Hacker News Reader

Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

That's why I'll never get in the Star Trek transporter. It takes you apart into information, then reconstructs you somewhere else. But it reconstructs a clone of you - you are dead. The clone believes the transporter works perfectly, and the clone was transported.

But the original you is no more.

View on HN

For once, rather than take apart the naive philosophy of the teleporter clone nonsense, I'm going to get pedantic about the rules of Star Trek lore.

The transporter does not create a clone. This is explicitly stated to not be the way transporters work in Second Chances (TNG). In that episode, it is considered a very unusual phenomena that there is a second Riker specifically because transporters don't work that way. All LaForge can offer is supposition.

Of course, Star Trek has always played fast and loose with its own technology's mechanics, so this may be contradicted by episodes I'm not currently recalling.

From my memories of reading the Trek Technical Manual:

1. The transporter blows you apart at the atomic level.

2. It then encodes all your atomic information into the transporter buffer. The buffer is a massive storage array (even for trek tech) but only has a limited lifespan (see: Relics, TNG).

3. The data in the buffer is then streamed over an 'energy beam' carrier to the destination location.

4. At the destination the atomic information is rebuilt into a new 'you'. Right down to what your synapses were doing at the time of step #1.

...

In the way that a jigsaw is still the same jigsaw no matter how many times you take it apart and rebuild it, the theory is that it's not a clone of you, as the original never exists at the same time the 'clone' does.

The above steps totally ignore the implausibility of being able to rebuild the subject at the other end, without any infrastructure. Transporter-pad to transporter-pad transfers make logical sense, but transporter-pad to anywhere-on-a-planet... not so much.

Derek Parfit argued that there is no defendable criterion to differentiate between the duplicate and the original.

That led him to the conclusion that the feeling of being a particular person is itself an illusion - just a side-effect of sequential brain events so to say. This is obviously quite a counter-intuitive proposition, but also quite hard to argue against without resorting to mere believes.

I guess Parfit would have considered this AI project an (albeit miniscule) achievement of immortality.

> But it reconstructs a clone of you

This is definitely wrong, there's a no cloning theorem in quantum mechanics [0].

But getting into possible methods of transportation is complicated. QM does allow for teleportation. So you can teleport the exact structure, but not have two copies at each end.

The teleporter could also reassemble you in an inexact way and you then would be a clone (at least conventionally speaking).

But the big question is: If you reconstruct everything in the exact same way is the being that comes out on the other end a different being that went in? This may be completely unverifiable because the being coming out the other end would have all the memories of the being sent in. But because of no cloning, you might be the same being.

Who knows?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem

I far I am concerned, the most crucial aspect is my mind. I think, but wouldn't know how to prove, that the information needed to satisfactorily copy a human mind is finite. You may not be able to replicate quantum states, but can definitely replicate bits.

Meh. That’s what we do everyday as our body sheds old cells and grows new ones. It’s the ship of Theseus already anyway. The me of yesterday is dead. The me of today only believes I am the same.

I didn't think brain cells were replaced.

That used to be the dominant theory - there is now evidence that new cells continue to grow - just the replacement rate slows down as we age. However we still do not really understand the mechanisms of neurogenesis (growth of new brain cells), the interplay with neural stem cells, cellular development dependencies or the pathological mechanisms associated with various diseases such as Alzheimer's. There continue to be new theories, emergent lab work etc but we still have a long long way to go before we have a clear insightful model of the mechanisms involved, never mind a predictive understanding for systemic outcomes.

Not an expert on the subject at all but to my knowledge not quite. Yes, this applies for most cells in the body but in the case of neurons and glial cells, they stay for decades, so in a real, practical sense, the you of yesteryear is still the you of today right down to the cellular level where it most matters in the brain.

Not only that, there's a difference in repairing a ship over time and swapping out all its parts at once. I'm pretty sure most people would consider the second scenario a new ship.

And the whole point of the thought experiment is to show that such a distinction is meaningless.

I'm not quite sure. There's multiple scenarios here. If we upload your consciousness into a computer and you're still alive, then there's multiple entities. If we replace your organs with machinery over time, then there is only a single entity that is changing. The latter is like the ship, but the former is not.

So by that reasoning, if we upload your consciousness into a computer and make sure we destroy you before we activate it, same difference right? We've just made the "slow replacement" process significantly more efficient.

I'm not sure if you're trolling, willfully missing the point to be contrarian (trolling), or just missing the point. Multiple entities makes a distinction in this thought experiment.

This is a really interesting point. From an economic perspective, I’ll say that if there are multiple entities, it dilutes the rarity of the original, and thus it is no longer the same. Destroying the original maintains the entity’s relationship to all external entities, preserving not only the original, but the original’s place in the system.

With cars, there's a distinction between a "restoration" and a "survivor". A survivor hasn't had things done to it other than maintenance.

There's debate about where the line is between a "restoration" and a "replica".

On that distinction i'm not sure I agree, if in both cases all parts of the ship have been replaced, the difference between doing it all at once and gradually is a semantic one, with rejection of the "new" ship as the same thing as the old ship being more of an emotional reaction. In either case, it's somewhat separate from what I mentioned about the cells in the brain and how they do stay the same over decades even if others in the body change just like the parts of the ship. Like I said though, that needs a bit of further confirmation because the science seems a bit ambiguous on the details.

I don't think the difference is as trivial as you think. When you replace things slowly there are shared experiences for those parts. They have commonality among them. When you replace something instantly there is no shared experiences or commonality.

This is an interesting point that I hadn't quite considered. Not sure how it would apply on the scale of inanimate objects but I could see it being relevant to a macroscopic organic system with consciousness, like our brains and bodies.

Well the analogy was directed at macroscopic organic systems with consciousness.

But with Theseus's ship we can see a similarity. If we had a ship, tore it down, then built a new ship without using any parts from the old ship, every sane person would call that a different ship. Frankly, the tearing it down step isn't required (an important factor). Conversely, if we repair a ship over time we do consider it the same ship. Maybe this is just personifying objects, but these conclusions about new ship/same ship would be pretty standard. It is why we distinguish replica and restoration.

If it were possible to swap out a ship with an “identical” replica instantaneously (I’m not sure what the benefit would be) I think most people on board would consider it to be the same ship. And, for that matter, it’s relatively common for ship owners to name their ships after the prior ship that held the same function, as if it was the same ship, even when it’s a totally different make/model!

But instead of swap make an identical copy. You now have two ships.

This reminds me of relics in the Catholic Church. An object held by a saint gains divinity due to their commonality, and being in the presence of that divine object passes along the divinity once again.

To be fair there's a few other more primary reasons you'll never get in the Star Trek transporter :)

You need to read Clifford Simak's "The Way Station"

I keep meaning to read that one :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com