Regarding Star Trek's Transporter: "It's not a transporter, it's a murder machine!!"
The philosophical implications of such a key system, isn't itself quite interesting, and certainly begs the question about two humans have souls or not, and how that mechanism itself would work. But it seems to me, that the point brought up in the video is quite valid, if you are disassemble, you no longer exist, unless there's some magic metaphysical continuity that steps in and preserves the actual you.
There is a fascinating book by David Brinn, called The Kiln People, which tackles this concept from a different angle: making temporary clones of yourself; then (from the first perspective narration) waking up as one of these freshly created clones, and then realizing you're only a clone - not the original, and dealing with that depressing revelation.
I've often pondered Trek's fictitious design concept and arrived at the same conclusion.
Modern sci-fi, would've used some kind of quantum mechanism to instantaneously relay the
original disassembled matter to the destination, in such a fashion that it would self-reassemble upon arrival,
rather than reconstructing it from local materials at the destination, thus essentially preserving the original organics.
Which begs the question for the Star Trek design...
What if the destination doesn't have any local matter to use for the reconstruction ?
And what mechanism is in place at the target destination, to receive the reassembly instructions,
acquire the local matter, and perform the reconstruction ? What kind of receiver is handling that transmitted
signal from the transporter ?
Obviously NONE !!
It just makes no sense from a logistical perspective !
🤔
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And you've reminded me of the movie The Prestige which I'll have to rewatch now.
Thanks 