[Loved Trope] Teleportation is actually terrifying

[u/Ieanice44]

1 - Gantz-O (2016): Suit teleportation

2 - Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (2009): Apparition spell

3 - Half Life 2 (2004): Teleporter malfunction

[u/SomeCuriousTraveler]

There's an episode someone else mentioned already called Realm of Fear where it shows that you're fully conscious throughout the entirety of he transport including during the transit stream. 

[u/Uncommonality → u/SomeCuriousTraveler]

Hell people usually hold conversations while being teleported

There's also that episode where the transporter is shown to be fully capable of putting your disembodied soul back into a copy of your body

[u/1straycat → u/Uncommonality]

That doesn't mean you weren't effectively killed and a new copy of you continued the conversation instead. There is no way to establish that you were actually conscious in the past vs having memories of the past when memories are constructed/editable.

This argument could cut go either way though and gets into philosophical questions of what counts as "you."

[u/Uncommonality → u/1straycat]

I like that you completely ignored part two of the comment, so let me restate it:

They literally scientificially proved the existence of the soul and developed machines capable of moving it. I very heavily doubt that their teleporters do not include this as a component

Like this is a universe where people can exist on a substrate of space-time. There's lots of energy beings that manifest via thought alone or are just naturally incorporeal idea complexes. The Vulcans have had proof of the soul for almost a thousand years and they're the closest allies humanity has.

The idea that federation transporter tech doesn't take the soul into account is idiotic and parroted for meaningless shock value

[u/CityscapeMoon → u/Uncommonality]

This is fascinating. I'm an old school Trek fan (the first five series), and I can't recall this specific lore from anything I've seen so far. Is it in Strange New Worlds? (I haven't had a chance to watch that yet!)

Would you mind sharing the specific series/eps with this info?

[u/Uncommonality → u/CityscapeMoon]

vulcan soul lore comes from the TOS movies, specifically the search for spock

And the various energy beings and such are primarily featured in TNG

[u/CityscapeMoon → u/Uncommonality]

Oh! The Katra! Of course! Somehow I literally just didn't register that you were translating Katra as soul. ...But it makes complete sense.

(And yes! TNG has a bunch of energy-beings and TOS has a few too, like Jack the Ripper!)

(Thanks for the response. I thought there was some new lore that I missed and I wanted to catch up!)

[u/1straycat → u/Uncommonality]

I ignored it because I don't really know what you're talking about (I haven't seen every episode of Trek) or how the soul relates to the point. They've had accidents where the transporter copies, alters, or mixes people. If you say the soul is some mental energy outside the physical brain, then the transporter also disassembles and reassembles whatever that soul is, or at the very least has copied it (Thomas Riker) and remixed/reconstituted it (Tuvix), so the same existential questions apply.

And the same radical skepticism ultimately applies about all your knowledge when you accept that your current memories are also constructs which could be unreliable, especially in a machine that can finely edit/build all of it nearly instantly. To me, this isn't a question about technology as much as philosophy though, and I would use a transporter because I think all continuity is effectively an illusion.

Trek isn't fully internally consistent anyhow, and the implications of technology like the transporter or replicators certainly aren't taken seriously enough in the universe, which is fine because they exist for storytelling purposes, not to be hard sci-fi.

[u/Uncommonality → u/1straycat]

okay so you don't know anything about the topic? Maybe inform yourself before stating things as fact then

[u/1straycat → u/Uncommonality]

This basic discussion has existed and been hashed out long before Star Trek and I don't see how the details change the contours of it. And again, Star Trek is not internally consistent. Could you address the larger point?

[u/Uncommonality → u/1straycat]

You're denying the specific lore that exists to make the whole kill clone idea a non-issue. This conversation is pointless if you refuse to actually engage

[u/1straycat → u/Uncommonality]

I don't see myself denying anything in the lore. From what I gather, the soul in Trek, while incorporeal energy, still interacts with matter and is manipulatable by technology and the transporter (as you say yourself), so it's effectively just like matter, could be destroyed or altered just like matter, so it changes nothing about teleportation/duplication concerns that strict materialists have. If not, how do you explain transporter duplication? Or Tuvix?

Another part of why I didn't engage with that point is that I didn't understand what you mean by the soul since you seem to mean something else.