From: jonathan@mantis.co.uk (Jonathan Egre')
Newsgroups: alt.atheism.moderated
Subject: Star Trek transporters and the soul (Re: faith vs. reason)
Date: 24 Sep 92 12:21:29 GMT
Organization: Mantis Consultants, Cambridge. UK.

Brother Redeye <c9221777@cc.newcastle.edu.au> writes:

> In article <1686825B1.PKJAMES@UKCC.UKY.EDU>, PKJAMES@UKCC.UKY.EDU writes:
> > Interesting...?  I may sound psychotic, but one time watching Star Trek,
> > I happened to think about what the transporter did.  Did it "copy" with
> > atoms from the new place or truly "transport" the original ones a a unit
> > through time and space.  That made me question what "identity" was.  Was
> > it the dynamic processes the atoms were going through, or the atoms
> > themself that were my soul-identity, or both?
> -- 
> Fascinating.  I had been pondering this myself.  The process appears to be
> duplication, as on one occasion (the name of the episode escapes me) the
> captain's body was "lost".  They managed to use a record of his body-pattern 
> the transporter matrix to "create" a new one and thus he lived happily ever
> after.

Yes, but if I remember correctly, restoring Kirk from an older image was an
abnormal procedure, which they had to think of themselves; if the transporter
normally worked by duplication, the restoration would have been a standard 
(albeit uncommon) procedure mentioned in the "Owner's Manual".  Also, this 
has only ever happened once; there were many other occasions when people
died, including by transporter malfunction, and were not recovered.

The original Star Trek contradicted itself in many places, due to the 
different scriptwriters not comparing notes closely enough.  The technology
which makes the transporter possible is spectacularly under-used.

I think the following evidence points towards the transporter actually 
moving the original atoms:

(1) Restoring people from older images is clearly not the way things are 
    normally done, see above.

(2) People can be transported to places where the necessary atoms do not
    already exist.

(3) The transporter clearly has a range which is miniscule compared with
    the range of Star Trek communication technology.  A murder & replicate 
    method could be used to transport people to anywhere in the universe
    with a "receiving" transporter; clearly this never happens.

(4) Important people are frequently transported into extremely dangerous 
    locations.  If the duplication technique were used, then it would be
    much more sensible to simply duplicate the important person, so that 
    in the probably event of his or her death, the original person would 
    still be available.

(5) Nobody has ever been duplicated to produce two people, no matter how
    badly they needed the reinforcements.  (Exception: "The Enemy Within", 
    co-incidentally shown on British TV last night, in which Kirk is 
    duplicated due to a malfunction; the two Kirks miraculously re-merge
    at the end; see below.)

(6) Outside the holodecks and food dispensers, which were only invented
    50 years later (in the fictional timeline), nothing is ever created
    by the transporter - it only moves things.  The holodecks and food 
    dispensers can never produce anything *really* useful; e.g. dilithium
    crystals must still be mined on planets, although the transporter can
    move the dilithium from the planet to the Enterprise.
 
(7) I find it hard to believe that the civilization portrayed in Star Trek
    would consider the murder & replicate technique acceptable from a moral
    point of view.

(8) Beaming atoms into enclosed spaces is admittedly implausible, but then
    constructing duplicates in enclosed spaces seems equally implausible.

> If [murder & replication] is the process used then the crew member who is 
> "transported" would never make it to his/her destination.  A replica that
> would be exactly the same in all respects to an observer would, but the 
> original?  If such a thing happened to you would your consciousness somehow
> gravitate to this new "you" unlikely. You would be, as far as you were 
> concerned - dead.  The replica wou have all of your memories and thus 
> consider itself to be you so what is the difference?  A soul?  Comments?

In the one single episode where a person is duplicated (Kirk, by accident), 
neither duplicate has all the mental faculties of the original person; one 
has all the compassion, but is wishy-washy, and the other is the "dark side" 
of the original person.  The scriptwriter clearly intended this to mean that 
each duplicate had only half of the original Kirk's soul.

The "Search for Spock" film is another clear example of the scriptwriter's
belief in souls.

I don't believe in a "soul", except as the sum of the activity of my atoms.
So, in the hypothetical case of exact duplication, down to the movement of 
every electron, I would say that both the original and the duplicate have the
identical souls, which then diverge over time (assuming that the original
could be said to have a soul).

Of course, it is impossible (even in a thought experiment) to determine the
position and movement of every sub-atomic particle in a person, even if we
were permitted to cut the person up; this is the basis for Heisenberg's (sp?)
Uncertainty Principle.  Hence, I do not believe that exact duplication is 
possible even in theory; therefore exact duplication of the soul is also 
impossible.

In practice I would be quite astounded if one could put together 70 kilograms
of matter to produce a living person who thought he or she could "remember"
being alive for several decades!  

--
Jonathan Egre' / jonathan@mantis.co.uk / jonathan_e@cix.compulink.co.uk      
                 Voice: +44 223 421094 / Fax: +44 223 421093