there is true teleportation, dimensional teleporting(in TNG there was one race that had it, but it damages them permanently) but federation never had that kind of technology. which doesnt “disitengrate you”
You mean I don’t have to be conscious anymore? And that a con?
I mean every other thing in life is now just a digital representation of life, why not life. Ascend us damn it.
Murdock? That you Reg?
The philosophical discussions in this thread remind me of Staying Alive (not the song).
I was thinking about IPoAC the other day and had a horrifying realisation of it’s implications: teleporting someone will involve moving enough data to reconstitute an identical human being from the sending to the recieving teleporter, and assuming storage technology grows in a similar way, there will be a point where it’s faster to be downloaded to a drive, strapped to a pigeon, and flown to your destination for reconstitution than it will be to wait for the data to transfer over.
You are somehow assuming
- the amount of data to reconstitute an identical human being would increase in meaningful quantities over time
- transfer bandwidths are not also growing to the point where finite amounts of data are transmitted between two points faster than a pidgeon can fly
Did you confuse this with the scenario of average bandwidth?
No, the assumptions are that it would be a static but massive amount of data and that transfer bandwidths grow slower than can keep up with storage volume, which is why there would be a point rather than multiple ones. At some point the bandwidth would outgrow the data and forever more be faster at the task than IPoAC.
You phrased that weirdly then. As if that point would be in the future, with an initial phase of transfer by radio.
Btw, that “IPoAC” could then easily be replaced by putting a human on a plane :p
You would also have to trust there is only one receiver, hackers would instantly try to break in any way they can to steal certain people’s
Sleeping is just teleporting 8 hours into the future and life is just continuous reconstitution anyways.
8 hours is for noobs. I can easily do 9-10
I mean, the brain mostly consists of the same matter, aside from cycling synovial fluid, once you reach middle age. Recreate me a body but keep my original brain and I won’t mind it, aside from all the horror.
The cells in your brain are not replaced like other cells in your body, but the atoms are. In fact, all of the atoms in your body are swapped out every seven years or so.
all of the atoms in your body are swapped out every seven years or so.
I’m not sure exactly what’s true, but what you’re saying seems like a factoid that gets repeated a lot but isn’t really 100% true.
Structural stuff like the calcium in your bones… it would be interesting if it was really replaced on a schedule like that. It wouldn’t shock me if it was getting replaced, but it would certainly be cool to learn how that would work.
Is the lens in your eye getting replaced like that? I’m trying to think of body parts that seem to not get constant automatic maintenance. How about the enamel on your teeth? Really replaced every 7 years?
Or if we’re really just talking about atoms in your body, then famously the problem with heavy metal poisoning is that your body can’t get rid of it. So, is it being replaced or is your body getting rid of it? Or… is it just there from before?
And if you want to get really pedantic, and I always do, what fun… Things like artificial hips or breast implants are definitely in people’s bodies longer than 7 years but are not getting their atoms replaced.
My understanding of this factoid is that it has more to do with atoms tendency to swap particles when they bump into each other. So it’s sort of through attrition all of the atomic particles in your body are swapped out over the course of about seven years. So like as oxygen and carbon dioxide, for instance, move in and out of your brain and other tissues they leave electrons and shit behind and take some with them. But it also wouldn’t be the first time I had misunderstood something.
Exactly. The “me” of yesterday is already dead. He can’t think, feel, act, reason, or anything else. I have memories of being him, but if I’d suffered head trauma, even those could be gone. The illusion of continuous, conscious experience is just that—an illusion.
The young-Earth people say that their god created the world about 6,000 years ago, and planted fossils to test our faith. I say that my god created the universe 6 seconds ago, including these memories that we seem to have. There’s literally no way to prove otherwise.
And yet you have a vested interest in your continued survival. If you stepped into a transporter and it failed to disassemble you on departure, you would very much protest if a maintenance technician attempted manual disassembly
Not being in prolonged excruciating pain is very much part of the appeal of the transporter.
Lol, love the “manual disassembly” terminology.
That’s not a philosophical objection, though, it’s just instinct. If the transporter made a copy of me, the copy would also very much object to this proposed method of error correction.
This is simultaneously the most depressing and most realistic take on the subject I’ve ever read. I’ve always considered time travel to the past to be impossible because the past already happened and is gone, there is nothing to go “back” to. Time is an arrow that only points to the future and is forever in motion, never leaving a trail behind.
With that said, I can still enjoy time-travel fiction for what it is, a fantasy, and suspend my disbelief enough to enjoy it.
“Life is a message scribbled in the dark.”
I will take the airplane
Still a dystopian future without HSR.
I’d rather be killed and replaced with an exact copy than have to depend on commercial airlines and airports.
Damn, I was going to ship of Theseus you about the cells in your body replacing themselves constantly, but apparently our brain neurons last a lifetime.
Now I don’t think I would ever use a teleporter, either. Shit.
That is why nervous system damage usually means life long problems. Brains and all their wiring are so arcane and complicated, even our bodies don’t know how to grow more than one of them, and we often don’t get it right the first time either unfortunately.
Well clearly you didn’t get it right.
Just believe we’re inside a simulation and transporters won’t matter.
Its kinda crazy actually if you think about it, our ability to anticipate actions is our ability to land in outcomes expected to be made by the reality generating around us if you imagine the reality outside our bodily sensory input as a big monte carlo field of potentials in the form of intertwined variables…like a big llm.
Aren’t LLMs basically pattern matching systems.
Humans are also pattern matching, and then predicting machines, but with way more inputs and senses than the LLMs.
They don’t match anything but do trigger the “nearest” response to a stimulus, so kinda like pattern matching but that implies doing it on purpose. But yeah the rest I agree with.
Will they anti matter then?
Yun Tianming: am I joke to you?
muscle cells too. the muscle cells you have now are the same cells you had as a kid (not entirely sure how far back it goes). they dont even divide when you gain muscle, the cells just get bigger and absorb nuclei from neighboring cells to support the extra mass. the cool thing is the nuclei stick around even if you let the muscles atrophy, so theyre forever changed by having once been big. thats probably part of why its easier to get back to muscle size youve been at before.
But what about the atoms/molecules that make up those neurons? Do they last a lifetime?
So far that we know of, neural cell DNA, tooth enamel, and eye lens crystallines, never have their atoms replaced.
Which is to say that we are a ship of theseus, and a transporter does not kill us. The only reason these atoms are not normally replaced is because there is no natural mechanism to replace them.
Radiocarbon Dating of the Human Eye Lens Crystallines Reveal Proteins without Carbon Turnover throughout Life Lynnerup N, Kjeldsen H, Heegaard S, Jacobsen C, Heinemeier J (2008) Radiocarbon Dating of the Human Eye Lens Crystallines Reveal Proteins without Carbon Turnover throughout Life. PLOS ONE 3(1): e1529. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0001529
Not sure I would tie my identity to my neuron DNA, tooth enamel, and eye lens crystallines. Definitely agree with you that we are living ships of Theseus. I’m pretty sure there’s no natural mechanism to replace those parts because it’s really hard, and we work “well enough” without being able to.
Meanwhile Buddha: have I got some bad, but also good news for you…
My grandma won’t drive on the interstate. These are the same.
Quite reasonable. “Driven the back roads so I wouldn’t get waylaid.”
Is it waylaid or weighed, as in driving over a scale at a inspection station?
We always sung it as waylaid. As in stopped by the PoPo. The song also speaks of transporting “smokes and folks”, so yeah, behave in a way that keeps one from ever talking to the authorities.
Yes thank you I agree that is what waylaid means. The lyrics however, are “weighed” as in pulling into a weigh station you usually see along the highway closed for some reason.
I used to think like that, but I have my doubts. Doesn’t “Realm of Fear” show that you are conscious during the transfer process? So it’s kinda like growing new brain synapses and starting to be conscious through them instead of old ones?
I wrote a blog post about this: https://phil.red/blog/2025/9/5/identity-illusion
The bit I find worrying is that you’d have to trust you will be 1:1 reconstructed at the other side.
What happens if there’s an error on the reconstruction side and it either fails to reconstruct you back properly, or at all?
Or what if some malicious party injects something into, or removes part of your reconstruction?
There’d be no way for you to know from the other side, so you could just be killed or maimed in an instant, and there’d be nothing you could do to stop it
Oh, sorry about that. Glitch in the teleporter gave your friend a 30cm cock.
Huh, turns out when you lept into the teleporter after him it balanced it by removing yours.
Do you think the transporter reconstructs the contents of your stomach & intestines? Like, do you still have to pee when you come out the other side, or does it just take care of business for you?
Assuming that whatever computer is processing your blueprint could accurately detect all of your poop and pee, then I don’t see why it couldn’t physically do that.
And the incentive would line up too, as it would both save the company money on reconstruction and be beneficial to the customer.
Better question yet is if it’s possible to tamper the blueprint, where would the limit be? Could it be used medically to essentially perform surgery on you (or rather your clone)? Could the teleporter service basically offer you a character creation screen to make yourself however you’d want to look or be?
Of course, again, this relies on you trusting the teleporter service with your entire being. If they fail, you’re not just literally dead, you’re conceptually just gone.
Assuming that whatever computer is processing your blueprint could accurately detect all of your poop and pee, then I don’t see why it couldn’t physically do that.
Heh, well, there might be a pressure problem… but yeah if it’s accurate enough to put all of the walls of your intestines back where they were, why bother reconstructing that log inside there? But then… do you fill the empty space with vacuum? air? fluid? or do you try to reconstruct the intestine, not as it was, but in a relaxed/empty state?
Better question yet is if it’s possible to tamper the blueprint, where would the limit be? Could it be used medically to essentially perform surgery on you (or rather your clone)? Could the teleporter service basically offer you a character creation screen to make yourself however you’d want to look or be?
If we can get rid of your waste, we can at least get rid of kidney stones too, right? And probably tumors and parasites, maybe even bacterial infections.
I always thought the lack of bathrooms was because they had little waste transporters that beamed the pee out.
Whenever they talk about tracing “warp signatures” what they mean is the waste trail transported just outside of the ship.
This is not dissimilar to what happened in the age of sail.
What do you care? That’s not you on the other side, just your copy.
If you’re taking teleportation, you’ve likely already accepted (or are ignorant of) the fact that you as a literal being will perish - but you survive conceptually through your copy.
So I care if that copy gets made. If it doesn’t, then I’m not just literally dead, but conceptually dead too.
I read one scifi novel where the teleportation was almost instant across the galaxy, the caveat was that it duplicated you, so the original walked out of the booth, while the copy was the one who actually went somewhere. Aside from the issues of having several of you around if you went back to the destination, not every teleport was great for the original either. One instance where they were trying to escape some creature planetside, and as they ran into the booth the main wondered if they’d be the one who made it to safety, or not. Of course next chapter picks up with the safe one’s pov…
Tap for spoiler
That’s the plot twist in The Prestige, too.
The bit I find worrying is that you’d have to trust you will be 1:1 reconstructed at the other side.
What happens if there’s an error on the reconstruction side and it either fails to reconstruct you back properly, or at all?
Pattern buffers
Or what if some malicious party injects something
“Fantastic! Another successful transport. Although now I feel compelled to spend lots of money at Burger King for some reason.”
If you fly instead, you have to trust the pilot, ATC, the mechanics, the aircraft engineers, the builder, its suppliers, and on and on. At least in a transporter malfunction, you die in an instant, rather than in terror as the plane crashes.
The ship of thesis is “the ship of thesis” because it is the ship that thesis is using. He could hop off a trireme and on to a “boston whaler” and it would be the ship of thesis.
Did you refer some meme I never heard of, of is that really how you thought “Theseus” was spelled?
I have a little voice in my head that says words and I guess how they are spelled based only on my phonix education in elementary school and my vaguely western New England/ upstate New York accent.
But have you like… Never read the name before?
shakes head in polyglot disbelief
I may have, but, it was stored as a phonetic sound with in my mind. I could try and transliterate it in to the couple other languages I am familiar with the phonetics of, but I suspect the same error would occur.
interesting how differently we people store information…
You ever read “Blind sight” by Peter Watts?
Really interesting hard sci-fi book about minds.
Not yet. Noted.
How can you spell trireme correctly, but not Theseus
Quick question: Do you pronounce it as “gif” or “gif?”
Yes
