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Comment by irl_chad | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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

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.

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