• ToastGhost [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    what if the teleporter operator just says sike and doesnt rebuild u on the other side? or he rebuilds you twice for shits and giggles? no fucking thanks

    • GalaxyBrain [they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Then it was built wrong. It's a thought experiment not a practical concept for a real invention.

      • ToastGhost [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        the concept itself is based upon being "built wrong" the type of teleporter were talking about has these problems innate to it, that the body created at the destination is separate from the body at the start, their fates are separate, and one does not necessarily need to die for the other to be alive.

        • GalaxyBrain [they/them]
          ·
          3 years ago

          Wait, when did that become a rule? I'm going by Star Trek rules where during transportation you atomic pattern is stored in a computer buffer before reconstruction.

          • ToastGhost [he/him]
            ·
            3 years ago

            at "atomic pattern" is a computer file, named funnily because no one was familiar with computers when the show aired. there is nothing magical about a computer that makes it special or really you. This "atomic pattern" with the right encoding scheme, could be written in plain text by monastery scribes, shipped across the continent by horseback, and fed back to another teleporter machine. The caravan could be stalled in the wilderness and never make it to its destination, it could be tamered with by some drunk guy who thought it funny to add "and absolutely swimming in leprosy", so much can go wrong in the middle.

            Unless star trek intends to ignore the laws of physics, the information has to travel by some medium, and while the medium of electromagnetism holds some fantastical properties in the minds of 1960s TV viewers, it is not fundamentally different than my medieval metaphor, perhaps even shakier, as now the information is at the mercy of random space phenomenon as well as just anyone with a radio dish pointed the right way, or anyone with a a strong transmitter shouting "print thousands of eternally tormented beings 1011100010101101010101010101110"

            • GalaxyBrain [they/them]
              ·
              3 years ago

              Once again it's a thought experiment not am engineering project. The thought experiment assumes it works perfectly. Shrodinger's Cat isn't actually about cats either.

              • ToastGhost [he/him]
                ·
                3 years ago

                But schrodingers cat describes a real phenomenon, just one which the cat is an analogy for, so that laypeople can understand a discovery, the cat is pop science. I dont see any real phenomenon which justifies this strange and unsettling metaphor that involves boiling people for a magic trick.

                • GalaxyBrain [they/them]
                  ·
                  3 years ago

                  Okay, Schrodinger's cat is a scientific thought experiment, this is a philosophical one. About how comciou does or doesn't relate to the physical being. It's not about the teleporter it's just there to make you think about stuff.

    • Segorinder [any]
      ·
      3 years ago

      The operator could convert your pattern into a form that couldn't be converted back to an organic mass. They could also convert your pattern into a form that has a phaser hole through its heart when you walk in the transporter room. You probably shouldn't piss off the transporter operator, but that doesn't change the philosophical implications.

      Also, if you try to bring the sci-fi into real world physics at all, the 'make more copies' option turns out not to be possible.

        • ToastGhost [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          but the bus doesnt disassemble you with knives, slide your sliced salami body through its mail slit, and rebuild you in your seat

          • GalaxyBrain [they/them]
            ·
            3 years ago

            If it did so and rebuilt me instantly at my destination with no pain then I'm fine with it.

      • ToastGhost [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        why wouldnt making more copies be possible? you scan the original, then radio the data across to the other side, the teleporter would have to have enough material to function more than once, why couldnt it run the same data twice? why couldnt it store that data and make copies arbitrarily at a later time? even interception of the original data could be possible, and some sideshow bob type intercepts the data to build his very own bart simpson to torture and kill at his leisure.

        • Segorinder [any]
          ·
          3 years ago

          If you start from driver's license details, height, eye color, hair color and such, you can print out an endless number of humans who match all of those details, but everyone would be able to tell that they were different people. If you add in centuries of sci-fi tech, you can get extremely detailed descriptions of the person, down to "this particular cell is at these exact coordinates". But, if you want to have what comes out the other side perfectly match what went in, you have to capture the exact state of all the particles that make up the person, and how they are interacting with each other. At this level, you have to deal how information actually exists in the universe, rather than how humans describe their observations, like with eye color. This is where observing the state of something, i.e. trying to make it fit into a human description, alters it.

          You can't make a copy because when the process is done correctly, it necessarily involves a transmission channel that no one knows the contents of. You can't make a second copy, because the contents of that unknown channel are gone. It could be intercepted, but if it was, nothing intelligible would come out at the intended destination.

          • ToastGhost [he/him]
            ·
            3 years ago

            so then it is impossible to truly copy someone, because that information must be sent between places in some form, which necessitates transforming it into some human invented abstraction of information. You have already read it, translated it through different forms, and tainted it with some sort of observation before it even arrives at its destination.

            • Segorinder [any]
              ·
              3 years ago

              No, this is something that we are currently capable of doing, and do semi-regularly. For example, say we have an atom A in some unknown state. We can have a photon interact with it, then fly through space to some other atom B. Because we didn't know the state of A, we can't predict the state of the photon, but with some preparation, we can set it up so that when the photon interacts with B, it will put it into the same state as A originally was, without anyone observing it. Also, once you've set the state of B, both the state of A and the photon have been scrambled by their interactions, so there's no way to spit out a second copy of B.

              • ToastGhost [he/him]
                ·
                3 years ago

                yes but now you know B and can reuse that as much as you want, and if you cant, you still have the same problem you did with A and nothing has been solved.

                • Segorinder [any]
                  ·
                  3 years ago

                  You don't know B, all you know is that it's the same state that A was before you started. The goal wasn't to learn what B is, but we now have a particle in a new location (potentially a space ship vs. the ground) that behaves exactly like the original would have in any test you do on it. If you can do this to all the particles in a person's body with no errors, you've teleported that person, and there's no possibility of making a second copy, or forgetting to throw the original in the dumpster.