When they beam you down from the Enterprise, some characters
are rather nervous.
How does it work?
Well, here’s one scenario. Let’s take beaming me down
to the surface of the alien planet.
The ‘bearmer’ records my molecular pattern exactly, destroying
my body in the process, then it beams the blueprint to
the planet where an exact duplicate is made out
of the material there. As my memories, thoughts,
personality are determined by the molecular
structure of my brain, that individual is psychologically
and physically just like me. He seems to remember
my life, he loves my kids and is as determined
to care for them as I am, etc.
Is he me? Well, no. My body has been incinerated.
I’m this animal, he is kaput forever.
Nobody can survive that. This is not a means
of transportation.
Does it matter? Why should I care that he isn’t me?
He is just as connected to me psychologically as
I would have been to myself if I’d never been
beamed down. So he’s made of entirely different
matter. Why should I care about that?
I don’t survive but isn’t this just as good as survival?
Isn’t the duplicate just as good? If not, why not?
Isn’t that true for us here and now, but on a much slower time-scale?
A friend of mine who practiced Tai Chi for 10 yrs said that after 7 yrs all the material in your bone has been replaced (and so, some of the benefits of Tai Chi aren’t apparent for 7 yrs).
Skin cells, intestinal lining are replaced very quickly. Blood cells are destroyed and replaced in a few weeks.
Even if we keep the same nerve / brain cells all our lives, their proteins, enzymes, etc are constantly being replaced. Water molecules, oxygen, carbon flow in and flow out in a constant merry-go-round of chemical cycles (ex. the Krebs cycle).
I wonder if we retain any of the molecules we were born with???
What holds us together is the information in our DNA, the patterns of interactions between different molecules.
I bought this boat a few years ago, and it’s from the 1700s, right? So I was really excited because, you know, I had an old boat. And a little later one of the boards rotted, so I had it replaced, but I was sort of worried, you know, because I wanted the boat to still be an 18th century boat. So they replaced the board with the same kind of wood and everything, and they distressed it so it looks right. So I guess it’s still an 18th century boat if you replace a board. But, thing is, the rotting problem has gotten really bad, you know? So I think that every board that was on the boat when I got it has been replaced. And it looks the same and everything, but I’m just not sure if it is the same boat. I mean, none of the wood is original.
It was my understanding the transporting demolecularized you, sent your molecules down to the planet’s surface and reassembled them on the other end. I don’t know anything about incineration.
Could be. I guess that might help explain how they
beam me up to the Enterprise–they’re not making
a new body of new matter from the Enterprise.
But please consider.
Suppose a mad scientist captures you.
He says:
I’m going to make an exact blueprint of your molecules.
Then I’m going to cut you into pieces, and the pieces into
pieces and so on until you are just a big puddle of
molecules. Very messy but all your molecules will
be sloshing around in the puddle.
Then I’ll put these molecules back together
in the same order they were in before, thereby
creating…
what? the same human animal or a duplicate made
of the same molecules? I vote for the latter.
An animal doesn’t survive being broken down into
a mere mass of molecules–even if they are reassembled
later.
What’s going on in the ‘beaming’ is less messy,
but wouldn’t it still destroy the original human
being and create a duplicate out of her molecules?
Right. So if you replace the animal’s matter gradually the
animal survives. If you replace the animal’s matter
very rapidly, you destroy the original and create
a duplicate.
But here’s the point–as long as the result has my molecular
organization, why should I care whether my matter
is replaced slowly or rapidly? If this fellow is going to
be tortured, say, I have just as much reason to fear
his torture either way.
So it doesn’t matter so much whether this future person
is identical to me. I should care about the resulting
duplicate just as much as I do about myself.
And he should be held responsible for my
crimes, shouldn’t he?
Identity–whether or not this guy is me–isn’t so
important. Even if my relationship to this guy
isn’t identity, even if he’s a duplicate of me,
it’s just as good as if he’s me, isn’t it?
Yes, it’s proceeding along naturalistic lines. I’m this human
animal, we’re supposing.
But suppose we introduce a soul or a spirit. I’m that.
Then the animal still gets annihilated and duplicated
by beaming process. It can’t survive on either
account we’ve given. So if my soul nonetheless
animates the duplicate, then what we have
is a case of reincarnation.
That is the soul that animates one human animal
later animates another human animal, the
duplicate.
Also a technical question–how does the beaming
process transfer my soul to the duplicate when
it beams my molecules down there? Why wouldn’t
it just get left ‘behind’? The process works for
molecules, but for souls?
Philosophically, how is stating, “After I am beamed through a Star Trek transporter, I will still be myself,” any different from stating, “After I sleep through the night and wake up in the morning, I will still be myself”?
Isn’t that pretty much what happened in one of the early Star Trek movies where the lost Voyager spaceship, having landed and eventually developed independent thought, vaporized the bald, sexy chick who Steven Collins liked but couldn’t…you know, like that much unless he wanted to totally go yaya (because that’s what would happen with women of her species,) but ultimately he decided to go for it in some kind of weird human/artificial intelligence fusion experiment (for the good of science, ya know?) but it was really a duplicate of the bald girl. But he was ok with that.
I think a more interesting question might be “What happens if the
annihilation step fails? Now there’s two of me. Are they both ‘me’?”
Also a technical question–how does the beaming
process transfer my soul to the duplicate when
it beams my molecules down there? Why wouldn’t
it just get left ‘behind’? The process works for
molecules, but for souls?
I like this one, it gets into the nature of the soul. Is the soul a collection of
thoughts and feelings, a pattern of energy (both totally replicatible), or maybe
something in a different dimension connected to our physical presence in
this dimension (much harder to transport).
Too much Star Trek and not enough ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’?