From the Vault: Transporters and Consciousness in Star Trek

In this classic Star Trek Week episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss teleportation in the Star Trek universe and the questions it raises about human identity and consciousness. (originally published 9/11/2025)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb. Today is Saturday. We're closing out Star
Trek Week with an episode from last year's Star Trek Week.
This one originally published 9-11-2025. It is Transporters and Consciousness
in Star Trek. This one was a lot of fun
to discuss, so let's go ahead and jump right into it.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (00:41):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.

Speaker 3 (00:45):
And I am Joe McCormick.

Speaker 1 (00:46):
And we are back with another Star Trek Week episode
here on Stuff to Blow Your Mind. We're going to
be talking about transporters and consciousness, but I do want
to go ahead and get this out there. We are
not going to fully explain consciousness, nor are we going
to fully explain Star Trek transporters or teleportation in the

(01:07):
Star Trek universe. This is a big topic. Yes, yes.
So we're basically going to, yeah, we're going to chat
about it. We're going to discuss some interesting concepts. We're
going to discuss some thought experiments tied into the whole thing,
and we're going to reference... some novel uses of teleportation
on Star Trek, in Star Trek motion pictures and so forth. But,

(01:31):
you know, we're still trying to figure out how consciousness
works and actually being able to teleport a living conscious
being from point A to point B remains somewhat beyond
our grasp and reach as modern humans. I'll also go
ahead and add the caveat here that we are not
Star Trek experts or Trek's I guess. And as always,

(01:54):
invite additional insight and observations from all of our listeners,
many of whom have seen far more Star Trek than
both of us combined.

Speaker 3 (02:02):
Yeah, we talked a bit about our individual Star Trek
viewing histories in the last episode, which if you haven't
heard the other one from earlier this week, go back
and check that out, too. That's the one where we
talked about the salt vampire featured in the first ever
episode of Star Trek and some fascinating analogs in the
real world in biology. But yeah, as I mentioned in

(02:23):
the last episode, I have always liked Star Trek. I'm
not like an anti-Trek person by any means, but I'm
just way less exposed to Trek than people might assume.
You know, I've seen most of the original cast movies,
a handful of episodes of the original series, and mainly...
The solid, the first whole season of Star Trek The

(02:43):
Next Generation, which people tell me is not the best
there ever was.

Speaker 1 (02:47):
The uniforms are super tight and uncomfortable looking on that season,
for sure.

Speaker 3 (02:52):
I was making a go at watching the entire Next Generation,
and the effort petered out. But I know there's a
lot of good stuff in there. I never got to.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
It's probably one of those shows where you really need...
a curated list of which episodes to hit along the way, which,
which I'm to understand is it's much the same with
the X-Files, which as we've discussed in the show, I'm very, um,
under familiar with. I've only seen like one or two
episodes of that. Okay.

Speaker 3 (03:18):
So we're the other way around on that. I've seen
basically all of the X-Files and yeah, uh, X-Files is,
I believe the show with the widest distribution of episode
quality of any show I've ever seen. Like Best X-Files
episodes are among the best television ever made. A lot
of episodes are some of the worst stuff I've ever seen.

Speaker 1 (03:39):
Now, coming back to Star Trek here, as I mentioned
in the last episode, I was mostly a Star Trek
The Next Generation kid, watched most of, if not all
of that, then moved on to Deep Space Nine and
watched at least a sizable chunk of all that. And
more recently, I've watched Star Trek Strange New Worlds. I'm
only two seasons into that, but I think that's an

(04:00):
excellent show. There are whole other series that I have
seen nothing of. But when it comes to the original
Star Trek series, certainly I watched the films, but the
original series, I don't know, I always felt like I
felt this brand loyalty or show loyalty to Next Generation.
I was like, this is the Trek for me. I
don't need the old stuff. And and I just I

(04:21):
tended to sort of dismiss it as I don't know,
as an inferior product or something without giving it a
tremendous amount of thought. So I have. historically not watched
much of the original series, but as part of Star
Trek week here, uh, in our preparation for it, I've
watched a couple of the episodes from the original run
and it's some pretty fun stuff. I think, and I

(04:43):
think it holds up really well. So I don't think
I gave the original series enough credit and enough attention
when I was younger.

Speaker 3 (04:50):
I mean, just this week I've discovered it has a
lot more screaming plants than I would have imagined.

Speaker 1 (04:55):
Yeah. And Lucha moves. We both watched one of the
same episodes in preparation. And yeah, there's Captain Kirk busting
out like not quite a Frankensteiner, but some sort of
like a Lucha head scissors takedown.

Speaker 3 (05:09):
You're talking about Space Seed, the first run with Ricardo Montalban.

Speaker 2 (05:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (05:12):
So we both watched that for the first time this week.
And yeah, you know, in that episode, I really expected
Kirk to finally get the better of of con with
some kind of clever trick. You know, he uses like, ah,
bet you didn't think of this, but really he just
sort of hits him.

Speaker 1 (05:30):
Yeah. Yeah. He pulls something out of the wall there.
It looks kind of like, uh, the, the pump from like, uh,
an industrial ketchup dispenser. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (05:38):
Just, uh, yeah. Grabs that hits him with.

Speaker 3 (05:40):
It, but that episode, not without a lot of cleverness
in it.

Speaker 2 (05:43):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (05:43):
I really, I really dug that episode. All right. We'll,
we'll talk more about that episode tomorrow, but, let's go
ahead and get more focused here for this episode. So
Star Trek obviously features various technologies that have come to
define the franchise. You've got your phasers, your tricorders, your
tractor beams, your photon torpedoes, your holodecks, and, of course,

(06:04):
the transporter. And while the crew of the Enterprise and
other starships can also travel ship to ship and ship
to planet in the show aboard shuttlecraft, that's a common
feature of, I think, all of the series, the transporter...
enables swift teleportation from one point in space to another,
generally within a localized range. And as such, the transporter

(06:26):
serves as a key means of moving from orbit to surface,
from ship to ship, in both tactical and casual uses.

Speaker 3 (06:34):
One interesting technical design feature of the transporter is that
you only need the technology to be at one end. Yeah.
You know, so you can beam from the transporter room
down to a planet where there's nothing there. There's not
like a pad for you to land on or something.
It just sends you wherever and it can beam you

(06:54):
up from anywhere nearby to the transporter room.

Speaker 1 (06:57):
Yeah, yeah. It's a different deal compared to the telepods
of the fly where you have one pod taking you
apart and one pod putting you back together again, which
is probably like a cleaner way of thinking about some
of the basics of the technology. You know, for our
purposes here today. But yeah, but yes, this is an
important point you make here about teleportation as we see

(07:18):
it in Star Trek. Now, the basic teleportation principle here,
as in other works of science fiction, is, of course,
matter-energy conversion. So break down matter into energy slash information,
transmit that energy pattern to the destination, and then put
it all back together again, transforming energy and information back

(07:40):
into matter.

Speaker 3 (07:41):
Years ago, I read some physics attempts to model like
how much energy, if you were to think, is this
process doable in reality, how much energy this would take theoretically,
how much information would need to be encoded to trans,
you know, to turn an entire human body fully into
information and recreate it from that. And it seems to

(08:05):
say the least implausible.

Speaker 1 (08:06):
Yeah. Yeah. I, we have to remember that in any
of these discussions of Star Trek technology, you know, it's
important that it creates drama, that it's cool looking and
that you can tell stories around it. And, but beyond that,
it's like, we are essentially talking about a civilization that
is depending on how you cut it, like 1.5 to

(08:29):
two on the Kardashev scale. So whatever they're doing in
pretty much any realm of science, it's a, it's a
good bit beyond what we can, you know, scientifically comprehend
in many ways from our point of view. But it
is certainly cool, and it does certainly produce drama. I
have to say, when I first really started watching Star

(08:50):
Trek in earnest via The Next Generation in the 90s,
I mostly just bought into the technology wholesale at first.
You know, it's just amazing. It's nearly limitless in its possibilities.
But the more you watch and the more you think
about it, essentially two things kick in, I think, for
the Star Trek viewer. First of all, teleportation via transporter
is raises a number of ethical and philosophical questions just

(09:12):
the more you think about it and the more you
pull in ideas about just what consciousness is. And then,
of course, various episodes of Star Trek just outright confront
the philosophy and ethics of teleportation as well, often getting
into teleportation mishaps that, you know, create some interesting plot developments,
but also... cause the viewer to to think and contemplate

(09:35):
uh you know exactly what we are and how we
work and what is the individual and so.

Speaker 3 (09:41):
Forth even as early as the original series just in
some of the episodes we were watching this week already
characters are complaining about the principle behind the the transporter
like mccoy says in the original series that he does
not want to get on the transporter. I mean, he
does it anyway, but he doesn't like it. He finds
it conceptually abhorrent.

Speaker 1 (10:02):
Yeah, yeah. It's like he realizes that it is a
death he's about to engage in, that there's maybe something
a little unnatural about it, right? Because, I mean, that
is a frequent interpretation and contemplation about the teleportation in
the Star Trek universe. Are they just killing themselves every
time they climb into one of these things and then

(10:24):
recreating an exact copy of themselves elsewhere? And then when
you move past that sort of gut feeling of horror,
you have to ask yourself, well, is that terrible at all?
Is that really any different than what happens just moment
to moment with our own consciousness and so forth? So
I think that's one of the lovely things about it

(10:44):
is just. Just just considering it on that level, it
forces you to deconstruct a lot of what you think
you know about who you are and how your brain operates.

Speaker 3 (10:54):
Yeah, that's right. Obviously, if the idea is that your
body is decomposed entirely, it's like completely taken apart at
the point of origin and then reconstituted somewhere else. The
most straightforward way to understand that is that the original
you is destroyed. And that a new copy of you

(11:15):
with all of the same thoughts and memories and all
that is recreated in the target location and it can
just continue going about your business. But I think our
intuition about that is just that like, okay, that means
like whenever the first time I use a transporter is
I just die. That's just the end of my life.
And then there's something that's exactly like me that is

(11:36):
going on with my life. But my experience of life,
will not be continuous. I will step into the transporter
and then that is death. My experience ends. Now something
else exactly like me is having an experience. But yeah,
as you bring up, of course, our bodies are changing

(11:57):
moment to moment. I, this one moment, I'm a different
being in a way than I was a few moments earlier,
but I have the sensation that my conscious experience has
been one continuous thing. And so the death in time
of the me from a few moments ago, just as
the seconds tick by, that doesn't really feel like a

(12:19):
death or like anything came to an end, even though
I am a different being now than I was just
a few moments ago. It does feel like that would
be something different than what we're imagining with the transporter,
where your body is decomposed into atoms or even, I
don't know, decomposed into what. And that does seem to
more intuitively... suggests there will be a final kind of

(12:42):
end to your conscious experience, even if something like you
is getting to carry on.

Speaker 1 (12:46):
Yeah, that's absolutely right. Yeah, the teleportation here, the transporter
seems to, in a lovely way, exaggerate, greatly exaggerate some
of what may already be going on with us. Because, yeah,
like you said, our bodies are constantly changing. Our identity
changes over time to varying degrees. And we periodically have

(13:09):
interruptions in consciousness. I mean, if nothing else, we go
to sleep every night. We may undergo surgery at some
point in our life. And then we have little altered
states of consciousness that arise along the way as well.

Speaker 3 (13:23):
I have had this thought going into general anesthesia before.
I've thought, what if the me that is going under
now just dies? And the thing that wakes up will
feel always like it is me. it is me and
it will feel like it has had just a continuous experience,
woke up after surgery and all that. But what if

(13:45):
somehow I right now before surgery never get to wake up? Uh,
it is, there's no way to prove that or disprove.
I mean, you know, that's not like an empirically testable thing.
There is just, uh, it's just a weird kind of
head space you can get into.

Speaker 1 (14:01):
Yeah. I mean, you can ask the same question about
going to sleep each night. Like, You close your eyes,
you enter a different state of consciousness and become unconscious.
You engage in dream activity. Your brain is undergoing various changes,
sort of a defragmentation, you know, to some degree. And
then the next morning, oh, well, you feel a little

(14:21):
bit different. You feel refreshed. But are you feeling refreshed
as in you just stepped out of the telepod and
now you have brundle fly energy, you know? Yeah, so again,
the sci-fi exaggeration forces you to rethink all of this,
the day-to-day things about our consciousness and existence. And indeed,

(14:42):
a lot of it does boil down to consciousness and identity.
Because to be clear, Star Trek's teleportation, to my knowledge,
has never engaged in any direct contemplation of life. at
least as far as teleportation goes, a soul. I know
that some episodes get into more spiritual territory, and you

(15:04):
do have entities that are encountered that do not have
physical bodies. So it can kind of be all over
the place and contradict itself in places as well, because again,
this is a decades-long franchise. It tells many different stories
created by many different people. It's not going to be
entirely consistent on all of this. But when it comes
to the transporter itself, the show does seem to lean

(15:26):
materialist more often than not. So, you know, it's not
getting into what we would call mind-body dualism, the idea
that consciousness exists separate from the body, as opposed to
a thing that is generated or cast by the body,
the basic materialist view.

Speaker 3 (15:44):
Yeah, I would agree that most of the Star Trek
I'm familiar with has a basically materialist approach to the mind.
Though I would add that I think that's not necessarily inconsistent, actually.
with speaking about a soul, depending on how you speak
about it. I mean, I just say from my personal
point of view, I personally have a materialist view of

(16:07):
what the mind is, and I also am quite comfortable
speaking of a soul. I'm using it more in the
metaphorical sense in that the word soul in English captures
things about our personality and integrity and stuff like that
better than any other word does. And yet I don't
think it refers to like a ghost that is physically

(16:28):
separable from the brain.

Speaker 1 (16:29):
Yeah, yeah. And I think that one of the key things,
and we've discussed this in the show plenty of times before,
is that, you know, we ultimately can have it both ways.
We can have it multiple ways. We can have, you know,
contradictory even ideas floating around our brains when it comes
to understanding who we are and how we work. So, yeah,
I mean, for my own part, I tend to be

(16:51):
more of a materialist. when I think about my consciousness, but,
you know, depending on how, you know, the mood hits me,
I might also engage in more of a, um, more
of a dualist approach to it and think more in
terms of like a soul and a body, either casually
in turn, or just interacting with language and I don't know,
poetry and song and so forth, or, you know, maybe

(17:14):
at times feeling more like religious about things or more
spiritual about things. Like you can, you can engage in
different ways. And in the same way that a show
like Star Trek can have it both ways and sort
of like follow whichever directions is in the moment providing
the best story or the best thought-provoking content. But it
is crazy then to think though, okay, we're engaging in

(17:37):
a very, again, materialist idea of what consciousness is. Consciousness
is generated via the physical brain, the inner workings of
the physical brain. And then we're thinking about it being
the physical body being broken down, destroyed, transmitted, and then recreated.
And then consciousness kind of cuts back on again or
doesn't cut out in completely. Or the same consciousness is reawakened,

(18:02):
but it is not the exact same consciousness in terms
of there was consciousness one and now there's consciousness two.
But consciousness two is identical to consciousness one, which no
longer exists.

Speaker 3 (18:13):
One way I've always imagined this within the narrative is,
I mean, if you stop to think about it, and
sometimes they just don't really encourage you to worry about
this too much. But if you do stop to think
of it, I tend to assume that, okay, if the
person who goes into the transporter is in fact destroyed,
it's not possible for that person, that brain, that body

(18:33):
to think, I am still the same person who came
out the other end. They don't exist anymore. But the
person who does come out the other end does think
I am still the same person. So the experience of
consciousness is continuous for the person who came out the
other end, not for the person who went in. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (18:52):
And maybe it's also like just maybe ultimately they think
differently about consciousness and self. Like your consciousness is like
just disregarding any idea that you have some sort of
a soul or anything and just know that you were
a shadow puppet. You know, you are a silhouette or
rather you are a silhouette cast by a shadow puppet.
That is what your consciousness is. That is what your

(19:13):
sense of self is. That shadow puppet that is used
to cast that silhouette, let's say of a king on
a wall or on a screen, that puppet can be
disassembled and then shipped to the other side of the world, reassembled,
and it can cast the same silhouette on the screen,
on the wall. And likewise, you could destroy the puppet,

(19:34):
write down instructions for how to build an identical puppet,
and that identical puppet can be built on the other
side of the world or on another planet, what have you,
and used to cast, again, the exact same king upon
the wall, that exact same silhouette. So ultimately, maybe that's
how someone in the Star Trek universe is supposed to

(19:55):
think about themselves. And, you know, don't get caught up
in lofty ideas about your eternal soul. You know, you
were a silhouette on a wall.

Speaker 3 (20:04):
I can see how that could be a very comforting framework,
though at the same time, I think a person going
into a transporter, were this a real technology, could be
forgiven for not wanting their experience of the world to
cease and to essentially die from their own first-person perspective
just to get a copy of themselves somewhere else. It's

(20:25):
almost taking on a kind of, I don't know, like
a worker ant kind of point of view about like,
as long as there's something that can continue doing my
job at the other end, then it's okay.

Speaker 2 (20:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (20:37):
Or if you believe in the great work of the
Federation of Planets, or the might of the Klingon Empire,
whatever faction you happen to represent. Yeah, if you believe
firmly in something greater than yourself, then you're just like,
all right, I'm going to sacrifice myself once again in
order to pursue this end. Now, I don't think we

(21:05):
mentioned this, but of course, a common thought experiment and
analogy that comes up all the time is the ship
of Theseus, which we've talked about in depth in the
show before. The idea that if you have, here's the
ship of Theseus, and then over time, stuff breaks, pieces
of the ship rot, pieces of the ship have to
be replaced. And after enough time, you will have replaced

(21:28):
the entire ship. Is it still the same ship, right?
And of course, again, a sci-fi technology like this just
speeds everything up. It's the ship of Theseus on Fast Forward.
We're going from the ship at the beginning to the
ship at the end, with destruction in the middle. Is
it the same ship at all? As always, the answer
is yes and no, yes but no, and also no

(21:51):
but yes. Another sort of navel-gazing thought that I've often
had watching Star Trek is, What if you do have
an eternal soul? What if we were to have a
religious view of the Star Trek universe? What if the
first time you use the technology, you die and your
soul leaves your body? Then what are you when you're

(22:15):
recreated on the other end? Just sort of like a
soulless living automaton, a copy of what you were, and
then that just continues, the cycle continues? I don't know.

Speaker 3 (22:25):
You get a new soul. You multiply souls just by
going through the transporter. And then what happens when the
new one dies? Now there are two yous in heaven
or in hell.

Speaker 1 (22:35):
Well, but then we're materialist again, though, right? Because a
soul pops into being because the body exists. But what if,
I guess if we're doing.

Speaker 3 (22:44):
Well, no, if you're dualist, you could have a view
of dualism. It's like we have to make a soul.
A soul must be created for each new copy of
the body. Therefore, every time the body is copied, a
new soul is made. Now, the bodies are never going
to end up in the same place at the same
time unless something goes wrong, but they're never supposed to.
So you wouldn't have this problem with the bodies, but

(23:05):
wherever the souls are going, they're just accumulating, right?

Speaker 2 (23:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (23:09):
Okay. Good point. Now, I want to make another quick
note about memory without just really going down the rabbit
hole of memory, because we've done whole episodes about different
forms of memory and so forth. But Obviously, memory plays
a huge role in identity and consciousness. And just thinking
about the role of memories in teleportation is pretty mind-boggling

(23:31):
because the transporter here wouldn't just be recording, breaking down,
and rebuilding your body and your brain and the cells,
the molecules, and every atom and so forth. But we'd
also have to copy, send, and then replicate Patterns of
neural activity, so neurons, synapses, electrochemical signals and synaptic plasticity,

(23:55):
copying of a person's engrams, you know, the physical trace
of their memories. And again, like this in and of
itself may be more feasible for a type one and
a half to two civilization on the Kardashev scale, but
almost inconceivable by today's technological standards. It's just so much
that would have to, so much information here that would

(24:17):
have to be recorded scent and then reproduced.

Speaker 3 (24:20):
Though, presumably, if you are a materialist about what the
mind is, then if you were to make a perfect
and actually perfectly exact physical copy of the brain, that
would seem to imply, unless there's a contingency I'm not
thinking of, that would seem to imply that the perfect

(24:40):
copy of the brain would come with all of the
same memories and tendencies and everything else, because If you're
a materialist, you think that that information is somehow represented
in the internal structure of the brain. That's what the
storage of the information is. Now, again, you could have
another view where there's something that the physical copying of

(25:00):
the brain or physical copying of the body in the
brain doesn't capture. There's something outside the body. But yeah,
if you think it is there in the body somewhere,
then perfectly copying the body should bring everything like that along.
But then again, Maybe that raises questions about like just
how much impossibility almost would be involved in actually trying

(25:24):
to create a perfect copy of a living body.

Speaker 1 (25:26):
Yeah, like it kind of comes out of a question
of like how how high detail is the the snapshot
of the body and then ultimately how much information are
we talking about?

Speaker 2 (25:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (25:38):
All right. Well, let's let's get into a couple of
different philosophical takes on all of this. These are both
going to be things that we've discussed in the past
on the show before, but I think it's good to
get into them here again when we're talking expressly about really,
I think, the most famous pop culture vision of teleportation.

(26:00):
All right.

Speaker 3 (26:00):
Now, one thing I know we've talked about is a
couple of years ago in an anthology of horror episode,
we talked a bit about teleportation, didn't we?

Speaker 1 (26:10):
That's right. Yeah. We, we talked about, um, we talked
about two as, as is our practice on anthology of horror.
We each picked out, uh, an episode from an, uh,
a TV horror and thought horror or sci-fi anthology series.
And we discussed like some of the ideas there. And
the one we talked about, uh, in two, one of
the two that we talked about in this episode was, uh,
from the 1990s outer limit series. It was an episode

(26:31):
titled think like a dinosaur based on a short story
of the same name. You can go look up that
episode if you want a full breakdown of that. But, uh,
The concepts explored in that episode line up rather perfectly
with the work of Derek Parfit, a British philosopher who
specialized in personal identity, among other subjects. He lived 1942

(26:53):
through 2017. He gets into this in his 1987 book,
Reasons and Persons, and he lays out what has come
to be called the teletransporter paradox. And in this, he
presents a basic teleportation idea and resulting paradox where you
have somebody that's being sent to Mars. So they're standing

(27:14):
on Earth, their body's destroyed in the scan, and then
this is what's supposed to ideally happen. The information then
is sent to Mars and they're recreated there. But uh-oh,
something messed up and the original was not destroyed. So
which is the individual, the original copy or the new copy?
Or the original or the copy, rather. And so, yeah,

(27:38):
he gets into this and chews over the philosophical contents here,
you know, and acknowledging that this is a common feature
in science fiction, that some people say, well, the first
person is destroyed and the new person is not me.
It's like my doppelganger. Others say, well, no, that is me.
That's just a complete continuation of who I am. And

(27:59):
so he uses the thought experiment here to discuss what
he calls two kinds of sameness. There's qualitative identity and
numerical identity. So the scanner and the replicator in his
scenario produce a double that is qualitatively identical, but not
numerically identical. In other words, the two were otherwise the same,

(28:20):
but not literally the same person in a physical sense.

Speaker 3 (28:23):
Kind of in the same way that you can have
two copies of the same book, but they're not literally
the same object.

Speaker 1 (28:30):
Right, right. And likewise, numerically identical individuals, he points out,
can also become qualitatively different. And this is something, I'll
bring this up again here in a bit, this is
also something that's explored in Star Trek. What happens if
you have two copies, but then they're essentially the same person,

(28:51):
but then they have different events that occur to them afterwards.

Speaker 2 (28:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (28:56):
That would actually be really if you could do that,
that would be great for like psychology and medical experiments
and stuff.

Speaker 1 (29:04):
Not in the Federation. The Federation wouldn't do that. Maybe
the Romulans are up to that.

Speaker 3 (29:08):
Well, no, not to do that on purpose. Let's just
say as you accidentally create a bunch of exact atom
for atom copies of people that they exist anyway, that
those people would be great to volunteer for various kinds of,
you know, human experiments, because then you could have like
perfectly controlled experiments.

Speaker 1 (29:26):
True, true. So Parfit sums this up by writing, quote,
though our chief concern is our numerical identity, psychological changes matter. Indeed,
on one view, certain kinds of qualitative change destroy numerical identity.
If certain things happen to me, the truth might not
be that I become a very different person. The truth
might be that I cease to exist and the resulting

(29:47):
person is someone else. So again, highlighting that this idea
of the teleporter or the transporter creating this new individual
that might not be me. Well, that same consideration occurs
in our own life. If something significantly alters your identity
and changes who you are, maybe you just have a

(30:08):
really awesome meal or see an amazing movie, read a
great book. Well, congratulations, you just destroyed yourself and recreated
a doppelganger of yourself that is qualitatively different than who
you were.

Speaker 3 (30:21):
Yeah, this is a philosophical question that has been explored
and it in other formats, like the question of how
can you really know if you want to make a
major decision in your life? And, you know, common ones
are like, if I want to move, you know, move
across state lines or have a child or something like,

(30:42):
or like change jobs, you know, something that's like a
big change in your life, you are making the decision
in a prospective way by like you know, presumably evaluating
the pros and cons. You have a set of things
you think you want, and then you imagine, will doing this,
will making this big change in my life better get

(31:02):
me toward the things I want out of life? But
the truth is, when you go through a big change
in life, the things you want can change. So in
some way, it's hard to predict whether going through a
big change will get you closer to what you want,
because what if going through the big change changes what
you want? And we know it often does.

Speaker 1 (31:22):
Yeah, I've mentioned it before, but there's a Terrence McKenna
quote that is at once reassuring. I sometimes turn to
it for reassurance, but also it kind of lines up
with what we're talking about here. He says, if something
needs to be done, you will find yourself doing it,
which is like, yeah, like if something happens, I'll deal
with it when it happens. But it's also like, I
don't know, it kind of reverses the flow of how

(31:45):
we think about our own our own agency in life. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (31:49):
Anyway, Rob, you cool if I talk about Swamp Man now?

Speaker 1 (31:52):
Yeah, let's summon the swamp man.

Speaker 3 (31:53):
So this is another philosophical thought experiment that is very
similar to the transporter question, and it has come up
on the show before. This is the American philosopher Donald
Davidson's swamp man analogy. Davidson introduces this idea in a
paper called Knowing One's Own Mind from Proceedings and Addresses

(32:16):
of the American Philosophical Association in the year 1987. And
in the paper, he sets up the swamp man thought
experiment like this. Quote, suppose lightning strikes a dead tree
in a swamp. I am standing nearby. My body is
reduced to its elements. While entirely by coincidence and out

(32:38):
of different molecules, the tree is turned into my physical replica.
My replica, the swamp man, moves exactly as I did.
According to its nature, it departs the swamp. encounters and
seems to recognize my friends and appears to return their
greetings in English. It moves into my house and seems
to write articles on radical interpretation. That's what Davidson did.

(33:02):
He writes his kind of articles. No one can tell
the difference. But the interesting thing here is that the
point of Davidson's thought experiment is that there actually is
a difference. And in his view, that difference illustrates weird facts,
not about it Parfit's point was about identity. Davidson is

(33:24):
not making a point about identity. He's trying to make
a point about knowledge, thought, and meaning. So Davidson writes, quote,
My replica can't recognize my friends. It can't recognize anything,
since it never cognized anything in the first place. It

(33:45):
can't know my friends' names, though of course it seems to.
It can't remember my house. It can't mean what I
do by the word house, for example, since the sound
house it makes was not learned in a context that
would give it the right meaning, or any meaning at all. Indeed,
I don't see how my replica can be said to

(34:07):
mean anything by the sounds it makes, nor to have
any thoughts. And so I think in the end, I
might disagree with Davidson here, but I think he is
making a very interesting point. He's arguing that even if
the Swamp Man, you know, the perfect copy of him
created out of this tree by Strike of a Lightning,

(34:29):
even if it is a perfect copy of him that
behaves exactly as he would in every scenario, it nevertheless
is not capable of having actual thoughts. and that whatever
statements it makes have no meaning because the swamp man
never learned the actual connection between objects and phenomena in

(34:52):
the real world and the words and concepts that point
to them. Davidson's trying to make a point that meaning
is created not just by internal mental states in the brain,
but by instead a relationship between those internal mental states
and and a history of interactions with the external world

(35:13):
that caused those mental states to arise. And it is
the fact that you learned to associate the word dog
with this actual material fluffy quadruped in the real world
that makes the word dog mean something when you say
it or think it. A swamp man that has never

(35:34):
seen or met or even learned any, has never encountered
any kind of sensory evidence of a dog, but can
use the word dog correctly in a sentence, does not
actually know what dog means. And thus, when it uses
the word dog, it is not actually talking about a dog.
In fact, it is not talking about anything. This is

(35:57):
another way of phrasing the point he's getting at. According
to Davidson- aboutness comes from this history of relations between
internal signals and external phenomena. So if we take this
to the analogy of the Star Trek transporter, to be clear,
Davidson never used this example himself, but it's similar enough
to the Swamp Man. I think he would probably argue

(36:20):
that after being teleported, the copy of Mr. Spock that
arrives down on the planet is does not actually have thoughts,
at least not initially. You know, it could go on
and live a life and maybe have experiences and learn
associations and have thoughts later. But initially, the newly teleported
Spock does not have thoughts. And when it speaks, the

(36:43):
words it speaks do not mean anything because this new
Spock has no causal history to connect those words to experiences.
This view is sometimes called externalism. Davidson's is one version
of the idea that thoughts or mental content cannot refer
only to internal structures or states in the brain. They

(37:05):
have to involve the external world. And specifically, Davidson actually
argues you need like three different things in order for
thoughts to have meaning. You've got to have, of course,
the self, the thinker. You have to have the external
world as the things you were thinking or talking about.
And then Usually, you also need at least one other
person or mind to communicate with. With these three things together,

(37:28):
meaning can actually be created because the self is able
to have the thoughts. The external world is something for
those thoughts to be about. And then with another mind,
you can compare thoughts about the external world to triangulate
and check for validity. Essentially, you can talk. And these
three things together generate the aboutness of mental activity. This

(37:49):
triangle is how meaning arises. So Davidson here tries to
leverage this swamp man argument to make the further case
that there are limits to self-knowledge through introspection. And the
background here is, you know, he's arguing against an existing
point of view because some philosophers in the tradition of

(38:10):
Descartes would argue that knowledge about your own thoughts is
basically infallible i think therefore i am and it's impossible
for me to be wrong about that in the same
way it's impossible for me to be wrong about what
i think i mean when i think of a dog
yeah but davidson says no actually it is not impossible

(38:33):
for you to be wrong swamp man could look at
an animal and say i think that's a dog But
Swamp Man has actually never met or seen or learned
about dogs before. So Swamp Man is incorrect about what
his own thoughts mean. And for a Star Trek analogy here,
Spock could beam down to a planet. He could see

(38:55):
a creature with the gray elf face with the fangs
and long white hair and suction cup fingers. And Spock
could say, that is a salt vampire. I've dealt with
one of these before. But the newly created Spock that
was reassembled by the teleporter has actually never seen assault vampires,
never met one. So while he can say the words

(39:16):
and behave as if he has met assault vampire, the
words don't actually have meaning. And he is thus wrong
about what his own thoughts mean. Our knowledge of our
own thoughts is not infallible, according to Davidson. Now, plenty

(39:40):
of philosophers reject Davidson's argument here. One response that we've
talked about on the show before is the late philosopher
Daniel Dennett's response. Dennett said, you know, Swamp Man is
interesting to play around with. Clearly, I think he liked
talking about this thought experiment, so he was not like
hostile to it. But he argued a couple of things

(40:01):
about it. For one thing, he said it's actually a
good illustration of why thought experiments tend to become less
useful or less valid the more they depart from plausible reality.
This scenario could never actually happen. That's never going to
just happen, like lightning strikes a tree and it makes

(40:21):
a perfect copy of somebody. And because it could never
actually happen, our intuitions are not very useful in manipulating
and drawing conclusions from it. For Dennett, thought experiments are
more illuminating when the scenarios they describe are somewhat realistic,
because then our intuitions are better tuned to react sensibly

(40:43):
to them. But beyond that, in actually addressing Davidson's argument,
Dennett wrote that with that plausibility caveat, the conclusion actually
didn't pass the basic intuition test. For Dennett, it's like
if it walks like a duck and it quacks like
a duck, most people actually would assume it's a duck.

(41:03):
And similarly, if the Swamp Man were actually created and
it behaves exactly like you, Most people would just assume
that it is you, and it actually is able to
think about a dog, even if it is never in
its own form as these atoms physically met a dog.
If Swamp Man's behavior is functional, why should we say

(41:24):
it is not meaningful? So for Dennett, though a history
of interactions with the outside world and other minds that
does in fact explain how our mental representations come to
have meaning, that history is just how it usually happens.
It's not a necessary part of the definition of what

(41:45):
thought and meaning are. So Dennett's position is sometimes called functionalism.
His would be a version of functionalism. If it behaves
exactly the same as a thinking being, and you can
make accurate predictions by imagining it as a thinking being,
then we have no reason to say it's not a
thinking And if those thoughts are behaviorally indistinguishable from thoughts

(42:09):
that have meaning, we have no valid reason to say
that they don't have meaning. One thing I was thinking about,
neither of the philosophers I was just talking about make
this comparison. Uh, but I was thinking about the idea
of like, okay, so if you imagine the swamp man
or the, the traveler who just went through the star
Trek transporter as kind of having meaning, uh, like a,

(42:32):
like a, uh, System operating software that comes pre-installed on
your computer when you arrive at an analogy to nature
in some ways, I think, could be the way that
animal brains in nature can have associations that are not
learned through experience, but delivered genetically through innate instinct. Like

(42:53):
some prey animals know with no prior experience to be
afraid of certain shapes of predators, like the silhouette of
a hawk or something, maybe the shape of a snake.
And if you think about it like this, you can
think that like, well, okay, so learning and prior interaction
with the world is usually necessary in order for internal
states like thoughts to have meaning. But that prior interaction

(43:16):
doesn't have to have happened to the same mass of
atoms that make up your current body. That prior interaction
could have happened in the case of the transporter to
the body of which a copy is made. Or in
the case of the real world in biology, it could
have happened to other organisms that were subsequently shaped by

(43:37):
evolution to have instinctual knowledge coming pre-installed by the time
that you're born.

Speaker 1 (43:43):
That's a great point, yeah.

Speaker 3 (43:45):
So anyway, this raises the question, like, you imagine McCoy
is beamed down to the planet. McCoy hates it. He says,
I didn't join Starfleet to have my atoms scattered back
and forth across the galaxy, but sorry, you did. That's
what you got to do. So you're going to get
beamed down to the planet. No, you don't like it.
So McCoy arrives on the planet. What does this now

(44:07):
arrived McCoy actually know or mean when he thinks about
a friend or a familiar concept, especially if you take
the view that the original McCoy was destroyed and this
is a reassembled a new body out of new atoms
and molecules?

Speaker 1 (44:21):
Yeah, like this numerically, this McCoy does not know anything.
quote unquote, know anyone on the ship that he just
beamed down from and is carrying out a mission that
is just pre-installed. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (44:36):
I don't know exactly where I come down here. I
think I would tend to lean more toward the functionalist
view that says, you know, if this McCoy is behaving
as if he knows, you know, Nancy Crater here on
the planet, he does know her. And the words he's saying,
he's behaving as if the words have meaning. We have
no reason to say that the words do not have meaning,

(44:57):
even though he may never have used these words before.
But yeah, it's a scenario that is so removed from reality.
I agree with Dennett's point that it is kind of
hard to apply our intuitions to it. We may just
be kind of.
Being led astray by weird little kind of red herrings,

(45:17):
little actually not important features of the scenario because this
is a scenario we would never actually deal with. So
we don't have to know how to react to it.

Speaker 1 (45:29):
Right, right. The more pressing real-world versions of this would be, say,
some sort of a machine or an advanced language model
that's presenting itself as McCoy or some individual.

Speaker 3 (45:41):
And you know what? They're... When you think about it
that way, I have intuitions. I'm not sure they're correct.
They might just be kind of an emotivism, like emotional expressions.
But if you start asking me, do I think that
the things said by a large language model AI are meaningful?
Is it actually having thoughts? Part of me there seems

(46:03):
to think no, actually. I feel more like this is
a kind of uncomprehending but sophisticated manipulation of symbols. But
I don't know. Maybe that's just a kind of emotional
bias on my part.

Speaker 1 (46:19):
Yeah, this, of course, is a huge area of consideration. And,
you know, by some estimates, maybe there is a line
there and it's not necessarily visible to us. And once
we cross that threshold, we are getting into an area
where there is something like consciousness on the other end.
And otherwise, maybe not. But again, a more. practical and

(46:41):
near-future consideration compared to the complete, you know, down to
the molecule, down to the atom, down to the very
synapse in the brain copy that is created by some
sort of teleportation device. But still, the Swamp Man discussion
is a lot of fun.

Speaker 3 (46:58):
I mean, do you have intuitions on this? Like, what
do you think? Like, Does it make sense to you
that a being could have meaning when it refers to
something that it has actually never experienced in any way?

Speaker 1 (47:11):
I mean, people talk about things they have little experience
with all the time. It doesn't mean I necessarily... Is
it meaningful? Yeah, I mean, sometimes. I mean, I guess
it's a sliding scale. Yeah. I guess I tend to...
Dealing with this particular scenario, I tend to believe that, yes,

(47:31):
if you've made a complete 100% copy of McCoy and
he has preloaded opinions about things that, yes, numerically, this
individual has never actually encountered, it doesn't take away from
the meaning behind it. When you beam him down and

(47:51):
he's going to start giving you a medical checkup, I
totally trust him. to apply medical care to me. I'm
not going to say, oh, but you actually don't have
personal experience treating anyone. That was the other copy. No,
like this is good enough. So I guess I tend
to buy into good enough-isms when it comes to this

(48:12):
sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (48:13):
Yeah, I guess the functionalist view again, yeah.

Speaker 1 (48:15):
Yeah. By the way, I think I've mentioned this on
the show before, but I researched this a little bit
at one point. Obviously, Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing
has close parallels to Davidson's Swamp Man scenario. Prior to
Alan Moore writing on the Swamp Thing title for DC Comics,
Swamp Thing was like a man who became a monster

(48:37):
in the more typical sense, but Alan Moore recasts the
character in a very Swamp Man way, being completely destroyed
and recreated in the likeness of the previous individual. And
as far as I can tell, No one is entirely
certain on how and to what extent these two were
actually connected. And of the two, only Alan Moore is

(49:00):
still alive. But it basically seems to be a case
where Alan Moore was creating entertainment based on philosophy. And
then Davidson was creating philosophy based on pop culture entertainment.
So maybe it's entirely possible that the two were completely unaware.
of each other. That's funny.

Speaker 3 (49:21):
By the way, I have thought multiple times that I
want to come back and check out one of the
Swamp Thing movies for Weird Alice.

Speaker 1 (49:27):
Oh, yeah. The Swamp Thing movies, they also came about
after Alan Moore's tremendous run on the series. But the
bear none of its complexity, but they're still pretty fun.
Still pretty fun movies.

Speaker 3 (49:41):
Did Wes Craven do one of them?

Speaker 1 (49:43):
He did. He did the first one. And Louis Jourdan
playing the villain in that one.

Speaker 2 (49:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (49:49):
Haven't seen him, but I gotta make it there one day.

Speaker 1 (50:02):
Now, coming a bit back to science fiction itself. Teleportation
science fiction naturally predates Star Trek itself. And this gets
pretty fascinating when you start tearing into it. There was
an 1877 short story titled The Man Without a Body
by Edward Page Mitchell that by some estimates might be

(50:23):
the earliest example of teleportation science fiction detailing a method
by which matter is telepumped. from one point to another
over a telephone wire. I believe a cat is telephoned
in this story. And then when it comes to the
term teleportation, it's my understanding that this largely originates with

(50:46):
Charles Forte. When you hear the word Fortean, this is
the Charles Forte in question here. He wrote a lot
about anomalous phenomena.

Speaker 3 (50:58):
Yeah, the namesake of the Fortean times.

Speaker 1 (51:00):
Exactly, yes. He coined this term teleportation in his then
consideration of mysterious disappearances and appearances as far back as 1931.
So things like someone vanishes or fish fall out of
the sky, that sort of thing. Okay. Now, prior to
Star Trek, one of the really big ones is Alfred
Bester's The Star is My Destination, which employed the idea

(51:23):
of teleportation, calling it jaunting, which of course also influenced
Stephen King, apparently, because this is... Because he has the excellent,
terrifying 1981 sci-fi horror tale, The Jaunt, which was published
in Twilight Zone magazine. Now, whether King's jaunt is truly
teleportation is another matter, I imagine.

Speaker 3 (51:44):
It's been a while since I read that, but it
has a very mentally grisly twist. Folks, if you want
to experience the story unspoiled and want to keep listening,
I don't know, skip 20 seconds ahead. basically the idea
is that when you go through teleportation, you have to
take a sedative to be asleep when it happens because
if you are conscious at the moment of teleportation, you

(52:06):
get mentally imprisoned for like billions of years inside of
a consciousness jail where you're just stuck there with nothing
to experience and you go insane.

Speaker 1 (52:17):
Yeah, you come out of the end completely insane and
then Oompa Loompas sing a song about how you shouldn't
have done that.

Speaker 2 (52:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (52:24):
Now another key predecessor, and we've we've referenced this already
a little bit in this episode, is George Langolin's 1957
sci-fi horror tale, The Fly, which was made into a
film the following year. It was originally published in the
June 1957 edition of Playboy magazine. And it, of course,
introduces the most famous teleporter accident in science fiction. What

(52:46):
happens if I enter a telepod with a house fly
and then you mix the idea, you do a mashup
of these two concepts and And that's what emerges on
the other end. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (52:58):
Did Brundle absorb fly?

Speaker 1 (53:00):
No. Fusion. We did a whole episode of Stuff to
Blow Your Mind, not Weird House Cinema, Stuff to Blow
Your Mind about the fly many years back where we
got into some of the additional teleportation considerations when you're
talking about sending one human through the teleporter. And maybe

(53:21):
you don't have to worry just about the fly, but
how about all the other things that live inside us?
that are genetically different from us.

Speaker 3 (53:27):
Oh, I forgot about that. Yeah, when you get fused
with all of your gut microbiota and all that.

Speaker 1 (53:32):
Yeah. Now, in Star Trek, the Federation seems to have
various safeguards in place to keep this sort of thing
from happening. But if you've watched Star Trek enough, you
know that transporter mishaps do occur. Sometimes, as with the fly,
they seem to happen for sheer horror's sake. The main
example of this is from 1979's Star Trek, The Motion Picture. Joe,

(53:54):
I don't know if you remember this moment or not.
I'm not sure how you could forget it in which
two individuals are fatally distorted via the transporter. They're like
not able to get in all the way. And then
they're gone and we're just told what we got back
didn't live long, fortunately. Yeah. So it's like straight up,
you know, horror moment here in that in that film,

(54:16):
more in line with the fly or or even the jaunt.

Speaker 3 (54:20):
Why did that happen in the story? Was it just
random or was there a sabotage of some kind?

Speaker 1 (54:26):
I don't know. You know, it's been so long since
I've seen Star Trek, the motion picture. I don't even
remember how important it was. It was more about setting
the tone that, like, this is Star Trek, the motion picture,
and the stakes are pretty high. Because prior to this,
you know, we did have teleporter mishaps on Star Trek,
the original series. For instance, in the episode, The Enemy Within,

(54:47):
the transporter messes up and generates two Captain Kirk's. One
that embodies all the goodness of Captain Kirk and the
other one that's all the evil. So the best and
the worst of an individual split into two beings who then,
you know, duke it out.

Speaker 3 (55:02):
Now, I imagine they have to deal with the bad Kirk,
but at the end of the episode, are you just
left with the good Kirk or do they re-merge back together?

Speaker 1 (55:10):
I believe we re-merge because the good, because that's the,
I guess that's kind of the meat of what they're
getting into here is the, if you take all the
good out of the person, like that's still not the person.
You've created good. Two versions of the individual that aren't
the original. So you've got to reconsolidate. It's an episode
that I haven't gotten to yet. So there may be
some nuts and bolts of that episode that I'm not

(55:32):
aware of. Now, I'm more familiar with the Next Generation
teleporter mishaps, and there are some doozies in there. There's
an episode called Rascals in which four crew members... are
reverted to their 12-year-old selves. And I have not seen
this one since I was a young person, but I

(55:52):
remember it being a lot of fun because, you know, oh, suddenly,
you know, they're these characters that are basically my age
and they're running around the Starship Enterprise.

Speaker 3 (56:01):
Is one of them Riker?

Speaker 1 (56:03):
Well, I had to look it up to remind myself.
It's actually, yeah, it's Whoopi Goldberg's character. It's Picard. It's
Ensign Roe. and then a character by the name of
O'Brien that I don't clearly remember all that well. But yeah,
they're all reduced to 12-year-old versions of themselves. How is
that possible? You know, for plot reasons, it's possible.

Speaker 3 (56:25):
Do they retain all of their adult knowledge and minds,
or do they, like, revert to what they knew and
were when they were 12?

Speaker 1 (56:33):
Like, are they Muppet babies, kind of?

Speaker 2 (56:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (56:36):
I don't remember how this one plays out. I think
clearly maybe one of the sillier examples. But then there's
another episode, and I remember this one too, and this
one I remember being quite good. And I think this
one also involves Ensign Rowe, as well as Geordi LaForge.
A mishap with the teleporter makes them invisible and intangible,
so they become like ghosts aboard the Enterprise. So that

(57:01):
one I remember being pretty good. One of the more
famous examples from Star Trek The Next Generation is the
episode Second Chances. in which we get two Lieutenant Rikers.
So essentially the way this happens is they're trying to beam,
at one point in the past, they were trying to
beam him back up and there were challenging environmental conditions

(57:22):
in place. They're like, okay, we'll use two channels to
do it, to pull him up from the surface. And
then we're going to consolidate all of that into one Riker.
But I guess this way, it's like you get incomplete
information on one side, incomplete on the other, but between
the two streams, we'll have one complete Riker. Okay. Sounds good.
But only one beam makes it back up. And it
delivers a full Riker. The other beam bounces back down

(57:45):
to the surface and creates another Riker who's identical. So
now you have two Rikers, but one gets to go home.
And if memory serves, the other one is like left
Robinson Crusoe on the planet's surface. So we end up
with years later, we have two different Rikers. We have
William Riker and then we have Thomas Riker. So identical
at the point of creation, but each has gone a

(58:06):
different way since then.

Speaker 3 (58:07):
What is the Crusoe Riker like? Is he, like, bitter
about it?

Speaker 1 (58:11):
Yeah, yeah. As I recall, he's bitter. Yeah. These two,
they don't get along.

Speaker 2 (58:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (58:18):
That's an interesting plot device because, yeah, it's easy to
imagine all the different ways that you could not like
yourself or not like people who you otherwise like if
you just get to see them react to different circumstances
than you.

Speaker 1 (58:32):
Yeah, yeah. Or if you met the you that had
slightly different circumstances, right? Yeah. The you you could have been. Now,
there's an episode of Voyager, and I watched, I think,
none of Voyager. I think it basically came out when
I was kind of getting out of watching Star Trek.
But I understand it has some great episodes. But you
have two characters that get merged into a third character,

(58:54):
a character named Tuvix. But not in the fly way,
not in a monstrous way. But it's like two individuals
become a new third individual that is like a perfect
blending of the previous two. And so that one, I
think gets into questions of like, okay, we have an
entirely new person. Do they have the right to exist?
Or are you going to separate them into the two

(59:15):
people that were merged to make them? Again, kind of
an impossible situation. I'm not sure to what extent this
one has any like real life ramifications, but still an
inventive development. All right. These next two are ones that, um, that,
that I, that I have definitely seen. One of them
I think was probably the Star Trek next generation episode

(59:36):
that blew my mind the most of the time. I
don't know. There were several like that. They really presented
me with sci-fi concepts that I'd never encountered before. There
was a, there's an episode titled relics and it was
always a favorite of mine because it features a Dyson sphere.
Like the, the ship encounters a Dyson sphere. They go
inside of it and you see like the interior surface
of it that is, uh, you know, like a planetary surface,

(59:59):
like a hollow Earth and with the sun captured in
the middle. I had not been exposed to this concept
in science fiction or, you know, or cosmology before. So
this was entirely new, just completely blew my mind.

Speaker 3 (01:00:14):
I still remember how bizarre and exciting it was when
I first found out about this concept. I'd never seen
it in fiction. I think I just read about it
and still it was so weird.

Speaker 1 (01:00:24):
Yeah. So for me, that's the most memorable thing about
this episode. But It was also pretty neat because they
happened to beam in Montgomery Scott, played by James Doohan
from the original Star Trek series, with the idea here
being that he was, this former version of himself was
preserved in a transporter buffer. So the information from the transporter,

(01:00:49):
like between point A and point B, got just stuck with,
you know, due to some sort of significant energy overflow,
I think from the Dyson sphere here. And so they
were able to just beam him into being. It's a
cached page. Yeah, a cached page. But once it's reproduced, well,
there you go. Here he is again. In a similar way,

(01:01:10):
the current series, Star Trek Strange New Worlds, that I've
really been enjoying, the chief medical officer on that is
this character, Joseph Mbinga, played by Babs Oluson Mokon. he
was in Dune. He played Jamis, a really good actor.
But this character keeps his terminally sick daughter, we find out,

(01:01:31):
in a transporter buffer. So she has some sort of ailment.
I forget the details of it. But basically, she has
very little time to live in reality. So what he
can do is he can keep her in a transporter
buffer and bring her out of that transporter buffer periodically
to spend time with her, but then puts her back in.
It's almost like keeping her frozen until such a time

(01:01:53):
as her ailments can be properly treated. So these are
just some of the ones that came to my mind
or that I was aware of or popped up on
a few lists here and there. There are probably some
other great examples of teleporter mishaps that have created some
great drama and some fascinating ideas on Star Trek. And
I'm sure they're going to keep coming up with new ones.

(01:02:15):
But even the ones we've discussed here, they raise so
many questions about like the The power of teleportation as
revealed in Star Trek, like what are all the things
that you could conceivably do that don't necessarily fit into
the world and of the show and the plot of
individual episodes? Like if you can filter out biocontaminants from

(01:02:36):
someone's information when it's being back to the ship, what
else can you filter out? What else can you change?
Could you improve on the original individual each time? You know, naturally,
that would take things into the forbidden zone of augments
in the Trek universe. But it's easy to imagine how
society could be completely changed by access to such technology. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:02:57):
It makes you wonder, like, why would you even need
physical medical interventions? Couldn't all of your medical interventions be database?

Speaker 1 (01:03:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:03:05):
You know, it's like if instead of doing physical things
to your body when you've got when you've got an
infection or something like that, they could just. put you
into the teleporter and then pop up, make some digital
edits and then pop out an information based version of
you without the infection.

Speaker 1 (01:03:22):
Yeah. Yeah. Basically be like, I'm just going to do
an Amazon return on my current state of physical or
mental wellbeing.

Speaker 3 (01:03:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:03:30):
Just to run this one through again. And some of
this too, you can, I don't know. It also brings
me once again, back to the fly, more specifically David
Cronenberg's treatment of it. I'm sure you remember early on
in the film, Dr. Brundle believes that that teleportation through
the pods has purified and improved him. He doesn't know
yet that he's been fused at a genetic level with

(01:03:52):
a house fly. So for a while, he's just like
the process itself is purifying. The process itself has made
me like a better and I don't know, more intense person.
So you can imagine like the various possibilities, like actual
possibilities with this kind of technology where people would just
continually redo it and redo themselves. changing themselves and also

(01:04:15):
engaging in the idea that each it's like waking up
in the morning, fully refreshed. Instead of taking a shower
in the morning, you get up, you climb onto the
end of the telepod and you just teleport yourself point
A to point A and then go about your day.
And you don't even have to have a cup of coffee. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:04:32):
Edit out the dirt.

Speaker 1 (01:04:33):
Yeah. Yeah. All right.

Speaker 3 (01:04:35):
Does that do it for you?

Speaker 1 (01:04:37):
I think that's probably the limit. Obviously, I could keep
rambling on about sci-fi teleportation. Endlessly fascinating topic. But again,
we have no firm answers on consciousness or teleportation here today.
But maybe we gave everyone some food for thought, food
for discussion as well. Obviously, write in with any thoughts, observations,

(01:04:57):
corrections that you have about the use of transporters in
Star Trek media today. If you have anything from extended
Star Trek media you want to write in about or
just other examples of teleportation and science fiction that you
think tie into the discussion here, write in. We would
love to hear from you. Just a reminder that Stuff

(01:05:18):
to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture
podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays each week
in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed. Within
that feed, we also have a short episode on Wednesdays.
And then on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns
to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
And indeed, tomorrow, we will be discussing one of the
Star Trek films.

Speaker 3 (01:05:39):
Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J. Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.

Speaker 2 (01:06:02):
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