I Want to Know How the Transporter Works

I thought the video was a little too long to address a simple point.

People constantly miss the critical issue in the Star Trek transporter scenario. It is not whether your actual physical body is moved or whether your original body is destroyed and a copy is made. The question is actually – what is the physical basis of consciousness? It may well be the case that moving all the atoms in your body and rearranging them elsewhere could cause your current consciousness to end, although a new consciousness, with all of your memories and personality, could arise at the new location. It could also be the case that, your consciousness remains the same and you experience no end/disruption if you simply re-create the atomic arrangement in a different location.

It’s not really how the machine works that is important so much as how consciousness works.

I’ve thought about this a lot (no, really. Don’t laugh). Dr. McCoy makes exactly this argument in the James Blish novel “Spock Must Die” and wonders whether they commit murder every time someone steps into a transporter. I suspect in the “real” world of Star Trek, if it existed, parents would take children through transporters at ages when they are too young to make that decision on their own, much as we take pictures of children when they are too young to make a decision about whether taking a picture “steals their soul”.

That’s one of the reasons we don’t think cameras steal souls. They never have in the past. Of course, if they had, would we know? That’s a similar argument for transporters. When McCoy raises his philosophical objection, Kirk says he has been through the transporter many times and doesn’t notice any loss of soul. McCoy then says something like, “If you were different, how would you know?”

“It may well be the case that moving all the atoms in your body and rearranging them elsewhere could cause your current consciousness to end, although a new consciousness, with all of your memories and personality, could arise at the new location. It could also be the case that, your consciousness remains the same and you experience no end/disruption…”

The problem is that your experience will be the same in either case. It is intrinsically impossible to experience an end of experience, for the same reason it is impossible to see the border of your field of view. You cannot see the border, because that would imply seeing past the border, and you cannot experience an end of your experience, because that would imply experiencing something after the end.

So if a new consciousness arises in the other places, that new conscious will think it was the same one, and the old one will never experience its ending, but will just stop experiencing.

In that sense, I think Eric is right — in a “real world” like that, you would already have used the transporter many times, before ever asking how it works.

Also, given that the transporter has both duplicated people and saved backups of people in the past, you would think they would research that. Even if the Federation has moral values against duplicating people, you would think some societies would want to duplicate or back up their greatest prodigies.

For those who are interested, this video does a good job explaining the transporter problem, and exploring a few possible explanations for it.

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

Let’s suppose the transporter doesn’t work instantaneously, but rather it puts you in suspended animation for seven years while it scans your pattern and transmits it to a remote location. At the end of the seven years, you wake up in a different location and your old body is forever gone.

Except for the suspended animation bit, this happens to all of us as long as we’re alive. The atoms that compose our bodies today are not the same atoms that composed them seven years ago. Every time you breathe in and out, some inhaled oxygen atoms are becoming part of you while other oxygen atoms are being exhaled as parts of carbon dioxide and water molecules.

The video would have you attach some great moral significance to this mundane fact of existence.

About 5 years ago I lost 30 pounds. At the margin, am I a murderer?

If I understand the ST transporter, though, it was impossible to make the “copy” without destroying the original wh

I don’t no about Star Trek, but there is the “no-cloning theorem” theory in quantum mechanics: There’s no way to replicate the quantum state of the original without destroying it.

@Bedarz Iliaci,

If you were to encounter such a constructed body that walked, talked and apparently thought just like you and I, how could you tell that it was not alive? Or are you claiming that you know for certain that life is more than chemical reactions? How do you know this? Every bit of evidence says that if you stop the chemical reactions of a body, the person dies.

I don’t recall that Caplan ever asked a question, except for a rhetorical one. What he was saying is that it makes a difference whether or not the “transported” body was composed of the same atoms after transport as it was before transport. I pointed out in a simple way that Caplan’s assertion is silly. Glenn Smith makes the same point, but his comment is funnier.