end up with junk answers.
But, you're never the same you. Your cells die and are replaced regularly. You are not literally the same as you were seconds ago due to this.
Did you know your brain cells typically last a life time and are never replaced when they die and that most philosophers don't understand quantum mechanics but use it to try and prove a point, or that I should have never brought up transporters, or that you can just not reply to this off topic conversation safe in the knowledge that thousands of people have posted the exact thing you are about to years earlier with similarly little benefit?
You know the best thing about being outside the politics threads? The freedom to wander around the topic a bit more
LOVED episode 4 though. The world ship was just so nicely done, and I liked the conversation between the two officers about how hard it was to date when everyone was worried about how much stronger you were than them. The splitting up felt a bit contrived though, would have been better if there had been some contrived reason for the separation (Say, someone slips down a cliff or something) than just deciding to wander off alone in this strange environment.
I do like the fact that these people feel real though. Like how actual humans would be in this future utopia the union put together. Really trying to do their best to be these idealized people that their culture thinks they can be, but struggling with the baggage that both makes us human and makes life 'fun'. Trying to rectify the fact that fart jokes will be funny from now till the end of time with a society where there are replicators and aliens.
"That is cool" - Abraham Lincoln
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ShadowfireVermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered Userregular
If there's one thing that bugs me slightly, and it is only slightly, it's that Isaac's voice performance is so close to Data as to practically be an impression of him. But that's probably intentional.
The design of the Orville bugs me a bit. Having the central drive bar (loop? thingy? whatever...) right in front of the shuttle bay seems like it's just asking for a wounded (or inexperienced or drunk) pilot to ram into it and disable the ships FTL capability. Seems like it'd be smarter to put the shuttle bay on the side or the front of the ship.
Posts
They have, but that still doesn't jive with how it would actually work if you could build one which is the problem the writers recognized. They put that in to try to demonstrate that they didn't have murder xeroxes in mind.
That would circumvent one of the issues they ended up coming across in TNG.
"Captain, I'm seeing weird stuff in the transporter beam"
"We'll just blind you before hand. After all, Lt. Barclay, where you're going, you won't need eyes to see."
I can see Rick on the bridge now: "You guys use transporters? You know those kill you every time, right?"
The inventor is hailed as a hero. The long nightmare is over.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Your consciousness is duplicated and sent into a clone body on the other end. The clone lives as you while your original body is left unconscious at the origin point. When you've had enough time as the clone, it gets into the pod on the other end and any new experiences or memories the clone has are transmitted back to the original.
Of course, if the clone dies (as tends to happen on shows about wanted space criminals) the original wakes up under the impression that little to no time has passed since they got into the pod.
It seems like an elegant solution to the teleporter problem. Though it does limit teleporting to established locales where there are already pods.
Though it starts to enter a more biological version of what the Cylons had going mixed with transporter tech.
Steam | XBL
Like... say Picard is killed in an away mission, but they've got a copy of him on file from yesterday's transport.
So they just re-construct him. He's missing a day, sure, but he's still Picard.
Picard: "Mr. Obrien, 3 to beam up!"
PIcard: "Mr. Obrien, do you read? 3 to beam up!"
Obrien: "Sorry sir, technical difficulties. We've already got you up here but the death beam's experiencing a 3 to 4 minute delay."
Picard: "Death what?"
I mentioned this before I think but this actually happened in season 1 of TNG.
But that's my whole point, it isn't the same because you would end. You're letting philosophical concepts obfuscate the 'reality' of the situation. You, the person who wrote the post I am quoting would cease to be (you will experience no more, because you are dead), and a new person who merely has your memories of writing the post and entering the machine would come into existence. If the philosophical notion that that person is fundamentally you just because they have the same knowledge and memories makes you okay with it, then more power to you I guess. But the fact that you and they could just as easily coexist as separate individuals with shared "data" (for lack of a better word) up to that point, but diverging experiences going forward, disproves any attempt to rationalize it as being the same person.
It's like a bad statistical model; you're abstracting things (What am I? What is the essence of a person?) to a degree that you end up with junk answers.
it's actually the plot of one of the TNG graphic novels (Forgiveness) wherein the guy who invents holodeck/ transporter tech has his test run sabotaged by fanatics because he's invented a soul destroying/ body cloning murder machine.
Wait we are here to talk about popcorn, right?
When your body moves around, especially when you pass through an aperture like a doorway, you experience diffraction like a wave of light does. Every single atom, particle etc in your body becomes a fuzzy probability distribution simply by passing through the aperture. You remain a fuzzy probability distribution, with every atom in your body delocalized until someone observes you. Now, this effect happens more strongly with say, protons through a slit 10 nm wide or something, but it absolutely happens to you too and causes you to experience the collapse of your waveform when the cluster of atoms which is you stops being a Gaussian probability distribution around a point distribution in space and collapses to have a precise position. You teleport to the extent that a star trek transporter would kill you whenever you walk through a door.
Actually you absolutely do. That's how quantum mechanics works. Sometimes you might work as an observer, sometimes you might not. You absolutely 100%, no questions, no doubt, if it's not true then the universe cannot be explained experience collapsing waveform events where you switch from being a probability distribution to a collection of point particles all the time. The only difference is that you only do so over short time like distances. For most star trek style transporters the only change from that is that you do so over long time like distances. Which mathematically is no problem.
Quantum mechanics seems absurd from a classical perspective. But it's the way the universe works, and it means that all kinds of crazy stuff like this happens.
Not to mention that your body today is an almost totally different organism from what it was a decade ago: most cells are constantly being refreshed.
Penny Arcade Rockstar Social Club / This is why I despise cyclists
You're just bringing up the exact same tired rhetoric I mentioned when I started this whole tangent last page. Like, I have to think you did that on purpose.
Are you sure you're the same you as the you that started the tangent? Or does this you merely share the memories of that other, past you?
I do like that Ball humor is appreciated among Bortus' people
Steam | XBL
The design of the Orville bugs me a bit. Having the central drive bar (loop? thingy? whatever...) right in front of the shuttle bay seems like it's just asking for a wounded (or inexperienced or drunk) pilot to ram into it and disable the ships FTL capability. Seems like it'd be smarter to put the shuttle bay on the side or the front of the ship.
Steam | XBL
But, you're never the same you. Your cells die and are replaced regularly. You are not literally the same as you were seconds ago due to this.
The more you know.
You know the best thing about being outside the politics threads? The freedom to wander around the topic a bit more
LOVED episode 4 though. The world ship was just so nicely done, and I liked the conversation between the two officers about how hard it was to date when everyone was worried about how much stronger you were than them. The splitting up felt a bit contrived though, would have been better if there had been some contrived reason for the separation (Say, someone slips down a cliff or something) than just deciding to wander off alone in this strange environment.
I do like the fact that these people feel real though. Like how actual humans would be in this future utopia the union put together. Really trying to do their best to be these idealized people that their culture thinks they can be, but struggling with the baggage that both makes us human and makes life 'fun'. Trying to rectify the fact that fart jokes will be funny from now till the end of time with a society where there are replicators and aliens.
Dude, spoiler alert for later in the season.