Asklemmy

Yes. I get to die and pass all my responsibilities to my quantum clone. Sign me the fuck up.

There's a Ship of Theseus aspect to Star Trek's transporters in particular that I find interesting. In that there is an actual matter stream sent to your destination. But ultimately I couldn't be sure that the me I am now would come out the other side - and I probably wouldn't.

I have the same concern about uploading my brain to a computer. Even if it's a perfect copy it's still a copy. And that's before you factor in for other things like, I am not just my brain I am also the hormones that affect my brain.

It's a literal suicide booth.

Sure, you can go on all day about changing out broom handles and whatever other metaphor you like, but I don't need my body to be a point of interaction with any consciousness and the world, i need it to be a point of interaction between my consciousness and the world.

I have a lot of feelings about the emptiness of identity and the ultimate unity of the universe, but that doesn't mean I'm going to off myself for the sake of convenience.

If I make a copy of myself, I'm still myself. I don't become the copy. I have no reason to believe that a genetically identical clone that's somehow got a copy of my memories will spontaneously cause my consciousness to jump to the other clone. No evidence of any such thing happening.

If I, then, make a copy of myself on Mars, why would I expect to spontaneously inhabit it?

The only reason being ripped apart and having an identical copy made looks like teleportation is the timing. There's a short story about this, where a teleporter malfunction leaves the original version of the traveler alive. Protocol is to 'balance the equation' by incinerating the survivor, which as it turned out was the fate of anyone who stepped into the teleporter under normal circumstances.

Think about a file in a computer system. Copying the file and making changes doesn't change the original file. When you download something and alter it, that's a different copy of the file that's been changed, not the original. Even when you move something rather than copy it, what's actually happening is it's being copied and then the original is destroyed.

Seamless for everyone else, sure. But a tragic, needless, and utterly stupid death for the one who enters the machine.

Use it on myself? No.

Use it to start a combination movers / electric / tunneling / waste management / highly-illegal-hardware-pirating company?

Yes.

If it's wormhole based tech then yeah why not, atomic based teleportation comes with too many philosophical and existential flavors for me personally

Absolutely! I might even die instantly, which is just a bonus :V

I am with Bob Johansson (Bobbyverse) on this one. Star trek is utterly inconsistent with how transporters work. They only ever play up when it's convenient for the plot line, but the rest of the time they're totally fine and no one worries about it.

Transporters are supposed to move the atoms by converting them into energy, moving that energy through subspace, and then converting them back to atoms on the other side, the only energy in the system is the energy that was created when the atoms were converted, so it shouldn't be possible to create a transporter clone, no matter how many "confinement beams" you have, as where would it's atoms come from?

Yup.

Not only would I use it, I would abuse it.

I'd duplicate myself more than once, and at least once so I could fuck myself.

I'd tweak the transporter to adjust my body as I went through it. Best weight-loss, gym routine, plastic surgery, dick-enhancement pill ever, all in one.

I would be the reason such devices would be strictly regulated by people with ethics. "Is it murder if you kill your clone?" "Who cares, energize and last one stabbed wins!"

This question all comes down to your opinion of what makes a person a person, whether that means we have something greater than the collection of our atoms, or whether we are simply the emergent outcome of the complex arrangement of atoms. If you subscribe to the former then you also need to believe that this machine is somehow capable of either transporting/transplanting that "soul" for lack of a better expression. Where if you subscribe to the latter than this is most certainly a suicide cloning machine.

I personally subscribe to the idea that consciousness is an emergent property of complexity. Given a sufficiently large enough series of inputs you can observe new and unexpected outputs that appear to be on higher orders of complexity than their inputs. This response is an example of that, from electrons flowing through transistors we end up with operating systems, hardware IO, web browsers, networking protocols, ASCII standards, font rendering, etc. All of that complexity emerges from a massive amount of on/off switches arranged in patterns over time.

Following this chain of reasoning I believe that making an exact duplicate of me down to the state of each atom is no different than that entity being me, however as a conscious being with human ethics and morals I put value in the singularity of my existence, and so a plurality of Zetaphor is something I find undesirable as it fundamentally challenges my perception of what it means to be myself.

So assuming the entity leaving the transporter is me, there's two ways to approach the way a machine like this could operate:

• It reads my state in its entirety and then destroys (or encodes for transport) that state
• Or it's creating the new instance of me bit by bit as it reads my current state

That means one of two things, either there is a brief moment of time where two identical copies of me are in the universe, or there is a period of time where zero complete copies of me exist in the universe. So either I stopped existing momentarily and then was recreated from scratch (death and clone birth), or I existed in two places at once and then died in one (cloning and suicide).

Of course I would.

Everything that makes you -you- is contained in the physicality of your brain. Even fairly small changes in your brain will create large shifts in cognition and personality. So anything that replicates your body and brain, down to the last atom, is going to be creating -you-. As far as you are concerned, nothing happened; you ceased to be in one place, and immediately sprang into existence in another.

Do you trust that they are safe to use?

Making an assessment on that requires a whole lot more context.

We trust in car safety because of regulation, established supposed Brand trustworthyness, and widespread use.

If teleporters had the same, and in terms of use at least significant precedent, there's no reason most people would use them. Traveling convenience would be a great upside.

Unser Those circumstance I'd be fine using them.

Nope, I have a hard enough time thinking about my consciousness being "the same person" even after sleeping. No way am I getting taken apart and cloned by choice.

Arthur C. Clarke covered it in his first published story.

I don’t travel by wire! You see, I helped invent the thing!

https://zoboko.com/text/qll1oe8j/the-collected-stories-of-arthur-c-clarke/7

I get the disintegration qualms. But slap some TNG-era biofilters on that baby and filter out heavy metal accumulations, budding cancer cells, chest congestion, etc., and I'd be first in line.

I would use it. Anything to not have to use public transportation or fly in an airplane ever again.

Imagine, going for a skiing trip and when you get down, you don't queue for the lift, but you just ski into the portal and continue at the top of some piste. The commute gets insanely short, I can WFH, pop in for lunch or a coffee chat, and then jump back home to do some work.

I've read that the cells in my body aren't the same as the ones I was born with, so I did a very slow gradual body swap already, possibly a few times.

Fuck yeah I would. As long as it's cheap and relatively safe I'd take instant transportation over spending hours sitting in a metal box any day.

I don't understand everybody worrying about whether their consciousness moves with us. We literally don't even know what it is, we have no provable theory or idea of what it is. As far as I can tell, your consciousness is something your brain does, not something that exists external to your body, otherwise that's basically believing in spirits.

Depends on the technology employed.

Quantum entanglement? Sure. All day, every day.

That annihilation shit that Star Trek does? Hell no.

I'd also take a method that's between the two. If it could split me up and send those very same atoms across the void to other side where they're recombobulated I'd be fine with that, too. Assuming it's not painful.

Edit: My sister: "What if it's the most painful experience ever, but the machine deletes that memory?"

Depends on how the teleportation worked and also how our consciousness worked. I’m not against the idea of creating exact copies of myself who, from their point of view, are indistinguishable from the me they were copied from. I am, however, against the idea of deleting the original me, which from my point of view would be indistinguishable from death,

Transferring consciousness is different from copying consciousness, even if the copy is flawless.

This is the same answer as the question of uploading our consciousness to a computer.

To my limited understanding, the us that exists is just a network of neural connections. If you could somehow copy that network exactly, you could conceivably create a complete personality copy of an individual, but that’s not the same thing as moving their consciousness.

I`v seen the fly, fuck this shit.

Fuck that, I dont care where "I" can go, I'll die and my clone will be there instead! Even if that was provably false, I wouldn't take the risk.

Do I trust that an ephemeral pseudoscience concept of "teleporter technology" is safe to use...? No...? On what basis would anyone make that judgement.

My continuity of experience continues, therefore I'm still me. Yes I would use it. I don't care if I'm also the man in the box.

Oh, hell yeah. Plus it's canon that it can heal some diseases.

Now, WRT the continuity of consciousness... hell, I lose that every night, and whenever I get major surgery. Heck, I've transported innumerable times if teleporting a break in continuity of thought plus a change in location. I passed out once from heat stroke and woke up in an infirmary.

Yeah, I'd use it.

If we're talking exactly like star trek I'm 90% on board with it. Yeah, yeah, so I'm a clone now, big whoop.

You wanna know the 10% that really fucking haunt me?! Mother fucking Tuvix. Everyone you know can turn into a Tuvix situation real fast, that's the real nightmare.

I definitely wouldn't use the disintegration/reintegration type. If it worked some other way, like through mini-wormholes or something, sure I would use it.

if you translocated Theseus' ship, is it still the same ship? what if you extracted the data from the transport buffer to reassemble the original in its original location?

If it existed, was proven safe, and was widely available enough for anyone to use, then of course.

The auto and airline industries would collapse, reducing pollution and global warming.

The biggest downside I can think of offhand is that everyone could vacation wherever they like, and that would quickly overcrowd and ruin all the nice places.

Hell yes. Yes please. Please.