Do transporters kill?

[SapphireFox]

Of course not, but how do we distinguish between duplicates and originals when there is no testable difference? If we cannot do so, how are we justified in making positive claims about whether a given entity is a duplicate or an original?

Like I said earlier I'm sure that there is an in universe way of testing for the one bit errors that are likely to occur within such a process like the transporter. The only other way I can think of at this moment would be to test if the matter was the same that went in to the transporter in the first place.

You talk about souls even more than I do; I question the proposition that you are in a good position to object this way. I can at least hope to quantify "me-the-algorithm," because such an algorithm could theoretically be written out in terms of, say, programming language. In principle.

I you want to define yourself like a program knock yourself out but I myself could never define myself in such a manner. I am not a programmer nor do I feel myself a program.

On the contrary. I am me and the clone is me. Of course, we will tend to diverge over time, until we are different enough that we can no longer both be said to be the same "me," but that will take a while.

"Me-ness" isn't necessarily a property that must be applied to one and only one entity, not as far as I'm concerned.

I can respect you for your beliefs but I can not share them in this case. This might be why we can't agree on this issue of death, we perceive it in truly different manners.

Since "still alive" is the precise inverse of "is dead," they're the same question. If the answer to "Is X still alive?" is "yes," the answer to "Is X dead?" is "no," and vice versa.

Thinks about it.... hmm your logic is sound I agree.

Disintegration kills, yes. Why can't reintegration un-kill? Imagine the transporter hiccuped and reassembled you from the same atoms you were originally made of, in a precise reversal of the process that killed you down to the subatomic level. What part of you has not been restored, that you can say you are now "dead" when you were previously "alive?"

Unfortunately the transporter doesn't work that way, if it did I wouldn't have nearly as much issue with it. The episodes that show the duplicate Rikers and Kirks show that it can't be the same matter because if it was there would not be enough matter to form two complete people. As for the reintegration to "bring someone back" I would have to accept that the person that has been assembled was the one that had been killed, which I don't.

So... Wodehouse owned two typewriters? Or could Wodehouse have owned a non-integer number of typewriters?

Since the definition of a typewriter is that of a whole any thing left over is parts thus not part of the whole. Thus in the end one whole typewriter and a number of fragmentary parts not consider a typewriter.

You invoked it for your own argument; I think I have a right to ask you to define your own terms.

And I stated what I believed immediately after. As I said earlier then even your question a soul can not be defined but is in the realm of philosophy,faith, and belief. There is no absolute definition of soul that I can quote (and neither can you) only belief and perception and I HAVE stated those.


The more we discuss this the more clear it becomes that it is defined by the the persons definitions and philosophy as much as science and logic. That said I will try to give a few facts and definitions as I see them.

1. The transporter disintegrates a person this is how they die.
2. The transporter uses the information gained in the disintegration to construct a clone of the transported individual.
3. The transporter affects the intangible undefinable aspects of a person. (As evidenced during the split kirk episode The Enemy Within TOS )
4. The transporter does not always produce a perfect clone there are one bit errors and the like evidenced by conditions like "Transporter Psychosis" described in (Realm of Fear TNG) this may be used to test if the transported individual is the original or not.
5. The transporter does not use the original matter in transporting the individual. (As evidenced with the split kirks rikers and in the splitting of tuvix in VOY)

[Simon_Jester]

Like I said earlier I'm sure that there is an in universe way of testing for the one bit errors that are likely to occur within such a process like the transporter. The only other way I can think of at this moment would be to test if the matter was the same that went in to the transporter in the first place.

I would hope that such methods exist, but the philosophical question remains very nearly the same if no such methods exist and no copying errors are introduced (either by luck or by excellent transporter design). Is an indistinguishable copy of me me, or someone else?

I you want to define yourself like a program knock yourself out but I myself could never define myself in such a manner. I am not a programmer nor do I feel myself a program.

I'm not a programmer either; I'm an apprentice physicist.

And yet... I don't feel myself to be a bunch of extremely dense clumps of baryons held together by electrostatic interactions among a rarefied fog of electron clouds. And yet that is very much what I am on the fundamental level, physically speaking. Why should my intuitions about the basic nature and structure of my mind be any more accurate than my intuitions about the basic nature and structure of my body?

Unfortunately the transporter doesn't work that way, if it did I wouldn't have nearly as much issue with it. The episodes that show the duplicate Rikers and Kirks show that it can't be the same matter because if it was there would not be enough matter to form two complete people. As for the reintegration to "bring someone back" I would have to accept that the person that has been assembled was the one that had been killed, which I don't.

No, transporters do not normally operate that way. However, given the stunning range of behaviors we've observed in transporters, it would hardly be surprising for one to hiccup in this fashion, failing to transmit the subject and reassembling it (him, her) on the pad.

Which is why I brought it up as a philosophical question: if we precisely reverse the process of disintegration, taking every individual step in the process and performing it backwards, reassembling the disintegrated body and brain atom by atom with an unreasonably precise set of tweezers... what, if anything, is missing? Why is this not the original person come back from the dead, given that they have not only the same structure but the same components?

If you hold that this is not the original person, then are there any conditions under which you can imagine "raising the dead" as a theoretical possibility? Or are you definining death as an irreversible process?

Since the definition of a typewriter is that of a whole any thing left over is parts thus not part of the whole. Thus in the end one whole typewriter and a number of fragmentary parts not consider a typewriter.

Fair enough.

So, over the course of his career, did Wodehouse own one typewriter, or two? Remember, at no time did he possess more than one typewriter, and at no time did he possess zero typewriters. But the typewriter he had at the end of his career was (according to you) not the one he had at the beginning.

And I stated what I believed immediately after. As I said earlier then even your question a soul can not be defined but is in the realm of philosophy,faith, and belief. There is no absolute definition of soul that I can quote (and neither can you) only belief and perception and I HAVE stated those.

Yes, yes, I understand. I was trying to explain that I thought I had a right to ask at the time I asked, not demanding that you answer the question again.

1. The transporter disintegrates a person this is how they die.
2. The transporter uses the information gained in the disintegration to construct a clone of the transported individual.
3. The transporter affects the intangible undefinable aspects of a person. (As evidenced during the split kirk episode The Enemy Within TOS )
4. The transporter does not always produce a perfect clone there are one bit errors and the like evidenced by conditions like "Transporter Psychosis" described in (Realm of Fear TNG) this may be used to test if the transported individual is the original or not.
5. The transporter does not use the original matter in transporting the individual. (As evidenced with the split kirks rikers and in the splitting of tuvix in VOY)

Very well. In turn, I present my view of the subject:

1) The transporter disintegrates a person, which is fatal; the transporter subsequently reintegrates the person, which is anti-fatal and therefore brings them back to life.
2) The transporter does not use the original matter gained by disintegrating a person to reconstruct them, but does use data gained in the process to do so.
3) Occasionally these data can be used more than once to produce multiple perfect copies of an individual (TNG: Second Chance), or multiple flawed copies of an individual (TOS: The Enemy Within). Under unusual circumstances, they can even be used to store a person who would otherwise die for later revival, though this process has a significant chance of failure over long periods of time (TNG: Relics). Interesting comparisons may be drawn between this and the practice of cryogenic freezing.
4) Transporter copies may be flawed to varying degrees, ranging from extremely subtle, microscopic errors (TNG: Realm of Fear) to major personality alterations implying significant changes in the structure or contents of the brain (TOS: The Enemy Within). A sufficiently extreme alteration may produce an individual who is similar to the original, but for practical purposes might as well be an entirely different person (the "Evil Kirk" of The Enemy Within).

[Stark]

Oh man, when you say it like that I seriously can't help but laugh. You HONESTLY think that you'll die but be 'resurrected' and that your individual perspective will continue, but you think OTHER PEOPLE are claiming the existence of a 'soul'.

Starglider's opinions I can understand - even though I think he's hilariously broken by his skillset - but when someone talks down to 'soul' stuff and hten literally says they think people are resurrected and being totally destroyed is like having a nap it's awesome.

[SCRawl]

But a piece of software like Office can't think -- it can only execute instructions. And it still doesn't invalidate the idea that the copy is still just a copy. The software that runs on the hardware inside my skull effectively boils down to the same thing, but I'd like to think that there's more to it than that, since I seem to have free will and self awareness.

Why can't a sufficiently complicated program have free will and self awareness, though, assuming we use reasonable definitions of those terms that are consistent with the observed nature of the universe?

I don't know if one can, but I won't assume that it's impossible. In any case I don't believe that Microsoft Office, as useful as it is, meets those criteria.

If there's a transporter accident causing -- let's say me, for the sake of argument -- to both re-materialize at my destination and remain on the transporter pad, then are both "me"? If one of them subsequently dies, then is anything lost?

I would argue that they are both "you," and that if one of them dies, one of "you" is lost. There's another you, a slightly different version of you, but a you still died. Just as if I destroy a computer running Microsoft Word, a Microsoft Word is gone, but the program Microsoft Word still exists, both as an abstract entity and in millions of instances running on computers around the world.

This is the point on which we disagree, I think. By my definition there can't be more than one of "me", since what makes me "me" is the fact that I'm experiencing it right now, and adding those experiences to the sum of "my" existence. I can't see through my copy's eyes, or compel him to scratch his nose. My copy will appear to all external tests to be just like me, but in that one sense -- the one that is most crucial to me (or is it "me"? ) -- he is fundamentally different.

We're using different definitions of "conscious" in this case. As someone else pointed out earlier, the sleeping person's brain is still functioning, is still continuously self aware. The fact that a subset of brain functions are temporarily suspended for maintenance purposes does not mean that the system has completely stopped.

But I question whether a sleeping brain is truly self-aware (except during dreams). It responds to stimuli, yes, but so does an amoeba. Amoebas are not normally considered to be self-aware, nor are some multicelled organisms with actual brains (like ants). The fact that there are neurons in your skull that are engaged in electrical activity does not mean that your "consciousness" is proceeding normally.

I would suggest that a mind which is capable of being brought out of "sleep mode" by someone saying the legal name of its owner with sufficient volume is more or less always on.

[Simon_Jester]

I don't know if one can, but I won't assume that it's impossible. In any case I don't believe that Microsoft Office, as useful as it is, meets those criteria.

And a good thing, too; imagine how annoying the Microsoft paperclip would be if it was sentient... but a genuine AI, even though it would be very different from Office in degree, would not be fundamentally different in kind; it would still be a program running on a computer, not a soul floating in the void.

This is the point on which we disagree, I think. By my definition there can't be more than one of "me", since what makes me "me" is the fact that I'm experiencing it right now, and adding those experiences to the sum of "my" existence. I can't see through my copy's eyes, or compel him to scratch his nose. My copy will appear to all external tests to be just like me, but in that one sense -- the one that is most crucial to me (or is it "me"? ) -- he is fundamentally different.

Ah. Interesting. But in that case, the only real difference between "you" and copy-SCRawl is that "you" are subjectively aware of your experiences, but not of copy-SCRawl.

Now, that's a very reliable way of telling people apart; there is no chance that if someone else drops a rock on their foot, I will cry out in pain, having mistaken them for me. The question then is: if the only thing that distinguishes "me" from "not-me" is my own self-awareness, why is a break in my self-awareness not equivalent to the destruction of "me?" Maybe sleep doesn't qualify; how about outright unconsciousness induced by drugs? What about a coma? If I go into a coma for two weeks and wake up, with no memory of the intervening time, am I still the same person?

I would suggest that a mind which is capable of being brought out of "sleep mode" by someone saying the legal name of its owner with sufficient volume is more or less always on.

I'm really not sure I can support that notion, given some of the relatively stupid animals that have learned to come when called by "their" names. Most reactions I know of that sleeping people engage in are pretty straight stimulus-response: waking up in response to a loud noise, moving in response to a physical blow, that sort of thing. I don't consider that to be sufficient evidence for consciousness being present, because if I encountered an animal that performed, awake, at the level a human being performs at asleep... I would not call that animal intelligent, and would not assume it was self-aware.

Oh man, when you say it like that I seriously can't help but laugh. You HONESTLY think that you'll die but be 'resurrected' and that your individual perspective will continue

Ah, not quite. You see, I don't live in Star Trek, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics makes it impossible in reality to reassemble me atom by atom casually the way Trekkers do with transporters.

I mean, I'd have an afterlife if I lived in most D&D campaign universes too; that doesn't prove anything.

My argument is that in Star Trek, given how transporters function, for the definition of "me" that I consider reasonable, a transporter jaunt wouldn't be "killing me" in any long-term sense of the word.

Starglider's opinions I can understand - even though I think he's hilariously broken by his skillset - but when someone talks down to 'soul' stuff and hten literally says they think people are resurrected and being totally destroyed is like having a nap it's awesome.

If your preferred reading style is to skim my posts and laugh at the resulting interpretation, I am happy to be of service. I aim to please.

[SapphireFox]

I would hope that such methods exist, but the philosophical question remains very nearly the same if no such methods exist and no copying errors are introduced (either by luck or by excellent transporter design). Is an indistinguishable copy of me me, or someone else?

By definition a clone or copy would be considered someone else perfect or no.

I'm not a programmer either; I'm an apprentice physicist.

And yet... I don't feel myself to be a bunch of extremely dense clumps of baryons held together by electrostatic interactions among a rarefied fog of electron clouds. And yet that is very much what I am on the fundamental level, physically speaking. Why should my intuitions about the basic nature and structure of my mind be any more accurate than my intuitions about the basic nature and structure of my body?

What the frack does that have to do with you choosing to define yourself like a program?

Which is why I brought it up as a philosophical question: if we precisely reverse the process of disintegration, taking every individual step in the process and performing it backwards, reassembling the disintegrated body and brain atom by atom with an unreasonably precise set of tweezers... what, if anything, is missing? Why is this not the original person come back from the dead, given that they have not only the same structure but the same components?

If you hold that this is not the original person, then are there any conditions under which you can imagine "raising the dead" as a theoretical possibility? Or are you defining death as an irreversible process?

In this case I would refer it as a form of energy suspension not disintegration. As for your second question yes I would define "true death" as as irreversible process.

Fair enough.

So, over the course of his career, did Wodehouse own one typewriter, or two? Remember, at no time did he possess more than one typewriter, and at no time did he possess zero typewriters. But the typewriter he had at the end of his career was (according to you) not the one he had at the beginning.

One typewriter slowly changed through out it's existence. The number of typewriters does not change, just through the process of hybridization and repair that it has changed into a different typewriter.

Very well. In turn, I present my view of the subject:

1) The transporter disintegrates a person, which is fatal; the transporter subsequently reintegrates the person, which is anti-fatal and therefore brings them back to life.

What the Unholy Shitfuck!! So you are claiming that anyone who steps into the transporter gets an automatic "Jesus of the Week" award. I got to agree with Stark-sempai that's messed up, funny but messed up.

2) The transporter does not use the original matter gained by disintegrating a person to reconstruct them, but does use data gained in the process to do so.
3) Occasionally these data can be used more than once to produce multiple perfect copies of an individual (TNG: Second Chance), or multiple flawed copies of an individual (TOS: The Enemy Within). Under unusual circumstances, they can even be used to store a person who would otherwise die for later revival, though this process has a significant chance of failure over long periods of time (TNG: Relics). Interesting comparisons may be drawn between this and the practice of cryogenic freezing.
4) Transporter copies may be flawed to varying degrees, ranging from extremely subtle, microscopic errors (TNG: Realm of Fear) to major personality alterations implying significant changes in the structure or contents of the brain (TOS: The Enemy Within). A sufficiently extreme alteration may produce an individual who is similar to the original, but for practical purposes might as well be an entirely different person (the "Evil Kirk" of The Enemy Within).

The remaining points I agree wholeheartedly especially with 2.

[Stark]

If your preferred reading style is to skim my posts and laugh at the resulting interpretation, I am happy to be of service. I aim to please.

Dude, you said 'anti-fatal', you think they're being resurrected and the original continues. That's just ballsy. In Star Trek it's clear nobody cares (and ST clearly has souls anyway).

[SCRawl]

This is the point on which we disagree, I think. By my definition there can't be more than one of "me", since what makes me "me" is the fact that I'm experiencing it right now, and adding those experiences to the sum of "my" existence. I can't see through my copy's eyes, or compel him to scratch his nose. My copy will appear to all external tests to be just like me, but in that one sense -- the one that is most crucial to me (or is it "me"? ) -- he is fundamentally different.

Ah. Interesting. But in that case, the only real difference between "you" and copy-SCRawl is that "you" are subjectively aware of your experiences, but not of copy-SCRawl.

That's basically it, yes. Isn't that a fairly clear distinction, at least to me (and, presumably, my copy)?

Now, that's a very reliable way of telling people apart; there is no chance that if someone else drops a rock on their foot, I will cry out in pain, having mistaken them for me. The question then is: if the only thing that distinguishes "me" from "not-me" is my own self-awareness, why is a break in my self-awareness not equivalent to the destruction of "me?" Maybe sleep doesn't qualify; how about outright unconsciousness induced by drugs? What about a coma? If I go into a coma for two weeks and wake up, with no memory of the intervening time, am I still the same person?

I don't think that there could be any doubt that anyone would have trouble accepting that my copy and I are different in the sense we've been discussing. We would be indistinguishable to all external tests, but still self-contained.

As to the question of whether or not a person in a coma has suffered a permanent break in self-awareness, and essentially that person's death, the answer I think is "no". There is no way to test my assertion, though, so it probably isn't worth very much.

I would suggest that a mind which is capable of being brought out of "sleep mode" by someone saying the legal name of its owner with sufficient volume is more or less always on.

I'm really not sure I can support that notion, given some of the relatively stupid animals that have learned to come when called by "their" names. Most reactions I know of that sleeping people engage in are pretty straight stimulus-response: waking up in response to a loud noise, moving in response to a physical blow, that sort of thing. I don't consider that to be sufficient evidence for consciousness being present, because if I encountered an animal that performed, awake, at the level a human being performs at asleep... I would not call that animal intelligent, and would not assume it was self-aware.

I know from my own experience that if someone whispers my name it can wake me up more quickly than if someone says a nonsense word with greater volume. That's hardly proof, I know, but take it for what it's worth.

[Simon_Jester]

That's basically it, yes. Isn't that a fairly clear distinction, at least to me (and, presumably, my copy)?

Oh, yes. It's just that I consider it a bit questionable as a basis, partly because it's not unique to any one person: everyone has a unique consciousness of themselves, and two otherwise identical people will both have one such consciousness each. An outsider cannot tell them apart this way, and an individual cannot tell whether they are an original or a clone in the case of a process that DID NOT destroy the original.

So I find it a bit... call it inadequate. Saying that someone is dead because their consciousness was interrupted seems insufficient to me.

I don't think that there could be any doubt that anyone would have trouble accepting that my copy and I are different in the sense we've been discussing. We would be indistinguishable to all external tests, but still self-contained.

If you're both standing there, yes, you're clearly different individuals; I can separate the two of you in space and prove that quite easily. But if only one individual is present, how do I (or anyone, including the individual) tell whether we're dealing with an original or a clone?

As to the question of whether or not a person in a coma has suffered a permanent break in self-awareness, and essentially that person's death, the answer I think is "no". There is no way to test my assertion, though, so it probably isn't worth very much.

But the coma patient is totally nonresponsive, and has no memory of what happened. How do you know their consciousness didn't have a break in there? If you can't rule it out, how do you know the original is still alive?

What the frack does that have to do with you choosing to define yourself like a program?

Not much, but it has a lot to do with whether you can rely on arguments of the form "I feel like X" to tell you what you really are. Which you do, when it comes to the nature of your identity, apparently.

In this case I would refer it as a form of energy suspension not disintegration. As for your second question yes I would define "true death" as as irreversible process.

OK. "Truly dead" is irreversible. Makes sense to me.

So why, when presented with what is by all appearances a reversible process, do you call it fatal?

What the Unholy Shitfuck!! So you are claiming that anyone who steps into the transporter gets an automatic "Jesus of the Week" award. I got to agree with Stark-sempai that's messed up, funny but messed up.

No more so than a patient who goes in for heart surgery.

Let's review the situation. Captain Kirk steps into the transporter. Shimmering light. Where is Kirk? Kirk does not exist anywhere in the universe. Therefore, Kirk is dead, right?

Now, wait five seconds. Shimmering lights somewhere else, and what is by all appearances Kirk steps out. As far as I'm concerned, the presence of this fellow standing around is a sign that Kirk is in fact not dead. If Kirk was ever dead, he isn't now.

I'm not going to contest the point that disintegration is fatal, but if it is, then being disintegrated by a Star Trek transporter is a lot like having your heart stopped during a medical procedure and then restarted. It's only fatal in the loosest sense of the term, because there's a live version of the subject around afterwards if you'll just show a little patience.

I have no idea what to call that. If Kirk disappearing on the pad is "fatal" then Kirk reappearing on the ground is something I don't have a word for, whatever the opposite of "fatal" is. "Anti-fatal" is a crappy name for it, but I don't know of a better one.

So yeah. If being "beamed up" is fatal, being "beamed down" is the opposite of fatal. Congratulations, you've just discovered a new and extreme form of "clinical death!" Of course, like heart surgery, if something goes wrong in the middle of the process, the subject may go from "clinically dead" in the temporary sense to just plain "dead" in the irreversible sense: what some call information-theoretic death.

[Kamakazie Sith]

Transporters do not kill you. If anyone has a copy of TNG Realm of Fear you can watch Barkley transport over from a first person perspective. There is no break in consciousness.

[SapphireFox]

Quote:
In this case I would refer it as a form of energy suspension not disintegration. As for your second question yes I would define "true death" as as irreversible process.
Simon_Jester wrote:
OK. "Truly dead" is irreversible. Makes sense to me.

So why, when presented with what is by all appearances a reversible process, do you call it fatal?

First of all as I defined previously, actual disintegration AS DEFINED BY BOTH OF US ACTUALY is fatal. Transportation is NOT a reversible process in that it disintegrates the body and produces a CLONE, not the original. You seem inordinately stuck on appearances not established fact. The transporter disintegrates the subject and produces A CLONE what part of this don't you seem to understand?

Quote:
What the Unholy Shitfuck!! So you are claiming that anyone who steps into the transporter gets an automatic "Jesus of the Week" award. I got to agree with Stark-sempai that's messed up, funny but messed up.

Simon_Jester wrote:
No more so than a patient who goes in for heart surgery.

Let's review the situation. Captain Kirk steps into the transporter. Shimmering light. Where is Kirk? Kirk does not exist anywhere in the universe. Therefore, Kirk is dead, right?

Now, wait five seconds. Shimmering lights somewhere else, and what is by all appearances Kirk steps out. As far as I'm concerned, the presence of this fellow standing around is a sign that Kirk is in fact not dead. If Kirk was ever dead, he isn't now.

I'm not going to contest the point that disintegration is fatal, but if it is, then being disintegrated by a Star Trek transporter is a lot like having your heart stopped during a medical procedure and then restarted. It's only fatal in the loosest sense of the term, because there's a live version of the subject around afterwards if you'll just show a little patience.

I have no idea what to call that. If Kirk disappearing on the pad is "fatal" then Kirk reappearing on the ground is something I don't have a word for, whatever the opposite of "fatal" is. "Anti-fatal" is a crappy name for it, but I don't know of a better one.

So yeah. If being "beamed up" is fatal, being "beamed down" is the opposite of fatal. Congratulations, you've just discovered a new and extreme form of "clinical death!" Of course, like heart surgery, if something goes wrong in the middle of the process, the subject may go from "clinically dead" in the temporary sense to just plain "dead" in the irreversible sense: what some call information-theoretic death.

I can't begin to describe how Epicly that FAILS. First of all as we already established the transporter produces a clone copy NOT the original. Clones by any definition are not the original, what ever it may believe it does not change that fact. It kills the original, clones, and deposits the clone at the specified location. I'm sorry but the Kirk in your example is dead and the clone takes over his life from there and so on and so on and so forth. The idea of comparing getting fragged by the transporter to a heart surgery is dumb as the body doesn't get destroyed by the stoppage of the heart. Sorry getting disintegrated is fatal and you can't escape that fact, that the machine spits out a copy doesn't change that fact.

As for your "Anti-fatal" Jesus machine, good luck in trying to sell that concept anywhere.

Yes! All hail our lord and mecha-saviour the Jesus transporter!!

[Simon_Jester]

First of all as I defined previously, actual disintegration AS DEFINED BY BOTH OF US ACTUALY is fatal. Transportation is NOT a reversible process in that it disintegrates the body and produces a CLONE, not the original. You seem inordinately stuck on appearances not established fact. The transporter disintegrates the subject and produces A CLONE what part of this don't you seem to understand?

None of this addresses my actual point: The cloned Kirk or Picard or whoever is, or can easily be, indistinguishable from the real one, and that there is no clear standard by which you can call being taken apart and put back together from the same blueprints "destruction" and not "transportation. Here are the arguments I've heard so far:
-Physical discontinuity A: The new guy is not made of the same atoms as the old guy, and is therefore not the same guy.
-Physical discontinuity B: We saw the old guy die, and the new guy therefore must not and cannot be the same person.
-Spiritual discontinuity: The old guy's self-awareness/consciousness/soul/mojo/whatever was destroyed when the transporter disintegrated his body; it therefore vanishes and cannot be reconstructed even if we duplicate his body on the subatomic level. Thus, obviously the old guy cannot be recreated, because this essential part of him is missing, and what we have now is a clone/zombie/whatever version of the original.

Spiritual discontinuity is easy to throw out, because it invokes a nonmeasurable property that exists only for the sake of this kind of argument. But it does its job badly, because even if it exists it proves very little.

I challenge you to tell the difference between Sameguy-with-soul and Sameguy-without-soul. If you cannot, then even assuming souls exist, you have no way to know if souls can't just spontaneously vanish from the body during normal activity. Maybe your soul vanished yesterday; how would you even tell for yourself? But if a non-souled version of the same person is not the same person, then you have no assurance that you are a continuous being, or that anyone else is, regardless of whether they've been zapped by technobabble. And it's foolish to say "People are only alive as long as they have their soul" if you can't tell whether they have their soul.

The only way you can get away with it is if some kindly person decides not to question your claim that souls normally stay "stuck" to a single body (how? why?) and will remain there as long as that body survives continuously.

Physical discontinuity A is only slightly less easy to throw out. Sure, we know the new guy is not made of the same atoms, but you wouldn't let that stop you from thinking you're the same person in real life, where the atoms of your body are gradually exchanged with new atoms in your environment. We don't let that stop us from thinking that someone is the same human being they were when they were five, with the same name and identity, even though it's obvious that something like 70% or 80% of their body weight must have been added since that time.

So I think you only worry about whether replacing little bits of someone makes them into a different person when it is convenient for you to do so. Otherwise, you'd pretty much be forced to accept that a single body, with a continuous thread of experiences, in real life, is not the same person that it was a decade or two ago. Which is foolish, because it turns "continuity of existence" into an unattainable goal, at which point I have to ask whether it's a necessary condition for life. You've been alive the whole time since you were five, even though the vast majority of your body mass wasn't part of you then. Would swapping the last few residual atoms for identical atoms have changed anything?

Physical discontinuity B is the most intelligent of these arguments, and even it isn't very good, because it's based on the idea that we can take a Stone Age definition of death and apply it to modern or post-modern life. Once upon a time, the idea of having a guy lever open your ribcage and poke around in your heart with a needle and thread would have gotten a "yup, that guy is dead, no way he's bouncing back from that!" reaction from nearly anyone. And yet today it is, if not routine, at least common and a well known part of life: you can stop someone's heart without killing them, and restart it more or less at will.

Now, having your heart stop is way less extreme than disintegration. I do not deny this. The analogy here is not directly between open-heart surgery and transporters. The point is that saying that a procedure is fatal without bothering to check and see what happens after the procedure is foolish.

How idiotic would you look if you insisted that someone who's had their ribcage cracked and has some guy in scrubs fiddling around with his heart was dead, only to have them get up out of bed a few weeks later? Would you be running around and panicking because "the dead walk?" Would you be saying that this new person is actually a clone of the old one? You would not, because that would be foolish. You would say "Hmm, maybe my previous definition of death was naive and wrong, because clearly this person has survived something that I once called 'death.' " But in the case of transporters, you aren't doing that, because you contend that this definition of death is sacrosanct, and is not to be fiddled around with like petty distinctions about brain activity or heartbeat are.

Which brings us back to "spiritual discontinuity" or "physical discontinuity A." Your argument that runs "the original is dead therefore this is not the original" depends on the idea that swapping out the atoms in a person for new ones is death, or that there is some essence/soul/whatever that doesn't get rebuilt with the body. Both of which lead to ridiculous conclusions, like our not having any way to tell whether any person is still alive.

The idea of comparing getting fragged by the transporter to a heart surgery is dumb as the body doesn't get destroyed by the stoppage of the heart. Sorry getting disintegrated is fatal and you can't escape that fact, that the machine spits out a copy doesn't change that fact.

Since you, unlike, say, SCRawl, never really got around to defining "fatal" or "dead" in terms that didn't invoke your own very personal and special ideas about a soul... I'm still not convinced that you have the faintest idea what the facts are. At least SCRawl nailed down the nature of his problem on a level beyond "zap you're dead so that guy who just came out can't be you"

As for your "Anti-fatal" Jesus machine, good luck in trying to sell that concept anywhere.

Yes! All hail our lord and mecha-saviour the Jesus transporter!!

I fail to see how this is any more "Jesus machine" than a defibrillator. Less, even, because all it manages is to do something that would normally be fatal and then undo it; it can't actually save your life unless you're a genius who does unnatural things with the technobabble.

Would the idea of a machine that could restart a stopped heart have bugged you this much 200 years ago, when basically anyone whose heart stopped was dead? I mean, this is really not a difficult concept. Modern medicine deals with it all the time: things that count as "dead" by some random Stone Age guy's definition, but are still reversible. But no! It must not be! Such a thing must be a Jesus Machine, and therefore the whole idea is Epic Fail! Right. Whatever.

[PeZook]

Everybody is missing the obvious: neither sleep, not a coma nor clinical death result in cessation of electrical activity in the brain. Your brain still works in all these instances, sustained by oxygen and nutrients it has in reserve.

If these nutrients run out, drastic and irreversible changes begin to occur, culminating in brain death (all electrical activity ceases). Obviously, hacking the brain up also makes it die.

This, of course, begs the question: If we had technology that allowed paramedics to scan and save on a hard drive the electrical state of every brain cell before brain death occurs, and said paramedic would then transport the body to a "resurrection hub" where the brain would be repaired and all electrical states restored...

Would the person be dead? And if yes, why? He has the same molecules in his brain, and his brain state is identical down to every neuron. He'd be able to wake up, sign out of the hub and go on with his life with nobody able to tell he was dead for six hours. If literally nobody in the universe can ascertain the person was braindead (without accessing medical records, of course) at some time in his life, including himself, why should we be able to arbitrarily declare him a clone and/or a copy?

Furthermore: if you believe the man is but a copy, should we deny him access to the original's wife and children and bank accounts and property? It's a logical conclusion, after all. If the original is dead, the copy should have no rights to anything of his.

I also see that nobody even tried to define what allows for "individual perception" to even exist. Why do people perceive the world? What makes "individual perception" something impossible to copy with a hypothetical magitech device capable of copying everything else.

And a final thought: every hour of the day, random neurons in your brain die. Some reach their natural end, others are poisoned and killed by toxins you inhale or drink (like alcohol), some are destroyed by random physical failures. Your consciousness runs on wetware that's massively different from what you had five years ago. None of us make decisions the same way we did fifteen years ago. Why are we still considered the same people?

[Kamakazie Sith]

And a final thought: every hour of the day, random neurons in your brain die. Some reach their natural end, others are poisoned and killed by toxins you inhale or drink (like alcohol), some are destroyed by random physical failures. Your consciousness runs on wetware that's massively different from what you had five years ago. None of us make decisions the same way we did fifteen years ago. Why are we still considered the same people?

Because there isn't an interrupt in ones consciousness?

Though I still take issue with the transporters clone people. Myself and others have pointed out that this doesn't appear to happen and the participants in this thread have ignored those points.

[Simon_Jester]

... Kamikaze Sith, I must be going blind, because I can't find the spot where you said that transporters do not clone people. I get where you say that transporters do not kill people, on the grounds that there is no interruption of consciousness. I don't disagree with that; I don't feel qualified to say whether consciousness is interrupted or not.

Personally, I feel that it doesn't matter- interruption of consciousness is not a sufficient condition for death.

[Kamakazie Sith]

... Kamikaze Sith, I must be going blind, because I can't find the spot where you said that transporters do not clone people. I get where you say that transporters do not kill people, on the grounds that there is no interruption of consciousness. I don't disagree with that; I don't feel qualified to say whether consciousness is interrupted or not.

Personally, I feel that it doesn't matter- interruption of consciousness is not a sufficient condition for death.

As I stated earlier the episode Realm of Fear clearly shows that consciousness is not interrupted from a first person view of Lt. Barkley. This tells us that transporters do not clone people, and they do not kill.

I disagree that cloning the original, and the clone taking place of the original does not equal the death of the original. It clearly does since the original is no longer conscious.

While lack of consciousness might not be the sole indicator of death it is one of the requirements for death.

[SapphireFox]

None of this addresses my actual point: The cloned Kirk or Picard or whoever is, or can easily be, indistinguishable from the real one, and that there is no clear standard by which you can call being taken apart and put back together from the same blueprints "destruction" and not "transportation. Here are the arguments I've heard so far:
-Physical discontinuity A: The new guy is not made of the same atoms as the old guy, and is therefore not the same guy.
-Physical discontinuity B: We saw the old guy die, and the new guy therefore must not and cannot be the same person.
-Spiritual discontinuity: The old guy's self-awareness/consciousness/soul/mojo/whatever was destroyed when the transporter disintegrated his body; it therefore vanishes and cannot be reconstructed even if we duplicate his body on the subatomic level. Thus, obviously the old guy cannot be recreated, because this essential part of him is missing, and what we have now is a clone/zombie/whatever version of the original.

Spiritual discontinuity is easy to throw out, because it invokes a nonmeasurable property that exists only for the sake of this kind of argument. But it does its job badly, because even if it exists it proves very little.

I challenge you to tell the difference between Sameguy-with-soul and Sameguy-without-soul. If you cannot, then even assuming souls exist, you have no way to know if souls can't just spontaneously vanish from the body during normal activity. Maybe your soul vanished yesterday; how would you even tell for yourself? But if a non-souled version of the same person is not the same person, then you have no assurance that you are a continuous being, or that anyone else is, regardless of whether they've been zapped by technobabble. And it's foolish to say "People are only alive as long as they have their soul" if you can't tell whether they have their soul.

As I have stated before that the argument on the intangible aspects is flawed as an untestable, unprovable, and unfalsifiable concept. It's YOUR argument that is based on the transfer of an intangible "Soul/self-awareness/me-ness" between the original and the copy not mine.

An intelligent being is a bit more complicated. You see, my definition of "me" is such that "I" am basically a decision-making algorithm that happens to run in the brain of a large hairless ape. If you could transfer that algorithm to a new ape, then as far as I'm concerned "I" am still alive, even if the original ape has been smashed into tiny little pieces. This is because the me-algorithm is an abstraction, something that could hypothetically exist independent of the platform it happens to run on, much like any other computer program. Erasing the program from memory in one computer and reinstantiating it somewhere else doesn't destroy the program.

As for your challenge its based on a untestable premise no one can answer that question at the current time. I have NEVER claimed that a person with or without a soul is alive or not.

Physical discontinuity A is only slightly less easy to throw out. Sure, we know the new guy is not made of the same atoms, but you wouldn't let that stop you from thinking you're the same person in real life, where the atoms of your body are gradually exchanged with new atoms in your environment. We don't let that stop us from thinking that someone is the same human being they were when they were five, with the same name and identity, even though it's obvious that something like 70% or 80% of their body weight must have been added since that time.

So I think you only worry about whether replacing little bits of someone makes them into a different person when it is convenient for you to do so. Otherwise, you'd pretty much be forced to accept that a single body, with a continuous thread of experiences, in real life, is not the same person that it was a decade or two ago. Which is foolish, because it turns "continuity of existence" into an unattainable goal, at which point I have to ask whether it's a necessary condition for life. You've been alive the whole time since you were five, even though the vast majority of your body mass wasn't part of you then. Would swapping the last few residual atoms for identical atoms have changed anything?

I explained this part when you asked the "ship and typewriter" questions. As for the question, no I am not the same "typewriter" that I was when I was five. I am a completely different "typewriter" than I was then. To you the concept of identity is fixed like a format. ex(he is an .html she is xml he is running windows she is running GWBasic) My concept of identity is fluid as we "hybridize" and "change parts". ie(grow, change, and gain experiences). My concept of identity is part of the whole but your concept is that the whole is part of identity. To me identity formed from the whole you seem to believe that identity can be separated from the whole and taken up by another whole.

Physical discontinuity B is the most intelligent of these arguments, and even it isn't very good, because it's based on the idea that we can take a Stone Age definition of death and apply it to modern or post-modern life. Once upon a time, the idea of having a guy lever open your ribcage and poke around in your heart with a needle and thread would have gotten a "yup, that guy is dead, no way he's bouncing back from that!" reaction from nearly anyone. And yet today it is, if not routine, at least common and a well known part of life: you can stop someone's heart without killing them, and restart it more or less at will.

Now, having your heart stop is way less extreme than disintegration. I do not deny this. The analogy here is not directly between open-heart surgery and transporters. The point is that saying that a procedure is fatal without bothering to check and see what happens after the procedure is foolish.

How idiotic would you look if you insisted that someone who's had their ribcage cracked and has some guy in scrubs fiddling around with his heart was dead, only to have them get up out of bed a few weeks later? Would you be running around and panicking because "the dead walk?" Would you be saying that this new person is actually a clone of the old one? You would not, because that would be foolish. You would say "Hmm, maybe my previous definition of death was naive and wrong, because clearly this person has survived something that I once called 'death.' " But in the case of transporters, you aren't doing that, because you contend that this definition of death is sacrosanct, and is not to be fiddled around with like petty distinctions about brain activity or heartbeat are.

Lets look at what you wrote.

Very well. In turn, I present my view of the subject:

1) The transporter disintegrates a person, which is fatal; the transporter subsequently reintegrates the person, which is anti-fatal and therefore brings them back to life.

Now you yourself state that the transporter kills a person by disintegration.(something I have been arguing all this time) You claim in your very next statement says that it resurrects a person. How can this be when the original is crisped on the pad and the clone can scrape up the originals microscopic remains from the pad? How can you be sure that you are the original if you can retrieve your own disintegrated remains? How can you be so certain that what came out of the transporter is the same who or what that went in?

4) Transporter copies may be flawed to varying degrees, ranging from extremely subtle, microscopic errors (TNG: Realm of Fear) to major personality alterations implying significant changes in the structure or contents of the brain (TOS: The Enemy Within). A sufficiently extreme alteration may produce an individual who is similar to the original, but for practical purposes might as well be an entirely different person (the "Evil Kirk" of The Enemy Within).

This part is probably damming part against the clone being original, since what comes out is NOT always who or what went in.

I fail to see how this is any more "Jesus machine" than a defibrillator. Less, even, because all it manages is to do something that would normally be fatal and then undo it; it can't actually save your life unless you're a genius who does unnatural things with the technobabble.

Would the idea of a machine that could restart a stopped heart have bugged you this much 200 years ago, when basically anyone whose heart stopped was dead? I mean, this is really not a difficult concept. Modern medicine deals with it all the time: things that count as "dead" by some random Stone Age guy's definition, but are still reversible. But no! It must not be! Such a thing must be a Jesus Machine, and therefore the whole idea is Epic Fail! Right. Whatever

This is what happens with the transporter according to your arguments.
1. the transporter disintegrates the subject and through the process all data for the process is collected
2. the transporter uses the data to construct a clone at the transport site
3. concurrently with 2 the ethereal intangible "soul/self-awareness/me-ness" aspects are transferred from the original.
4. transport complete the copy since it posses the intangible aspect is considered the original and thus the original not dead

Can you see the problem with this? You continue to use the intangible aspects in your argument even when we both think they should not be used. Can you understand why I call this a "Jesus Machine". A defibrillator restores a pulse to life that is still there, this thing gives life where none existed before.

I apologize if you feel I have been insulting in my comments, but I NEEDED you to understand how this stupid and insulting sounded. defibrillators and the like don't make life after it has been terminated nor do they destroy the body they restore what was already there. Disintegration doesn't allow for there to be question of fatality(something we have already agreed upon) creating a copy of someone who is dead doesn't negate that death.

If I took some DNA from a person who died in heart surgery and created a clone of him would you still say the original was not dead and if I showed him the body of the original would he say the original was not dead?

[Havok]

Transporters do not kill you. If anyone has a copy of TNG Realm of Fear you can watch Barkley transport over from a first person perspective. There is no break in consciousness.

This. Despite all the other arguments, this has not been explained in the context of those arguments, nor been countered. It seems like it has been largely ignored.

Only Stark touched on it with his 'consciousness during the swirly parts' post. But that doesn't explain the episode away at all.

[SCRawl]

Transporters do not kill you. If anyone has a copy of TNG Realm of Fear you can watch Barkley transport over from a first person perspective. There is no break in consciousness.

This. Despite all the other arguments, this has not been explained in the context of those arguments, nor been countered. It seems like it has been largely ignored.

Only Stark touched on it with his 'consciousness during the swirly parts' post. But that doesn't explain the episode away at all.

I have reviewed the important parts of that episode, and I remain unconvinced. Here is the relevant quote:

...if we held Barclay suspended -- in mid transport -- at the point where matter starts to lose its cohesion...

That's what they end up doing to Barclay -- hold him in the beam before he gets taken apart. Not during, not after, before. Later, while he's actually on the transporter pad, you can even see from Barclay's perspective: he can see the sparkly stuff as well as the transporter room. My verdict: he hasn't been disintegrated at that point in the process. If he had been, then he wouldn't have been able to see, because he wouldn't have had eyes.

In other words, the person travelling by transporter dies at some point (from his perspective) past the point at which Barclay was held during the experimental procedure we saw in that episode. The rest of the world doesn't care, because, well, for all intents and purposes that person hasn't changed at all.

[Kamakazie Sith]

That's what they end up doing to Barclay -- hold him in the beam before he gets taken apart. Not during, not after, before. Later, while he's actually on the transporter pad, you can even see from Barclay's perspective: he can see the sparkly stuff as well as the transporter room. My verdict: he hasn't been disintegrated at that point in the process. If he had been, then he wouldn't have been able to see, because he wouldn't have had eyes.

Not the point in the episode I'm talking about. When Barkley beams over to the USS Yosemite you see the entire transport from his perspective from start to finish. You see O'Brien fade away and then the transport site of the USS Yosemite appear.

In other words, the person travelling by transporter dies at some point (from his perspective) past the point at which Barclay was held during the experimental procedure we saw in that episode. The rest of the world doesn't care, because, well, for all intents and purposes that person hasn't changed at all.

In other words you are wrong. Please try to view the entire episode, and not only cite examples that help your position. It is available on YouTube. The relevant scene is available here at about 2:35min in. Link

[Stark]

So what would 'not having a brain or eyes' look like to Barclay? Whether he's 'anti-fatal' and the same guy or a copy or whatever philosophical nonsense is irrelevant; he could by definition not percieve any break in consciousness (which is a major part of the whole 'no difference = the same' thing). He's not going to have flashes of hell or a few seconds of black screen while he's 'dead'. Since we know the swirly is the scanning process, all he sees is being scanned and being assembled. How does that 'prove' anything? He's canonically turned to gunk and stored in a computer - what would he 'see' then?

[Simon_Jester]

Transporters do not kill you. If anyone has a copy of TNG Realm of Fear you can watch Barkley transport over from a first person perspective. There is no break in consciousness.

This. Despite all the other arguments, this has not been explained in the context of those arguments, nor been countered. It seems like it has been largely ignored.
Only Stark touched on it with his 'consciousness during the swirly parts' post. But that doesn't explain the episode away at all.

...Yeah. Assuming that we're tracking what happens to Barclay, and not "what Barclay perceives," that's a clincher. The catch is that if there's a five second period during which there is no conscious Barclay, then we're not going to see that period through his eyes, any more than we see the events passing around our viewpoint character when he's unconscious.

As I have stated before that the argument on the intangible aspects is flawed as an untestable, unprovable, and unfalsifiable concept. It's YOUR argument that is based on the transfer of an intangible "Soul/self-awareness/me-ness" between the original and the copy not mine.

How?

I'm not arguing for souls here. I'm not arguing for any self-awareness that takes any form outside the electrical activity within the brain. What I am arguing for is the existence of programs as abstractions, in the sense that the C program "Hello, World!" exists. I can point to instances of "Hello, World!" I can even write out its code. But a copy of "Hello, World!" is not the same beast as the program "Hello, World!" itself. The instance of the concept is not the concept itself, any more than a falling rock is the law of gravity.

If I erase a copy of "Hello, World!" and write another copy, I have not destroyed "Hello, World," nor have I created it. All I've done is move it. The person who wrote it for the first time can be said to have created it, and the person who destroys the last extant copy (including copies that are stored in computer or human memory) can be said to have destroyed it, but so long as a copy of it exists, "Hello, World!" exists.

I explained this part when you asked the "ship and typewriter" questions. As for the question, no I am not the same "typewriter" that I was when I was five. I am a completely different "typewriter" than I was then. To you the concept of identity is fixed like a format. ex(he is an .html she is xml he is running windows she is running GWBasic) My concept of identity is fluid as we "hybridize" and "change parts". ie(grow, change, and gain experiences). My concept of identity is part of the whole but your concept is that the whole is part of identity. To me identity formed from the whole you seem to believe that identity can be separated from the whole and taken up by another whole.

Yes, I do, because the idea of fluid identity, used as you use it, can lead to absurd conclusions. For example, if you are not the same person you were at five, are you the same person you were halfway between five and your present age? What about halfway between that age and your present age? And so on? If identity is hybridizable, then we're left with "A is the same person as B, and B is the same person as C, but A is not the same person as C."

Now, we can finesse our way out of that by saying "A is 99% the same as B, and B is 99% the same as C, therefore A is 98% the same as C." Which is reasonable; you're comparing two people's identities in the same sense that you would compare their genotypes- they're similar but not exactly identical. But then for practical purposes you have to be willing and able to say that for some value of X, "A is X% the same as B" means "A is B." For a sufficiently close resemblance, the two identities must converge into one, or identity is instantaneous, because you are not exactly the same person you were even a microsecond ago.

If identity is to mean anything at all, there has to be a horizon of "sufficient similarity" within which identities converge to one for practical purposes. But that leads us right back to the problem of figuring out just how similar two people have to be before they count as the same person, rather than one original and one copy.

Lets look at what you wrote.

Very well. In turn, I present my view of the subject:
1) The transporter disintegrates a person, which is fatal; the transporter subsequently reintegrates the person, which is anti-fatal and therefore brings them back to life.

Now you yourself state that the transporter kills a person by disintegration.(something I have been arguing all this time) You claim in your very next statement says that it resurrects a person. How can this be when the original is crisped on the pad and the clone can scrape up the originals microscopic remains from the pad? How can you be sure that you are the original if you can retrieve your own disintegrated remains? How can you be so certain that what came out of the transporter is the same who or what that went in?

If I could find a satisfactory testing procedure to show that I was, in fact, not the same person (such as comparing the results of brain scans), this would be a fairly compelling argument. If no such procedure can be found, then I will be satisfied that I am the same person if I believe myself to be the same person, because I see no harm in behaving as if I were the person I remember being.

But I think you've misunderstood my point. A subject disintegrated by a transporter is, in my eyes, not permanently dead. The state they are in is best compared to "clinical death" on an operating table: the subject is reduced to a state at which they are kept in existence only by outside intervention, and in which they will cease to exist if that intervention goes wrong. But if the transporter works properly, you never undergo information-theoretic death: the technology exists to undo the (very extensive) harm that has been done to you, just as the technology exists to undo the act of stopping the heart of a patient who undergoes heart surgery.

Reversible "death" is not the same as irreversible death, from a philosophical standpoint.

4) Transporter copies may be flawed to varying degrees, ranging from extremely subtle, microscopic errors (TNG: Realm of Fear) to major personality alterations implying significant changes in the structure or contents of the brain (TOS: The Enemy Within). A sufficiently extreme alteration may produce an individual who is similar to the original, but for practical purposes might as well be an entirely different person (the "Evil Kirk" of The Enemy Within).

This part is probably damming part against the clone being original, since what comes out is NOT always who or what went in.

This is not, however, evidence that what comes out always IS NOT who or what went in. If I beam Kirk up from the planet, something may go wrong and leave me with zombie-Kirk or evil-Kirk or six identical Kirks or Kirk from an alternate universe. The process is not without its bizarre and improbable risks. But I may also end up with a normal Kirk. The normal Kirk I get cannot be distinguished from the normal Kirk I started with; I see no reason to accuse this Kirk of being a fake and denying him access to the bridge on the grounds that he is not the captain.

Which, as Kamikaze Sith pointed out, would be the appropriate response if the Kirk I get "isn't really" Kirk.

This is what happens with the transporter according to your arguments.
1. the transporter disintegrates the subject and through the process all data for the process is collected
2. the transporter uses the data to construct a clone at the transport site
3. concurrently with 2 the ethereal intangible "soul/self-awareness/me-ness" aspects are transferred from the original.
4. transport complete the copy since it posses the intangible aspect is considered the original and thus the original not dead

Can you see the problem with this? You continue to use the intangible aspects in your argument even when we both think they should not be used. Can you understand why I call this a "Jesus Machine". A defibrillator restores a pulse to life that is still there, this thing gives life where none existed before.

The only intangible thing being transferred is a name tag: "This is (a) Captain Kirk." That's not an essence or soul at all; that's just a description. It's like saying "this is a lump of granite" or "this is the script for A New Hope."

If I beam a copy of a movie script from point A to point B, I still have a copy of a movie script. Even if it the only copy in existence, the movie script still exists; the process of making a copy and destroying the original did not destroy the abstraction that is "the script." I can demonstrate this by writing a script, then transcribing it, then burning the original. I still have the script.

My argument is that saying "This is Captain Kirk" is like saying "This is the script for Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan." Destroying a copy and creating a new one does not make the new one any less an authentic version than the old one was, because the identity of an item (or a person) is defined by what it is, not where it's been.

I apologize if you feel I have been insulting in my comments, but I NEEDED you to understand how this stupid and insulting sounded. defibrillators and the like don't make life after it has been terminated nor do they destroy the body they restore what was already there.

For older definitions of "life" and "death," defibrillators do very much make life after it has been terminated. Existing technology has forced us to modify the definitions in order to preserve the concept of "death" as something that cannot be reversed, as opposed to being an extreme form of unconsciousness. Future technology may force us to change the definition even farther. I submit that transporters would force us to rewrite the definition almost entirely.

But for some (bad) definitions of "death," or for a definition corresponding to "clinical death," a transporter brings about temporary "death." However, it does not bring about the permanent death of an individual, even though it brings about the permanent death of an instance of an individual.

If I took some DNA from a person who died in heart surgery and created a clone of him would you still say the original was not dead and if I showed him the body of the original would he say the original was not dead?

That depends. So far, you haven't told me whether he shares the same mind, and I associate identity strongly with minds. Assuming for the sake of argument that they do, and working the argument back to the transporter:

I can point to the pile of ashes that was Captain Kirk and say "That Captain Kirk is dead" in the same sense that I say "That copy of the script has been destroyed." However, I am then obliged to point to the guy wearing a Starfleet captain's uniform who just beamed up to where I am and say "That Captain Kirk is alive," because he is in fact standing there going all William Shatner on me. That guy passes any "Is this or is this not Captain Kirk?" test I can devise, and therefore must be a genuine Captain Kirk.

And given the presence of a genuine Captain Kirk, I cannot say that "Captain Kirk is dead," because dead men don't smack me upside the head with a campy doubled-fist punch for calling them dead men. Nor do they reply that history considers them dead and ask who they are to argue, or any of the other things that (a) Captain Kirk might do in response to being told he's dead.

Granted, this Captain Kirk is not the original Captain Kirk, much as my copy of Hamlet is not Shakespeare's rough draft with all its beer stains and crossed out words. But my copy of Hamlet is still Hamlet, and this guy is still Captain Kirk.

[Stark]

Wow, you're even conflating tags with identity. You 'associate identity strongly with minds' and then say stupid shit like 'dead people don't punch me'. In a world where bodies can be rebuilt from computer records, YES, they do. I mean I could say the person punching you isn't dead, but that's so obvious you have to be a retard to say it; the issue is whether that person is the same person (ie, not just 'the same') as the dead person.

Which requires 'anti-fatal' events, which are so stupid I'm glad you clarified this is a ST thing and not something you actually believe.

[Simon_Jester]

Wow, you're even conflating tags with identity. You 'associate identity strongly with minds' and then say stupid shit like 'dead people don't punch me'. In a world where bodies can be rebuilt from computer records, YES, they do. I mean I could say the person punching you isn't dead, but that's so obvious you have to be a retard to say it; the issue is whether that person is the same person (ie, not just 'the same') as the dead person.

I don't think there's an inconsistency between saying that a person who can punch me is not dead and saying that the question "who is this person?" is answered by looking at their mind.

The identity of any person or thing is going to be an answer to that question: Who is this person? What is this thing? For abstract things, like computer programs or plays, there's a clear difference between an instance of the thing and the thing itself. My copy of Hamlet is not the original copy created by Shakespeare, but it is still Hamlet. Shakespeare's copy would also still be Hamlet, if it still existed.

And you cannot remove a thing from existence simply by removing an instance of it. Burning a copy of Hamlet does not destroy the play itself. You have to get rid of all the instances, beyond the possibility of retrieval: so long as people can reconstruct Hamlet, the play has not been destroyed or lost in any but the most trivial, temporary sense.

When we beam Captain Kirk up from a planet to the Enterprise, we destroy an instance of Captain Kirk in the process of creating another instance. But the instance of Kirk is not the man himself; it is merely a Kirk. The old instance dies in the process. The identity "Captain Kirk" does not, because there is still a man passing all possible "Is this Captain Kirk?" tests afterwards. The man definitely exists (he can punch me), and he is by all evidence Captain Kirk. Therefore Captain Kirk is alive as far as I'm concerned.

The kind of death that you have during a five second span in which there is no you, sandwiched between two periods in which there is a you, is a very trivial sort of "death," death in the clinical sense. Not at all the kind of permanent thing we normally think of when we use the word.
_________

EDIT: Now, if the whole point of the exercise was to show that an instance of Captain Kirk is dead, yes. But making a huge philosophical thing about how Starfleet has no problem killing people and cloning them with transporters... that implies more than the death of mere instances. That implies the death of the actual individual.

It's like accusing a culture of "burning books" on the grounds that it sometimes throws a book away and its garbage is sometimes incinerated. Technically true, but misleading, because when we think of "book burnings" we think of a systematic attempt to eradicate the book itself from the record, not the disposal of individual copies.

[Stark]

Uh, you just agreed with everyone that Kirk is dead, and another identical Kirk now exists. Without 'anti-fatal' events, this involves death. He can pass the 'is he identical' tests all he wants, it doesn't change this. The idea that because it appears the same to YOU means anything about HIM is stupid. The issue is whether or not the lights come back on.