Does Captain Kirk die when he goes through the transporter? | Hacker News Reader

Does Captain Kirk die when he goes through the transporter?

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34 pointsnsoonhui92 comments

I like to think that technology like this is indeed as cruel as truly killing you, but that the implication is overlooked due to the transported clone being able to attest that they indeed survived the journey, and that there is no dead Kirk to say otherwise.

And for pragmatic reasons, a spacefaring society would ofcourse be very happy to have technology like this, and very disinclined to abandon it. Furthermore, as much as humans tend to speak highly of the value of life, if the victims of such a machine are completely silenced and their relatives see no difference, this is an easy dark bargain for humanity to make.

What I'm saying is that there is likely no scientific uncertainty about machines like teleporters killing the original, but that human society simply accepts and hides this fact under the rug. We are good at ignoring uncomfortable side effects, when they have no direct impact on us. (until you're the one standing in a teleporter for the first time, facing the social pressure of either calling everyone else a clone and a fake, or taking the teleportation yourself)

What there is instead is a strong cultural established norm that teleporters do infact not kill you, and that this cultural norm is upheld for more or less pragmatic reasons. A false but useful-for-society cultural norm.

On the trope of the "wiser and kinder aliens", I would imagine that if a machine like this were to exist in any other universe than Star Trek (idk about Star Trek aliens that much tbh, they seem like humans cultures more or less), there would definitely be alien societies that have discovered teleportation but would not for a second consider teleporting living objects of importance, let alone themselves. Because they could be more thorough with the philosophical implications of the machine and less inclined like us, to hide it under the rug.

In TNG, we have a story where a transporter malfunction results in two Rikers. They cannot both be the original Riker, and there is nothing to point to one of them being the original over the other, so the logical conclusion seems to me to be that neither is the original, meaning the original Riker has to be gone.

And why can’t the logical conclusion be that either one of them could be the original Riker? Why does the original have to be gone?

As in, either could be the original, and as we have no way of telling them apart it does not matter which? Okay, that sounds reasonable. However, if we know that at least one of them is a clone, we know that transporters are built with the ability to create clones of people. It seems hard for me to believe that transporters would be built to have that ability unless that is the way they always work.

I play the Ship of Theseus problem card and I follow up with the argument there never was an original Riker to begin with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

This is where I always end up with these kinds of things. Riker didn't die, and in fact neither life nor Riker ever really existed as a coherent entity.

I believe it takes about seven years for every particle in our bodies to be swapped out; all the atoms in your body today are different from those of seven years ago. In a sense, we're never truly "original".

Every particle in your body doesn’t get swapped out which is how they can do molecular analysis on things like teeth and bones to try and pin point where you grew up.

Even if every cell in your body is replaced over a 7 years period which they don’t since not all cells actually undergo mitosis or are even replaced through stem cells not every molecule in your body needs to be replaced for that to happen and in fact it doesn’t it would be exceedingly wasteful and impractical.

So the many if not most hydrogen molecules you were born with are still probably somewhere in your body.

In the Star Trek world, I think the transporter and the replicator are the same technology just applied differently. When transporting goes wrong, they mention things like “pattern buffers”, where (presumably) information about how to reconstruct the person’s matter is held until all info arrives. I suspect you hold on to the pattern buffers for things you want to replicate. Unanswered by this… where does the matter come from? Maybe just reconstituted energy from the engines.

From the technical manual: raw stock for replicators is stored in the form of a sterilized organic particulate suspension that has been formulated to statistically require the least quantum manipulation to replicate most finished foodstuffs.

on the next episode of TNG: the sterilized organic particulate suspension tank leaks, forcing the crew to decide whether to teleport the captain back to the ship or eat steak for one more meal

For reference the episode is Second Chances [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Chances_(Star_Trek:_The...

Maybe both are the original? Think of the turnstile in tenet. A person who enters while traveling backwards seems to appear twice, traveling in two directions of time, but clearly both are the original. If one then reverses and catches up to the other, they are still both the original, even though they can shake each other’s hand.

What if the transporter malfunction causes the same for riker, except both rikers now travel forward in time right from the start. Therefore, they are both one and the same original riker, but they inhabit the same points in time at different points in space and therefore they will diverge as soon as they exit the transporter.

As a hypothesis go, it’s worth stating, but only since it leads directly to a conservation-of-mass problem and is therefore disproved by contradiction, a problem that Tenet does not encounter (it has its own problems of course, most obviously causality issues from the conflation of pataphysical outcomes with thermodynamic constraints).

Therefore neither are the original Riker, which was evidently terminated in the most horrifying fashion the first time it stepped into a transporter beam.

There's an Outer Limits episode with a transporter-like device, but it merely makes an exact "copy" of the person and the machine automatically destroys the "original".

I don't recall the episode name off-hand, or want to give away too much of the plot, but I thought that was better than the duplicate Rikers.

Also: two Crichtons in Farscape, although that wasn't due to a transporter-like accident but a "normal" clone.

It's "Think Like a Dinosaur", based on the short story by James Patrick Kelly [0]. It deals more or less with the transporer issue described in the linked article.

I remembet having read it when it was first published in Asimov's SF magazine. God I'm old.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Like_a_Dinosaur

The Prestige (major spoilers to follow) has the same idea. A stage magician invents a trick that appears to instantly teleport him across the room and nobody knows how he does it. The "trick" is that a duplicate is created and the original is dropped into a locked container of water to drown.

> They cannot both be the original Riker

We don't experience the future, which means our sense of continuity can only be a result of something in the present and/or the past. That isn't violated by teleportation or duplication. When two copies step out of a duplicating teleporter, they are both a continuance of the same person. The "original" Riker is the original in the same sense as you exactly one moment ago are the origin of you in this moment.

In fantasy stories, we don't know how technology works and thus can't make logical inferences about how it works.

Of course you die when you transport. And a new person (with the memories of the old) begins their life at the destination of transportation.

Transporter = pattern recorder + vaporizer + replicator

and this also how we have the different transporter gaffe episodes:

* Copy in a parallel universe (the various "mirror universe" epidoes)

* Replicator on both sides makes a copy (William + Thomas Riker, TNG 6x24 Second Chances)

* No copy made (e.g. TNG 6x04 "Relics")

* Modified copies (virus removal with biofilters)

* Multiple copies

> So, what happens in the transporter is “just” that you get converted into a different medium

Yes, like when you are (just) vaporized by a phaser. That's the part you (just) die in.

> A copy ... from the perspective of Physics, there is no reason why this should not be possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle

and it's not a "subtlety" (as the video later concedes - but why suggest that it's possible to record perfect state, in the first place?). Anyway, whether the copy is exact or not doesn't help at all with the fact that the transporter kills you.

> There are various ways people have tried to make sense of this conundrum

It's not a conundrum except in the sense that a TV series has a lethal transportation mechanism...

It‘s clearly not as easy as you make it seem to be. First being a separate subject is already merely a concept. And second the idea of dying carries all kind of baggage that clearly does not exist when being transported. Like the fear of death or of not being able to continue and all of that.

> First being a separate subject is already merely a concept.

Maybe, but being vaporized by an energy discharge is not merely a concept.

> And second the idea of dying carries all kind of baggage that clearly does not exist when being transported

"clearly does not exist" ... in the make-up TV show which need this prop.

The "no baggage" is a bit like how people in cults can commit mass suicide - believing they're not really dying, but rather being transported into heaven or something along those lines.

The difference being that the transporter (in that universe - if it were not TV series) is a fact not an unprovable possibility or even fiction you choose to believe in. So no, it‘s not like a mass suicide.

I think the same question should be asked when someone hopes to become immortal through uploading their mind to a computer.

(Well ~ If there's a way to keep the duplicate/virtual minds bidirectionally in-sync for a while, then ...)

Still then: The main question remains.

Is it ethical to do STRG+X instead of STRG+C?

Have you ever read the Lena [https://qntm.org/mmacevedo] short story?

That was a crystal clear and haunting presentation of many of the fears I have about BCI.

Here are a few more:

- Whoever wins BCI wins the evolutionary arms race. They can have an infinitely scalable workforce (slave force) to build anything conceivable and rapidly outperform the competition. (They also won't need biological humans anymore, so they can easily chemically eradicate us.)

- How does Democracy work in BCI? A lot of the things we take for granted break down and have no clear analog. Who decides the rules of the system? Who shuts down simulations? Who decides what simulations get certain stimuli (or tasks)? Benevolent God or dictator seem to be more stable configurations, and the latter is probably more efficient.

- If physics is solvable and losslessly reversible, a future entity could grab and emulate us at any point. We could be simulations of originals right now. Or in the future subjected to infinite torture and pain without any control. Pointing this out was how I learned of the similarly themed Roko's Basilisk.

I'm curious whether we'll invent AGI or BCI first. There have been more developments from the deep learning camp, but BCI seems to be gaining more interest.

> (Well I think if there's a way to keep the duplicate/virtual minds bidirectionally in-sync for a while, ...)

Ship of Theseus

I think a more interesting question is whether you're the same person when you wake up every morning. Chemicals in flux when you're awake undergo dramatic turnover and shift, sometimes without returning to the same baseline.

What about moment to moment?

I think the view of "self" is what's to blame.

I think the primary issue is the continuity of self (or an object).

So let’s say in the Ship of Theseus experiment all the boards are replaced one after another pretty quickly. I think it’s not the same ship. If it’s done over a longer time period it’s the same ship.

Similarly to your body - your cells get replaced but you maintain continuity. So nightly yea you’re the same person. But you probably aren’t the same person as you were 10 years ago. This is true in many ways, some simple examples are your tastes and preferences changing. Beliefs, etc.

> I think the view of "self" is what's to blame.

Agree completely and I think this bleeds into discussions around consciousness as well.

I loved the video game SOMA which played with this idea in its story and environments.

Stephenson's Fall, or Dodge in Hell deals with this extensively. It's even more meandering than most of his work and I would not overall call it one of his best but the parts dealing with whether or not an uploaded copy of someone's brain is the same person are pretty interesting.

I mean, the only real answer is "it depends on the writer," but given the general way the transporter is supposed to work most of the time (converting matter to energy, transmitting the energy somewhere, then reconverting the energy back into matter and reassembling the original thing) then... yes, the original Kirk dies, and a facsimile Kirk comes out the other end.

If that kind of technology really existed (especially given its 'fail states' like merged beings and clones,) I would assume people's concept of what "life" and "death" and "self" were would be radically different than today. If what comes out the other side is you, down to the quantum level (the show had to come up with a "Heisenberg compensator" to explain how this was possible,) what does it matter if the "you" entering the transporter ceases to exist?

> I mean, the only real answer is "it depends on the writer," but given the general way the transporter is supposed to work most of the time (converting matter to energy, transmitting the energy somewhere, then reconverting the energy back into matter and reassembling the original thing) then... yes, the original Kirk dies, and a facsimile Kirk comes out the other end.

I agree.

> what does it matter if the "you" entering the transporter ceases to exist?

A lot! Most of us are hardwired to know that If you die, you die and knowing that a perfect copy would exist, doesn't compensate that.

Separate the body and mind. Attach a special device to the head that lets you store the digitalized memories of that person in a chip. Remove the chip, transport the body and then reinstall the chip. Go one step further and digitally transfer the chip's data to another chip at the other end, insert the chip into the body.

It's clear that each new body is a new person but with the same memories.

For outside observers the chip is precious, the body is not. In other words, death and murder are socially accepted.

Anyway, why don't they exploit the more powerful potential of that technology ? I'm talking about backups. In the first motion picture, something went wrong with the transporter and a crew member was re-assembled like a Picasso's painting, that was stupid. They could save backups of crew members they are about to transport, I was thinking, and restore them if something goes wrong. They also could, in emergency situation, restore died staff members. Oh, by the way, if I have a red uniform, I refused to be transported on the first unexplored planet without a backup.

Doesn't that imply that the crew then is immortal and everything loses its meaning? There's zero stakes, you can even restore from homebase.

Every time you are restored a part of your memory is lost ( the events happened between the last backup and the restoration ), this could be the risk. The backup isn't you. Plus, nobody want to die, backup or not backup.

We're playing at sci-fi here, so don't take my response too seriously, but allow me to engage.

We know that e=mc^2, and so it's going to take a hell of a lot of energy to make enough mass for another copy of you. The only 'efficient' way to use a transporter therefore is to turn your 'original' body into energy, and use that energy to make the copy at the other end.

I don't think it's a problem in Start Trek universe: they use REPLICATORS to generate meals for the crew (to cook ?). So what's the problem there ? If Einstein is dead in the kitchen, he is dead everywhere. As you tell us, it's fiction, so the whole discussion can't be taken seriously, IMHO ;-)

Maybe the food replicators work by transporting the appropriate meals from elsewhere in the galaxy :)

The short film "To Be" [1] is a fun exploration of this idea. (The animation is a bit crude, but it's worth watching. There's a low-quality version on YouTube [2].)

The same paradox is a major plot point in Christopher Nolan's The Prestige, and in Stanislaw Lem's Star Diaries.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Be_(1990_film)

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUXKUcsvhQc

Thank you for sharing this. Here is an official (free) link with better resolution: https://www.nfb.ca/film/to_be/

I don’t think we will be able to answer that until we understand the medium or substrata that our consciousness utilizes.

It is clearly non-physical in nature, but it also requires bioware to operate. Thoughts in this medium are also unbounded by the laws of physics or thermodynamics, as we can easily imagine and simulate things falling upward or entropy spontaneously decreasing.

The universe became conscious in the form of man, and has utilized this medium to ask: ‘who made me?’ since time immemorial.

If this medium breaks during transport and your new arrangement of atoms is turned on, it might be more likely that your transported self is a real life p-zombie :)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

I semi-agree with you, in the sense that until we better understand the "substrata of consciousness", there are two possible interpretations:

1. We keep "dying" and being replaced by our future selves, in which case transporting may not be different then just staying at the same place. But we still die, at least in that sense, on transportation.

2. There is some kind of continuous substrate to conscious existence. And we die on transport.

> It is clearly non-physical in nature

I don't think this is in any way clear. We just like to think so because it makes us special.

If you can find a way to touch someone’s (or your own) plane of consciousness with any foreseeable device you are correct.

What does "touch someone’s (or your own) plane of consciousness" even mean?

That’s what philosophers debate :)

Technology-wise it might look like inserting not only advertisements into your imagination, but changing your thought process on demand to think about needing the products without even knowing why. Or erasing all experiences and replacing with other peoples, or inserting other peoples conscious experience into your own so you could have a debate :)

We only have issues with this because we think our consciousness is somehow special wrt the laws of Physics. As always with this discussion, I'll recommend the book Permutation City from Greg Egan [0]

I always think about cloning an OS to a second hard drive. Will the OS care what happened? The only annoyance it may have is that it has the same /etc/hostname as another copy but it won't ague about what OS is "the real one". It's just our obsession with identity and uniqueness that leads to discussion.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City

No, we only have issues with this because of mathematical induction. "Suppose Riker was cloned during transporter malfunction and now there are two Rikers" is false statement because to store information about 10^27 atoms of human body is impossible. The statement is false. Anything you base on the false premise is false, nonsensical.

What's next, Star Trek's idea of dilithium not matching reality either?

Thought experiments can be non-sensical, and it’s useful to argue about them. In this case I don’t agree that it’s non-sensical, I mean who says the data should be stored anywhere (it’s stored as Riker himself isn’t it?) but I like the 2 Rikers thought experiment.

Why not? Presumably you can compress the data a lot given that it's non-random. It's possible that you can't compress it enough or perhaps you can but storing the exact data for all 10^27 is an unnecessarily naïve approach.

Haven't read that, might take a look. Off the top of my head here a couple of books also with interesting related themes:

Altered Carbon - Richard K Morgan (Also probably my all time favourite book along with the other two in the series. Lots of stuff about consciousness transfers.)

Timeline - Michael Crichton (Basically the topic of this question with time travel instead.)

A short story I vaguely remember about a cloning process a rich guy uses to create a new him - Stephen King(?)

What makes you think that consciousness arises from matter? Is it a verifiable hypothesis?

Until there is a better hypothesis I'm applying Occam's razor. Nothing "unmaterial" has ever been found in brains. There are 0 indications that consciousness needs more than matter (or I should say, more than our our laws of Physics can describe currently).

Believing that something special is required, sort of stops the reasoning about this topic, as that something is very vague. Or do you have some hypotheses with some experiments you can suggest?

No, just curious. I think it’s useful to remember when a hypothesis is not verifiable or refutable. Raising that question does not necessarily invalidate the hypothesis, in my opinion.

An alternative hypothesis doesn’t have to imply something special, but it could e.g. raise a possibility that matter is a map rather than the territory. But yes, so far also not refutable as far as I know.

Your consciousness is just a matter of the combination of your braincells. So yes, you die, a copy of yourself emerges somewhere else. But the copy will have exactly my memories from before transport. So for anyone else there is no difference. But you, the original, dies (you get vaporized).

I would only use it if my copy and his memories get merged into mine after he is done. Or if I could take over my remote copy by VR, so it is more like an avatar.

I’ve always thought the transporter was a missed opportunity to make giant clone armies. Is there a particular reason why it’s not possible in that universe.

What does it mean to be alive? The arrow of time in our consciousness comes from the direction of memories. What happens if Kirk gets transported and two Kirks come out the other end? The simple answer is that both are Kirk. Once their experiences diverge they will be different Kirks, but consciousness state is contained in one's memories so it can be copied, moved, time travelled, whatever.

I like to think transporter technology just opens a wormhole and pushes the person through it to the other end. No death need happen.

There are several points in Star Trek canon which state that transporters function by digitising the target’s molecular makeup, transferring that into temporary storage, and then reconstructing it at the desired location.

This does for me raise the question of why people routinely die on away missions. Just keep some storage somewhere on the ship which stores a copy of the person at the point in time they transported down, and if they get injured restore from that backup.

I remember the first time I heard this theory, after thinking about it for a while, I found myself wondering; does this happen when we sleep? The principle hear is about the recreation of body, but what if consciousness is a reconstruction at waking, like a boot process? If so, this is already happening to all of us, and we'd never know.

Neither would Kirk.

> does this happen when we sleep?

I did wonder this too for a bit but I think if you have experienced very bad sleeping patterns you start to realize that sleep is more of a transition than an off switch and what is happening around you can enter your dreams, you can remain conscious and in control from dream start to end with lucid dreaming and also what you dream can come into the real world in high fidelity for a few moments through hypnopompic hallucinations.

From experiencing this it makes me feel sleep is more like you maintain your self you were the night before and the on off switch feeling is just because your brain chooses not to remember it.

Consciousness is reconstructed about once every 1.5 minutes. You just don't (normally) notice the short gaps, because during those gaps you are (by definition) unconscious.

just like a movie (collection of still images) is seen as motion.

All arguments about consciousness requiring continuity suffer from this basic flaw. Even if during normal sleep we still have continuity in some sense, there are other situations (general anaesthesia, concussion, those people who temporarily drown in freezing water) where it's hard to argue we have any kind of ongoing conscious function.

It seems pretty clear to me that consciousness is an ongoing process arising from our brain function and that 'we' are recreated from thought to thought and experience to experience.

I find my answer to this question in my belief in God. What happens to the soul during transportation? If this technology were to exist, I would defer the question to The Church.

I know that region isn’t the answer that will satisfy most of HN, but it is one that would be mainstream and given by hundreds of millions or billions of people.

“And what of the immortal soul in such transactions? Can this machine transmit and reattach it as well? Or is it lost forever, leaving a soulless body to wander the world in despair?”

~ Sister Miriam Godwinson, “We Must Dissent”

What is a soul but a pattern of energy? A pattern that the transporter duplicates. SO in the case of two Rikers, both would have a soul or would they share a soul?

Only God creates souls.

I think the idea of two bodies sharing a soul is plausible. But I’m not a canon scholar.

Only God creates souls in Christianity.

I guess they're a well established source of statements to be accepted as fact 'on faith' without further examination.

The trouble with belief is that it doesn’t really provide answers, more a promise to trust that some higher power has the answers.

The church, incidentally, is not a higher power. It’s a just a bunch of priests, and you can become one yourself if you like.

Churches don’t have answers, and what’s more, they discourage better questions.

There can be some ethical considerations where an all-knowing higher power (especially one offering a generous afterlife program) could deliver solutions which could never be achieved in life (as we know it).

Now for the truly faithful Trekkies maybe they rely on philosophy according to W.W.K.D.?

https://mixedtees.com/star-trek-wwkd

That doesn't load for me but the general idea of What Would Khan Do is a great one, thanks.

Transporter accidents show all kind of weird things.

A good and evil Kirk. Nelix and Tuvok merged into one person, Scotty in suspended animation by doing a transporter loop.

By using a hair with dna on it, they can restructure a person who got dna damaged. In fact if the transporter still has a pattern they can create a body of that person and mind from before they beamed down and died.

The real question is, what about Holodeck characters? Are they real?

There's a whole episode of The Orville about that sort of thing.

I don’t see it mentioned yet, so I’ll add

van Vogt, A. E., The World of Null-A. 1948

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_of_Null-A

https://www.google.com/search?q=world+of+null-a

Like I wrote in response to a comment here, a short story exploring this exact scenario was "Think Like a Dinosaur", later made into an Outer Limits episode [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Like_a_Dinosaur

This article doesn't really address all of the assumptions, culture, psychology etc. wrapped up in the concept of a person dying. What exactly do we mean by that? Without considering that, all of the other considerations will be incomplete given that the original question is based on it.

The Outer Limits has an episode on this (Think Like a Dinosaur) which explores the ethical implications of transporters by explicitly separating the steps of the process (where destruction of the original is a separate and final step).

You can’t know this any more than you could tell the original Kirk was “real” so it really hasn’t added or subtracted anything from your knowledge. You can go through it yourself and decide afterwards if you’ll take the risk.

The Prestige (2006) holds the answer, and it isn’t pretty.

This made me remember you could clone high value pokemons by transferring them with a friend and yanking the cable between gameboy's at the exact time

Yes. But new Kirk wouldn't care.

Right, but how does old Kirk feel about it?

We know how to turn consciousness off (like when you get surgery), so he won‘t feel anything about it.

He doesn't feel anymore.

But old Kirk is the one who gets to decide if new Kirk even exists.

No, Scotty decides! Also, Old Kirk was New Kirk in the previous teleport, so for him doing it is not a big deal, he was OK the last time. So why should he even worry?

Or if we replace every single cell of our body, at what point do we are still the same person?

After you are born, your body keeps making new cells. Once your mass has doubled, is it only half you?

I think that's a variation of the same question that may or may not point to a clearer answer.

The only true transporter is a wormhole

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