• nullptr@lemmy.world
      0·
      12 days ago

      Soo… Did i just spent 10min opening each image on a new tab, zooming in, reading it, while on toilet, for nothing? This has to be one of the most underwhelming stories out there

      • tetris11@feddit.ukEnglish
        0·
        12 days ago

        I did the same, but came to a different conclusion.

        The idea that you’re tethered to your future self by imagination, and it to you by mere memory is a profound one.

        It solidifies slightly better the idea that you should do right to yourself if you believe in doing right to others.

    • pjwestin@lemmy.world
      0·
      12 days ago

      Never bought into the whole, “sleep is the same thing,” argument. There’s no period during which your brain functions cease during sleep. They slow during non-REM sleep, then reach near waking levels once you enter REM, but they never end. That’s not remotely like having your entire body disassembled at molecular level and rebuilt somewhere else. One is essentially like a computer that’s screen has gone idle while it performs background tasks. The other is like transferring all of your files to a new computer and then throwing the original into a woodchipper.

      • mathemachristian [he/him]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        0·
        12 days ago

        Conciousness, what makes you, you, is not your brain functions. A “braindead” person usually still has a functioning part of the brain that regulates heartbeat. But the parts that are required for conciousness are gone.

        The point behind the sleep analogy isn’t that everything shuts down as in death, but your conciousness shuts down. It’s more like a computer that has suspended it’s processes to disk (aka hibernated) but then went into low-power mode instead of powering off completely. You can wake it back up and it restart these processes. You could even buy a new computer identical to the old one, copy the hard drive over bit by bit and have the new computer launch all the old processes. Are they then the same processes or different ones? A calculation that was suspended will pick up where it left of after all.

        • cevn@lemmy.world
          0·
          12 days ago

          It doesn’t actually shut down though. Did the person behind this theory not have dreams?

        • pjwestin@lemmy.world
          0·
          11 days ago

          Conciousness, what makes you, you, is not your brain functions.

          This is an extremely debatable assertion that scientists and philosophers will still be debating long after you and I are dead, but empirically, the evidence is pointing towards, “No, your consciousness is just a byproduct of that lump of meat in your skull.” Phineas Gage, for example, discovered that a huge portion of what made him, him was actually his left-frontal lobe.

          We could argue about conciousness, the soul, and the ship of theses for hours, and it would all still be opinion, but what is not opinion is this; your consciousness is being run on meat hardware, physical damage to or a chemical imbalance in that hardware will effect your consciousness, and it is constantly running processes, even when in sleep mode, until it is permanently shutdown. Based on that information, I would not let anyone disintegrate my brain, even if fhey reassembled it perfectly.

    • scholar@lemmy.world
      0·
      13 days ago

      In fairness to Mr Tesla, his machine didn’t kill. It made a perfect living duplicate. (The magician on the other hand…)

  • zabadoh@ani.social
    0·
    13 days ago

    That is one theory of how teleportation will work. Otherwise, you have a replication machine.

    • AeronMelon@lemmy.world
      0·
      13 days ago

      Star Trek has multiple stores about people being accidentally cloned by the transporter.

      Which implies it is creating a copy.

      Which implies it is killing the original.

      • GraniteM@lemmy.world
        0·
        13 days ago

        In the TNG episode Lonely Among Us, while under the influence of an alien entity, Picard disintegrates himself into a nebula. The crew spend hours trying to get him back and are about to give up, when Troi senses Picard’s disembodied presence nearby, and they are able to reconstitute his body from the transporter buffer, reuniting it with his mental energy.

        So Star Trek has effectively confirmed the scientific existence of the soul, and the fact that it exists independently of the body, and that the soul can continue to exist without the body, and that the transporter can transport the soul without destroying it. So, no, the transporter is not a suicide machine.

          • GraniteM@lemmy.world
            0·
            13 days ago

            Yes, they confirmed the objective existence of the soul within the context of their fictional universe, alongside faster than light travel, time travel, accessible parallel universes, stable wormholes, hand-held weapons that can vaporize a human being, and artificial general intelligence.

            On the scale of science fiction hardness, Star Trek is somewhere between warm jello and cotton candy.

            • Dion Starfire@lemmy.worldEnglish
              0·
              12 days ago

              Ironically, Star Trek is considered “hard sci-fi”, even if there are other shows/books that are harder. The hardness of science fiction isn’t related to how plausible the science backing it is, but how much effort the story puts into explaining the “science”, and how internally consistent that explanation is. Trek spends a fair amount of effort into technobabble, and had dedicated technobabble writers whose job was to try to maintain consistency with those explanations.

              Compare this with something like Star Wars (the movies, not third party novels), where nearly zero effort is put into explaining how magical Force powers work or why laser swords have a fixed length.

              Hard sci-fi says “this is how this works”, even if it’s complete bullshit. Soft sci-fi says “just accept that these things work, so we can use them as plot devices”.

  • nathanjent@programming.dev
    0·
    12 days ago

    My theory is that the being who created the totems is borrowing the power of each soul’s death and using that to recreate their body on the other side. There must be some minor difference in power that this being collects for itself. Even a small difference would be worth it at scale.

    • JackFrostNCola@aussie.zone
      0·
      11 days ago

      Also you have to assume any state change isnt 100% efficient, so there would be some losses in heat and maintaining that ethereal green glow, so theres definately a cost being incurred.

  • PixeIOrange@lemmy.world
    0·
    12 days ago

    Arent we kinda new every micromoment? I mean, the electrons powering our feelings and deeds are new every moment in time. The atoms we are made of are exchanged over time so we arent even the same matter after x many years… So we are never who we were before. Dying seems to be a part of living, not just the end…

    Edit: even the Information saved in our bain change over time, they get more. And remembering things isnt correct every time so even the quality of information changes…

    • Soggy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      11 days ago

      Yes. I think this thought experiment ultimately boils down to “do you believe in a soul”.

      • TwistedTurtle@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        11 days ago

        Not necessarily, I see it as “stream of consciousness”. And no, sleep isn’t the same as your stream of consciousness completely ending and then a clone of it starting up somewhere else.

        I don’t believe in souls, but I sure as shit wouldn’t go through a Star Trek style teleporter. Many people seem to think that since the clone that pops out the other end is identical to them, down to the brainwaves, that it doesn’t matter. They don’t seem to comprehend or care that from THEIR point of view, they would die.

        The fact a perfect copy has replaced me would not be of any solace, if anything it makes it scarier.

  • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
    0·
    12 days ago

    Atomic teleportation where a pattern or parts are converted or reassembled = death

    Quantum teleportation where particles exist in multiple locations states before collapsing into one… not so sure.

      • Aniki@feddit.orgOP
        0·
        13 days ago

        my personal opinion is that instant (i.e. arbitrarily close to speed of light) teleportation machines could be built in theory, but doing so is really expensive and there’s just no economical reason to do so.

        for example, for fast travel, we already have aircraft and rockets. Yet nobody would use them to ship objects produced in china to europe, e.g. cars, if there’s no time-critical component (i.e. food that spoils very quickly etc.). So the fastest way of travel is typically also the most expensive one, while cheaper modes of transport take more time.

        Then, you can think of a teleportation device as a mode of transport where the speed approaches the speed of light. If our previous experience is anything to go by, that means that the cost of transport would increase enormously, and thus practically nobody would use it anyways. So that’s the practical side to this thing.

    • gwl [he/him]@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      0·
      12 days ago

      Explicitly don’t work like that, the Transporter Problem Thought Experiment was “what if they worked like that”

      But in Star Trek it’s a streaming connection, kept in the Transporter Buffer

        • gwl [he/him]@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          0·
          12 days ago

          Transporter Buffer Error caused by trying to do a workaround for inability to get a lock on due to interference.

          An unusual distortion field meant the Potemkin had difficulty beaming him up. A second confinement beam was initiated to overcome these difficulties, with the intent of reintegrating the two beams in the transporter buffer. This was unnecessary, as only one beam was successful at transporting Riker; the modulation of the distortion caused the second beam to be reflected back down to the surface, materializing the two Rikers, one on the ship, and one on the planet’s surface.

          • davidgro@lemmy.world
            0·
            12 days ago

            If the transporter is actually moving matter from one place to another, instead of (destructively) recording a pattern then copying it, then how could there be enough original matter to create two Rikers?

      • schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        12 days ago

        The Prestige is a movie where Wolverine and Batman fight in a battle of who is the best magician. David Bowie makes a teleportation machine for Logan to teleport across the entire theater to the shock of the audience.

        Tap for spoiler

        But we learn that the machine is not a teleporter, but a distance copier–the original Logan still remains on the pad. Logan rigs a trap door for his original self to fall into and drown every night, and every night, he never knows if he will be the one to die or to live.

  • hakunawazo@lemmy.world
    0·
    12 days ago
    $me = "🧍"; 
$stillMe = & $me; 
unset($me);
print($stillMe); // wohoo, teleportation rocks!!!

$me = "🧍"; 
$copyOfMe = $me; 
unset($me); // 💀 this sucks!!!
print($copyOfMe); // wait, what happened?
    • tetris11@feddit.ukEnglish
      0·
      12 days ago

      the reference never changed position in memory, so nothing actually happened during the teleportation process other than a re-labelling.

      For real teleportation, that memory has to physically change position. I would do it gradually though, bit-by-bit, synchronized, and very fast.

      The idea is that if you slow it down, you witness half-yourself getting destroyed exactly as you witness your other half getting created, with the only carry-over being a single 1 or a 0

      • hakunawazo@lemmy.world
        0·
        12 days ago

        So teleportation is like going into the woodchipper feet first? Ok, now I slowly understand McCoys problems with that invention.