The Trouble with Transporters

4:51 Imagine being that one version of you that was created when you woke up from your alarm clock and then immediately killed when you pressed snooze

it weird seeing a cgp grey with a full body as opposed to just the stick figure

According to the inventor of the transport in Star Trek: Enterprise "I had to spend years convincing people that it actually was you that came out the other side and not some weird clone."

This is the same problem with any sort of "uploading your consciousness to a computer" thing.

So it's like copying a save file while deleting the old one.

And I told myself. "Okay, last video before bed."... dammit!

"still here? you cant stay awake for ever" played just as i closed my eyes about to pass out

Sounds just right! Yesterday I went to sleep and I woke up transported!

2016: The Trouble with Transporters 2020: The Trouble with Tumbleweeds

I will take the "IGNORANCE IS BLISS" on this one.

There's an episode of Next Generation that makes the transporter question much, much more complicated. In one episode Lt Barclay admits to never having used a transporter and being terrified of doing so, largely because of the concerns raised here, and is promptly peer-pressured into doing so by Counsellor Troy. The way this episode muddies the water it that when Barclay uses the transporter, the camera-angle 'follows' him through. We see him remain fully conscious throughout the entire experience. Later in the episode he even interacts with other entities during transportation and manages to pull something out of the beam upon rematerialising. Bizarrely, the question of death raised here doesn't work, because transporters are canonically not a break in consciousness on any level.

Star Trek transporters have always had some seemingly problematic aspects to them. For example, if transporters work the way supposed by this video, why not just make lots and lots of clones all day? A real device like this might be more accurately considered "the duplication machine", but in-universe, there's a clear difference between transporters and replicators which isn't fully understood.

Ok so if beds are suicide boxes then transporters are just naps.

“Who is you?” “You is two”

When he started talking about giving people the benifit of the doubt for being alive I got vibes of when I was six and thought the whole world was created for me

2:28 “the philosophy majors in the room are dying to bring up the ship of Theseus now so fine” Me like 15 seconds before he said this: but- the ship of Theseus

Why did I decide to make this the last video I watched tonight?

The sweater is making me uncomfortable. Where is MY CGP GREY WITH HIS STICK BODY.

Trek even made episodes involving the copies that made it clear that the "copies" had their own streams of consciousness and made entirely divergent decisions. When i was new to it, I sort of expected them to somehow quantify the "soul" to explain why transporters weren't death machines, only to find the opposite was true.

The movie, The Prestige - directed by none other than Christopher Nolan, did a great job of a deep dive exploration of this conundrum and the dark implications.