Star Trek
r/startrek: The Next Generation
Star Trek news and discussion. No slash fic...
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Upcoming Episodes
| Date | Episode | Title |
|---|---|---|
| 05-23 | DSC 5x09 | "Lagrange Point" |
| 05-30 | DSC 5x10 | "Life, Itself" |
| 07-01 | PRO S2 | Index |
| 10-24 | LD 5x01 | TBA |
| 10-24 | LD 5x02 | TBA |
In Production
Lower Decks (2024-10-24)
Strange New Worlds (2025)
Section 31 (2025)
Starfleet Academy (TBA)
In Development
Untitled comedy series
Wondering where to stream a series? Check here.
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Because teleportation is murder. Whatever comes out on the other side may look and act like you, but isn't you, because you're now dead for having been disassembled by the teleporter.
Teleporters are interesting because when you think about it long enough, you realize the person on departure end died.
You think about it more... and if the person that comes out the arrival end is an exact replica -- down to the atom -- and, further, has internal continuity of experience... You realize that if you accept they died then you kind of also have to accept that the "you" of any given instant is constantly dying and giving way to the "you" of the next instant. That person living that experience at that exact moment will never exist again; they're dead.
So you're kinda back to transporters being business as usual again, but with a fun new existential crisis on the side.
In practice, I agree with you. The transporter scans, disintegrates, and reconstructs the thing being transported. But when the thing being transported is reconstructed at a subatomic level it is effectively identical.
I can imagine the society we see in startrek having already worked through the moral and philosophical implications. I would have loved to see that addressed in an episode tho.
Is one carbon atom the same as another carbon atom, philosophically? Can you keep your identity when all your atoms are replaced by other atoms of the same kind? It's the ship of Theseus problem
I would think so. Our cellular machinery is constantly excreting waste made of atoms. Conversely, we eat food that gets broken down and used to create and repair cells. Are we all not ships of Theseus in that regard?
Irrelevant to the transporter as the same matter is moved by the matter stream and reassembled in the same order. This is less asking if the ship of Theseus is the same ship after the hull and the mast were replaced and more asking if my kitchen table is still the same after I took the leaf out, folded the legs in, put it in a truck, moved to a new house, and set it back up
Do you think you have the same skin cells as last week, yesterday, 20 minutes ago?
Do you think the new cells come from the same carbon atoms?
We're already being disintegrated. It's just a lot slower with imperfect replication. In fact, one could make the argument that that is a decent argument for life. Although it does include viruses and prions, so maybe not that far.
Outside of measure of a man-type episodes, I don't think they've ever had a super in-depth discussion on selfhood and the soul as characters see it in universe. , but it seems like materialism is the generally accepted philosophy. Post Enterprise, people who have hangups on the transporters (perhaps more based in dualism) are treated as weirdos.
More evidence for materialism: Q, the godlike being who might be able to tell the difference, treats Golem-Picard the same entity. And last I checked nobody's going around saying that Thomas Riker and William Boimler are p-zombies.
(I guess Gray Tal is the odd man out, since there was some consciousness that got somehow ceremonially split off before shoving it in a golem. Maybe that's just trill symbiont weirdness though).
The fact that everyone treats Golem-Picard as True-Picard felt to me like confirmation that, in the ST universe, what makes you you is your mind. Memories, thought patterns, etc... I know it was tv-show hand wavery but the fact that no one mourned the death of their friend, or really ever once questioned the validity of the golem taking his place bothered me a little.
Also, M'Benga's daughter is still the same person, despite being an energy being now, without a physical body.
If my consciousness is continuing, especially into a physical form that looks exactly like myself, what practical difference does it make?
Sure, and maybe I could have phrased my comment above better. I just watched Second Chances recently, and they make a point of saying the Thomas and Will Riker have very similar brain patterns. So star trek has pretty consistently been a universe in which the self is brain patterns, and brain patterns are physical things that can copied, saved in worm aliens, and reformatted to robot bodies types.
Which is absurd as souls objectively exist in Star Trek and at least two major species objectively have them-- which implies most do.
It's not just effectively identical, it's completely identical. The same matter, the same quantum state, the same consciousness.
Star Trek's transporters and Stargate's Stargates are cloning devices
The real question is why they wouldn't use the transporter buffers effectively as backups for away teams. Have an away team member killed? No problem, rematerialize them from the buffer.
The simplest answer would be because it doesn't ordinarily work that way.
Well, Thomas Riker proves you can create duplicates and the doctor's daughter in Strange New Worlds as well as some other episodes prove that the patterns can be stored in the buffer for extended periods of time.
Here's the thing: Does Tom Riker actually prove that? That's the explanation suggested in the episode, but the preponderance of information about the mechanisms of transporter technology, as given both before and after, conflicts with it. But there's another hypothesis, a simpler one, and one that we know for a fact transporters are capable of, because it's a recurring element in Star Trek: Thomas Riker is from another universe, brought to the Prime universe by similar means as many of the various visits to and from the Mirror universe.
@taladar @dustojnikhummer Why not just let the crew member stay on the ship and just send dozens of copies of them to the planet to overwhelm any danger with sheer numbers?
Well, it makes sense to me to want to have the away mission in the memory of the crew member you retain long term unless something happened to them on the away mission.
Are stargates cloning devices? Aren't they wormholes? I haven't watched a lot of SG-1 so forgive me if they covered that
They frequently mention the Stargate operates using wormholes, but also that things dematerialize and get reconstructed on the other end. The iris works because it's so close to the wormhole that it doesn't leave enough room for things to be reconstructed. Also Teal'c got stuck in the Stargate "buffer" once when the power was cut prematurely from the other end.
And remember the Jumper stuck in the gate? It all had to go through, not just a part of it
In universe, Stargates dematerialize you, transport you using a wormhole to the other gate's pattern buffer and that reconstructs you. So if we say that transporters are cloning machine, so are Stargates.
This is refuted by in-universe POV accounts. We have traveled through the transporter with several characters, and not once is their stream of consciousness or even vision broken.
Barclay even observes creatures slightly out of phase in the transport stream and manages to pull them in. (TNG, "Realm of Fear")
I know it's described as disassembling and reassembling, but in practice it looks more like they're being adjusted out of phase, pushed to their location using the annular confinement beam, and resequenced into phase with the rest of the universe. This is what happens with Geordi and Ro in TNG, "The Next Phase."
It doesn't explain transporter clones or most transporter accidents, or even TNG, "Relics" but the transporter as a whole is kinda sorta space magic anyway.
If our consciousness is just a series of electrical impulses, as long as the transporter keot those impulses intact, makes sense that we would still be us at the other end. But I’d think nearly any transporter accident would kill the person being transported since it would mess that up.
Dr. McCoy famously hated the Transporter. He always complained that his atoms were being scattered, but never once did he voice the opinion that the transporter killed the transportee. Also, I don't believe even with Badmirals abounding, that Starfleet would allow such a death machine to be in regular use.
Nah it just feels tingly.
if the consciousness transfers, then what is the practical difference, though?
No the fuck it isn't. Dualism is clearly true in Star Trek's universe and even if it weren't we see consciousness is maintained while beaming but is normally too brief to be perceived. (TNG: "Realm of Fear")
Beaming is no more death than sleeping, or existing for longer than a single Planck unit of time is.