also, take your foot off of his shoulder
this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
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Miles Obryan looking down at the console: Ok good, teleportation complete, noooow to destroy the original.
Sometimes when nobody's around, he'll let them out and do it the old fashioned way. "What's the difference?" he asks himself.
...as he removes the surgical gloves.
DS9 meets Dexter - you know it's gonna happen someday.
ETA: maybe a show following Kira, Garak, and Dukat during the war would be interesting.
That would kind of explain what those teleport engineers are doing all day in the transporter room. According to stardates, they kind of transport like 3 people every month or so, but always be chilling at the ready in the transporter room.
Now if they always have to dispose of the bodies in the meantime, maybe they have holographic therapy in between all the time.
This is possibly the scariest take on teleportation I can imagine. You get in the chamber, the button is pressed, the operator nods and confirms it's complete.
Only then do you realise that a perfect replica of you, down to the molecule, has just been created somewhere else. You realise that you teleported to work the same morning, and shiver at the thought as the operator opens the nitrogen valves to the chamber to suffocate you. Your perfect replica is sitting down to dinner with the kids you remember raising but only now realise you never actually met. Your last thought before slipping into darkness is that no one can be warned, since your memories were copied the instant before the teleportation took place.
"As we pursue technological advancement we should be careful not to abandon our humanity in the process."
A surprisingly relevant line for modern day.
glares at gen AI "art"
Or you still have a soul that now has to haul ass to get to wherever you just teleported to.
People assume teleportation sickness is from reconstruction of your molecular biology, but scientists agree it's because your soul just had to haul ass across light-years to catch up to you.
It wouldn't be an issue if you didn't keep skipping soul leg day!
Of course teleporters make a copy of the original.
Unless there's a malfunction in the dilithium encabulator matrix, then it would make you some sort of vacant, soulless husk that traps people in pattern buffers for fun in order to try and feel something after multiple lifetimes of torture and pain....
That never happens though.
What, never?
Okaaay, maybe like once or twice per hundred thousand teleports, but that's like no big deal.
So what would happen if the original wasn’t “destructively” scanned and was just scanned. 2 would exist. Ergo, you’re dying each time.
I’ve thought about this for over 25 years at this point. Ever since the first journeyman project game and moment where you teleport to work and it’s like you die, then come back to life, because that’s the only way it could ever work. Unless there’s some weird physics shit I don’t understand where you like slip through a wormhole or something. I don’t know I suck at that kind of physics
The body is dying but the conscousness continues, that's where the self is anyway. Done right it would be like falling asleep on the train and waking up somewhere else but legally fraught.
Duh, that’s the inherent philosophical construct. The body dies but a consciousness continues. What “is” consciousness. Is it a “soul” that can be extracted from a corporeal form and injected into a (in this example) carbon copy? If that is the case how does one “verify” the “extraction” occurred and the process of creating a carbon copy did not create a carbon copy “soul”? To the outside observer the scenario you describe would happen but you would die on the train and you 2.0 would pick up where you left off.
Perhaps (and far far more likely) consciousness is a byproduct of extremely high quality sensory processing with the capacity for storing both long and short term memories and attending to stimuli. But even again if we created a perfect replica of this that is all it would be, a replica. It would think it’s you, but it’s not. The original you, the you it’s copied from, is dead.
To defeat this means to upend several sciences as far as I know. Biology, neuroscience, physics. A clone will always be morally distinct, and teleportation would always ultimately result in creating a clone. What the legal ramifications of this would be i dont know. Capitalism is wild and if someone did figure this out I bet money there would be a product on the market that was rushed despite not having answered these (likely unanswerable) questions and probably protected from criticism because it “revolutionizes transportation” or some shit
It would think it’s you, but it’s not.
Cogito, ergo sum. I am not the collection of atoms I was when I was born and I am not a continuity of consciousness from before the last time I slept.
Your brain doesn't stop doing things when you sleep, because if it did, you'd not be breathing.
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but I'd still be the me of theseus
I'm already the me of theseus. Am I still me? Oh fuck. Who am I?
That opens up all kinds of cans of worms. Let's say you are put into a medical coma, no thoughts, only eniugh activity to sustain life. You're scanned, and a perfect copy of you is made. You both wake up in another room, at exactly the same time. Are both versions of you equally "you?" You don't know which is which. Does the answer change if a 3rd party knows, or there is no knowledge of which is which? If all that matters is continuous stream of consciousness, then I suppose the answer would be you died in the coma, and two people with your memories were born, I suppose.
Are both versions of you equally “you?”
Yes and then immediately no. Their experiences diverge from that point to become two distinct people with a shared past. It's entirely irrelevant which body is "original". Continuous stream of consciousness is overrated.
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If, by 'teleport', we mean: a machine scans your data and sends it to be rebuilt, then I wonder: why stop at 1? You have the data, make 9001 of me!
The creation of such a machine may actually be dystopia. Human diversity may plummet, with most of us in a predetermined role as clones.
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine an infinite amount of Tom Rikers hitting on any female face – for ever."
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But that means the original, "real" you died and the person that comes out the other side is essentially a clone with a copy of your memories.
Is that distinguishable from the "real" you, though? Because from a material point of view, that's real life too.
Your cells are dying and renovating, the atoms that make up your body come and go, your consciousness is a sliver of a moment of a flow of electricity that is gone before you can even intercept a moment.
If you could track every little bit of matter that makes you, you wouldn't be able to keep an unique well defined "you" at any point in time. A convoluted system maintains your memories and self thorough that experience.
I'd argue that an instance of life is it's continued existence. An interruption where it gets fully destroyed means that instance of a life has ended. Once reconstructed, a perfect, indistinguishable copy is created, but it is not the same life.
If you were to create the copy without destroying the original, would you now be in two places at the same time? Or are there two you's in two different points in space?
What about when you sleep, or get anesthesia? Continued existence of what exactly?
What if you kill and freeze a person, and revive them later?
What if you do the same but piece by piece and reassemble them?
Those questions are easily answered, though.
This question obviously revolves around the philosophical idea of the ship of Theseus.
In the scenarios you listed, it is definitively the same ship (albeit with different pieces/cells that have replaced parts over time), whereas in the original scenario it is akin to making an identical, second ship.
There is a clear distinction between those things. If there weren't, the ship of theseus couldn't exist as a thought exercise
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Your brain doesn't stop working when you sleep or are under. Your physiology keeps going.
Killing and freezing a person kills them. You can't revive someone after doing that.
We're unable to do piece-by-piece replacements of the brain(stem) so not much to argue about there. But if we could, it's probably still you since you're the continuation of your biological processes, which doesn't get interrupted, just modified.
There's plenty of examples of people who have drowned under the ice, been dead for many (most I can remember is around 30) minutes, and have been revived. We're talking about people that have had no heartbeat and no brain activity for a prolonged amount of time. I would definitely argue that they're the same "life" when they wake up.
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The true answer to this is that we simply don't know. Consciousness is perhaps the greatest mystery in our universe
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OK but that's not different than just the passage of time
Not for everybody, although I'm starting to wish it were so I wouldn't have to feel ever more thoroughly depressed as each day just brings more wanton destruction of any hope for a better future.
They're probably more likely to explain to you that a soul is not a real thing.
We should totally make copies of ourselves for sexual purposes.
I'm of the opinion that what we call a soul is a byproduct of the physical brain and not some ephemeral, immeasurable nonsense. So if you can perfectly replicate the brain down to the spin of the quarks, then yes, the copy has a "soul." The original doesn't anymore though because that poor bastard is dead.
What is that picture from. It reminds me of the movie Heavy Metal but I don't think it's from that.
Also if you've never seen that y'all owe it to yourselves.
Seems great, thanks for the recommendation!
Here’s one back at you - Metal Hurlant Chronicles
This looks more like old anime rather than the western style of Heavy Metal.
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After?
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