What if you die when teleporting and it only creates a perfect clone?

>>58209515

Disproven in both Next Generation and Enterprise.

>>58209533
How can you disprove something that's not even real

>>58209515
What if you quit being an idiot and stopped saving thumbnails?

>>58209533
I recall a post about this a few months back referring to how characters were aware and just didn't give a fuck

>>58209515
>a perfect clone
Then what's the problem?

>>58209515
What if, despite being a clone, it's like when a person has a heart attack and is 'dead' and then revived?

What if your consciousness ends every time you take a nap and when your body wakes up it has an entirely new consciousness.

Ah so refreshing to take a nap.

>>58209711
I think it's more like saving state on a VM and then resuming execution

Then teleporting doesn't make sense. Why destroy the original? Why would anyone want to die just to have a clone spawned at another location?

i'm not familiar with how star trek transporters work

if it destroys and recreates a perfect copy, then either you die before and the copy is dead, or you die after and the copy dies
if the copy process is not instantaneous, such that the copy is comprised of parts of you captures from slightly different times, and you die /during/ this process, then whether the copy dies depends on how you died
for example, if you're shot in the head, but your head was already scanned, then the copy will have the pre-shot head, and should be fine

>>58209515
Your soul then possess you're clone. No problem there

>>58209764
The problem is that the teleported person cannot know if hes the original or not. So there is no known way to prove if the original died and a new lifeform was created or not.

Play Soma OP

>>58209790
This. Everyone who has been transported thinks it works. But in truth, Reg was right. Transporters kill the original.

>>58209515
A man is only a concept, his DNA+personality+memories. A system, you might say.
If the system is perfectly recreated, then the man hasn't truly died.
This is hard to accept for humans, though, since we don't think of ourselves as merely systems. We think of ourselves both as an entity and as a gathering of cells. And, well, in a way the cells we are made up of after teleportation won't be the same as before, so our intuition says this "clone" won't truly be us.
But it will, to the world and all our friends and to everybody who looks, unless the recreation isn't perfect. It's not even the matter of them being stupid, since the information, who we were, is perfectly transmitted and the system is recreated.
Also, though if somebody dies right at the time they are recreated on the other end of the teleporter, it's all simple and easy, if the time of death and recreation is further away, it gets harder to answer whether it's the same man.
Especially if the original doesn't die after the teleportation, since the systems start to diverge, so the more time passes before the original is dead, the less it is like the two men are identical.
Plus, what if the second teleporter, the one that recreates, glitches out and never recreates a man? Then the man is just dead, and the teleporter killed him.
But yet a perfect teleportation still hasn't truly killed a man, unless we find an immortal soul, or something.
In the end, it just shows yet again that the universe doesn't care what we think about something (for example, what really constitutes a death), and we will have to deal with it somehow.

>>58209841
>This. Everyone who has been transported thinks it works. But in truth, Reg was right. Transporters kill the original.
No. See >>58209738

>>58209711
Consciousness doesn't work that way. It changes every second.

Perfect clones are impossible

>>58209962
why?

>>58209560

Good question, Jayden.

>>58209515
Someone discovered CGPGrey.

>>58209515
If the clone is perfect, then the end result is the same.

This thought experiment is only challenging to christfags who believe in a “soul”

>>58209533
what version of teleportation?
star trek one?
sg1 asgard one?and the stargate itself
charmed magical teleportation one?
doctor who?
heroes?
power rangers?

logically speaking the only thing close enough to what humans are researching now "Quantum teleportation" is the stargate

>>58209768
i remember watching some special on the science channel a few years back that had neil degrasse, michio kaku, and a few other university professors on it talking about teleportation and the possibility of star trek type teleportation. iirc, they spoke in lengths about how a star trek teleporter actually works and how we can theoretically duplicate it, with a few successes already with teleporting atoms.

what they argued was essentially, star trek teleportation works by making a MRI style scan of the body, but down to the molecular, atom level. saving that image in a "computer" and then using something similar to a human 3D printer to reprint the body back at a different location. with the data being transferred at the speed of light and be recreated in a matter of minutes by the destination printer.

so yes, teleportation would work by destroying the old and recreating a perfect clone.

File: teleport.png (13KB, 1118x240px) Image search: [Google]

13KB, 1118x240px

Teleportation is easy

>>58210022
Atomic level may not be enough to fully recreate a human being. We don't understand whether or not the human brain depends on quantum effects in any macroscopic way. By distorting the quantum state, it's possible you'll irreversably damage the human's thoughts, memories or perception.

>>58210022
What's the point of breaking down the original person though? Wouldn't it be easier to make a cloning machine this way?

>>58209515
>What if you die when teleporting and it only creates a perfect clone?
Anon this assumes that there is some facet of 'you' which is not contained in the physical structure that is your body. If you are perfectly cloned via teleporter then it really is you, per the definition of perfect cloning.

>b-but what about that episode where riker and his double
Again, you're making a false assumption, namely that there can only be one instance of you; if you accept that there is no facet of youness which exists independently from the structure that is your body, since the body is just an object it's entirely plausible that more than one you could exist, should we have a process capable of producing sufficiently accurate replications of your body.

>>58210004
>This thought experiment is only challenging to christfags who believe in a “soul”
This is basically correct.

>>58210064
>Anon this assumes that there is some facet of 'you' which is not contained in the physical structure that is your body. If you are perfectly cloned via teleporter then it really is you, per the definition of perfect cloning.
Minor nitpick: Teleportation is not the same thing as cloning.

Perfect cloning is impossible. Perfect teleportation is.

>>58210064
>If you are perfectly cloned via teleporter then it really is you, per the definition of perfect cloning.
They keyword here though is "perfect" and there's a possibility that teleporters can never achieve perfect cloning, even if the resulting person looks and acts just like you do.

>>58209772
And how do you think they're going to add that functionality? Is there gonna be a command line -soul flag as well?

>>58209955
We don't know what consciousness is yet

>>58210063
It would be unsettling and create a bunch of problems for people who just want to "teleport.". Who would take over the role of (you) when there are two (you)s? When the clone is exactly the same as you, what gives one or the other priority?

It probably work as a regular cloning machine though.

>>58209515
>you die
>you
Prove it

>>58210082
The question that naturally arises, of course, is how sufficiently accurate you have to be to consider yourself “you”.

I mean, the whole concept of “you” is fuzzy to begin with. Where do we start and stop? Do the atoms you're constantly losing from your skin still count as you? What about all the atoms you're exchanging with your local nearest body of water? Your cells are in a constant cycle of dying, being replaced by new cells made from whatever atoms you recently ate, dying again, being shed, etc.

There's a lot of room for error. Heck, you could deliberately introduce “errors” during the teleportation process, to do stuff like remove fat or change the shape of your nose. Basically plastic surgery - or any surgery, really - taken to the absolute extreme.

Would it still be you? Sure, because the shape of my nose is not really something that I think of as strongly defining me. It wouldn't be a perfect copy, but it's not like people complain about no longer being themselves every time they go in for surgery either.

>>58210102
Yes we do. People just don't want to admit it because religiousfags will start rebelling against the truth that it isn't a magical force independent of our bodies.

>>58209515
You do this every day though. When you go to sleep your consciousness ceases to exist for some time, and when you wake up a brand new consciousness gets generated by your body. So "you" woke up for the first time this morning, and your memories have been created in your brain by previous consciousnesses generated by your body.
If this doesn't trouble you neither should teleporting

>>58210063
well, to "teleport" to preserve "one copy." if you want teleportation on a mass scale, you can't really endure 40k+ copies of the same person running around all over the place.

but they also noted that yes, indeed, this is essentially a cloning device. every time you use it, another copy of your state is saved. a copy of your ten year old body, twenty, thirty, and so on. immortality in a way would be achieved.

>>58210063
>What's the point of breaking down the original person though?
You'll end up with a ton of clones of yourself in various places for no reason?
Why duplicate yourself if you don't want/need to

>>58209711
>>58210135
oh fuck someone already said it, I feel dumb now

>>58210123
I think most people consider the line to be conssciousness. As in, the difference between seeing through your own eyes as opposed to looking at an image of you in a mirror.

>>58209515
You die everytime you use the transporter

>>58210114
both of them will be "you"

it's not an easy thing to imagine

take a VM for example, if you paused it, transferred its state and disk to another machine, then resumed it on both machines, which is "the VM"? both of them are, it's the same VM, just now there's two of them

>>58210135
we barely can understand what short of information the brain needs in order to achieve Consciousness
and anons already took it to the next level...throwing out of the windows the very thing we know its one of the signs of Consciousness...the rem cycle..

>>58210210
>sleep=rem cycle
hmmm

>>58210063
If you want to make a perfect copy of something down to the quantum level, you're going to need to analyze the original on a quantum level, which implies destroying the quantum state.

Basically teleportation works by producing an entangled pair of quantum particles. You send one copy to the destination and leave one copy in the source. When you teleport a quantum particle Q, you first let Q transform one half of your entangled pair, and then measure both of them (collapsing the quantum state in the process).

You send the results of your measurements via classical means to the destination, and then use that information to reconstruct the original quantum state from the second half of the entangled pair, by rotating it based on the information you received.

(>>58210036 for a diagram)

But in the process of reconstructing an identical copy, you *had* to measure the original state, so you had the information required to know how to sufficiently rotate your entangled qubit to reproduce the original.

tl;dr, in quantum mechanics, you can't copy a qubit (no cloning), so a quantum-accurate clone is impossible. Of course, a sufficiently good macroscopic clone might still be. (For example, perhaps the atomic level is enough - without needing to worry about quantum states?)

Also, teleportation is still very limited, because

1. you can't send information faster than light, so at best, teleportation is a way of travelling at the speed of light

2. you can't travel anywhere without there being a receiver in the location you want to travel, so it won't let us explore the universe any better - just teleport between places we've already been

3. For a quantum-accurate teleportation, you need to exchange tangled particles between the source and the destination beforehand, so every 1 kg of mass you want to teleport requires 1 kg of entangled particles to be transported via classical means first.

>>58210205
>take a VM for example, if you paused it, transferred its state and disk to another machine, then resumed it on both machines, which is "the VM"? both of them are, it's the same VM, just now there's two of them
Precisely this.

>>58209515
Well, don't you die when you get separated into tiny pieces and teleported to somewhere else?

>>58209515
This would be a huge improvement over contemporary transportation. It doesnt even need to be perfect.

E.g.: An eight hour flight will expose you to a considerable level of radiation, induce problems with your blood-circulation, put your eyes and ears under pressure stress, literally take 8 hours off your lifetime, put you into hazard from germs on the plane, put you in a considerable risk of accident.

Compared to this, creating a near-perfect clone and killing the old me for technical or social-ethical reasons seems 100% fine.

The real problems with this will be so much more important: Imagine the social impact if you have a technology that can literally create a human being (that is h2o, carbon and other elements) with the highest precision instantly out of nothing.

tl;dr, utopian thought is dumb

>>58210205
How do you know humans work as VMs do?

>>58210205
-- i should say, they /were/ the same VM
moments after unpausing, they are independently free to diverge from one another, as you would if you were copied
but i wouldn't call that proof of one not being you, you are constantly changing, the you from yesterday is not exactly the same as the you right now

>>58210130
mow they will argue that the magical force also travels to the new body

>>58210224
>>sleep=rem cycle
god damn it that was just..hmm
https://www.sleepassociation.org/sleep/rem-sleep/

>>58210130
>Yes we do.
What is consciousness?

>>58210167
Consciousness is not really some rigid, solid thing. Consciousness, thoughts and perceptions are malleable and flexible.

For example, every time people take drugs, they're affecting their perception and their consciousness. When you're high, you have different thoughts. Same shit when you're sleeping. Do you stop becoming yourself when you're in your sleep? No, you're just in a state of severely warped consciousness.

What about somebody suffering a stroke and losing memories? What about somebody who got a pole shot through their head and lost parts of their personality as a result? What about somebody stuck in a coma? Are they still the same person as before? The border isn't an easy one to draw, because all associations we make with the things we believe to know are fuzzy connections at best. The brain doesn't operate on rigid definitions, after all.

My point is: you have a lot of playing room for error before people start getting really uncomfortable with the concept of themselves.

>>58209981
kek

>>58209515
There is no difference for the observer.
Therefore you do not die.

>>58210244
i haven't seen anything solid that suggests otherwise

>>58210205
>>58210230
Sure, at the exact moment of the cloning, they will both be you. But both versions of you will go through different experiences, and after enough time passes, there will be some difference in personality and other degrees of youness that eventually you'll be two different people. In this case, what if for example you're some super bigshot with lots of authority. Which clone or version of you is entitled to that authority? Don't say both because eventually, different people will have some sort of conflict and that becomes a mess.

>>58210262
What the fuck are you even implying? I said sleep was more than rem, why are you linking me this?
Your original post was written in some of the most butchered english I've seen here for a while, so that might be the source of this confusion

>>58210243
>yfw the teleporting device malfunctions and two of you come out on the other end

>>58210244
Humans occupy matter and obey the laws of the universe

This means you can fundamentally describe humans as the combination of (their current state) × (the laws of physics), similar to how you can describe a VM by a combination of (its current memory) × (the execution rules of the processor).

In both cases, the only evolution over time depends on the inputs you feed into that system. Give two VMs the same inputs, and they will evolve the same way over time. The only thing keeping us different is the fact that we're all living life from a different perspective (different parents, different surroundings growing up, etc.)

>>58210227
and this is why much of the research that has come out in the past two years has concluded, at least right now, for the sake of interest, we should focus using this to advance quantum computer designs.

NPR did somewhat of an article about it: http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/07/29/427161157/beam-me-up-teleporting-is-real-even-if-trekkie-transport-isnt

>>58209965
Because this recent video that was too dumb to follow said so!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owPC60Ue0BE

>>58210298
>yfw script kiddies infect the device with a virus. people come out with pepe faces.

>>58210314
>Because this recent video that was too dumb to follow said so!
What was wrong about the video?

>>58210285
Not a problem: all cloning must be done in 3's, and vested authorities in the original agent must be agreed upon.

If only two clone exist, or if there is no consensus, the original agent takes precedence in all legal matters.

lets be clear about one thing...
star trek version of teleportation isnt even close to what we know now as quantum entanglement
its more close to asgard beaming technology or goauld rings(aka ancient ring transport) than to an actual instantaneous transport that the stargate showcased...

>>58210130
You are half way through it.
Reliousfags are also half way through it in a different way.

Don't let yourself to fall for the dunning-kruger effect.

You think you know what consciousness is, go ahead, write it down, listen carefully to any intellectual who talks about it. I'd say that if you are capable of deconstructing consciousness fully, you are probably the smartest man that ever lived and you are ready to stop being one, you are ahead of yourself.

>>58210264
>When you're high, you have different thoughts. Same shit when you're sleeping. Do you stop becoming yourself when you're in your sleep? No, you're just in a state of severely warped consciousness.
You're not talking about consciousness as a philosophical phenomenon, just the psychological aspect of it. The awareness of the subject will be altered by the drug, but they're still running the same iteration of their "track of mind" so to speak.

Arguably, memories and cognitive functions are chunks of the whole complex of consciousness. Perhaps there's a reason why severely mentally impaired people are sometimes considered to be "not the same person" by their families. But on the other hand, we have no way of knowing what those people truly experience firsthand.

>My point is: you have a lot of playing room for error before people start getting really uncomfortable with the concept of themselves.
Killing yourself to create your identical twin somewhere else seems to be way past that point.

>>58210279
>nothing disproves it so it's true
I'm a sexy alien spider.

>>58210327
Blergh, I meant to write that *I* was too dumb to follow. Terrible mistake on my part

isn't this what badger said in breaking bad

>>58210302
And what constitutes the "current state" of the human being? How do you know it stops at the atomic level? Isn't it necessary for a clone to be "exactly the same as the original" to also share the respective position of his particles with the original?

>>58209515
>die
Define this, and then we can begin to have a rational discussion.

>>58210285
yes, the two people will diverge to become effectively different people
it's not possible for two people to have precisely the same things happen to them

property ownership and relationships have no simple solution
presumably you both would need to either divide them or one of you would need to abandon them altogether

realistically, "the original" would probably have a higher legal standing, but this is assuming that this is unknown
a copy having degraded legal rights over the original also comes back to teleportation, your teleported self is a copy, but there is no original to contend with, do you legally become the effective original?

>>58209860

And what if the teleporter bugs out and creates two.. Three, maybe ten copies?

Still not dead? Then which of them is you?

>>58210363
>>nothing disproves it so it's true
that's not what i said

>>58210435
All of them are.
This is a bit of a problem, though.

>>58210406
and who governs the stupid notion that you NEED to be cloned? for all we know in reality the device can dematerialize you store you in a buffer and send the data on the location you wanna go without you being cloned or paste or or or

>>58210457
Because atoms and data are fundamentally about as different as a house and a blueprint of it.

>>58210406
>And what constitutes the "current state" of the human being? How do you know it stops at the atomic level? Isn't it necessary for a clone to be "exactly the same as the original" to also share the respective position of his particles with the original?
The point of the thread is not about the practical (or in principle) feasibility of teleportation, merely whether or not you would be dead if you used one. For the purposes of the hypothetical the feasibility of it is irrelevant.

>>58210478
Hypothesizing about technology that is not feasible is mere fanfiction and not really technology related.

>>58210363
>but they're still running the same iteration of their "track of mind" so to speak.
I don't really understand what you meant by this.

but,
>Arguably, memories and cognitive functions are chunks of the whole complex of consciousness.
This is true for sure. The entire concept of a thought makes no sense in isolation - we think in terms of relations to experiences we've already have, by relating what we're currently experiencing to existing patterns we've imprinted upon ourselves.

The concept of a ‘tree’, for example, is not something that's rigidly imprinted in my brain; it's more like I've seen so many trees that I recognize them by association. When I think of the concept ‘tree’, the only things that come to my mind are all the trees I've seen in my life, coming together to form a concept of “tree”-ness that I can frame my thoughts against.

It's the same for every single word. It's the same for every single thing we've seen, heard, felt or experienced in some other way. And if you ask me, it's the same for the very concept of stuff like the flow of time, “self”, causality, etc. - everything we can understand as a concept is just some sort of pattern we've trained ourselves to recognize, including the part where we can recognize “ourselves” simply by having looked into mirrors and learned to associate our previous thoughts with our actions, and our actions with our observation of ourselves.

The brain is nothing but a big pattern recognition machine that is really, really, really good at recognizing patterns - not just first-order patterns but second-order, third-order and so on up to n-th order patterns as well. The more intelligent among us are just those who are more capable of recognizing higher-order patterns.

So consciousness, memories, cognitive input etc. are all just deeply related concepts that sort of form the concept of intelligent thought by way of associating every stimulus/situation/etc. with other, similar stimuli.

That's pretty much exactly how it works. It dissolves you into particles, saves your pattern, then materializes the pattern again at a distant location. The original you is instantly obliterated and it constructs a new you at the target location. You couldn't pay me to step into a Star Trek transporter.

>>58210538
>I don't really understand what you meant by this.
Think of two identical twins, that wear the same clothing, went through the same life experiences, share the same interests. Do they share their respective consciousness?

>>58210406
>And what constitutes the "current state" of the human being?
Assuming our laws of quantum mechanics is sufficient to desdcribe the evolution of a human being (which we can't know for certain, but it seems to be the case so let's assume it is), then a human being would be defined by the collective sum of particles and their associated quantum states. (Being a superposition of classical states)

Of course, in reality, due to (perceived) quantum randomness, even an identical quantum copy would in principle start behaving differently over time. For example, a random mutation due to quantum fluctuations could create a cancer cell and kill off one person while the other survives.

We don't have a satisfactory answer yet to whether or not the universe is deterministic (which the “human being is like a VM” argument would imply) or not, so whether the argumentation in >>58210302 applies is also an open question.

>>58210363
>I'm a sexy alien spider

Pics?

>>58210549
That's why I can't see star trek teleportation as something everyone would use casually.

If anything goes wrong during the de-materialization process, you're effectively dead.

Someone has been watching The Prestige

>>58210453
These sorts of questions are why the transporter and to an extent the replicator are fucking terrifying.
Their lives are worthless, all of them.
They are reduced to mere concepts dispatched across the stars yet somehow the pattern buffer isn't utilised to shit out a clone army, meaning once they die they're absolutely fucked. It's a savestate for a replicator and they're lying to themselves.
Even reviving the dead should just be a party trick if they have a working pattern, or close enough to one to make a few changes.

>>58210564
>Think of two identical twins, that wear the same clothing, went through the same life experiences, share the same interests. Do they share their respective consciousness?
Depends on a number of factors:

1. Is this a purely hypothetical thought experiment in which you could literally _exactly_ duplicate their life experience?

I mean, differences will start to arise in the womb already. I think that due to the nature of chaotic effects, you will very quickly start to diverge identical twins even if you try very hard not to.

2. Does the human brain's decision-making process depend on quantum random effects?

We don't have an answer to this question. It's an open question; basically the question of superdeterminism vs free will, which has been unanswered for a while.

But then again, people are somehow very uncomfortable with the notion of giving up the (imo poorly defined) concept of “free will”, so it's possible that we just aren't finding solutions to this question because we subconsciously don't want to contemplate it.

>>58210607
>If anything goes wrong during the de-materialization process, you're effectively dead.
Or until your family buys a new teleporter, pulls a recent backup of your state off the cloud, and spits out a new you

>>58210648
Lives are inherently worthless. The perfect cloning thought experiment just makes it easier to see.
Not that perfect cloning exists or will ever exist if this video is true: >>58210314
So, I guess it won't ever be as big a problem in real life as it is in our heads.

>>58210648
>Their lives are worthless, all of them.
It's funny how you consider somebody's life worthless if it's a machine spitting out the humans, but not when it's another human doing the human-making.

We have billions of people on this earth, all of them produced on a mass scale by self-replicating devices (human beings). What makes their lives any less worthless than the hypothetical humans who came out of machines instead of other humans?

>>58210302
There are two reasons why what you're saying is complete conjecture. First, we don't have a full understanding of how the human brain even works. Beyond that, we have a hard time defining what consciousness is to begin with, let alone how the human brain uses its structures to create it. So as this (>>58210056) anon said, there are any number of quantum effects that could affect the brain that we don't know about because nobody has has any reason to check.

As for the teleporter as it exists in Star Trek, it's very interesting as it's similar to the notion of quantum immortality. If the many-worlds theory is accurate and quantum immortality is also accurate, then what religion calls the soul is actually consciousness.

>>58210705
>>58210713
Based, interesting perspective.

What if teleporting makes you cum lol

>>58210705
>Not that perfect cloning exists or will ever exist if this video is true: >>58210314
That assumption depends very strongly on whether or not quantum states are an important part of the human cognitive process, to which we don't know the answer.

If the human brain is dictated entirely by classical physics and chemistry, an atomic-level classic copy (which is *not* excluded by the quantum no-cloning principle) would be sufficient for reproducing an essentially identical copy of a human being. The exact same legal / social / philosophical issues would apply.

>Lives are inherently worthless. The perfect cloning thought experiment just makes it easier to see.
Here is where it gets interesting: What does the word ‘worth’ mean, to begin with? There's no such thing as an objective concept of ‘worth’ and ‘worthlessness’ in the universe. ‘worth’ is a social construct, arising from a person's or collective people's desire for something.

A person has no inherent worth, but people are worth something to the people around them. For example, you're worth something to your family. This kind of worth - a social worth - inherently comes from the relationships, connections and meaningful interactions you have with the people around you.

So let us ask ourselves this: Would a cloned human retain those relationships with their “original” families? Would the family just choose to keep one copy as their family member and send the others out into the universe, to go and find their own relationships (thus also giving them “social worth”)? Would the family alternatingly interact with any member of the you-collective, and treat you all the same?

Would you share a house with yourself? Which one of you would show up for work? Probably there's going to be nothing better than randomly selecting one and christening it as the “true successor”, killing or isolating the rest.

>>58210753
Asking the important questions

>>58210753
Hey Jordan
Did you take your pills today?

Please, kill yourself already!
~your family

>>58210736
You quoted me both times :^)

>>58210705
>>58210713
It's more the selflessness of the society than anything.
Redshirt syndrome springs to mind, you have johnny no-name run the academy gauntlet to die to generic mook on day 1 of their first tour, theirs is a particuarly worthless existence.

At least when you're out for yourself your life seems to have a bit more meaning, being part of a swarm in the same manner as they do is a horrible thought, like a demotion to an ant.
Whatever makes them happy I guess.

You get a massive whiff of nihilism from this show that can hit home if you think too much about it.

File: repsg3-964x557.jpg (42KB, 964x557px) Image search: [Google]

42KB, 964x557px

>>58210648
you mean those?

>>58210015
He's talking bullocks.
Basically, it's never really explained how it works because it'd be a contradiction.
But as the Star Trek lore goes, there exists a device called the Heisenberg compensator, which is somehow magically able to scan molecules down to 100% precision and thus copy your entire being, including soul. You exist during the transport process, albeit unconscious.

>>58210882
>theirs is a particuarly worthless existence.
Is it really? What makes them worth any less than somebody who lived to a ripe old age and died of natural causes surrounded by a loving family?

>>58210015
the stargate is a wormhole though

>>58209515
Doesn't matter as long as my mind stays intact, which most certainly seems to be the case in practice. I don't give a fuck if the particles my current meatbag is composed of aren't the same as the particles of my new, teleporter-assembled meatbag.

>>58210996
Probably only wormhole versions of teleportation are possible since the universe is a simulation with limited processing power. If we could create new consciousnesses without limit, we'd eventually crash the system.

>>58210882
>You get a massive whiff of nihilism from this show that can hit home if you think too much about it.
I think you get a whiff of nihilism from anything if you think hard enough about it. It's the natural conclusion to the universe that all of our thought eventually leads up to, even though most people try to suppress it / not think about it.

Religion as a whole is basically a big loophole to try and escape the conclusion that nothing is special, because people seem to have difficulty reconciling that with their own life satisfaction.

Personally I don't see what the big deal is. A computer image is just a bunch of dots on a screen, yet it doesn't stop me from appreciating the patterns. A fractal is just a single formula, yet it doesn't stop me from being awestruck by its depths. And the universe is just a collection of particles evolving according to simple laws, yet it doesn't stop me from marveling at the wonders of human life.

A lot of these things go back to some really old schools of thought, like classic Taoism (not the new-age spiritual religion crap, the original teachings which are basically nihilism - and the rejection of higher-order concepts as anything other than social constructs - in disguise)

>>58210996
the stargate is a device actually being made by naquadah i hypethetical element with anti gravity properties
the gate itself is a pretty simple desing but the creation of the wormhole and how the OS (sort of speak) of the dht was able to copy the exact location of you while you are passing through the wormhole and instantly materialize you on the other side is well the tricky part

>>58210668
>We don't have an answer to this question. It's an open question; basically the question of superdeterminism vs free will, which has been unanswered for a while.
wanna see something that will make you rethink the whole situation?
check the tests Benjamin Libet did they were pretty simple but they had great impact

>>58210263
Current composition of your memories combined with your subconscious, animalistic mind (survival instinct is there, for example). Without any memories we're all almost identical, but while acquiring them we build our own identity. Consciousness is nothing more than us thinking about our identities and actively using our senses to perceive our surroundings. It doesn't actually exist, just like time doesn't exist. It's just something we made up to make sense of things (again, like time or gods) and attributed to ourselves because as a race we're very egoistic and self-centered.

>>58209567
Third post best post.

>>58209515

This is my greatest fear about any kind of consciousness transfer. It's a breathtaking concept otherwise, but seems pretty worthless if I won't be there to actually experience it afterwards. And the most maddening about the whole thing is that it makes zero difference whatsoever to anyone else in the world except you, including the copy.

>>58211127
Does that mean some animals have consciousnesses while others don't?

>>58210794
>That assumption depends very strongly on whether or not quantum states are an important part of the human cognitive process, to which we don't know the answer.
Wasn't there some study saying they did find out brain uses quantum processes somehow?
Well, not like I read the study itself, so it could be an exaggeration, as is usual with these things.
>what does worth mean
Worth arises from humans finding worth in something. It is a social construct, of course.
A ton of people nowadays are effectively worthless to society, without any need for cloning, if we count worth as "society sees me as useful". And also, worth in the eyes of society can always be substituted by something else. Cloning might make a person more worthless from that perspective, but not only cloning. Well, cloning would be a pretty big drop in "worth", though.
We could define worth in the terms of circle of friends and acquaintances finding worth in someone. In this case, too, cloning would probably diminish the individual's worth, but in time it would be partially restored for all clones either by changing their circle of friends and acquaintances, or the two clones starting to become too different to count them as the same individual.
Or we could define worth in how the individual sees himself, closer to "self-esteem" in that interpretation. In which case it's all fully up to the individual whether he's worthy, and the clones only affect his worth if he thinks they affect his worth.
In any case, from every perspective, there are a ton of completely worthless (by definition established) and yet unique people in the world, which I think is a lot crueler in a way, but yet it's just the way universe works. You don't have inherent worth by being unique, it might just amplify the worth you gained. Cloning just takes away being unique, thus making the inherent worthlessness of a life more easily noticeable.

>>58210954
Wait, so, in Star Trek they somehow loopholed the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?
Huh.

>>58211249
yup. its one of many magic wands.

>>58211127
Can you really say that time doesn't exist, though?
You could as well say height doesn't exist either.

>>58210713
Maybe his choice of wording is off, "cheaper" or "more expendable" would be a better fit. A working teleporter as described in this thread would allow you to create savestates of people at the peak of their uniqueness like freezing freshly harvested produce for later use, except that you can mass produce people from that savestate, whereas you can only unfreeze something once.

>>58211170
Animals become self-aware after a certain level of complexity.

For example, one of the simplest things you can do is to put a dot on an animal's forehead. Dumber animals will try and remove the dot from the surface of the mirror, and smarter animals will recognize themselves and try and remove the dot from their own forehead. This implies a certain level of self-awareness that arises naturally after some level of animal complexity.

Also, some animals are pretty darn smart. Crows for example are notoriously self-conscious, capable of solving complex problems involving mirrors and their own reflections, such as recognizing even advanced solutions to a problem and understanding the concept of it being mirrored with respect to reality, and so on.

Some types of parrots are incredibly intelligent as well, even understanding concepts such as addition and multiplication, color, the basics of human speech, relationships, love/affection, and so on, to the point where you can have a basic conversation with them.

One absolutely wonderful example that comes to mind was a research parrot that knew it was going to die soon and basically explained this to the researchers, alongside repeating stuff like “I love you” and “goodbye” over and over again. (Of course, it died not long after)

The more you look at the animal kingdom the more you realize that there's absolutely nothing “special” about humans, we're just sufficiently intelligent animals, to the point where we've reached tool supercriticality. It wouldn't surprise me if other species did the same, given another 50,000 years or so one way or another. (We're just the culmination of millions of years of evolution, so that's a tiny drop in the ocean of time in comparison)

>>58211180
>ton of people nowadays are effectively worthless to society, without any need for cloning, if we count worth as "society sees me as useful".
What I don't like about statements like these is that they abstract too far away from ‘society’ as if it's some single uniform blob. Rather it's more like every person plugs into some very tiny part of society, but each integration is generally very deep. While a single person might not have much value if you look at humanity as a whole, kill any one person and you're bound to have a very profound effect on the close circle of friends and family they had around them.

>>58211328
I guess we could imagine what would have happened if you could simply keep resurrecting, say, Steve Jobs from a save state you made from before his cancer became malignant. How would this affect companies, society and culture?

Or heck, you could do something more useful and resurrect Albert Einstein, teach him modern quantum mechanics, and ask him to find the solution to quantum gravity.

>>58209515
>What if you die when teleporting and it only creates a perfect clone?

Way Station, by Clifford D. Simak

http://www.lib.ru/SIMAK/waystat.txt

File: 1467898644991.jpg (73KB, 767x1100px) Image search: [Google]

73KB, 767x1100px

YES, EVERYONE HAS SEEN CGP GREYS VIDEO ON THIS.

YES, WE DIE EVERY NIGHT, SHIP OF THESEUS, SUPER DEEP ETC

>>58211113
>check the tests Benjamin Libet did they were pretty simple but they had great impact
I'm not really convinced.

1. I don't think his testing methodology hade much worth. How can I even answer a question like “at what time on this timer did you consciously decide to do something”? I mean even experimentally, I'd need to do something like first decide to do something, and then look at the timer to look at the time. That lag in itself implies some form of delay already. Measuring when I decided to do something is not something I would consider myself capable of self-reporting, and therefore I don't put any amount of worth in other peoples' equally flawed assessments of this

2. The argument that “decisions are subconscious therefore free will is fake” makes no sense to me, because I consider my subconscious an extension of my conscious. Both are formed by the same memories and experiences, they're both just as me. Decisions are just based on feelings, and so is your subconscious. Both are things that arise in your brain based on your personality (which is the collective sum of experiences you can relate stimuli to), so why should they be any less part of yourself, or “more or less determined?

>>58211381
That's why they chose "friends and family" and "society" as different "worth" providers.
"Society" here means more like legal and political structures and worth to a country, and such, that is, strictly "worth" as part of a bigger whole, of a civilisation.
Or are you saying that worth to friends and family and worth to society are one and the same in the end? In a way it is, but I still think your worth to your friends as individuals and your worth to society as part of a group of individuals that itself provides services to a civilisation are too far apart to say they're the same. The second one cares about your impact on the group which makes it impact civilisation itself, and the first one talks about feeling of every individual in a group. I addressed both.
You can't talk about "worth to a society" without making society into a uniform blob, I think. It's what people call abstraction. Sometimes you have to drop some information if you want to talk from a certain perspective or about certain traits of a bigger whole, because it just complicates everything, and you can't think about stuff like that. Humans are not uniform blobs either, yet we drop the cells and atoms all the time, since it's easier to think of them as uniform blobs in some way. As systems.

>>58211568
>Or are you saying that worth to friends and family and worth to society are one and the same in the end?
I'm saying that the concept of “worth to society” is not as easily or light-heartedly defined as you are by just throwing it out there in questions like these.

Worth is a subjective concept, so how do you abstract from a collection of subjective experiences to an overall experience for the collective?

>>58211301
It's already agreed that time doesn't exist. Only thing that does is matter. And time is only our observation of matter changing.

>>58211343
Eh, you need a ton of prerequisites to become something as intelligent as humans. Just intelligence alone, ironically, doesn't cut it. The intelligence should also be useful in a variety of ways and so start developing.
Creating and using tools is one way, and it requires opposable thumbs, developed hands, developed communication, etc. We don't know of any others, I think, though they might theoretically exist. But I don't think we thought of any.
I think I heard of someone that raccoons technically have the potential for the same evolutionary path (developed hands, no strong specialisation in something else, etc).

>>58211653
I think it's a very narrow-minded idea to believe that the concept of tools requires opposable thumbs. That line of thinking seems to be essentially saying “humans are intelligent animal, ergo every intelligent animal needs to be like humans”

>>58211600
By leaving room for error, and then defining the concept.
And seeing if it is useful somehow and if it reflects reality in a useful way, giving out some predictions that would be hard to make without the definition, and how faulty these predictions are.
I think there is something that could be defined as "worth to society" and the definition is not useless. Then again, I'm not a sociologist. It's all philosophical.

>>58211619
Sauce?
Does space not exist then too? How does theory of relativity fit into this?
Agreed by whom? Physicists or philosophers or people on the internet?

File: whats in the box.png (476KB, 1024x435px)

476KB, 1024x435px

>>58209515

>>58211689
Not sure if it really requires opposable thumbs, just heard it somewhere.
In any case, it is true that creating and using tools does have some requisites which we happened to have.

>>58211653
Crows are able to develop and use specialized tools for obtaining food, and they lack opposable thumbs. They also have developed communication and can describe specific humans to other crows in a way that suggests they have a verbal history.

>>58211762
OK, then I fucked up.
Not even sure where I heard about opposable thumbs.
Then again, you could ask how far could crows take tool-making without opposable thumbs.

>>58211653
Several other animals use tools, though humans have a lack of useful body parts and that's the only reason we started developing tools.
Also, "intelligence" is a human concept. You can't "test" intelligence of other living beings like you would on a human. Something like this guy said >>58211689. Humans like thinking we're the only creatures that matter and we compare other beings to ourselves constantly even though it's pointless to compare apples to oranges.

>>58211789
to the point they can create hooks and similar tools to retrieve food from places their body won't fit.

They've also been observed to drop nuts and other hard foods into intersections, wait for them to get run over, wait for the lights to go red, then retrieve the cracked nuts.

Humans are hella smart but we didn't get here on smarts alone. We are highly adaptable and very generalized and it's a big part of why we have stayed on top so far.

>>58209515
that's kinda fucked up but to be honest we understand nothing of cognizance

as far as we know, in such a scenario the ego could simply die forever on the spot (and thus be replaced), or resume upon re-materialization of the host

both possibilities are equally likely as far as I know

>>58211804
There is something that the term "intelligence" defines, and this is something we have that made us incredibly successful in our habitats and really widespread.
Intelligence is a complex and ill-defined concept, though, and it is possible you could have some other kind of "intelligence", that is, developed brain, that would work completely differently and yet grant you similar boons.
Shame we haven't seen it yet.
There is a reason why humans are anthropocentric. Several, in fact. First, it's really hard not to be anthropocentric when we're all humans and our brains are wired to think of freaking sun as humanoid. Second, humans are massively influential, both on other humans and nowadays on other species too.
>>58211867
Smarts is probably the biggest part of it, though. I'm not saying it's the only part.
In fact, I think that's what I was saying, in a way, when I said intelligence alone doesn't cut it, though I formulated it a bit differently.

>>58211739
It's what theory of relativity is based on.
You can't go backwards or forwards in time because there is no "time". You can only accelerate particles of a system enough for them to not function as they would "normally", slowing down the processes within the system. This isn't traveling through time, it's putting a system in a hibernation and that's exactly what time dilation is.
>space doesn't exist
Space exists, but separating time from it (what 99% people do) is stupid. "time" is merely what an observer would call the perceived rate of space changing around him/her. It's only a help term used to simplify things, but it doesn't not actually exist.
>sauce?
Physics.

>>58211127
Memories aren't magic aether though, they're just sets of neurons that activate in the same sequence as they did with the initial stimulus. It's why people tend to remember situations differently because some information doesn't get a perfect "save" for a lack of a better word.

So are we not going to be getting those pictures of sexy space spiders?

The funniest shit is, why don't they ever use the transporter offensively? It's a fucking beam that can dissolve people. It can target large numbers of people at once. As soon as the shields go down, they could simply atomize everyone, just skip the materialization part. Just delete the pattern data and have a nice day.

>>58211947
>There is a reason why humans are anthropocentric. Several, in fact. First, it's really hard not to be anthropocentric when we're all humans and our brains are wired to think of freaking sun as humanoid. Second, humans are massively influential, both on other humans and nowadays on other species too.
Yes, it's definitely natural to relate everything to human experiences. After all, we're literally incapable of processing any information except by relating it to that which we already know.

But that's why it's so important to realize just how incredibly warped our view of the universe is by our subjective experience. Even something as simple as mathematics is dominated by our perspective of things.

But you can take the same mathematical system and project it into a different world view to get something that, at first, looks completely alien. A quick example could be arrow diagrams vs string diagrams in category theory. Same concept, same laws, very different representation, and therefore very different way of thinking about them.

I believe that everything, including such basic things as addition and multiplication, is shaped by our perspective of things, and other intelligent beings in the universe might have a very different - compatible, but different - concept of things like numbers.

>>58212100
All scifi shows have to balance what makes sense, what's realistic, and what makes for an entertaining show.

What many people fail to realize when analyzing sci-fi shows is the important of the third part. If it was not a successful show, you wouldn't be analyzing it. So a lot of trade-offs are made in order to make the story's narrative more interesting, for example.