Starfleet Jedi

• • • Buritot wrote:I was wondering what happens to a Force-User if he'd get transported via Star Trek transporters. I've read a previous thread (Effects of a transporter on a Jedi), but came to no satisfying conclusion. Darth Wongs arguments of the transporters working as a person annihilation clone assembly machine don't strike me as correct. I know of the Riker-clone quandry, and can't explain it, but neither would I expect the Federation to willingly ... substitute persons by perfect clones only for convenience sakes. Quite the opposite, actually, the various shows showed different phases in the development of the technology and human teleportation had to wait until it was deemed safe.
      
      So... why the widespread belief of transporters killing transportees?

      Xess wrote:Personally I say they don't kill. Since the person that goes in is the same as the person who goes out no one has died. As long as the information (memories and the like) is identical then the matter it is made out of is unimportant. The Stargate in SG1 works the same way, if Trek transporters kill then so does it.

      Stark wrote:OK, I'm going to scan your body and tell you I made a functionally identical copy that will continue from that point as you would have done. Then I'm going to point a gun at your face.
      
      Turns out the copy is a different individual and you're still going to get shot in the face and die. Let's see how 'no information is lost' reassures you when you are about to end your existence. The information isn't lost; someone else has it. Feel better? BANG you're dead.

      Xess wrote:Would I feel better? No, I would not. That does not mean however that any functionally identical copy of me is not functionally me. He would go on with his life as though nothing ever happened, and since he is functionally me that means I'm going on with my life. I find the idea disturbing but I can't honestly say that there's anything special about the matter I'm presently made of.
      
      When I was put under general anesthetic to get my wisdom teeth removed I woke up in a different room than I started in with no knowledge of what happened in between. The dentist could have hacked me apart with a chainsaw, built an identical copy and put that copy in the recovery room and when it woke up it would think all it had done was a wisdom tooth removal never knowing it was a copy. Or he could have copied me the original, removed my wisdom teeth and put me in the recovery room while having killed the copy. From the perspective of the guy sitting in the recovery room either one is exactly as likely as the other since they're both running on pre-sedation information. What that tells me is that the copy is just as good as the original, in the short term at any rate. Should both survive and diverge with different experiences they become different people and should be treated as such.
      
      This is of course my opinion on the matter. I am not an expert in this stuff, or even mildly educated in it for that matter.
      
      EDIT: When I said just as good I meant functionally just as good, the idea still makes me feel uncomfortable.

      Stark wrote:It's amazing that you can understand there's a personal difference but pretend to not care. Of course it's a functionally identical copy; nobody has ever disputed that. Turns out the original is all that affects YOU.
      
      It'd be pretty funny to realise you were on a planet and the only way off was transport; you know you're a temporary individual created to traipse around and shoot Romulans, so that your experiences can be rebuilt somewhere else for the benefit of another you that doesn't exist yet.
      
      Your example is asinine; of COURSE the copy continues unfazed. The point is that if the dentist hacked your body up, you wouldn't have woken up. The copy he built would have woken up and continued as if nothing untoward had happened. In the transporter example this is not the case; everyone KNOWS it's regularly happening.

      Rama wrote:Of course you die.
      
      Whilst the matter that composes your body, your memories, thoughts and every experience prior to the transportation process are perfectly recreated and at one point, it was a perfect copy of you; the instant it came into existence (and yours ceased), it started developing unique memories and experiences, separate from yours (which you can no longer perceive). After the process, it’s in the transporter room with the rest of the crew, experiencing life in a completely different way, interpreting the surroundings in a way that’s specific to it and that of every other transporter clone prior to it and following. After even a few seconds of being alive, it’s no longer your exact copy, it has new memories and experiences and opinions and everything else that informs someone’s unique personality. And whilst these traits are not drastically different on a noticeable level, and the clone will continue along a fairly linear path in a manner similar as how you would have experienced the world, they are far more than you've experienced at this point. It looks exactly like you, yes, and shares all of your previous memories, but it is not you, not anymore. Just another person.
      
      All the available information is in place, and the clone is most likely following your "intended" pathway to a T, but the discontinuity of an active consciousness for eternity still represents death to the individual much in the same way that permanent brain death results in the termination of an organisms existence.

      Azron_Stoma wrote:Personally I don't feel it's so much a matter of it being like the Prestige, since vulcans believe in eternal souls and routinely use transporter technology, I feel the soul does in fact go with you, as it is also energy.
      
      Call it a form of using the original writer's intent to fill in the blanks of what is inadequately explained, but it seems to me that the "neural data" or whatever is just a cold line word (like non-corporeal residual energy = ghost) for the soul, and that the other person isn't just a copy with all the memories etc, but does, in fact, carry the same consciousness.
      
      in general though, transporters were never explained very well, the more detail they go into on them, the more questions are raised.

      Simon_Jester wrote:

      Stark wrote:Turns out the copy is a different individual and you're still going to get shot in the face and die. Let's see how 'no information is lost' reassures you when you are about to end your existence. The information isn't lost; someone else has it. Feel better? BANG you're dead.

      See, that's the trouble. You're assuming the conclusion to a philosophical argument. Disintegrate me and I'm dead, but reintegrate something indistinguishable from me five seconds later and am I still dead?
      
      In real life, death is completely irreversible, and we've had to come up with increasingly rigorous definitions of "death" to keep from having to say that CPR or defibrillators can raise the dead. But if I have the ability to make a copy of you, disintegrate you, then reintegrate something no one can tell from you, including you, somewhere else five seconds later? At that point, claiming that you're capital-D Dead because of the five seconds during which no "you" existed is a bit extreme, I'd say.
      

      Rama wrote:Whilst the matter that composes your body, your memories, thoughts and every experience prior to the transportation process are perfectly recreated and at one point, it was a perfect copy of you; the instant it came into existence (and yours ceased), it started developing unique memories and experiences, separate from yours (which you can no longer perceive). After the process, it’s in the transporter room with the rest of the crew, experiencing life in a completely different way, interpreting the surroundings in a way that’s specific to it and that of every other transporter clone prior to it and following. After even a few seconds of being alive, it’s no longer your exact copy, it has new memories and experiences and opinions and everything else that informs someone’s unique personality.

      By the same argument, though, future-you is not you. At this instant in time that you read this, Rama has had a particular set of experiences. Tomorrow, Rama will have had a different set of experiences that will have slightly changed Rama's personality and attitudes. For that matter, Rama may even fall unconscious at some point in between, suffering a discontinuity in his awareness of the universe. Hell, Rama could fall unconscious and wake up somewhere with no idea how he got there!
      
      And yet in real life, there is no doubt that you are still you, not a new and different person, no matter what you experience. Rama does not need to be an identical clone of past-Rama in order to be Rama.
      

      All the available information is in place, and the clone is most likely following your "intended" pathway to a T, but the discontinuity of an active consciousness for eternity still represents death to the individual much in the same way that permanent brain death results in the termination of an organisms existence.

      But in that case, how do we know that you're the same person every day when you get up in the morning? How do we rule out the idea that there are actually a string of 6000+ Ramas, each of which only lived roughly sixteen hours before falling asleep, dying, and being replaced?
      

      Azron_Stoma wrote:Personally I don't feel it's so much a matter of it being like the Prestige, since vulcans believe in eternal souls and routinely use transporter technology, I feel the soul does in fact go with you, as it is also energy.

      Alternatively, the soul is somehow attached to your physical body, such that if your physical body is reintegrated elsewhere, your soul normally goes to it.

Mr. Oragahn wrote: What is clear that biological life stops during transport, but by Federation scientific and philosophical standards, you're not killed, but turned into an energetic lifeform, very quickly and temporarily, an energetic lifeform that the transporter is coded to recognize.

• • • • • • Wikipedia about the problems of a definition of death wrote:For those who define death as a state following the state of life, one of the challenges in defining death is in distinguishing it from life. Death would seem to refer to either the moment at which life ends, or when the state that follows life begins. However, determining when death has occurred requires drawing precise conceptual boundaries between life and death. This is problematic because there is little consensus over how to define life. Some have suggested defining life in terms of consciousness. When consciousness ceases, a living organism can be said to have died. One of the notable flaws in this approach is that there are many organisms which are alive but probably not conscious (for example, single-celled organisms). Another problem with this approach is in defining consciousness, which has many different definitions given by modern scientists, psychologists and philosophers. This general problem of defining death applies to the particular challenge of defining death in the context of medicine.
            
            Other definitions for death focus on the character of cessation of something. In this context "death" describes merely the state where something has ceased, e.g., life. Thus, the definition of "life" simultaneously defines death.
            
            Historically, attempts to define the exact moment of a human's death have been problematic. Death was once defined as the cessation of heartbeat (cardiac arrest) and of breathing, but the development of CPR and prompt defibrillation have rendered that definition inadequate because breathing and heartbeat can sometimes be restarted. Events which were causally linked to death in the past no longer kill in all circumstances; without a functioning heart or lungs, life can sometimes be sustained with a combination of life support devices, organ transplants and artificial pacemakers.
            
            Today, where a definition of the moment of death is required, doctors and coroners usually turn to "brain death" or "biological death" to define a person as being clinically dead; people are considered dead when the electrical activity in their brain ceases. It is presumed that an end of electrical activity indicates the end of consciousness. However, suspension of consciousness must be permanent, and not transient, as occurs during certain sleep stages, and especially a coma. In the case of sleep, EEGs can easily tell the difference.
            
            However, the category of "brain death" is seen by some scholars to be problematic. For instance, Dr Franklin Miller, senior faculty member at the Department of Bioethics, National Institutes of Health, notes "By the late 1990s, however, the equation of brain death with death of the human being was increasingly challenged by scholars, based on evidence regarding the array of biological functioning displayed by patients correctly diagnosed as having this condition who were maintained on mechanical ventilation for substantial periods of time. These patients maintained the ability to sustain circulation and respiration, control temperature, excrete wastes, heal wounds, fight infections and, most dramatically, to gestate fetuses (in the case of pregnant "brain-dead" women)."
            
            Those people maintaining that only the neo-cortex of the brain is necessary for consciousness sometimes argue that only electrical activity there should be considered when defining death. Eventually it is possible that the criterion for death will be the permanent and irreversible loss of cognitive function, as evidenced by the death of the cerebral cortex. All hope of recovering human thought and personality is then gone given current and foreseeable medical technology. However, at present, in most places the more conservative definition of death – irreversible cessation of electrical activity in the whole brain, as opposed to just in the neo-cortex – has been adopted (for example the Uniform Determination Of Death Act in the United States). In 2005, the Terri Schiavo case brought the question of brain death and artificial sustenance to the front of American politics.
            
            Even by whole-brain criteria, the determination of brain death can be complicated. EEGs can detect spurious electrical impulses, while certain drugs, hypoglycemia, hypoxia, or hypothermia can suppress or even stop brain activity on a temporary basis. Because of this, hospitals have protocols for determining brain death involving EEGs at widely separated intervals under defined conditions.

• • • • • • 
            • • That's what they are calling a survivor. A few cell still alive is more than needed.