Damn, I was going to ship of Theseus you about the cells in your body replacing themselves constantly, but apparently our brain neurons last a lifetime.
Now I don’t think I would ever use a teleporter, either. Shit.
That is why nervous system damage usually means life long problems. Brains and all their wiring are so arcane and complicated, even our bodies don’t know how to grow more than one of them, and we often don’t get it right the first time either unfortunately.
Just believe we’re inside a simulation and transporters won’t matter.
Its kinda crazy actually if you think about it, our ability to anticipate actions is our ability to land in outcomes expected to be made by the reality generating around us if you imagine the reality outside our bodily sensory input as a big monte carlo field of potentials in the form of intertwined variables…like a big llm.
Aren’t LLMs basically pattern matching systems.
Humans are also pattern matching, and then predicting machines, but with way more inputs and senses than the LLMs.
They don’t match anything but do trigger the “nearest” response to a stimulus, so kinda like pattern matching but that implies doing it on purpose. But yeah the rest I agree with.
A distinction between a teleporter and a transporter…
To teleport implies the original matter is instantly moved from one place to another so there would be no destruction and reconstituted copy. A wormhole would seem to be the only realistic way that could be achieved.
A transporter, well that means copy then kill. No one knows if the kill part is painful because noone survives it. I find it funny Riker’s copy is actually the “original” and his lack of death is considered a transporter accident. Yet he is the one treated like the copy…
And all that said, barclay’s experience in the transporter beam is more suggestive of a wormhole style device.
I don’t know why I bothered to write all this out…
I mean every other thing in life is now just a digital representation of life, why not life. Ascend us damn it.
I always liked the idea of teleporters that are just wormhole pairs.
If you want to travel from New York to Paris you have to first go to your local wormhole station, walk through that and be taken to the central station for all US wormholes, walk over to the international portal and be taken to the global interface station, which would be located wherever the electricity is cheapest so probably somewhere in Iceland, then you walk over to the French national station, and be taken to some facility in France, and then from there walk over to the Paris wormhole.
All wormholes are 20 m across by standard allowing cargo containers to transport through, with the Americans have made system unnecessarily complicated by standardizing their wormholes to 2.5 giraffe widths.
y’know, it is interesting how fear of teleporters is handled but never stigma against teleportees. this hypothetical star trek grandparent is very understanding, but in the early days of the technology i can imagine many people wouldn’t be
Conspiracy theorists would have a field day
Remember Enterprise (the show), and how the Teleporter was only for cargo due to its newness as a technology?.. but one episode they used it on people for an emergency and ended up with debris stuck in their bodies upon rematerialization?
Remember Bones in the premier of TNG? I was there man!
I remember being taken back by how horrible the prosthetics were to make him look old.
Haha funny because it’s true
The universe is a hologram, and our physical brain is just an antenna tuned to the higher dimension of consciousness. Your consciousness exists separately to your body, so if the transporter builds an exact copy of your body (and brain) you will just tune back in to your same consciousness when you’re done transporting.
i am not touching that devil’s elevator as long as i live.
So does everybody else.
You mean I don’t have to be conscious anymore? And that a con?
Sleeping is just teleporting 8 hours into the future and life is just continuous reconstitution anyways.
Exactly. The “me” of yesterday is already dead. He can’t think, feel, act, reason, or anything else. I have memories of being him, but if I’d suffered head trauma, even those could be gone. The illusion of continuous, conscious experience is just that—an illusion.
The young-Earth people say that their god created the world about 6,000 years ago, and planted fossils to test our faith. I say that my god created the universe 6 seconds ago, including these memories that we seem to have. There’s literally no way to prove otherwise.
And yet you have a vested interest in your continued survival. If you stepped into a transporter and it failed to disassemble you on departure, you would very much protest if a maintenance technician attempted manual disassembly
I mean, the brain mostly consists of the same matter, aside from cycling synovial fluid, once you reach middle age. Recreate me a body but keep my original brain and I won’t mind it, aside from all the horror.
The cells in your brain are not replaced like other cells in your body, but the atoms are. In fact, all of the atoms in your body are swapped out every seven years or so.
all of the atoms in your body are swapped out every seven years or so.
I’m not sure exactly what’s true, but what you’re saying seems like a factoid that gets repeated a lot but isn’t really 100% true.
Structural stuff like the calcium in your bones… it would be interesting if it was really replaced on a schedule like that. It wouldn’t shock me if it was getting replaced, but it would certainly be cool to learn how that would work.
Is the lens in your eye getting replaced like that? I’m trying to think of body parts that seem to not get constant automatic maintenance. How about the enamel on your teeth? Really replaced every 7 years?
Or if we’re really just talking about atoms in your body, then famously the problem with heavy metal poisoning is that your body can’t get rid of it. So, is it being replaced or is your body getting rid of it? Or… is it just there from before?
And if you want to get really pedantic, and I always do, what fun… Things like artificial hips or breast implants are definitely in people’s bodies longer than 7 years but are not getting their atoms replaced.
Everyone always focuses on the Ship of Theseus or the existential parts of this, but the societal impacts would be crazy.
Millions of people teleporting to the most beautiful places on earth and wrecking them, highways and boring parts of cities abandoned, mass death of people teleporting into a crush crowd at Mecca, landmarks toppled under the weight of teleporting tourists and bosses teleporting into your house for a “work from home” meeting, weapons and bombs being teleported into war zones…
Things would eventually find a new normal and teleporting food and resources around would remove the need for ships and trucks, you could explore the world much more easily and there would be lots of science to do in hard to reach places, marine biologists would have a field day exploring the deep ocean, doctors could teleport cancer cells out of patients, space agencies teleport probes, bases and astronauts to the moon and around the solar system…
Like it would be such a huge upheaval with so many implications. It’s interesting that people really fixate on the “would I die though? What does dying even mean if I’m still around?” part, even though I think that’s maybe the least interesting thing. I guess it taps into a very primal survival instinct?
There are a couple old sci fi stories that feature “time tourism”, where they have to stop sending people to popular events like the crucifixion of Jesus because they’re getting overcrowded. Robert Silverberg’s novel Up the Line and Garry Kilworth’s Let’s Go to Golgotha! In one of them the time travelers vastly outnumber the locals, and swing the vote to release one of the thieves instead of Jesus, because that’s what the travelers think they’re supposed to do.
There’s a book where people have figured out teleportation so they have to hide women to prevent kidnappings.
Depends on how the technology works. It’s more likely that you would need someone’s how to receive or both ends, even if it were technically possible to just teleport randomly from point a to point b I feel like that feature would be disabled on commercial models precisely to stop the above from happening.
Can I just teleport the poop out of my colon and the piss out of my balls, so I don’t have to get up to go to the bathroom?
Where are you storing your piss again?
Piss is stored in the balls
When you’re a little older you’ll learn about what actually comes from the balls.
Or you could eat whatever you want and then teleport it out of you. No more fatties – unless they like that shit.
But that would enable bioterrorism, where you teleport your waste into the body of someone you want to kill. We would all have to wear tinfoil suits.
Warhammer 40k: Can I interest you in a trip through literal hell?
Also: what kind of immortality would you like?
With the current constant scanning an analyzing and advertising pushed on us, I’d stay far as fuck away from any teleporting service…
If they have the tech to disassemble and reassemble you including memories, then they can manipulate that.
Would you trust Google Instant Transport Services to not tune your personality to be more favorable toward products from their ad partners, or just slightly tune your political opinions to be more inline with their own.
Just a slight adjustment, an active protester against new datacenters would become less aggressive, a random person starts buying more Pepsi instead of Coke, a change small enough that no one notices a big change in behavior.
Also, would you trust that your memories would stay private?
I am mashing my thumb raw by obliterating X.
Honestly, I’d never thought of it, but if they can reconstitute you, memories and all, they can probably just straight read your fucking mind.
Jesus Christ, imagine a government that can know every single thought you’d ever had, and assassinate accordingly
There’s also the possibility that consciousness (including memories) is part of some kind of metaphysical net that “latches” onto a particular collection of cells/matter like an attuned radio. So once your matter stream is reconstituted, your memories just “latch” no need to reconstruct the memories. If our consciousness exists in the space between electrical pulses in our brain then such a thing is a kind of energy, yeah? Perhaps, like some forms of matter, consciousness is something that can transcend space and time? Within Star Trek this might explain how species like Betazoids and Vulcans can use telepathy—they’re able to tune into the consciousness net.
And, no, I don’t do drugs.
Hey. That’s close to my favourite theory :) although with different consequences. I like to believe that consciousness is just another property of matter that we can’t measure (yet?). Stones, dust, grass, all atoms / particles have it. But it takes a certain complex arrangement - like our CNS - with the capability to store and retrieve information (and thus learn) to actually form a conscious mind.
However this would mean your mind gets fully destroyed on disassembly and likely the copy won’t function / might be a vegetable on arrival because the unmeasured properties of atoms used to construct the copy were completely different (think of things like spin).
There a series called Riverworld that I think you would enjoy.
The books, not that TV movie that’s virtually entirely unrelated
I would be the guy who says, “Open-source teleporters only.”
I ain’t risking having myself modified surreptitiously. 😑
uses teleporter
is inexplicably desperate to try the New Improved Coca Cola
I’d use a teleporter with no hesitation. What’s important is my memories and sense of self, not the actual meat it’s in. I could find out I’m a copy of myself right now and not be bothered.
I think this idea and confidence hold extremely true until you think about Elon Musk.
I have no idea what you mean lol
His machine would not work very well.
Actually, now that I think about it, it’s far worse than that. If a company has a teleporter that can build a copy of you, they can also build an almost-copy of you. Say, a copy that is less rebellious. More obedient.
Yeah, the idea’s cool in fiction, but in reality I would never touch a machine like this. I will walk my ass over in analogue.
I’m a biologist. Perfectly recording something is very very far removed from understanding something enough to make targeted modifications.
Yeah but once you step in the teleporter you stop being. The copy is only useful for other people to keep interacting with your clone, but the actual you is dead.
What happens to “you” several years from now when every cell in your body has been replaced by mitosis?
Aldebaran’s great, okay,
Algol’s pretty neat,
Betelgeuse’s pretty girls,
Will knock you off your feet.
They’ll do anything you like
Real fast and then real slow,
But if you have to take me apart to get me there
Then I don’t want to go.Take me apart, take me apart,
What a way to roam
And if you have to take me apart to get me there
I’d rather stay at home.Sirius is paved with gold
So I’ve heard it said
By nuts who then go on to say
“See Tau before you’re dead.”
I’ll gladly take the high road
Or even take the low,
But if you have to take me apart to get me there
Then I, for one, won’t go.Take me apart, take me apart,
You must be off your head,
And if you try to take me apart to get me there
I’ll stay right here in bed.Go Stick Your Head In A Pig
