This column will change your life: consistency bias | Life and style | The Guardian
The Star Trek transporter presumably works by scanning a body down to the level of the subatomic, destroying the body at one location, and recreating it elsewhere. One metaphysical question that arises is whether the person stepping out of the transporter is really the same person, or a copy. When I step into the transporter do I just die, and does another body that "thinks it's me" emerge on the other end?
And does that question actually have any meaning? Science fiction is full of stories where a character's personality gets fed into a computer, and they are supposed to achieve some kind of immortality that way. But isn't it "really" just a computer that acts as if it's the person? Didn't the "real" person actually die? Absent any actual contact with the soul of the departed (or the person who stepped into the transporter) how could we tell?
Since I am more than skeptical of the existence of souls in the first place, I see this as a meaningless question. The linked article points to why.
When I remember my childhood, I place myself in those memories.
"Well of course you do. You were there" you say.
But was "I" really there? The "me" that I place in those scenes is not a 57 year old grouchy old home brewer with a decent understanding of a few things, and a superficial understanding of a lot of things. He isn't a person who has been through the joys of being a grandfather; the pain and loss of seeing loved ones slip into entropy; the irritation of loss of visual acuity, muscle strength, effortless recall of words, and fair endurance.
In fact, the "me" that wakes up in the morning isn't really the "me" that went to bed last night. But I have this illusion of consistency, because when I place myself in my own memories of the past (as the saying goes) I'm not much, but I'm all I've got to work with.
When we are nostalgic for the "good old days" we imagine that, because we lived a sheltered, protected, simple life, the world was that way. We see the world as getting more dangerous when it is in fact much, much safer, because in our memories we were safe. Or at least we survived. Witness all those "I grew up without bicycle helmets and I survived" libertarian screeds on Facebook. We hear about all the bad things today, but don't realize that much, much more of the bad stuff happened in the past, we just didn't hear about it. Leave it to Beaver only showed the town on one side of the tracks.
You don't need to believe in any odd view of the soul to be horrified at the prospect of being ripped apart, atom by atom, and then some other thing being reassembled afterwards to take your place.
ReplyDeleteIf you doubt that, consider this scenario. Worf offers to copy all your data into the transporter. Then he'll shoot you with a phaser. Tomorrow, after lunch, he'll reassemble your atoms.
Sound good? Of course not.
Part of our sense of self is our sense of the continuity of our consciousness. You can say this is an illusion if you like, but if you are offered an absolute, definite stop to your own consciousness (e.g., bring shot with a phaser), the prospect that some other being will think it's you is cold comfort.
Maybe, but the question is, is it some "other being" or not?
ReplyDeleteSuppose that someone gets into the transporter, and when they come out on the other side they are told that there was some kind of glitch; their data was stored, but that it was now 100 years later. Of course they would be upset that everyone they knew was now dead, but they wouldn't think they were a different person.
And I think there were Star Trek episodes where they went back to the last available transporter record, at least to get rid of some disease or defect they couldn't fix otherwise.. One wonders why they don't do that for someone who has died.
I think I did read that the scriptwriters had to be careful not to use the transporter as a magic solution to everything. I guess, as a plot device at least, that's why it seems to break down so much.
Yes, but in the Star Trek universe people have accepted that "they" will come out on the other side. Nobody ever explains how they come to that belief, or why it's reasonable. It's just assumed because they need to have a transporter. :-)
ReplyDeleteWhether what comes out is "another being" is not necessarily the same question as whether what comes out is "me." I don't care if the being that comes out on the other side is considered "the same being" in some philosophical sense. What I care about is whether I have continuity with it.
But that's the rub: there's no way to tell.
ReplyDelete