Would you use teleporter technology if it existed? Why or Why not?
Would you use teleporter technology if it existed? Why or Why not?
You know those sci-fi teleporters like in Star Trek where you disappear from one location then instantaneously reappear in another location? Do you trust that they are safe to use?
To fully understand my question, you need to understand the safety concerns regarding teleporters as explained in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQHBAdShgYI
spoiler
I wouldn't, because the person that reappears aint me, its a fucking clone. Teleporters are murder machines. Star Trek is a silent massacre!
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.
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).
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!"
Use it on myself? No.
Use it to start a combination movers / electric / tunneling / waste management / highly-illegal-hardware-pirating company?
Yes.
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?
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.
I don't buy the idea that disintegrating my molecules and reconstructing new ones is tantamount to murder or suicide.
If all I experience is being one place one moment and another place the next, then it's me. It's isn't some fucking clone, it's me. You're just being turned into some other form (energy, if we're using Star Trek rules) and then being turned back.
I'm pretty sure that at 26, I'm already a completely different person than the baby I was born as, literally. My cells have all died and been replaced. The horror. ./s
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?"
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.
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.
No, I don't see any possible solution to continuity of consciousness. See Walk like a Dinosaur to understand the implications, but basically you would need to destroy the original and duplicate it from scratch.
If there is such a thing as a soul, it would likely be impossible to duplicate, but even if not, you would have to destroy the original.
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.
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`v seen the fly, fuck this shit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We've seen someone's POV going through a transporter. From your own perspective you would just see some glowy shit and appear at your destination. Of course, I would make an army of myself with another me in the transport buffer tweaked to retain the pattern for a long time. But instant transportation is invaluable.
Well, if the technology actually existed, it would solve that whole "soul" question.
We would know pretty quickly if we transported humans and they came out the other side as soulless aberrations because their original just got killed.
So yeah, I would 100% use it after it first proved once and for all that the sum of our consciousness really is all the synapses and signals and grey matter in our heads. Because if so then what does it matter if your original matter has been erased and then recreated. Your clone is just as much you as you are you at that point.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=nQHBAdShgYI
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
If I were afraid to use the teleporter I’d be afraid to go to sleep. And I ain’t going there, so yes I would use the teleporter.
Also PSA for anyone using an iphone: it’s unaware of the word “teleporter” and will autocorrect it to teleported.
Here's another great video on the transporter problem!
If we talking time tested technology that's been around for a couple centuries (i.e. Star Trek), sure.
Brand new tech? No thanks.
I won't. I take public transportation with friends and teleportation doesn't really have that social aspect.
Imagine you have a device that transmits your brain signals into another body so that you can control 2 bodies at once. Clearly you are one self that is controlling two bodies. Clearly destroying either one of these bodies wouldn't really kill you (so long as your brain is fine) you'd just continue existing in the other body.
Now let's say we copy your brain exactly and put it in the other body, and then a device that synchronizes your memories and experiences. body 1 would act exactly like body 2 in every circumstance. I don't see the difference between the first scenario and the second, you are one self, distributed across 2 brains and 2 bodies. If you killed one of the bodies, no one would die, it would be more akin to losing a limb.
Now let's remove the synchronizer, for the first instant it's identical to scenario 2, but over time the 2 selves would diverge and become separate people.
so as long as we kill off the old self immediately before or at the same time as the new body comes online then I don't see it as a murder machine like you describe.
however, if we have the tech to copy the body perfectly, who is to say we can't improve the body as teleport them, make the new body stronger or disease proof. And if we do that, who's to say we couldn't make small changes to the thoughts or memories, make you more docile or forget injustices. That seems pretty risky to me.
As long as it us thoroughly tested and considered safe. I'm not going first.
We are all clones already.
I would hope that people would start finding a way to include them into sports and play.
Thieving would be impossible to stop so it would become the standard.
The world would be held together by mortal gods; what a hootenanny.
I'm already a clone. Sure, why not.
Anyone remember that Outer Limits episode about this? They thought the teleporter malfunctioned, but it really just failed to destroy the source "copy" of the girl at the point of origin. Since she also appeared at destination, the station operator had to flush the original out of the airlock.
TLDR- Would totally use it.
If it's a tesseract, yes, but that's not really teleportation. Otherwise, absolutely not.
I've always had a hard time understanding what's so bad about the person who arrives being a clone, never saw the downside. Yes, I 'd definitely use it. One of the biggest hurdles in my everyday life is the "going there". When I was still working, the one thing I always complained about and what ruined my every morning was having to go there and return after. If I'd had the option to instantly teleport to work, I would have loved every day because I loved my work and I wanted to be there. Now that I'm disabled, I regularly have to cancel stuff like doctor's appointments last minute because my chronic exhaustion is acting up and I physically can't move my body there.
(If teleporting isn't available, I'd settle for a ship's computer core as a PDA)