Transporters and Consciousness in Star Trek

In this special 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.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and dian Joe McCormick, 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 out there. We are not
going to fully explain consciousness, nor are we going to

(00:34):
fully explain Star Trek transporters or teleportation in the Star
Trek universe.

Speaker 3 (00:40):
This is a big topic.

Speaker 2 (00:42):
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, Star Trek motion pictures and
so forth. But you know, we're still trying to figure

(01:04):
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 perts, I guess,

(01:25):
and as always 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 (01:34):
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

(01:55):
the last episode, I have always liked Star Trek. I'm
not like an anti Trek 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,
handful of episodes of the original series, and mainly the
solid the first whole season of Star Trek the Next Generation,

(02:16):
which people tell me is not the best there ever was.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
The uniforms are super tight and uncomfortable looking. Yeah, on
that season, for sure.

Speaker 3 (02:24):
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 2 (02:32):
It's probably one of those shows where you really need
a curated list of which episodes to hit along the way.
Which I'm to understand is it's much the same with
The X Files, which, yes, as we've discussed in the show,
I'm very under familiar with. I've only seen like one
or two episodes of that.

Speaker 3 (02:49):
Okay, so we're the other way around on that. I've
seen basically all of the X Files, And yeah, 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

(03:09):
I've ever seen.

Speaker 2 (03:11):
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 Stays nine and
watched at least a sizable chunk of all that, and
more recently I've watched Star Trek Exchange New Worlds. I'm
only two seasons into that, but I think that's an

(03:31):
excellent show. There are a 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 trick for me. I
don't need the old stuff, and I just I tended

(03:53):
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 in our preparation for it, I've watched a
couple of the episodes so from the original run, and

(04:13):
it's some pretty fun stuff. I think, I 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 (04:22):
I mean, just this week, I've discovered it has a
lot more screaming plants than I would have imagined.

Speaker 2 (04:28):
In 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 (04:41):
You're talking about Space Seed, the first run with Ricardo Montleblanc. Yeah,
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 Kahn with some
kind of clever trick. You know, he uses like a
I bet you didn't think of this, really, he just
sort of hits him.

Speaker 2 (05:01):
Yeah. Yeah, he pulls something out of the wall there.
It looks kind of like the pump from like an
industrial catchup dispenser. Yeah yeah, yeah, grabs that hits him
with it.

Speaker 3 (05:12):
But that episode not without a lot of cleverness in it.

Speaker 2 (05:14):
Yeah, yeah, I really dug that episode. All right, Well,
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 got your phasers, your tri quarters,
your tractor beams, your photon torpedoes, your holidex, and of

(05:35):
course the transporter. And while the crew of the Enterprise
and other starships can also travel ship to ship and
ship a planet in the show aboard shuttle Craft. 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,

(05:57):
the transporter serves as a key means of mood moving
from orbit to surface, from ship to ship in both
tactical and casual uses.

Speaker 3 (06:05):
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. It's not
like a pad for you to land on or something.
It just sends you wherever, and it can beam you

(06:26):
up from anywhere nearby to the transporter room.

Speaker 2 (06:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (06:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:29):
It's a different deal compared to the telepods of the Fly,
where you're have one pod taking you apart in 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 it in Star Trek. Now,

(06:52):
the basic teleportation principle here, as in other works of
science fiction, is of course matter energy conversion. So break
down matter in to energy, slash information, transmit that energy
pattern to the destination, and then put it all back
together again, transforming energy and information back into matter.

Speaker 3 (07:12):
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

(07:36):
say the least implausible.

Speaker 2 (07:38):
Yeah, yeah, 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. But beyond that, it's like,
we are essentially talking about a civilization that is, depending
on how you cut it, like one point five to

(08:00):
two on the Kardashev scale. So whatever they're doing in
pretty much any realm of science, 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 starting started watching Star Trek internest

(08:22):
via the next generation in the nineties, 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 raises a
number of ethical and philosophical questions. Just the more you

(08:44):
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 creates some interesting plot developments, but also cause the

(09:05):
viewer to think and contemplate. You know, exactly what we
are and how we work, and what is the individual
and so.

Speaker 3 (09:12):
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 transporter. Like
McCoy says in the original series that he does not
want to get on the transport. I mean, he does
it anyway, but he doesn't like it. He finds it
conceptually abhorrent.

Speaker 1 (09:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:34):
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 recreating

(09:57):
an exact copy of themselves elsewhere? And then and when
you move past that sort of gut feeling of heart,
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
is just considering it on that level. It forces you

(10:20):
to deconstruct a lot of what you think you know
about who you are and how your brain operates.

Speaker 3 (10:26):
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,

(10:47):
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 going

(11:08):
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 we are our bodies are
changing moment to moment. You know, I this one moment

(11:32):
am 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. Yeah, and
so the death in time of the me from a
few moments ago, just as you know, the seconds tick by,
that doesn't really feel like a death or like anything
came to an end, even though I am a different

(11:54):
being now than I was just a few moments ago. Uh,
it does feel like that would be something different than
what we're imagining with the transporter, where your your body
is decomposed into atoms or even I don't know, decomposed
into what. Yeah, and that does seem to more intuitively
suggest there will be a final kind of end to

(12:14):
your conscious experience, even if something like you is getting
to carry on.

Speaker 2 (12:19):
Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely right. Yeah, the teleportation here that
the transport seems to, in a lovely way, exaggerate, greatly
exaggerate some of what may already be going on with us, because,
like you said, our bodies are constantly changing, our identity
changes over time to varying degrees, and we periodically have

(12:41):
interruptions in consciousness. I mean, if nothing else, we go
to sleep every night. You know, we may undergo surgery
at some point in our life, and then we have
you know, little altered states of consciousness that arise along
the way as well.

Speaker 3 (12:55):
I have had this thought going into general anesthesia before
I've 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 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

(13:17):
somehow I right now before surgery never get to wake up.
There's no way to prove that or disprove I mean,
you know, that's not like an empirically testable thing. There
is just it's just a weird kind of headspace you
can get into.

Speaker 2 (13:32):
Yeah, 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 bit different,

(13:54):
You feel refreshed.

Speaker 3 (13:55):
But are you.

Speaker 2 (13:56):
Feeling refreshed as in you just stepped out of the
telepod and now you have brundlefly 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 a lot of it does
boil down to consciousness and identity. Because to be clear,

(14:21):
Star Trek's Teleportation, to my knowledge, has never engaged in
any direct contemplation of at least as far as teleportation
goes as soul. I know that some episodes, you know,
get into more spiritual territory, and you do have entities
that are an encounter that do not have physical bodies,
So you know, it can kind of be all over

(14:42):
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
materialist more often than not, So you know, it's not

(15:03):
getting into what we would call mind body dualism. The
ideaic 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 (15:15):
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'd just say, from
my personal point of view, I am I personally have

(15:37):
a materialist view of 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

(15:58):
ghost that is physically separate bull from the brain.

Speaker 2 (16:01):
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

(16:22):
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
more of a dualist approach to it and think more
in terms of like a soul and a body, either
casually in terms or just interacting with language. And I
don't know, poetry and song and so forth, or you know,

(16:46):
maybe 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 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 or the best thought
provoking content. Yeah, but it is crazy then to think, though, Okay,

(17:07):
if we're engaging in 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

(17:32):
same consciousness is reawakened, but it is not the exact
same consciousness in terms of there was consciousness one, and
now there's consciousness too, but consciousness too it's identical to
consciousness one, which no longer exists.

Speaker 3 (17:44):
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 they
are not, it's not possible for that person that brain,

(18:04):
that body to think I Am still the same person
who came out the other end. They're just 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.

Speaker 2 (18:23):
M Yeah, 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 were a silo,
or rather you were a silhouette cast by a shadow puppet.
That is what your consciousness is, that is what your

(18:45):
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 on the screen on the wall, and likewise you
could destroy the puppet, write down instructions for how to

(19:07):
build an identical puppet, and that putt 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, ultimately, maybe that's how someone
in the Star Trek universe is supposed to think about themselves.

(19:28):
And you know, don't get caught up and offt the
ideas about about your eternal soul. You know, you were
you were a silhouette on a wall.

Speaker 3 (19:35):
I can see how that could be a very comforting framework.
Though at the same time, I think a person going
into a transport transporter, were this a real technology, could
be forgiven for not wanting their experience of the world
to cease and and to to essentially die from their
own first person perspective, uh, just to get a copy
of themselves somewhere else. It's almost taking on a kind

(19:58):
of I don't know, like a worker aunt 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 (20:08):
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 it, 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

(20:36):
mentioned this, but of course a common thought experiment and
analogy that comes up all the time is of 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

(20:59):
replaced the entire ship. Is it still the same ship?

Speaker 3 (21:02):
Right?

Speaker 2 (21:03):
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 the 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 but yes. Another sort of navel gazing thought

(21:27):
that I've often had watching Star Trek is the what
if you do have an eternal soul? Okay, what if
we were to have like 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 recreated on the other end,

(21:48):
like 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 (21:57):
You get a new soul, you multiply souls just going
through the transporter, and then what happens when the new
one dies? Now there are two us in heaven or
in hell?

Speaker 2 (22:06):
You know. Well, but then we're a materialist again though, right,
because the soul a soul pops into being because the
body exists. But what if I guess, I guess if
we're doing well, No.

Speaker 3 (22:17):
If you're dualist, you could 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
wherever the souls are going, they're just accumulating, right.

Speaker 2 (22:40):
Yeah, 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 and teleportation is pretty

(23:02):
mind boggling because the transporter here wouldn't just be recording,
breaking down and rebuilding your body and your brain and
you know, the cells, the molecules and every atom and
so forth, but it would have to we would also
have to copy, send, and then replicate patterns of neural activity,
so neurons, synapses, electrochemical signals, and synaptic plasticity. Copying of

(23:27):
a person's in grams, 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 so much
that would have to so much information here that would

(23:49):
have to be recorded, sent and then reproduced.

Speaker 3 (23:52):
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

(24:12):
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

(24:32):
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 maybe that raises questions about like just how
much impossibility almost would be involved in actually trying to

(24:55):
create a perfect copy of a living body.

Speaker 2 (24:58):
Yeah, Like it kind of comes out of a question
of like how high detail is the snapshot of the body,
and then ultimately how much information are we talking about?

Speaker 3 (25:08):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (25:09):
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.

Speaker 3 (25:32):
All right, 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 2 (25:42):
That's right, Yeah, we talked about We talked about two.
As is our practice on Anthology of Horror, we each
picked out an episode from a TV horror, horror or
sci fi anthology series and we discussed like some of
the ideas there. And the one we talked about one
of the two that we talked about in this episode,
it was from the nineteen nineties Outer Limits series. It

(26:02):
was an episode 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 the concepts explored in that episode line
up rather perfectly with the work of Derek Parfitt, a
British philosopher who specialized in personal identity, among other subjects.

(26:23):
He lived nineteen forty two through twenty seventeen. He gets
into this in his nineteen eighty seven 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 on Earth, their

(26:47):
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 something messed up and
the original was not destroyed. Which is which is the
individual the original copy or the new copy or they're
the original or the copy rather, And so yeah, he

(27:09):
gets into this and choose 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, recomplete continuation of who I am.

(27:31):
And 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

(27:51):
the same but not literally the same person in a
physical sense.

Speaker 3 (27:55):
Kind of in the same way that you can have
two copies of the same book, but they're not literally
the same object, right right.

Speaker 2 (28:03):
And likewise, numerically identical individuals, he points out, can also
become qualitatively different. And this is this is something as
I'll bring this up again here in a bit, this
is also something that's explored in Star Trek. You know
what happens if you have two copies but then of
the same they're essentially the same person, but then they
have different events that occur to them afterwards.

Speaker 3 (28:27):
Yeah, that would actually be really if you could do that,
that would be great for like psychology and medical experiments
and stuff get.

Speaker 2 (28:36):
Out in the Federation. The Federation wouldn't do that. Maybe
the Romulans are up to that.

Speaker 3 (28:40):
Well, no, not to do that on purpose. Let's just say,
as you accidentally create a bunch of exact atom for
adam copies of people 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,
true true groups.

Speaker 2 (29:00):
So Parfit sums us 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
person is someone else. So again highlighting that this idea

(29:24):
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
really awesome meal, or see an amazing movie, read a
great book. Well, congratulations, you just destroyed yourself and recreated

(29:47):
a doppelganger of yourself that is qualitatively different than who
you were.

Speaker 3 (29:53):
Yeah, this is a philosophical question that has been explored
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 that, or

(30:14):
like change jobs. You know, something is 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, we'll we'll doing this,
We'll making this big change in my life better get

(30:34):
me towards 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 2 (30:53):
Yeah, yeah, I've mentioned it before, but there's a Terrence
mckinne quote that is at once reassuring I sometimes turn
to it for rescis insurance, 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,

(31:13):
I don't know. It kind of reverses the flow of
how we think about our own agency in life.

Speaker 3 (31:20):
Yeah, anyway, Rob, you cool if I talk about swamp man.

Speaker 2 (31:23):
Now, yeah, let's summon the swamp man.

Speaker 3 (31:25):
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

(31:48):
of the American Philosophical Association. You're nineteen eighty seven, and
in the paper he sets up the swampman thought experiment
like this quote. Suppose light strikes a dead tree in
a swamp. I am standing nearby. My body is reduced
to its elements, while entirely by coincidence, and out of

(32:10):
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 didn't.

(32:33):
He writes his kind of articles. No one can tell
the difference. But the interesting thing here is that Davidson.
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.

(32:55):
Davidson is not making a point about identity. He's trying
to make a point of 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 can't know my friend's names, though

(33:19):
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 mean anything by the

(33:40):
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 light, even if it is a

(34:02):
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 the real world and the

(34:25):
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 a history of
interactions with the external world that cause those mental states

(34:47):
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
means something when you say it or think it. A
swamp man that has never seen or met or even

(35:07):
learned any that 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 another way of phrasing

(35:30):
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 swampman, I
think he would probably argue that after being teleported, the

(35:54):
copy of mister Spock that arrives down on the planet
does not actually have thoughts, at least not initially. Now
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 words it speaks do not mean anything,

(36:17):
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 structure, structures, or
states in the brain. They have to involve the external world,

(36:40):
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. It's 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, meaning can actually be created

(37:01):
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 triangle is how meaning arises.

(37:24):
So Davidson here tries to leverage this Swampman 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 Descartes would argue that knowledge

(37:45):
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. But Davidson says, no, actually,
it is not impossible for you to be wrong. Swamp

(38:07):
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 a creature with the gray olfface,

(38:29):
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 and behave as if he has met

(38:50):
a salt salt 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 of philosophers reject Davidson's argument here.

(39:15):
One response that we've talked about on the show before
is the late philosopher Daniel Dennett's response. Dennett said, you know,
Swampman 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
things about it. For one thing, he said, it's actually
a good illustration of why thought experiments tend to become

(39:39):
less useful or less valid the more they depart from
plausible reality. This scenario could never actually happen, the swamp
that's never going to just happen like lightning strikes a
tree and it makes 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 Dinnet,

(40:05):
thought experiments are more illuminating when the scenarios they describe
are somewhat realistic, because then our intuitions are better tuned
to react sensibly 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 dinner,

(40:28):
It's like, if it walks like a duck and it
quacts like a duck, most people actually would assume it's
a duck. And similarly, if the swampmen 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.

(40:52):
If swampman's behavior is functional, why should we say it
is not meaningful? So for Dinnet, 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 like

(41:13):
not a necessary part of the definition of what thought
and meaning are. So Dennet'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

(41:35):
thinking being. And if those thoughts are behaviorally indistinguishable from
thoughts 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. But I was thinking about the
idea of like, okay, so if you imagine the swamp

(41:56):
man or the traveler who just went through the Star
Trek transporter as kind of having meaning like a 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

(42:16):
nature can have associations that are not learned through experience,
but delivered genetically through innate instinct. Like 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,

(42:38):
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 doesn't have to have happened to
the same massive 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,

(43:02):
or in the case of the real world in biology,
it could have happened to other organisms that were subsequently
shaped by evolution to have instinctual knowledge coming pre installed
by the time that you're born.

Speaker 2 (43:15):
That's a great point.

Speaker 3 (43:16):
Yeah, So anyway, this raises the question, Like you imagine,
McCoy is beamed down to the planet. McCoy hates it.
He says, I didn't want I didn't join Starflee to
have my atoms scattered back and forth across the galaxy.
But sorry, you did. That's what you gotta do. So
you're gonna get beamed down to the planet. No, you
don't like it. So McCoy arrives on the planet. What

(43:37):
does this now 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 new body out of
new atoms and molecules.

Speaker 2 (43:53):
Yeah, like this numerically, this McCoy does not know quote
unquote know anyone on the show that he just damned
down from. And is it is carrying out a mission
that is just pre installed.

Speaker 3 (44:07):
Yeah, I don't know exactly where I come down here.
I think I would tend to lean more toward the
functionalist view that says it. You know, if this McCoy
is behaving as if he knows, you know, Nancy Krater
here on the planet, he does know her, and the
words he's saying he's behaving is if the words have meaning.
We have no reason to say that the words do

(44:27):
not have meaning, even though like he may never have
used these words before. But yeah, it's just it's a
scenario that is so removed from reality. I agree with
Dennet'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,

(44:49):
little actually not important features of the scenario. Because this
is a scenario we would never actually deal with, so
we don't we don't know, we don't have to know
how to react to it.

Speaker 2 (45:00):
Right, right, the more like pressing. Real world versions of
this would be say some sort of a machine that
is exactly or an advanced language model that's presenting itself
as McCoy or some individual.

Speaker 3 (45:12):
And you know what there 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

(45:35):
to think no. Actually, I feel more like this is
a kind of uncomprehending but sophisticated manipulation of symbols. But
I don't know it. Maybe that's just a kind of
emotional bias on my part.

Speaker 2 (45:50):
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 crossed 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

(46:13):
near future consideration compared to the complete you know, down
to the molecule, down to the atom down to the
very signups 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 (46:30):
I mean, do you have intuitions on this, Like what
what do you think?

Speaker 1 (46:33):
Like?

Speaker 3 (46:33):
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 2 (46:43):
I mean, people talk about things they have little experience
with all the time. It doesn't mean I said meaningful. Yeah,
I mean sometimes I mean I guess it's a sliding scale. Yeah,
I guess I tend to I tend to deal with
this particular scenario. I tend to believe that, yes, if
you've made a complete one copy of McCoy and and

(47:09):
he has preloaded opinions about things that, yes, numerically this
individual has never actually encountered. Uh, it doesn't take away
from the meaning behind it, Like like what he's when
when he you beam him down and he's going to start,
you know, giving you a medical checkup. I totally trust
him to apply medical care to me. I'm not going

(47:31):
to say, oh, but you actually don't have personal experience
treating anyone that was the other copy. Now, like this
is good enough. So I guess I tend to I
tend to buy into good enough isms when it comes
to this sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (47:45):
Yeah, I guess the functionalist view again. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (47:47):
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

(48:08):
in the more typical sense, but Alan Moore recasts the
character as 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

(48:31):
is 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.

Speaker 3 (48:52):
That's funny. 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 House.

Speaker 2 (48:59):
Oh yeah, yeah, the swamp Thing movies. They also came
about after Alan morris tremendous run on the series, but
bear none of its complexity. Better still just still still
still pretty fun, still pretty fun movies.

Speaker 3 (49:13):
Did Wes Craven do one of them?

Speaker 2 (49:14):
He did? He did the first one. Yeah, And Louis
Jordan playing the villain in that one.

Speaker 3 (49:21):
I haven't seen him, but I gotta make it there
one day.

Speaker 2 (49:34):
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 eighteen seventy seven short story titled The Man Without
a Body by Edward Page Mitchell that, by some estimates,

(49:54):
might be the earliest example of teleportation science fiction, detailing
method by which matter is telepumped from one point to
another over a telephone wire. I believe I believe a
cat is telepumped in this story. And then when it
comes to the term teleportation, it's my understanding that this

(50:15):
largely originates with Charles Fort. When you hear the word Fortian,
this is the Charles Fort in question. Here. He wrote
a lot about anomalous phenomena.

Speaker 3 (50:30):
The namesake of the fourteen Times exactly.

Speaker 2 (50:33):
Yes, he coined this term teleportation in his then consideration
of mysterious disappearances and appearances as far back as nineteen
thirty one. 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 Stars My Destination, which employed the

(50:54):
idea of teleportation, calling it jaunting, which of course also
in Stephen King, apparently because this is because he has
the excellent, terrifying nineteen eighty one 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 (51:16):
It's been a while since I read that, But it
has a very mentally grizzly twist. Folks, if you want
to experience the story unspoiled and want to keep listening,
I don't know, skip twenty 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

(51:37):
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 2 (51:49):
Yeah, he come out of the end completely insane, and
then oop Olympus sing a song about how you shouldn't
have done that.

Speaker 3 (51:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (51:55):
Now, another key predecessor, and we've referenced this already a
little bit in this episode is George Langlan's nineteen fifty
seven sci fi horror tale The Fly, which was made
into a film the following year. It was originally published
in the June nineteen fifty seven edition of Playboy magazine,
and it of course introduces the most famous teleporter accident

(52:17):
in science fiction. What happens if I enter a telepod
with a house fly and then you mix mix the idea,
You do a mashup of these two concepts, and that's
what merges on the other end.

Speaker 3 (52:29):
Yeah, did Brundle absorb Fly? No fusion.

Speaker 2 (52:33):
We did a whole episode of stuff to blow your
mind not weird, howse 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 you don't
have to worry just about the fly, but how about

(52:54):
all the other things that live inside us that are
genetically different than from us? Oh?

Speaker 3 (52:59):
I forgot about. Yeah, wouldn't you get fused with all
of your gut microbioda and all that.

Speaker 2 (53:04):
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 nineteen seventy nine Star Trek
the motion picture Joe, I don't know if you remember

(53:27):
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 them 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 like straight up you know, horror moment here in
that film, more in line with The Fly or even

(53:50):
the Jaunt.

Speaker 3 (53:51):
Why did that happen in the story? Was it just
random or was there a sabotage of some kind?

Speaker 2 (53:57):
I don't 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. If 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 misapps on Star Trek
the original series. For instance, in the episode The Enemy

(54:18):
Within that the transporter messes up and generates to 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 into individual split into
two beings who then, you know, do get out now?

Speaker 3 (54:33):
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 2 (54:42):
I believe we re emerged because the good 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 two versions of the individual that aren't the original,
so you've got to reconsolidate. It's actually it's an episode
that I haven't gotten yet, so there may be some
nuts and bolts of that episode that that I'm not

(55:03):
aware of now a next I am. I'm more familiar
with the next generation teleporder mishaps, and there are some
doozies in there. There's an episode called Rascals in which
four crew members are reverted to their twelve year old selves.
And I have not seen this one since since I
was a young person, but I remember it being a

(55:25):
lot of fun because you know, oh, suddenly you know
they're they're these characters that are basically my age, and
they're running around the starship Enterprise.

Speaker 3 (55:33):
Is one of them Richer Well.

Speaker 2 (55:35):
I had to look it up to remind myself it's actually, yeah,
it's it's Whippie Goldberg's character, it's Picard, it's insign Row,
and then a character by the name of O'Brien that
I don't clearly remember remember all that well, but yeah,
they're all reduced to twelve year old versions of themselves.
How is that possible? You know, it's for plot reasons,

(55:56):
it's possible.

Speaker 3 (55:57):
Do they retain all of their adult knowledge minds? Or
are that do they like revert to what they knew
and were when they were twelve?

Speaker 2 (56:05):
Like are they muppet babies? Kind of? Yeah, I don't
remember how this one plays out. I think clearly maybe
one of the sillier examples. Yeah, 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 Row as well as Jeordie LaForge. A mishap
with the Chet teleporter makes them invisible and intangible, so

(56:27):
they become like ghosts aboard the Enterprise, So that one
I remember being pretty good. One of the more famous
examples from Star Trek the Next Generation is the episode's
Second Chances, in which we get two Lieutenant Rikers. So
essentially the way this happens is they're trying to beam

(56:49):
At one point in the past, they were trying to
beam him back up, and they were challenging environmental conditions
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 that into one riker.
But I guess this way, it's like you could incomplete
information on one side, incomplete on the other. But between
the two streams we'll have one complete riker. Okay, sounds good,

(57:10):
But only one beam makes it back up and it
delivers a full riker. The other beam bounces back down
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

(57:32):
William Riker and then we have Thomas Riker, so identical
at the point of creation, but each has gone a
different way since then.

Speaker 3 (57:39):
What is the Crusoe Riker like? Is he like bitter
about it?

Speaker 2 (57:43):
Yeah? Yeah, there's as I recall, he's bitter. Yeah, these
two they don't get along.

Speaker 3 (57:49):
Yeah, 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.

Speaker 2 (58:03):
You, yeah, yeah, Or if you met the you that
had slightly different circumstances, right, yea, 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
it 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

(58:23):
into a third character, a character named Tuviks, but not
in the flyway, 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 in questions of like, Okay,
we have an entirely new person. Do they have the

(58:44):
right to exist or are you going to separate them
into the two people that were merged to make them again?
Kind of an impossible question. 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 that I that I have definitely seen. One

(59:04):
of them I think was probably the Star Trek Next
Generation episode that blew my mind the most of the time.
I don't know. There were several like that that really
presented me with sci fi concepts that I've never encountered before.
There was a it was an episode titled Relics, and
it was always a favorite of mine because it features
a Dyson sphere. Like the ship encounters a Dyson sphere,

(59:24):
they go inside of it and you see like the
interior surface of it that is, you know, like a
planetary surface, like a hollow Earth, and with the Sun
captured in the middle. I had not been exposed to
this concept in science fiction or or you know, or
cosmology before, so this it was entirely new, just completely

(59:45):
blew my mind.

Speaker 3 (59:46):
I still remember how bizarre and exciting it was when
I first found out of this concept, and I've never
seen it in fiction. I think I just read about it.
Still it was so weird.

Speaker 2 (59:56):
Yeah, So for me, that's the most memorable thing about
this episode. But it was a also pretty neat because
they happened to beam in Montgomery Scott played by James
Doohan Duhan 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

(01:00:19):
from the transporter like between point A and point B,
got just stuck with, you know, due to some sort
of a significant energy overflow I think from the Dyson
sphere here, and so they were able to like just
beam him into being. So yeah, yeah, yeah, cashed page.
But once it's reproduced, well there you go. Here he

(01:00:40):
is again in a similar way. The current series star
Trek Strange New Worlds that I've really been enjoying. The
chief medical officer on that is this character Joseph Imbinga
played by Bab's Ulusan Mocon. He was he was in doone.
He played Jamas, a really good actor. But this character

(01:01:00):
keeps his terminally sick daughter, we find out in a
transporter buffer. So she has some sort of ailment. I
forget the details of it, but basically, you know, 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

(01:01:21):
back in almost like keeping her frozen until such a
time as her ailments can be properly treated. So these
are just these are just some of the ones that
came to my mind or that I was aware of,
or you know, 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

(01:01:42):
fascinating ideas on Star Trek, and I'm sure they're going
to keep coming up with new ones. But even the
ones we've discussed here, there raised so many questions about
like 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

(01:02:05):
you can filter out biocontaminants from someone's you know, 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 an easy to imagine
how a society could be completely changed by access to

(01:02:27):
such technology.

Speaker 3 (01:02:28):
Oh yeah, it makes you wonder like why would you
even need physical medical interventions? Couldn't all of your medical
interventions be databased. Yeah, you know, so 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 out,

(01:02:49):
make some digital edits, and then pop out an information
based version of you without the infection.

Speaker 2 (01:02:54):
Yeah. Yeah, basically be like, I'm just going to do
an Amazon return on my current state of physical or
mental well being, just to run this one through again.
In 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, doctor Brundle believes that

(01:03:16):
that teleportation through the pods has purified and improved him. Yes,
he doesn't know yet that he's been fused at a
genetic level with 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 end, I don't know,
more intense person. So you can imagine like the various possibilities,

(01:03:37):
like actual possibilities with this kind of technology where people
would just continually redo it and redo themselves, changing themselves,
and also engaging in the idea of it 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

(01:03:58):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:04:03):
Yeah, edit out the dirt, Yeah yeah, all right? Does
that do it for you?

Speaker 2 (01:04:09):
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,

(01:04:29):
corrections that you have about the use of transporters in
Star Trek media. If you have anything from you know,
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

(01:04:49):
Stuff 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
win Days 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 (01:05:10):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:05:33):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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