Is beaming down in Star Trek a death sentence? | Hacker News Reader

Is beaming down in Star Trek a death sentence?

arstechnica.com

32 pointsTomte68 comments

There's a whole section in here about how people do stuff while being transported, and then about energy beings. This is just fiction, people! The philosophical issues from the start of the article are just made unrealistically complicated if you also posit that teleportation has to obey the demands of the plot. Make sure to be clear about the difference between "is teleportation in Star Trek a death sentence" and "is teleportation in principle a death sentence". [As has been rightly pointed out, I really mean "teleportation by beaming". There are other possible means of teleportation which don't require disassembling one's self and reassembling it elsewhere: for example, travel through wormholes.]

Teleportation in principle is not a death sentence if (like me) you're a reductionist who believes that the mind is a pattern which happens to be encoded on a physical substrate. To copy the substrate perfectly implies copying perfectly the pattern encoded on it, and hence (since I'm a reductionist) copying perfectly the self.

No comment from my end about teleportation in Star Trek being a death sentence.

What if someone made an exact copy of you? Would your consciousness gain a second body?

Yep. Both are me; they start diverging as soon as the copy is made.

Both were you, they stopped being both you the second they started diverging which is the second they came into existence.

Per the parallel thread: the word "are" is misleading, and you should distinguish between the two things you mean by it. (I should have done that myself in the grandparent to this comment.) I am who I was five minutes ago, and I am also not who I was five minutes ago, for two different senses of the word "am" which happen to have the same word in English.

I think it's more accurate to say the problem is "me." We don't need to worry about it most of the time, but the only "me" around is the state of your brain at this instance in space and time. Anything else is just more or less "me"-like, but not exactly "me." So if someone recreated you in triplicate, the instant after they appeared, all four of you would all be the same amount "you," though you four would all diverge thereafter, and be more and more some other version of you.

Nice angle I hadn't really crystallised in my mind. I'll meet in the middle and say that the problem is the combination of "is" and "me"; one sense of "is" applies to a particular sense of "me", and the other sense of "is" applies to the other sense of "me".

Now if one of the copies mysteriously grows a goatee then all bets are off.

Simply put, identity and equality are different things; he's conflating them. This was already pointed out, but he didn't grok it.

I'm not conflating identity and equality; I'm arguing that you mean two different things by "identity" but are using one word to refer to both, resulting in confusion all round.

I was not replying to you, you're intellectually dishonest, we're done, I've made that clear.

I think it's all relative. Identity and equality are the same if you disregard a thing's environment. Are two USB keys with the same data on them "the same"? It depends on what you care about.

Indeed, this is the essence of the Buddhist denial of "self." The idea of a persistent self is a convenient abstraction for communicating things like "I'll go to the store this afternoon," but it should not be mistaken for the reality that the persistent self doesn't exist. "You" die every moment.

Basically the big idea behind We Are Legion (We Are Bob)!

You would have an identical twin.

> Teleportation in principle is not a death sentence if (like me) you're a reductionist who believes that the mind is a pattern which happens to be encoded on a physical substrate. To copy the substrate perfectly implies copying perfectly the pattern encoded on it, and hence (since I'm a reductionist) copying perfectly the self.

A copy of you is not you, one need only not destroy the original for you to quickly admit that the copy is not you. If I copy you, and ask you if the copy over there is you, you'll say no. If I then kill you, you have just been sentenced to death. The copy will live on feeling as if it is you, but it isn't you, it's a copy of you. That is unless you believe there can be any number of you; but the second they're created they are by definition no longer you, they are them, and your experiences are no longer identical, you are instantly separate beings so they are instantly no longer you.

Here we go :)

Your fundamental misunderstanding of my viewpoint is that there can only ever be one of me. The "copy", as you put it, is also one of me. The two are different people by the time you come to threaten one of them with death, but at the instant of creation of the second, they were the same. They diverged since (just as identical twins would, immediately after their brains began to form in the womb). The question of "which one is me" is meaningless: they are both me, in the sense that they have a common "ancestor" (i.e in the sense that I am who I was five minutes ago), and they are both not me (in the sense that I am not who I was five minutes ago).

You're just playing a semantic game with the word "me" and "self". Saying they are both me and they are both not me is saying nothing, it's a meaningless statement devoid if any value to communicate anything at all. Put the semantics aside, and try and address the actual underlying issue, identity. The second a clone exists, they are unique individuals, they cannot both be you anymore.

Fine. But it's not really a surprise that the language becomes inadequate when the situation becomes extraordinary: the verb "to be" was never built to cover situations where a single entity bifurcates into two identical copies of itself, and you want to track the relationship between the children and the parent.

> A copy of you is not you; one need only not destroy the original for you to quickly admit that the copy is not you.

We're not allowed to play semantics, so this statement is meaningless: you need to play semantics if you want to use the word "is" in this context.

> If I copy you, and ask you if the copy over there is you, you'll say no.

Correct. This is using the word "is" in the same sense as I would if I said that I am no longer who I was five years ago.

> If I then kill you, you have just been sentenced to death. To be precise, someone has just been sentenced to death who was once the Smaug123-who-is-typing-this-now. The one who was killed would say "I have been sentenced to death". The one who was not killed would say "someone else has been sentenced to death".

> The copy will live on feeling as if it is you, but it isn't you, it's a copy of you.

Now who's playing semantic games ;) this time, you're using the word "you" in a different sense to me. Again, "you" refers to two concepts here: the timeless "Smaug123 who is always the same person", and the individual "Smaug123 who can vary over time".

> We're not allowed to play semantics, so this statement is meaningless: you need to play semantics if you want to use the word "is" in this context.

That was not remotely a semantic game and I find this statement so absurdly intellectually dishonest that I'm done with this conversation.

Your "five minutes ago" consciousness would continue along in the original body, and would have the sense of being the same person. The copy would have that sense as well. If both copies are aware of the copying process and which one is the copy, then they could agree that the original is the original "you". But if the copying process destroys one and makes two, or in some other way makes it impossible to distinguish original from copy, then both people could legitimately claim to be the original, and to have a continuous conscious experience of being the original.

That'd be kind of messed up.

Basically right, yep :) although personally, my "descendants" wouldn't consider the question of "am I the original?" to be either meaningful or interesting. Both are the original (both descended from the same source through time) and both are not the original (both have diverged from the same source over time).

They might be concerned that one of 'you' had their consciousness terminated prematurely, if only for them wondering on the next transport if they get to continue experiencing life as 'you'.

A lot of fiction that deals with consciousness copies finds that copies are far more willing to "die" knowing that another instance of the pattern will live on.

Ultimately our desire for self-preservation itself only comes from our evolutionary history. That desire itself is mutable, and you could expect that the portion of it that cares about being the original would slowly evolve away if transporter use were a significant component of the fitness function.

It's fiction, it doesn't find anything, it asserts. There's no rational reason at all to think a copy would be more willing to die. We have copies in the real word, twins, and being a twin doesn't make the other have less of a survival instinct.

Twins are very low-fidelity copies of each other. They may have been diverging for decades. To use them as counterexamples is dubious at best. (Not disagreeing with your point, but your example is not really evidence in favour of it.)

EDIT: actually, I think you may have provided weak evidence against your assertion. It's not wildly unusual for a family member to sacrifice themself to save other family members from death.

Nor is it unusual for people to sacrifice themselves for communities, nations, or even ideologies. "Self" is not as narrow a concept as naive philosophies assert.

Twins are copies? You are stretching a bit, I think. I understand you feel strongly about this, but you're not going to convince anyone with weak arguments like this. But, thanks for helping make my intent clearer.

There isn't frequently a situation in reality where a reduction in self preservation would be favored, even in the case of twins. Although I'd bet you would in fact find that twins express a moderately greater willingness to die for one another than other types of siblings.

Twins are the closest thing to an exact copy that exist in the real world, that's not remotely stretching, it's trying to ground it reality to make the silliness of the fiction obvious. Like all analogies, it's flawed, try and see the point rather than pick on the flaw. Uh no I don't feel "strongly" about a conversation about identity vs equality of Star Trek transporters, you're projecting. And dying for the love of another isn't remotely the same thing as your original statement, you've moved the goal post.

The point is that the analogy actually shows the opposite of what you want it to show! Family members are very, very weak copies of each other, and they still sacrifice themselves to save other family members. Explicitly, we have weak evidence against "There's no rational reason at all to think a copy would be more willing to die", namely that the better the copy of you, the more likely you are to sacrifice yourself for them. (Would an average human be more willing to die for their third cousin twice removed, their aunt, or their father?) The evidence is weak, naturally, because nature doesn't contain anything even remotely like two exact copies of a person; all we can do is attempt to extrapolate from the obvious trend that "the closer the relation, the more willing I am to die for them", and the obvious extrapolation is "the closest possible relation - the exact copy - is the most likely candidate for me to sacrifice myself to save".

By the way, the reason I downvoted your comment was because of the "you're projecting", which comes across as snarky and is not remotely implied by the parent comment.

> the mind is a pattern which happens to be encoded on a physical substrate

Why do you believe you can differentiate between mind and substrate?

Copying the mind is not like copying a hard drive at rest. It's more like copying a hard drive while somebody is actively writing to it at random, inserting new sectors, shaking it, etc.

I believe that to perfectly copy the mind, you have to make an instantaneous perfect copy of the entire human.

Sure, I'm happy to believe that. This is only a thought experiment, so we are allowed to do things instantaneously if it makes the issues clearer; and I never actually said that the physical substrate was necessarily the brain. It could just as well be the body more generally.

Ok sounds good, but why differentiate between mind and substrate? Doesn't the pattern / substrate model reduce the mind to just information, and the brain (or body) to just machinery? For me the substrate and the pattern are the same thing, like a vinyl audio recording.

There's arguments each side of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind–body_dualism

Sure, this is basically just amateur late-night fireside chatting based on stuff that has already been hashed out in much more detail by much more competent people :)

But yes, there is a sense in which they're definitely the same thing: changing the substrate would change the pattern encoded on the substrate. There's a sense in which they're different: the pattern could in principle be copied off the substrate and encoded on a different substrate. (I'm a reductionist, so in my opinion this holds for my self, as well as recordings on vinyl.) The reason I differentiate here is so that I can be more flexible when weird situations come up, like the notion of me living as an emulated human on a different computer system.

I've always thought that strong AI needs to model emotions, and that for emotions you need biochemical modelling.

It reminds me of what happened with analog synthesizers. After many years of a divide between digital and analog synthesis, in the 2000s they started making virtual analogs (VAs), which are analog synths modeled in software and available as plugins for your audio software or as physical keyboards with VA insides. (You probably know all this.) For many people these were/are good enough but a purist could always tell the difference. Less warmth, character, etc.

In the end I think a Turing test-passing emulation is possible but it would help a lot / be necessary to model the substrate. However since you know yourself better than anyone else I'm not sure if you could pass your own Turing test. Probably there are lots of things written about this too :)

”To copy the substrate perfectly implies copying perfectly the pattern encoded on it, and hence (since I'm a reductionist) copying perfectly the self”

But if yo copy a living being, you end up with two living beings, each (presumably) with their own self. Some people would argue getting rid of the original is murder (if you assume the original and the copy share a self, it would be mutilation)

I think the way out of this is to not call it copying but moving (you move a body from atoms a pattern buffer and from there back to atoms)

Yep, it would be murder - except that in this thought experiment, I stepped into the transporter of my own free will, and thereby expressly consented to the destruction of one of my selves in the immediate future. It becomes much more interesting if someone is forcibly transported; then I think the moral answer depends on what the transportee believes about their consciousness. Do they believe they'll be murdered, or not? Then I think there's a fair argument to say that the forcible transport is morally evil, or neutral, depending on the two cases.

"one of my selves" - the flaw in your logic is revealed by this phrase.

Not to me, it isn't. Care to elaborate? (Pointing out "there is a flaw in your logic" to someone who has a flaw in their logic is rarely very helpful unless you actually point out the flaw too.)

Who are you if you aren't an individual? How can you have multiple selves? What entity is doing the possessing of multiple beings? Do you believe in a soul?

"Individual" is a word that is usually a pretty descriptive one, but breaks down a bit in this kind of situation; likewise "self". As clarified elsewhere in the thread, we use "self", "me", and so on, to express several different notions: "who I am right now", and also "who I was in the past" and "who I will be in the future".

Nothing is possessing multiple beings, except in the sense of my final paragraph in this comment. "I" is merely a pattern expressed on a physical substrate: a computation being executed, if you like. I don't believe I have some kind of essence that is not completely expressed by my physical state.

If you want a neat shorthand for my position: I am to my body as Mac OS is to the computer I'm currently typing on. There can in principle be different incarnations of Mac OS running on different computers (indeed, there are thousands! Every Mac is running a different incarnation of Mac OS right now), but the one which is running on the computer I'm currently using is unique because it's diverged from the master copy that was imprinted on it by the install process. In that sense, Mac OS is the abstract entity possessing multiple computers, though each instance of that entity is different from all the others; Mac OS has multiple "selves". In the teleporting-by-copy analogy, "take a backup image" is the process of scanning matter ready for transmission and disassembly; "install that backup onto a new computer" is the process of recreating my body; "destroy the original computer" is the process of destroying the original body.

You are still alluding to the concept of a non-physical layer of reality, the concept of the platonic ideal. There is no "abstract MacOS" floating out in the ether that all your computers have diverged from, unless you believe in a soul or platonic ideal. There are only individual computers with operating systems that happen to look similar to our flawed senses. The abstraction that they are all instantiations of some original is in your head, not a fundamental aspect of reality. Abstractions are a feature of the mind.

Furthermore, the human body is not digital, and not encoded in numbers. You can't completely copy all properties - you would have to change some properties, for instance location in space.

Is something more "you" or less "you" based on how much it has diverged from the original? Thats just absurd.

If I told you ”I’ll delete you, but don’t worry, we have a backup” would you be worried? I would, even if I knew that backup existed and were convinced you would restore it, and even if that backup already had been restored, and probably even if those copies shared a “self”, because destroying one could destroy part of the memories of the combination.

Can a "pattern recorded on a physical substrate" consent? What does this even mean?

What does it mean for you to consent? It means that. According to the worldview I have been expounding, I'm "just" a really complicated program running on wildly convoluted wetware. Whatever it means for a person to consent to something, is what it means for that pattern to consent.

I agree with all of your points about "beaming" it just wasn't clear from your statements that you were considering alternate implementations of teleportation.

> is teleportation in principle a death sentence

If we were to harness folds in spacetime, or other dimensions to teleport, we would have no philosophical questions around it being death, because locomotion through any dimension is a "solved philosophy".

The real irony here is that Gene Roddenberry did not invent the transporter because he thought it was a good idea from a dramatic point of view, but because he was forced into it by budgetary constraints. Back in the 1960's it was way beyond the financial means of a weekly TV show to produce a special effect of a shuttlecraft landing on a planet or in the shuttle bay for every episode, so they invented the transporter as a way of getting people to and from planetary surfaces with reasonable production costs. That real-world reality has shaped the face of science fiction for fifty years.

Nowadays we have the technology to fly spaceships around on screen pretty much at will, which actually presents a dramatic opportunity: someone could write a Star Trek episode where they actually take seriously the possibility that the transporter is a bad idea and ban it in favor of shuttlecrafts. I think this could make a really good premise for a novel and/or movie. It could even re-shape the face of science fiction for the next fifty years the way the original transporter did for the last fifty.

>Someone could write a Star Trek episode where they actually take seriously the possibility that the transporter is a bad idea and ban it in favor of shuttlecrafts.

Star Trek Enterprise kind of did that, because it was set in a time when transporters were new technology and deemed unfit for anything but cargo. Unfortunately because it's a franchise staple to see the away teams beaming down to planets, they took the coward's way out and quickly forgot it.

"The Orroville" is also a (very good IMHO) Trek knockoff that dispenses with the transporter.

Related: CGP Grey's "The Trouble with Transporters"

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

Is sleep a death sentence?

To boil it down, "I" am made of two things: qualia and memories.

During unconscious sleep, those mysterious qualia disappear, except for brief chaotic flashes which we call dreams. Meanwhile a physical process takes place in the brain: those memories are reorganized, reformatted, and reconstituted.

In this view, there is a very literal sense to the idiom "I woke up feeling like a brand new person." Yet, few people go to sleep at night worrying that "they" will no longer exist in the morning, even though that is quite arguably the case.

I would worry about biological sleep long before I worried about teleporters. While any OSHA-compliant teleporter can (we would assume) preserve the continuity and integrity of one's memories, sleep doesn't even have that feature.

If "you" are the product of your experiences (environment) acting upon your corporeal components (atoms, your "blueprints" etc), then isn't it true that the "me" from 1 nanosecond ago ceased to exist and a "new me" is actually being created in every new frame in time?

If you think of it this way, I don't see why being demolecularized by a transporter, and being reconstructed on a ship in orbit, is any different to walking across a room.

In both transitions the state of trillions of atoms in my body change, and I gain and lose atoms, the difference is only one of magnitude.

No mention of the accidental creation of two William Thomas Rikers?

> If, however, we destroy the ship but mail its blueprints somewhere else and then build a new, identical ship, it’s not the same ship. It’s a separate ship built from the same blueprints. It doesn’t even matter whether you use the same planks or not. [Emphasis added.]

The last sentence implies that something designed to be repeatedly disassembled and reassembled is a different object on each assembly. That doesn't sound right.

Teleportation is a fiction and you can just invent the necessary details to decide whatever you want, but I still like this webcomic treatment:

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/1

It comes down to the philosophical question -- are you better defined by the pattern of matter and energy that represents you, or are you the matter and energy that represents you?

I personally believe it's the former. I.e. if I had a terminal illness and I made a copy of myself (the same except healthy), I like to think I would be happy to let it carry on my life and work.

What would likely happen is that a society that invents a transporter would be forced to redefine their cultural parameters for concepts like "death" and "self" because the device is just too useful to ignore, despite any existential ramifications it may present.

So the answer to this perennial Trek puzzle depends, ironically, on a certain point of view.

Statistically, yes, if you're wearing a red shirt.

At least until they re-did all the wardrobe so that Security wore gold or navy blue :)

No way in effing hell I'd teleport, even with tech 1000000 years advanced from today.

No way in effing hell am I getting into a car, even with tech advanced 100000 years from today ;)

Not saying I'd ever get into a teleporter willingly. But remember that people have said this about most inventions at some point.

There is another.

Teleportation in Star Trek is "beaming", but worm holes are the alternate means of teleportation. There is no notion of death when traveling through a worm hole.

There was a Star Trek species called the T'Kon who used something like wormholes to create dimensional gates that let them just walk to other planets as easily as walking across the room. That was presented as a technological feat "sufficiently close to magic" even to the Federation. Wormholes in that universe seem to be rare and unstable and weird, though not nearly so much as in Farscape, where they seem to be able to access all of space and time, IIRC.

Related: "What Makes You You?"

https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/12/what-makes-you-you.html

Polyopic heatuscopy is just an odd hallucination where you are split into multiple copies of yourself. You and your forks are aware of each others thoughts, but you may not be able to distinguish the real you.

If Chalmers is right, it would seem that a transporter would be a machine for making p-zombies.

Why? Just you beging copied and your first instance dying doesn't make the copy a p-zombie.

Chalmers believes in the metaphysical possibility of p-zombies and argues that this necessarily implies that physicalism is false. If a transporter recreates the physical structure of a person, but physicalism is false, then this recreation must be without any of the subjective qualia of the original. Under the premise that the transporter works, however, the re-creation acts as if it has these qualia, so therefore it must be, by definition, a p-zombie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie#Zombie_ar...

If you've played "Soma" it explores this concept a lot.

If you like these ideas, read the Altered Carbon series :)

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