Am I? Who knows

I'm taking shuttlecrafts.

Star Trek The Motion Picture's transporter accident gave me nightmares.
Galaxy Quest's transporter accident made me laugh so hard I almost pissed myself.
Anything that ever includes Galaxy Quest is an immediate win from me. Doesn't help I've seen the movie so many times (it's a movie version of my weighted blanket) that I can vividly hear that 'exploded' line in my head.
Fuck you I've gotta turn the damn movie on again now.
Now look what you've gone and done.
- I like the "Gay" folder lol
- FYI your bottom image crashes Jerboa client 100% of the time lol
- By Grabthar's hammer...what savings.
Enterprise... what we got back didn't live long... fortunately. The fortunately was always the worst part of the line.

I'm terrified of transporters

You and a significant amount of individuals in Starfleet apparently. I can't say I blame them too much. After all the shit that's gone horribly wrong? They have a point.
- His head is on… backwards!
Old McCoy in his TNG cameo was right.
~~You~~ the infinite molecular clones of you die every time.
- nah
What a Barclay.
- Proudly so, ha
Yup, I'm taking the stairs
- From orbit to the planet? That's at least a dozen flights of stairs.

Geordi: Reg, transporting really is the safest way to travel.

Barclay: Maybe you're....wait a second. Didn't it turn you and Ro into fucking ghosts like...2 weeks ago?

consider how often the enterprise threatens to explode, compared with how often they encounter issues with the transporter, and Geordie isn't exaggerating. he just isn't telling the whole story.
Tbf Ro thought they were dead, Geordi never accepted that.
- Reg can be hyperbolic.

It's funny that when it's transporter people freak out at this idea, but technically every single person goes to sleep not knowing if the 'them' that wakes up was the same as the one that went to sleep.

We could effectively have individual consciousnesses dying each night and new ones picking back up the next morning.

Something to think about as you lie drifting off to sleep tonight.

Well...if that's true then I have died over 14,000 times so I must be used to it.
G'night
The original comic page mentions the sleep thing in the alt text
Great, I needed more existential dread. Thanks!
- I gotchu fam. Anytime - happy to help.
I wake up in the body of someone else with the same residue of Cheetos in my mouth as the other person ate before bed? Seems like a lot of effort
This thought has prevented my sleep for years now.
I mean... video recording kind of shoots that theory in the foot, doesn't it?
- How so?
  Do you think I'm taking about something related to the entire physical body like Dark City?
  No - I mean the continuity of consciousness inside your brain.
  That potentially the part of you that IS you, your subjective experience of existing, might in fact die each night never to return and simply be replaced by a different new one spun up with access to the hippocampus and a sense of having lived a whole continuous life, none the wiser to the many past yous that came before and will never be again nor its own impending doom in just a few short hours.
The solution that clears up all of these issues and results in a fully consistent view of the self is the one people like the least. There is no "you" or "me", the self is an illusion the brain creates to make sense of things.
- The Illusionist theory of Consciousness is pretty solidly refuted. The emergent theory of consciousness is vaguely similar, and argued by some to be stronger, others to be weaker, than illusionism. I think it's the most popular view among physicalist philosophers. For the arguments against emergentism, the most common seems to be the required presupposition of physicalism plus some handwaving to make it work. It's noted, however, there are a vast number of permutations of the emergentism argument or what emergent mental states actually mean, which each one of those permutations a bit different.
  Upon analysis, neither has demonstrated being "a fully consistent view of the self" with any success. Ultimately, both are just unsubstantiated attempts to fill the gaps in our understanding.
There's a great They Might Be Giants song about exactly this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSbEOZY7k20

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/teleporter-3

Source to give credit and so you can read the title text, the panel that was cropped off, and the bonus panel.

Didn't even realize that it was cropped out. I saved this from elsewhere, I wouldn't intentionally deprive credit to the artist. I'll edit it into the description and give you the credit for that too. Sorry!
Weird, there's a bonus panel? I don't see anything except the cropped intro

I don't subscribe to the Star Trek teleporters killing you. They turn you into energy on one side, shoot that energy across subspace to the other end, and recombine you back into matter.

Why do I believe this? Because of several episodes where transported crew members, including Barclay, describe the sensation and what they see as they stream through the energy/matter conversion field. If they can describe the feeling and visual stimuli from end to end, I don't see how it's 2 different entities. It's the same one, converted from matter to energy and back again.

This also explains how Tuvix was created because of some plant getting mixed in with them. The weirder, harder to explain things, are the straight up transporter clones.

The problem is that transporters don't actually exist, so there isn't a "real" way in which they work. The show presented several different descriptions for how they worked, and the functionality had whatever feature the plot demanded.
So you get the ship's doctor who avoids it because she thinks it's basically as described in this cartoon, you get the copy of Riker from the time he Schrodinger escaped from that planet, you've got the autosaved DNA sequences that helped them reset after a virus was about to kill everyone, and you get teleported people perceiving their trip. All of that can coexist in just one of the mamy shows because it isn't consistent. Star Trek has some excellent detail, and explores some interesting hard scifi topics, but it's still just fiction.
Not to poo poo on your theory because this is all fake anyways but to your point brains are weird and we make shit up all the time when we can't or just don't understand how something works.

Well consciousness is just chemical and electrical impulses. If you manage to re-create everything down to the molecule in the right area then you could completely rebuild the consciousness. Also means you'd be able to completely manipulate memories, experiences, basically anything held in the brain. Provided you had an intense enough neural mapping and deep enough understanding of the human brain to accomplish that. Luckily in the Trek universe, at least at the time of the 24th/25th century, that isn't possible.
- Your current consciousness, the one you are thinking with right now, would end.
  A clone of you would go on at the transport site, fully believing that it is you, and that everything was fine.
  Reconstructive teleportation is just remote replicators with mind control.
- Also means you’d be able to completely manipulate memories, experiences, basically anything held in the brain.
  That's assuming you know which exact parts do exactly what. Kinda like an encrypted zip file versus an unencrypted one.
  You edit whatever set of bits/bytes you want in both, but only in one of them will you actually know whats going on.
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace%27s_demon
It's just a more complicated example of the ship of Theseus, and honestly it comes down to if you believe in the concept of a soul.
To illustrate mechanically is a computer with the same model of hard drive with a copy of the data the same?
- If you take the drive apart, ship its parts somewhere, and reassemble it, is it the same drive?
I believe there have been numerous times where it’s confirmed that you are conscious and perceiving things while in the transport stream
- Barclay got sweet tentacle hugs a few times during transport.
Play the game SOMA
Daniel Dennet: "Only a theory that explained conscious events in terms of unconscious events, could explain consciousness at all."
We don't understand just how this works just yet. But I'm confident that some day we will.

Transporter accidents prove transporters work this way and are murder machines. To an outside observer a perfect clone is the same person, impossible to differentiate. But to the individual's experience, they die every time they are disintegrated in a transporter. It's a new consciousness being created when reassembled that thinks it's continuous. It's hand-waved away because it's how it's always been and transporters are a key part of the Star Trek setting.

There was that one episode with Barclay that showed he was conscious during transport and also showed that people could exist inside the matter stream (or whatever the technobabble is).
- I haven't seen that episode. But it kind of defeats the traditional explanation of how transporters work. Unless we go with the "we can exist as beings made of energy" which is always a popular type of alien or alternate being in Star Trek. And the classic transporter accidents don't make sense, then. When a transporter clones someone, who is the real one and how would you figure it out? Most of the accidents only make sense if you treat a transporter as a digital device that moves data.
- Yeah that whole episode had strange ideas. He grabbed a fish person from the matter stream and it became a human person when he integrated. That just makes no sense with how the transporter works! Even O'Brien couldn't figure that one out
People get way too worked up about this.
Be less "Guy Fleegman afraid he was a redshirt" and more "Guy Fleegman once he's realized he's comic relief".
If a consciousness thinks it's continuous that consciousness is continuous.
The substrate your consciousness dances on also changes all the time. Molecules arranged around the galaxy or cells dying and being replaced pose the exact same quandary, and the solution to both would seem to be "who cares"?
The arrangement of cells and neurons known as "You" goes in, the arrangement of cells and neurons known as "You" comes out.
- If a consciousness thinks it’s continuous that consciousness is continuous.
  No, it's simply mistaken.
  The substrate your consciousness dances on also changes all the time. Molecules arranged around the galaxy or cells dying and being replaced pose the exact same quandary, and the solution to both would seem to be “who cares”?
  The difference is that molecules and cells don't all disappear at once. Consciousness is brain activity, and the brain has redundancy that allows that activity to continue uninterrupted even while small parts are being swapped out. When you destroy the whole thing, though, the activity stops.
  The arrangement of cells and neurons known as “You” goes in, the arrangement of cells and neurons known as “You” comes out.
  Would you be okay with your child (or some other loved one) being forcibly taken away and replaced with a perfect clone? If what you're saying is true, you should be, since according to you they're not just a copy, they're literally the same person.
- Not quite. You're describing our brains as a ship of Theseus, which is fairly accurate. But our consciousness is always on while alive. Even asleep and in near-death or temporarily dead our brains don't fully stop or die. Though our brains don't actually replace neurons quite like they replace all other cells. When neurons are damaged, those pathways are lost. Our brain is redundant enough that rarely manifests as a total loss of ability. And when it does, our brains can eventually route new pathways. If enough of these are damaged at once, it can totally change a person's personality.
  But transporters turn matter into energy, those patterns are transmitted elsewhere, and energy (or different energy if stored in a pattern buffer) is reassembled very much like replicators. In this case the entire brain and body is stopped, destroyed and re-created. This is, for all intents and purposes, death and cloning. People have trouble with this because to anyone NOT transported, it looks identical. But the person absolutely stopped being alive and a new one was borne that thinks it has always existed.
  And Star Trek backs it up. The classic transporter accident that makes a clone of someone? If the transported person is still the same consciousness, what is the clone? Clearly that person isn't controlling 2 bodies with 1 consciousness. Which is the "real" McCoy? The answer is whichever wasn't disintegrated, or neither if they both were as part of the transporter process.
I think it's more they are murdering the current instance of a pattern of matter and with it the biological implementation of the pattern of consciousness. Another instance of the same pattern is created near simultaneously. To flip it, aren't they life creating machines as much as murder machines?
- To flip it, aren’t they life creating machines as much as murder machines?
  Yes, but having a baby doesn't exculpate you of murder. It doesn't cancel out.

There is a chapter or two from a book by philosopher Derek Parfit that tackles the transporter issue pretty head-on. It draws what I feel to be a pretty compelling distinction between the continuity of your conscious mind, referred to as Relation R, and the personal identity that is lost when using the transporter. He then asks which is more important. Worth a read if this stuff interests you.

I look forward to reading it, and I will be able to enjoy certain kinds of scifi much more if it convinces me nothing is lost. Your phrasing makes me think it's just going to reinforce my general worry about that sort of tech though.
(I recognize that it's fictional, it just breaks stories with similar tech a bit for me.)
- Nothing of value is lost.

There was an episode of The Outer Limits (7x08 Think Like a Dinosaur) that dealt with this exact question.

In that episode, humans are maybe-given a teleportation tech that creates a perfect copy somewhere else, but the aliens need to trust that we will 'balance the equation' (destroy the original) every time. That's easy when the human in question is immobilized for transfer. Only one transfer goes wrong- the person being transferred is woken up before the transfer is confirmed, and then the transfer gets confirmed. So now you have the original human, who's already been copied, and the transfer operator still has to 'balance the equation'...

Not surprised Outer Limits has an episode on it. Definitely gonna try and watch it later. Sounds fascinating.
How have I not heard of this series? Looks twilight zone-ish? Is it worth a watch?
- Yeah Twilight Zone is an apt comparison. It's been a long time since I saw it but I remember there were a few pretty good ones. I'd give it a watch...
And that was based on a short story of the same name.

This is the struggle session that launches a million "a sufficiently high fidelity copy of a person is literally the same person" takes, which often conveniently require the original person to die to maintain that "literally the same person" take. If the person didn't "go anywhere" and was told "congratulations, you teleported! Now kindly step into the biomass recycler because literally you is already at the destination" I don't blame that original from not going quietly.

https://www.existentialcomics.com/comic/1

- The “magic law” is just the consequence of what it means to be the “same” person. To be the same person, you have to, among other similarities, take up the same spatial-temporal space. This is why if we ask “is Bruce Wayne the same person as Batman” one of the first thoughts is “you know, I’ve never seen them in the same room before.”
  Maybe what you’re getting hung up on here is the split. Let’s imagine there is one river (river A) which goes for a bit before it forks and becomes river b and river c. In some sense, we could say that both river b and river c are river a. But if you’re river b, then river c is not the same as you, and vice versa.
- Sure, if your totally-not-magic society has 100% fidelity printed people and is totally fine with someone with officer clearance printing a few hundred of themself to collectively pull rank in every part of a Star Trek ship at once and demand interchanging legal presence as if the same person was everywhere at once at all times no matter what individually differentiating experiences those 100% fidelity copies start picking up to distinguish themselves. Totally not a magic system. Totally not just your hangup and contempt for the idea of an individual existing outside of crude reductionistic principles.
Uhhh, excuse me? My takes are totally original. T'Pol told me so.
There's actually a book series I enjoy, the Bobiverse series, that does an interesting take on it. In it a human, the eponymous Bob, gets digitized and becomes the AI of a Von Neumann probe. He's given the mission to make copies of himself, explore the galaxy, and build colonies for humanity.

There's a lot of sci-fi hand waving in it, but I thought it was a fun way to approach the question.

Does that mean transporter clones are when the transporter ACTUALLY worked?

- What's that? I was right? Time to go talk to FNN then

OK I'm not even a Trekkie but I was doing some elecromag homework and I have a really cool theory on this:

The teleporter thingy actually acts more like a guitar pickup, in a more E=mc^2 type of way, entirely perfectly converting the person into energy - not matter. (This would require an analog encoding from matter to energy). The biggest difference is the pickup totally uses up the entire person, so like if you strum a guitar and it converts to a perfect electrical wave (but the guitar goes mute).

This energy is a lot easier to transfer than just matter, but the person encoded within it still only exists once in that energy. (for the guitar analogy a speaker at the other end that picks up the guitar wave, and turns it back into sound)

Its then entirely used up to power the 'person builder' in an analog way, much more accurately than were able to recreate digitally (aka why tape record are the truest form of music recording we have, it accutate to a way smaller scale than we can capture digitally.)

This would then mean that we can't just duplicate the creation process, cause the energy only flowed into the machine one time in that exact fashion, and duplicating it would require knowledge of every single atom in a person; then a way to accurately recreate that energy waveform to power the machine.

This also opens the possibility of the transporter 'missing' if somehow they moved faster than the speed of light, while the person was still being transported, and them being just a flash of light endlessly propagating throughout the void.

Idk if the things have range in the series, but it could also be that the angle a transporter can accurately capture that energy is limited, and so really far away things are too large to be able to accurately capture (unless you have a massive radar dish or something alike)

That's a really cool theory, probably the best I've heard! It's established that there is a limited range, and that transporting during warp is possible, but extremely difficult, have to match the other ships exact speed etc., though they technically aren't traveling faster than light but existing within a warp bubble.
- Yeah, that really depends on how they define warp bubbles in the universe then, cause it'd imply the transmission occurs between ships faster than light
  Maybe something like the receiving ship trails behind the sending, exact same course just at a distance where light leaving the warp bubble would 'fall' that exact y distance over the time it takes to travel the distance between them in the x distance. It'd also still limit their distance even within their own space bubble
  Then it'd make sense cause any course deviation would cause them to 'miss' and again travel through the infinite cosmos as energy.
  Thinking about it it also describes those thematic sparkles that happen when they teleport, cause what were seeing is essentially the existence of that person as light.
  edit: forgot to say thanks for the comliment! I definitely am gonna have to watch the show(s) soon!
They addressed this in startrekng, it was called the 'Hisunberg compensator '
and duplicating it would require knowledge of every single atom in a person
I think that's how a replicator works when you ask it for a dish.
- I was also thinking about that, maybe they can do some simple proteins and such enough to trick our taste buds, but something as complicated as a conscious human would be out of their control.
  So IG it also describes replicators?
As far as I know that's pretty much on point on how transporters work. There is an episode of TNG where someone was stuck in the energy state and conscious and saw energy beings living there. Of course then there is also the case of the two Rikers which seems to show that copying a person is indeed possible under very specific circumstances (I think there was some interference with exotic energy or something).

Transporters are death machines!

https://www.schlockmercenary.com/ webcomics has a very interesting story arc about teleporters and why they were replaced.

Jeezus I forgot about that for like 20 yeara
- Hell man, it ran for 20 years.

Okaaaay, just because you've brought it up.....

Transporters in Star Trek are shown to definitely not be duplication machines. "Our Man Bashir" (DS9) is probably the most definitive proof of that.

Personally, I think transporter technology explains the staunch atheist (but still open-minded and sometimes spiritualist) Federation mindset: they know that their entire being can be reduced to a matter/energy stream. The transporter makes a devastating philosophical challenge to the idea of a "soul." Which is, ironically, why so many Federation officers refuse to accept anything that challenges that assumption (VOY "Sacred Ground").

Adding to your examples in the cannon of Star Trek the teleporter is not a murder machine, except for all those transporter accidents. In "Daedalus" (ENT) the creator of the teleporter somehow proved it, even if not every officer believes that yet.
Real life though, I'd never set foot in a transporter. A real life, Star Trek like transporter would definitely be a murder machine though.
- The real life version wouldn't even make a copy somewhere else, it would just be that phone booth from Futurama.

Probably my favorite Schwarzenegger film.

But what's the difference really

It would arguably be safer XD
With the traditional method if something goes wrong you're screwed, but with this one there's some time to confirm everything went smoothly before doing any damage to the original
That being said, the whole plasma-inator thing would be extremely dangerous
- Would be safer to keep both until the mission is over in case one of them gets killed. After that, safer to keep the original and dismantle the away team member so they don't become supervillains bent on revenge.
- Indeed. You could even do one better; instead of flashing the old copy to vapor once you'd confirmed that the groundside copy was working correctly, why not freeze it instead? Then if the away mission goes wrong and the groundside copy is killed, thaw the old copy back out again.
I'd be cool with it as long as I didn't know it worked that way

This is the plot of The Prestige, and to some extent of the survival horror game Soma.

Both excellent for the same reason.
- Soma is absolutely one of the best atmospheric story games!
This is exactly what I thought of. After The Prestige and Soma, the wonder and awe of teleporters were forever lost to me and replaced by a Lovecraftian, world of Cthulhu-esque cosmic horror type dread. Let's have some technological advances for bending time and space a la A Wrinkle In Time or Dune. Manipulate stuff that's not my body.

I guess if he remembers the conversation he knows it’s not true. If he doesn’t remember the conversation, you get more amusement next time you tell him.

How does he know it’s not true? The copy is supposed to remember it
- Hmmm, ok I misread it. I was thinking the duplicate had already been printed before the conversation started, and they were waiting to destroy the original. But he does say the duplicate has been printed "complete with memory of this conversation".

You have to get materials for the replicators to make things some way, don't you?

Replicator exist in this setting, which are seemingly capable of making everything from food to weapons, so presumably the original material isn't needed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfHbsMa_wao

If you stepped through a time-travel portal, your conscience would effectively not exist between the original time and the time the portal leads to, yet no one would call you dead. If you could somehow install your mind into a new body, let's say you download it into a flashdrive and plug it into someone else's brain while your original body lays without a mind, people may call our body dead but not you. So when there is a continuity of self between the person who steps inot the teleporter and the person who steps out, I will never call that a death, that's silly.

Downloading to a flash drive - I don't think this is actually transferring consciousness. Flash drives are just copies.
To survive the process, you would have to initially be plugged into something that is capable of acting as a full extension of your brain. You would then become simultaneously "one" with the device, as well as your current brain. Then somehow, your current brain functions would need to cease working, and you would be fully reliant on the new "brain."
From there, that process in reverse would bring you to a new body.
In the time travel instance, there is still two of a person if they happen to visit the same place at the same time. They have different perspectives and experiences at that point and are different people even if they are from the same origins. They don't share a consciousness; there are now two consciousnesses.
Same deal with the transporter struggle session if it just so happens that matter was replicated (like in the comic) but the person that was to be disintegrated simply wasn't disintegrated.
- I was specifically talking about forwards time travel to distinguish between someone's mind existing in the world and them being alive as two separate states. In teh backwards timetravel example, what makes them different people? I would say legally they are the same person, and the same ethics and morals apply to them, and many people who know the version of them in the past would probably recognize them as the person they know albeit a bit different. Are you not the same person you were yesterday? Or a minute ago?

If your consciousness exists right down to conversationally-induced existential dread, what do you care what or where the substrate it exists on is?

As long as poutine still exists and my elbows are still as sensuous then I don't care what happens.
The idea is that it does not exist. I have this worry about transporters (or would if they were real). I can only look at it as that one consciousness ends, truly dies. On the other end out pops a consciousness that thinks it is the same person, but is actually a new person, who will live only until it enters the next transporter.
In other words, whatever you think the rest of your life is going to be, post-transporter, will be unknown to you, because you will be dead, and that future will be lived by someone who believes themselves to be you, but is not.
I don't say this to be argumentative - I WISH I didn't view transporters this way - it ruins Trek for me if I let myself think about it, and I'd love to be convinced I'm wrong.
- If they act the way I would act and have my memories how is that not me?

Read the "The Punch Escrow". Not star trek but well worth it if you're into this sort of thought experiment.

Always reminds me of one of my favorite books (part of a series) The Collapsium by Will McCarthy. A big part of the book is their version of teleporting which does involve destruction and recreation, but while you're at it you could make more than one copy at the destination...