Real life star trek in the making

[disabled]

The ehtical part of the way thier transporter works is that you must be killed to be transported. IE, your data must be destroyed so the scanners can read it. Then you are rebuilt on the other side.

[AeoN2]

And the philosophical question would be "Will I keep my own consciousness after being transported?"

Since every atom gets identically duplicated, I would expect the person having been transported to say "Sure, I feel exactly the same"

But the question would still be, "Would I still be me? or would I die to let someone identical to me with my experiences live? is there a soul?"

And ofcourse the next and even more interesting possiblity would be the hacked transporter machines that didn't destroy the original, instead duplicating a person (I can see many evil uses of this possibility)

EDIT: or did the original have to be destroyed to transport?

--
AeoN2
--
Inside every small problem is a large problem struggling to get out.

[ June 20, 2002, 12:44: Message edited by: AeoN2 ]

[dogscoff]

And ofcourse the next and even more interesting possiblity would be the hacked transporter machines that didn't destroy the original, instead duplicating a person (I can see many evil uses of this possibility)

Read "Schlock mercenary" for an exploration of this exact(ish) situation. S_J links to it, or you can go to my site and find the bookmarks/ Online comics page. It's a great read.

[Jmenschenfresser]

Sounds to me like this is another case of Chicken Little.

Perhaps the first philosophical book I ever read.

[disabled]

I wonder....

Suppose you were to pull a prank and make it so the transporter didn't transport clothing....

[geoschmo]

Of course everyone has a soul. But to make a transporter work you simply have to configure it to also duplicate the persons soul exactly. With numerous and overlaping data parity checks it should be a simple matter really. I suppose maybe God could tell the difference, but we can always hack into His mainframe and reset the database that He uses to keep track of all that stuff. Being omiscient He may suspect something unusual is going on, but He won't be able to prove it.

EDIT: Of course as an alternative we could use the transporter for the body and send the soul modulated on a high power carrier wave. Then you have no ethical issues to deal with because you aren't duplicating the soul. And you would not have any problems with non-destoyed duplicate bodies laying around, because it would be quite obviouse to everyone they are just souless shells. But that would limit the range of the transporter somewhat.

Geoschmo

[ June 20, 2002, 15:52: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

[AeoN2]

Whatever... In any case I don't think I will ever travel with a means of transport that requires my body being sent to /dev/null