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Thomas Riker is the result of someone basically sending down a second transporter beam, overlapped over the first one.. Which resulted in Riker basically being put into two matter buffers.. which resulted in essentially a clone when one of the transporters reflected off the atmospheric conditions back to the ground.
proper use of a transporter doesnt cause issues.. that was not a proper use of a transporter iirc.
My favorite take on this question comes from Existential Comics
Wow, I haven't seen that comic in years; the first time I saw it I was in a pretty bad mental space and I think this perspective helped more than I realized at the time. Thanks for the memory ❤️
i love that one. sometimes it's a giggle, sometimes it's a gutpunch, always worth reading.
That's a solid one
Oof.
Damn, that's really good.
My only counterpoint to the "suicide booth" argument is that people have some semblance of consciousness during transport.
It was a TNG episode where we learn that Barkley is able to see an energy monster during transport. If he was totally ripped apart and "dead" then I'd expect there to be a blank part of his memory during the moments the body is turned to energy.
Assuming it’s a particle transfer instead of data transmission, what the transporter does is disassemble things at an atomic scale. But it doesn’t disperse you, that’s what the confinement beam is for.
(This is grizzly, but hear me out.) there’s a 2cm hole. You obviously can’t fit through. But if you were chopped into 1cm cubes you would. What if that chopping didn’t upset you or cause pain, what if those pieces were held inside a stasis field to prevent them from falling apart or leaking? What if they were put back together perfectly in a matter of seconds. Would your body react like it was chopped into pieces? Would it even understand that that’s what happened? If you chop someone’s head off clean enough and fast enough it takes the brain several seconds to realize it’s not connected to the body anymore.
Transporters take this to the nth degree. It cuts you up into pieces so small that you can pass through solid matter as long as you stay within that (stupid strong) confinement beam. Apparently, if you are carefully disassembled without trauma and those pieces are kept in the general vicinity of each other, you don’t die AND you remain aware. And before your body can declare that something is wrong and react, you’re back in one piece.
Maybe your (carefully spaced apart) brain is confused and thinks you’re dreaming so it doesn’t get upset.
Even when you stay within the conservative rules of how a transporter behaves they are still tremendous hacks on a fundamental level.
Then there is Scotty who was caught up in a pattern buffer for almost a century crashed on a Dyson sphere.
The problem with appealing to episode details is that the transporter is presented very differently in different episodes depending on the needs of the story. That's fine for storytelling, but it means we can't pin down a fixed set of rules for how transporters work. To ponder philosophical questions we have to invent rules by picking and choosing presentations of the transporter that seem most interesting, and filling in gaps with our imaginations.
Yes, there's the episode where Barclay is conscious during transport. But there are contradictory presentations where Scotty puts himself in stasis in the ship that crashed on the Dyson's sphere, and M'Benga putting his daughter in stasis. In those cases neither has memories of time during transport.
There is the episode where Picard uses the transporter to convert himself into an energy being to try to live in a space cloud. The story is the transporter converts matter to energy, and energy in Star Trek is another possible state of living existence. Thus continuity. But there is a contradictory episode of DS9 where crew members' physical and neural patterns have to be stored in computer memory, not "pure energy", and we see holosuite character versions of them.
So there's either no suicide booth problem, or there is. You get to pick depending on which scenario you feel like talking about.
Since both have been depicted, both must be true. There is no need to pick or choose:
how Picard can have a gay merry vacation
Yes but we also meant that Barkley has multiple mental illnesses, and is an unreliable narrator.
If that were the case, Scotty being stuck in the transporter buffer for 100 years would be a nightmare on his subconscious.there has to be a demarcation point where the consciousness can't function without the brain structures in place. That'd be the death point.
I remember Noam Chomsky mentioning this when talking to his kids or grandkids when talking about psychic continuity. I believe the question was surrounding what would happen if you weren’t “teleported”, but instead you remained on the ship as well as the remote location.
Star Trek science has always been for non scientists. if you could move a pattern and save a pattern, then everyone would backup to the last healthy copy of themselves.
I'd also lose all my memories since the backup. With those memories goes the way I make decisions. Not the most desirable way of maintaining youth and health. Kirk made that point in ST:V:
"Damn it, Bones, you're a doctor. You know that pain and guilt can't be taken away with a wave of a magic wand. They're the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves.
I don't want my pain taken away!
I need my pain!"
there is ethics about body modification and especially about enhancing your self artificially, it's seen as a dead end because people who are artificially "perfected" end up being stagnant and pointless. experiencing aging and illness is a part of ethical behavior, or is ultimately preferable to the alternative.
But they do. On several occasions a ship's doctor has managed to completely restore a mutated crewmate back to how they were before based on data stored in the medical computers. This is only possible if the medical computer contains a full biological backup, in the form of data.
Episodes like Threshold and that one where the Enterprise crew turn into children come to mind. The latter actually involves transporters.
Episodes like Threshold and that one where the Enterprise crew turn into children come to mind. The latter actually involves transporters.
They don't usually revert the crew using the backup data, though. They just program it to make changes to their bodies, like removing things. It wouldn't be any stranger than removing an alien pathogen.
The backup data, I think was only used for Pulaski when she got the ageing disease (where it might have been a reference pattern to correct errors, and they had to actually compare with a known good genome), and for Tuvix.
We do also know that a bad transport can't just be retried either. The Motion Picture had a transport go wrong, and Starbase One couldn't just restart the transport with backup data, or repair what they got back. Similarly, Scotty couldn't just load up Franklin's backup from the Jenolan's computers and transport him in either.
Failed transports generally seem to stem from not having quality data to reconstruct with. Not getting a good enough sensor lock, damage to the buffer corrupting the data, etc.
The entire point of a backup is to overwrite and replace bad data, though. If a backup was kept, it would logically follow that it would be possible to overwrite the damaged parts of the pattern, since we know that transports can succeed even if a portion if the pattern is lost.
Geordi specigically brings up it being impossible to materialise Franklin because his pattern had degraded too much, not that it was degraded at all, and would suggest that there's a threshold before repairs are no longer possible.
Transporters ar le weird. The way Dr. M'Benga keeps people in the transport buffer until there is a cure for their disease (Rukiya) or until medical facilities are no longer overrun (Battle of J'Gal) is presented as a hack. How is it not standard procedure?
Also he has to materialize them from time to time because their pattern degrades. So is it not a digital image of sorts? How can it degrade?
What would happen to the people if the buffer were to lose power or malfunction in any way? Even a small risk of anything adverse plus the degradation while being stored would make this not acceptable from medical viewpoint.
but really though, they have time stopper technology for people with incurable diseases. that's absolutely something that people would take a risk on in the face of certain death. put up a few redundant fusion reactors and battery backups and people would take up the offer.
Let's say you're given two ways to travel faster than light:
Star Trek Teleporter/Matter Reassembler
And
Shuttle through the Wormhole to the Gamma Quadrant
Which would you prefer and why?
If the transporter is going to kill me and recreate me at the destination, then I'm going wormhole.
Send a postcard. I'll keep my ass on the couch at home.
Y'all thought Picard'a brother was the bad guy.
Man just wanted to live and drink wine. C'est la vida loca
Either way works for me. Better than the options currently available on planet Earth at this point in history.
Furthermore, any civilization able to have matter reassembly and wormhole travel available as convenient means of travel will be amazing to experience and live in.
Beam me up, Scotty!
the wormhole seems safer, since its the prophets artificial wormhole and its stable, made more stable later in the series, not so for other wormholes, they seem to have the same dangers as random transporter malfunctions . The transporter seems fickle , numerous incidents where it had cloned, killed, merged 2 people into one, depending on the plot of the episode, or it cant transport fast enough when someone is shooting a disruptor weapon at you, ends up killing the person, or the transporter picks up some wierd pathogen/lifeforms. plus the wormhole doesnt require energy to use, so no problems activating it.
honorable mentions, is other than the ICONIAN gateways which is probably the best ftl type of instananeous rift travel, subspace catapults, or even the caretakers intergalatic ftl dimensional rift generator/teleporter, other forms of transporters/rift/interdimensional teleporters are pretty complicated and somewhat dangerous.
Here’s what I don’t get.
Okay. All that is true. Yet they clearly still retain a certain sense of self. The same memories, experiences, personalities and such.
Remember reading about a guy who cloned several generations of cats, all the same stock. Each cat was clearly unique.
Maybe the distinction is that the experiences are basically the same going though it.
In any case. Why can’t they keep generic information on hand and and clone up a fresh body and plant the bits relevant to memory and experience and stuff?
Cloning is very different though. In cloning you aren't exactly copying the neurons and their connections. That means the cloned cat will learn different things, be different, just from that very fact. All it takes is one or two small daily differences in routine as the kitten grows and bam, different personality.
It's the classic struggle of how much is nature (genetics) and how much is nurture.
With teleportation the neutral pathways are copied. It becomes more of a question of what makes you "you". Is there some spirit that gets left behind? Is it the memories that do get copied? Is it merely enough that you believe you're you?
The issue is with the conscience and the soul. Essentially the question is: "If your whole body is taken apart atom by atom, does the soul get taken along with it?"
In this case, the soul can just mean 'you'. The 'you' that is seeing through your eyes right now, and is giving you the current experience you are now experiencing. To give an easier example, let's say you are copied exactly four feet to your right. Your copy will look exactly like you, have all your memories, yadda yadda yadda. It seems pretty obvious that 'you' won't all of a sudden be seeing through your copy's eyes, no? If you get vaporised, then, your conscience is not going to just teleport into your clone, right? At least there's nothing to suggest that would happen.
Teleportation is just a fancy version of this in a different order. You are vaporised first, then your atoms are moved real fast to the new location, then your copy uses those atoms. There's zero reason to think that the 'you' which was vaporised is ever coming back. Once it's gone, it's gone, or at least that's the idea.
Whether you believe in the spiritual concept of a soul, or that your experience of the world is just a specific instance of electrical charges in some fancy meat, both seem to suggest that once the anima departs, it will never return. A new anima must instead be made.
My question is, what if say, Wolverine went through it.
Would his healing factor overcome the molecule destruction and leave a copy?
I'm an identical twin none of this scares me. Ive been a duplicate my entire life.
The scary part isn't being a duplicate, it's more like if someone killed you and then said "but you have a twin so it's fine"
For book explorations on this theme see :
and
Though the latter doesn't focus on it as much as the former.
They make consciousness transfer via transporter canon in the episode where Picard's consciousness gets lost in a gas cloud for part of the episode due to a transporter accident. Thomas Riker is a replicated clone with a new consciousness created by a freak accident.
It's not like the concept of a soul isn't canonically a thing in Star Trek. It's outside the realm of the federations science, but clearly still a thing the enterprise encounters on multiple occasions.
Thomas Riker wasn't the one at the destination, so he's not the original.
Gotem.