A classic debate: Is a transporter a suicide machine?

[hopewrites]

That was where my mind went when I read the thread title.

It is my understanding that memories are held in the body as well as the mind (which may or may not encompass more than the central nervous system and its parts) thus phantom feelings or memories experienced by amputees. I am acutely aware that the method by which I walk and read, or walk and crochet, is by setting one physical activity to "autopilot" while I do the other. I'm aware because I found that if I walked while thinking, I paid more attention to my inner world (thoughts) and often missed my turn or step. That my body continued on at the pace I had set it at regardless of whether that pace was sustainable, or prudent. I further found that it was difficult to reengage control over an activity I'd set to autopilot.

Through various other personal experiences I know that I can inhabit or uninhabit large or small portions of my physical self. I can even seem to myself to disinhabit my physical self and retreat to a state of being which has no ties to physicality. (Whether or not I completely disinhabit my physical self has not been observable to me, and I therefore refrain from claiming that I have done so.)

Given all that, I have assumed that the something non-physical, yet physically expressed which makes me me and you you, also has a model of transference. A given destination that is the repaterened physical form, for lack of a better way of putting it, 3D printed at the transportation site.
Hence transporter accidents where people are lost, or their patterns held in stasis, or accidental clones are created.

Like in wal-e

Spoiler

when at the end his board is replaced, he is just like any other normal wal-e device. Crushing discarded items into cubes. It isn't until that something extra and unseen happens that we get the wal-e we came to love over the movie back.

Parts aren't what makes the whole.

 

[sinister42]

Yeah, this brings up the analogy of the sword/knife. If you replace every piece of a knife, one at a time, over a period of years, then is it the same knife? We replace all of the cells in our body every [QI told me this once but I don't remember] days, so are we really the same person we have always been?

 

[hopewrites]

The consistency of personality shows that personhood is not physical in origin. Many philosophies hold that there is something beyond the sum of our patterned matter that makes us who we are. If you've ever seen the remains of a dead friend or relative you will have (no doubt) noted that while physically the same collection of parts while alive, something is missing.

If we are the physical manifestation of thought, it is my belief, that that something that goes missing at death is the thinker.

 

[SilentRoamer]

The consistency of personality shows that personhood is not physical in origin.

I disagree. Biological systems by their nature are self renewing comprising of composite individual parts, the individual parts at a molecular scale are irrevelevant but their formation of the whole is. When enough of the physical components fail then we have degraded consciousness - look at degenerative brain disorders - they clearly have an affect on personality and are physical in origin.

 

[hopewrites]

They restrict normal personality expressions. Persons who experience them often feel that they are not the same as they were. What sensory input is providing this information if persons are strictly physical in nature? What disappears from the body at death physically to cease its previous functions? Nothing. All the physical constituents remain, something non physical departs, deanimating what was once animate.

 

[BAYLOR]

Then there are the two William Rikers

 

[SilentRoamer]

What disappears from the body at death physically to cease its previous functions? Nothing. All the physical constituents remain, something non physical departs, deanimating what was once animate.

What disappears from the body at death physically:

All biological functions - your heart stops beating, your lungs stop oxygenating the blood which is no longer circulating to your muscles. Your cells self replication stops. All electrical brain activity stops - in life the brain is extremely electrically active.

So actually there are a lot of physical processes that stop - almost all of them tied in to the self perpetuation and renewal of the whole at a cellular level. If nothing physical ceased to function then bodies would not degrade and rot - unfortunately corpses are not the same as living humans just without the animate. A human is not like a car with the engine taken out because in a human the engine is every piece of cellular material that functions to comprise the whole.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

bodies would not degrade and rot

Most of the "rot" is bacteria.
Hence simple preservation in vacuum, freezing or replacing fluids and air with a preservative liquid.
At a lowest temperature, just above ice crystals forming, there is possibility of resuscitation from "drowning" (in near freezing water) or electric shock, when the person was already suffering hypothermia and the only issue is that he person has stopped breathing and heart beating. So it seems we can be "paused" for a short while in very unusual circumstances. Probably not actually dead.

 

[SilentRoamer]

Most of the "rot" is bacteria.

Of course - which is held in check by physical processes during our life which no longer exist at our death.

Oh what a jovial topic!

 

[Parson]

I'm with Hope on this. I've been present at several deaths. (Occupational Hazard) And something (I won't go religious here although I am well and truly tempted) leaves at death. During some of the death watches I could almost feel something leave even before the labored breaths go silent. I have no scientific words to explain, but that does not mean it doesn't happen.

 

[Carolyn Hill]

SilentRoamer, are you saying that quantum entanglement could be the basis for some sort of transmat device that didn't require "suicide"? Cool.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

Well to bring this question back to what really matters - Star Trek! - the writers actually did their best in Enterprise to circumvent this question. They had one epp where someone got transported and we got to see the POV of said person - and instead of the person vanishing, the world round them changed while they were consciousthe whole time.

Also I should point out that transporters were never part of the original vision. They were "invented" because it would have cost too much in the original series to build sets for shuttles and film people flying to the ground. Transporters were quicker and cheaper!

Cheers, Greg.

 

[hopewrites]

@SilentRoamer stopping is not the same as departing. I can stop moving, or stop breathing (momentarily) without being separated from the body. I can have body parts replaced by other organic or mechanical parts (provided my body finds them compatible and doesn't reject them) without loosing my me-ness.
I think it requires one to get close to the religious side of philosophy to comment on that phenomenon which science has yet to comment on. That something, scientifically unexplained, yet observable, changes at death. An organisms physical manifestation may be kept in a state in all ways physically identical to life, while the essence of the organism has departed. In such cases it is up to the discretion of the attending physician to declare the time of death at the departure of the Personality, or the unplugging of the artificial support system.

If that which makes us intrinsically ourselves is not the physical manifestation, but the force behind said manifestation, then we can explain how a body whose life functions have been suspended can be reanimated, how an inanimate body can be artificially sustained, yet be void of its driving force. Electricity is non-physical, so even if the base argument is that the electric current of an individual is what departs at death, it's still a non-physical thing separating itself from the physical body.

The reason any of this is relevant is that the transporter shows it has a method of transferring the non-physical essence of the things it transports, as well as a method of deconstructing/restructuring the physical structures said non-physical essences inhabit.

When a person is held in "cycles" in the transporter, it is my belief that what is held in the cycled holding patterns is that non-physical essence, like the movie The Terminal, where Tom Hanks character waits in a political crack to complete his transportation from his country of origin tohis country of destination. There is nothing physical for the essence in the transporters holding cycle to inhibit, the pattern of their physical manifestation is stored in a computer system while they wait for someone to come along and finish the cycle, releasing them into a destination physical presence.

The transporter can destructor a physical body, hold its essential inhabitant in a suspended state, while the pattern of the physical body is rewritten to eliminate contaminants. If the computer program fails to properly remember the physical makeup of a party being transported, it can fall back on an earlier copy ONLY if the essence has been successfully suspended in the transporter process. Otherwise, the transporter engineer shakes their head sadly and the death is noted in the logs as a transporter accident.

 

[LordOfWizards]

This thread caught my attention. So I woke it up from it's state of suspended animation.

I too have seen people I knew who had passed, and they simply weren't there anymore.

There is a British Philosopher and Physicist who has examined this question quite thoroughly. His name is Peter Russel. His treatment of the subject is both intelligent and humorous. He quotes both Philosophers and Physicists. I give you a taster: "There's certainly nothing original about the observation that conscious experience poses a hard problem." - David Chalmers. Russel goes on to say that he "doesn't think it's a hard problem, he thinks it's an impossible one." Because (it goes all the way back to Descartes) we believe that reality is nothing but the physical dimensions that we sense around us, but consciousness cannot be doubted, and it cannot be explained (no true neuro/scientist/biologist will tell you that thinking and/or dreaming is fully understood in terms of pure biology).

There are new developments in science that hint at the possibility of a glimpse of what makes us conscious like: "never before has the brain so vigorously engaged the public imagination. The prime impetus behind this enthusiasm is a form of brain imaging called fMRI, or functional magnetic resonance imaging, an instrument that measures brain activity and converts it into the now iconic vibrant images one sees in the science pages of magazines.
As one scientist remarked, brain images are now "replacing Bohr's planetary atom as the symbol of science". With its implied promise of decoding the brain, it is easy to see why brain imaging would beguile almost anyone interested in pulling back the curtain on the mental lives of others: politicians hoping to manipulate voter attitudes, agents of the law seeking an infallible lie detector, marketers tapping the brain to learn what consumers really want to buy, addiction researchers trying to gauge the pull of temptations, and defense attorneys fighting to prove that their clients lack malign intent or even free will.

The problem is that brain imaging cannot do any of these things – at least not yet" excerpt was from here.

Now, I'm not sure I agree with Peter Russel either since he goes on to challenge the modern day assumption that science makes that matter itself is "unconscious" or "insentient", and that maybe there is a hierarchy of consciousness that goes up the scale with life. One argument he makes is how most of us would feel uncomfortable about throwing a jellyfish on a fire instead of a log.

Although, I believe that he is onto something because he talks about Max Planck's constant and spacetime from an interesting angle, and also points out that everything we know, we know because of how we sense it. We think that something is blue, but that is just something our brain does with light that came in through an optic nerve, etc. Our perception of how the universe is could be completely unlike an alien life form's viewpoint.

And speaking of light, there is a phenomenon that is at least a measurable entity we can experience that has no mass. And we all know of the mass-energy equivalence, right? So perhaps what the transporter does is to capture the energy pattern that is the essential human along with the physical pattern and transfer them both.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

Yes the transporter is a suicide booth. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the person who walks out of the other booth however many miles away is the same person as the one who walked into the first one.

This is actually a centuries old philosophy riddle called the duplicates paradox - Thomas Reid 1775 - reworked a different way. Reid asked when another being in another time could be so identical to the first that he actually is the first. The answer is of course, never.

Lord I miss Philosophy Forums!!!

Cheers, Greg.

 

[LordOfWizards]

There is absolutely no reason to believe that the person who walks out of the other booth however many miles away is the same person as the one who walked into the first one.

I'll answer that quote with another quote:

Not necessarily - as Clarke said "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

This is actually a centuries old philosophy riddle called the duplicates paradox - Thomas Reid 1775 - reworked a different way. Reid asked when another being in another time could be so identical to the first that he actually is the first. The answer is of course, never.

Lord I miss Philosophy Forums!!!

Cheers, Greg.

If you approach this topic from a strictly philosophical point of view, then yes, you will come to this confusion, er, I mean conclusion. But it has been said in this thread that we should keep an open mind to future technologies, since after all there are things we don't know that we don't know.

Don't get me wrong. I actually love Philosophy, but I don't like to draw concrete conclusions in such a mysterious existence as the one we find ourselves in. The scientific method is the way I prefer to come to conclusions, and even those are not concrete, as they don't become laws without exhaustive repetitive testing.

 

[hopewrites]

I think more pertinent than "how it works" is the question "would you use one?"
Is the immediacy of transportation and the ability to continue experiencing life (ether as your transported self or as a clone of your disintegrated self with implanted memories of a former life you never actually lived) worth it? Or will you pack a few books and your favorite synthetic tea program onto a shuttle craft every time you have to change localities?

 

[LordOfWizards]

I think more pertinent than "how it works" is the question "would you use one?"

Well, let's see. The title of the thread is a question: Is a transporter a suicide machine? So It seems to me the question of whether I would use one would depend on the answer to that question. If the thread had completely settled the debate as to the answer being Yes, the transporter is a suicide machine, then I would say unequivocally No. I would not use it. But my dear Hope, I don't believe the matter has been truly settled, and I'm not sure that it can be settled in our lifetimes since we don't have another mythical machine from Science fiction that can transport us to the future. So I think the matter of "how it works" is pivotal in making my determination.

Is the immediacy of transportation and the ability to continue experiencing life (ether as your transported self or as a clone of your disintegrated self with implanted memories of a former life you never actually lived) worth it?

This is one interpretation of the result of such a technology that suggests that it is not the original "you" that shows up at the other end. (unless I misunderstood)

I posed what I thought to be a somewhat realistic (if maybe under-informed by lack of insight into actual future possibilities) solution to how tele-transportation could be achieved by the recording and teleporting of an energy pattern that doesn't just represent the real you, but is the real you. I'm sorry if some of you have a hard time with that concept, but I don't see much of anything as impossible given enough time, ingenuity, and creativity.

 

[hopewrites]

No no I clearly understood your position. (And from my earlier posts I hope it can be easily inferred that I'm of the "transported self" camp not the "disintegrated and cloned" camp.)

I think that the dividing lines may be influenced by whether an individual is personally drawn to the prospect of skipping the line between points A and B and just jumping from one to the other, or if the individual finds that point B can't be fully appreciated unless physically traveled to from point A.

The desperate points of view will inform the choice of whether one uses such technology should it become available. Which may also inform or at least prejudice one as to how such future tech may or may not function.

I'm impatient. So instantaneous travel appeals to me.
I read in the car (unless I'm driving) or on the bus or train. Not giving more than minimal attention to the process of getting from where I am to where I m going. So however a transporter works, I'd use it! (Provided I believed I was me when I arrived) This coupled with my strong will to live biases my opinion to the side of "no! Not a suicide booth. I don't care if it's magic or tech or what, I'm the me at the other end of the telepoter beam."

Knowing my bias, and it's basis, helps me keep an open mind when presented with an argument that doesn't agree with my bias to begin with.

 

[HareBrain]

I posed what I thought to be a somewhat realistic (if maybe under-informed by lack of insight into actual future possibilities) solution to how tele-transportation could be achieved by the recording and teleporting of an energy pattern

But if it's a case of recording and teleporting an energy pattern (information) where's the necessity in removing the original?

And if you don't remove the original, then either you have an original with awareness in their original body and the new body at the same time (which I can't rule out, but which seems less likely), or you have two individuals with separate awareness.

And if the latter, then killing the original at that point would result in the death of the original's awareness; their awareness wouldn't then suddenly "jump" to the copy. And since there is no difference in that scenario from the removal of the original at the time of the copy's creation, that makes the transporter a suicide machine as far as the original's awareness is concerned (though it creates a copy that believes it is a continuation of the original).