Wow, I haven't seen that comic in years; the first time I saw it I was in a pretty bad mental space and I think this perspective helped more than I realized at the time. Thanks for the memory ❤️

i love that one. sometimes it's a giggle, sometimes it's a gutpunch, always worth reading.

That's a solid one

Oof.

Damn, that's really good.

Assuming it’s a particle transfer instead of data transmission, what the transporter does is disassemble things at an atomic scale. But it doesn’t disperse you, that’s what the confinement beam is for.

(This is grizzly, but hear me out.) there’s a 2cm hole. You obviously can’t fit through. But if you were chopped into 1cm cubes you would. What if that chopping didn’t upset you or cause pain, what if those pieces were held inside a stasis field to prevent them from falling apart or leaking? What if they were put back together perfectly in a matter of seconds. Would your body react like it was chopped into pieces? Would it even understand that that’s what happened? If you chop someone’s head off clean enough and fast enough it takes the brain several seconds to realize it’s not connected to the body anymore.

Transporters take this to the nth degree. It cuts you up into pieces so small that you can pass through solid matter as long as you stay within that (stupid strong) confinement beam. Apparently, if you are carefully disassembled without trauma and those pieces are kept in the general vicinity of each other, you don’t die AND you remain aware. And before your body can declare that something is wrong and react, you’re back in one piece.

Maybe your (carefully spaced apart) brain is confused and thinks you’re dreaming so it doesn’t get upset.

Even when you stay within the conservative rules of how a transporter behaves they are still tremendous hacks on a fundamental level.

The problem with appealing to episode details is that the transporter is presented very differently in different episodes depending on the needs of the story. That's fine for storytelling, but it means we can't pin down a fixed set of rules for how transporters work. To ponder philosophical questions we have to invent rules by picking and choosing presentations of the transporter that seem most interesting, and filling in gaps with our imaginations.

Yes, there's the episode where Barclay is conscious during transport. But there are contradictory presentations where Scotty puts himself in stasis in the ship that crashed on the Dyson's sphere, and M'Benga putting his daughter in stasis. In those cases neither has memories of time during transport.

There is the episode where Picard uses the transporter to convert himself into an energy being to try to live in a space cloud. The story is the transporter converts matter to energy, and energy in Star Trek is another possible state of living existence. Thus continuity. But there is a contradictory episode of DS9 where crew members' physical and neural patterns have to be stored in computer memory, not "pure energy", and we see holosuite character versions of them.

So there's either no suicide booth problem, or there is. You get to pick depending on which scenario you feel like talking about.

If that were the case, Scotty being stuck in the transporter buffer for 100 years would be a nightmare on his subconscious.there has to be a demarcation point where the consciousness can't function without the brain structures in place. That'd be the death point.

Yes but we also meant that Barkley has multiple mental illnesses, and is an unreliable narrator.

I'd also lose all my memories since the backup. With those memories goes the way I make decisions. Not the most desirable way of maintaining youth and health. Kirk made that point in ST:V:

"Damn it, Bones, you're a doctor. You know that pain and guilt can't be taken away with a wave of a magic wand. They're the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves.

I don't want my pain taken away!

I need my pain!"

there is ethics about body modification and especially about enhancing your self artificially, it's seen as a dead end because people who are artificially "perfected" end up being stagnant and pointless. experiencing aging and illness is a part of ethical behavior, or is ultimately preferable to the alternative.

Star Trek can't decide whether it wants to be hand-wavey, "whatever moves the plot along" science or super-serious explained-in-detail science and ends up being the worst of both worlds.

What would happen to the people if the buffer were to lose power or malfunction in any way? Even a small risk of anything adverse plus the degradation while being stored would make this not acceptable from medical viewpoint.

I have to wonder why the pattern must be lost in the process of materialization. I'm not saying they should keep them forever, but if they can just not delete the patterns when sending people on a dangerous away mission, they'd leave open the option of restoring them to a back up state if they get killed (or worse).

Of course, while that would raise a lot of questions to be explored in a single episode, it would lower stakes and fundamentally changes the stories they can tell, so I'm not surprised they writers don't do it.

Cloning is very different though. In cloning you aren't exactly copying the neurons and their connections. That means the cloned cat will learn different things, be different, just from that very fact. All it takes is one or two small daily differences in routine as the kitten grows and bam, different personality.

It's the classic struggle of how much is nature (genetics) and how much is nurture.

With teleportation the neutral pathways are copied. It becomes more of a question of what makes you "you". Is there some spirit that gets left behind? Is it the memories that do get copied? Is it merely enough that you believe you're you?

The issue is with the conscience and the soul. Essentially the question is: "If your whole body is taken apart atom by atom, does the soul get taken along with it?"

In this case, the soul can just mean 'you'. The 'you' that is seeing through your eyes right now, and is giving you the current experience you are now experiencing. To give an easier example, let's say you are copied exactly four feet to your right. Your copy will look exactly like you, have all your memories, yadda yadda yadda. It seems pretty obvious that 'you' won't all of a sudden be seeing through your copy's eyes, no? If you get vaporised, then, your conscience is not going to just teleport into your clone, right? At least there's nothing to suggest that would happen.

Teleportation is just a fancy version of this in a different order. You are vaporised first, then your atoms are moved real fast to the new location, then your copy uses those atoms. There's zero reason to think that the 'you' which was vaporised is ever coming back. Once it's gone, it's gone, or at least that's the idea.

Whether you believe in the spiritual concept of a soul, or that your experience of the world is just a specific instance of electrical charges in some fancy meat, both seem to suggest that once the anima departs, it will never return. A new anima must instead be made.

The scary part isn't being a duplicate, it's more like if someone killed you and then said "but you have a twin so it's fine"

Thomas Riker is: …The Prestige!

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It's less Theseus and more Humpty Dumpty.

By Grabthar's Hammer, by the Suns of Warvan