Teleportation in Science Fiction

General / off topic
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Except he’s not been alive for billions of years in Heaven Sent, this is a common misconception.

Spoilers for Heaven Sent:

He teleports in, does some cool stuff around the castle, is mortally wounded, and then crawls back to the teleport room before he dies. The room has reset itself back to how it was before he first arrived, as all the rooms do. So his energy pattern is still in the teleport chamber.

He burns himself up to power the teleport, and then another copy of the Doctor steps out and restarts the same process, with a little more progress on the diamond wall this time (and one more skull in the water, and time moves on hence the constellations change).

But it’s not the same Doctor in a loop. He’s just re-teleporting in.

So the very last Doctor, the one who punches through the wall of diamond and gets to Gallifrey, from that Doctor’s perspective, it has only been about a day since he left the Trap Street and teleported in.

So he’s about a day older, but he has travelled billions of years.

Kinda removes part of the emotion of it when he says “this is the part where I realise” and does the whole sulky “why can’t I just lose” speech, but yeah he only experiences it for a day!

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22

So are you saying that teleportation is just the sci-fi equivalent of the “Ship of Theseus”?

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23

Yeah, this is what I meant by Trigger’s Broom :blush:

(Summary: Trigger gets an award for saving money by using the same broom for 20 years. But he says it’s had 17 new heads and 14 new handles in its time. So how can it be the same broom?)

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If when you replace the parts of the ship it’s using planks of wood with the exact same molecular structure (a physical impossibility), at which point I would say it’s absolutely the same ship.

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i pretty much agree with moffat here, i think… also, there’s just so much we don’t know and probably will never know about what makes you “you,” so i don’t think you can prove that you aren’t the same person after a teleport etc. but also it’s interesting to think about the possibility of the teleport (or whatever) glitching and scrambling something that turns out to be vital… or the teleport being able to rearrange the atoms but not preserve whatever “spark” makes you you.

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Oh I agree with you (and Chibnall apparently) here. :slightly_smiling_face:

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I think the billions comment was just an exaggeration on the doctor’s part, to emphasise how Long it’s been, rather than an accurate statement on their age

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That, of course, is a possibility :wink:

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Well, there’s a difference in recreating the exact structure of brain, and decoding the signals that it produces while thinking.

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I guess it depends on the definition of what it means to be “you” or “the same person.” If one assumes it’s not the same person because the matter constituting the person is not the same, then just living is the same as teleportation. The matter that constitutes my body changes all the time.

Of course, one could add that it has to be all the matter that’s changed to make a new person. I did a quick Google search. It seems like at least brain cells have the potential to stay the same until one dies. So, some matter stays the same when aging and therefore we think its the same person and ageing not the same as teleportation? At the same time, isn’t the brain the one thing in which we would assume the biggest change of a person over their lifetime, even if the matter stays the same?

Before I follow this thread of thought, a slight tangent: if I teleport, I stop living for some time. What’s with people who die and are brought back, eg after an accident? The experience may change their personality, but are they different persons just because they weren’t living for a while? I guess that goes into religious territory. Does one believe in a soul that leaves the body when dying and this soul being the “real” person? Does it come back, if you stay near the place where you died but not if you move, eg by teleportation? I will not touch this question further. :wink:

Back to the brain: would a brain in a jar still be me? I think many people in Europe would say yes, because identity is heavily equated with our thoughts and emotions, and our thoughts and emotions are i guess for most in this part of the world situated in the brain. Others may add the heart and some the guts. So, does every other matter making up our physical form not matter? Or does it?

I am interested in complex adaptive systems theory. From some folks researching this topic, I hear stuff that goes more in the direction of who someone is as “emergent properties” from all that constitutes a person. So again, the whole body and the interplay of all its parts. And therefore also continuously changing over time, even without teleportation.

And I guess that’s the point I am aiming at: me being, in the eyes of society, the same person I was born as nearly 50 years ago is a (social?) construct. Even when people through severe trauma become “another person” and people who knew them before say so, for the law and society at large they are still the same person.

Without teleportation technology, the current status quo for this definition has a relatively easy baseline: born as someone, always being this someone (which brings its own bag of worms).

Should teleportation technology be invented, that would probably lead to religious and cultural wars about the “truth.” About the only true answer to the question in the og post.

But I think there is no one true answer. It’s a question of what society settles with. Just as society is just fine in seeing my nearly 50-year-old self as the same person I was as a child, “society” could do so for teleportation. Or not.
And most would see it as the only truth either way, just because people work this way.

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31

Altered Carbon Season 1 on Netflix: A series that I do not tend to recommend because the cruelty shown crossed some of my lines. I found parts of it unbearable.
With this content warning out of the way, it is at the same time just brilliant, especially regarding the whole question of this thread.

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I think I know some of the things you mean from Season 1, but man is it a good show.

Shame about Season 2.

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Yeah, there’s more and more evidence that aspects outside the brain can influence thought and behaviour, especially with the gut-brain axis and the microbiome. Which, speaking of, the transporter would have reconstitute the billions of micro-organisms (including viruses) that we coexist with to truly make an exact copy.

(This also leads into another discussion about how micro-biomes could introduce deadly pathogens to alien worlds and/or the past etc through space/time travel etc. but that’s a whole other can of worms)

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34

Okay, so, I’m going to get into this now. Expect it to be kind of long because 1. I had like three lectures on precisely this and will give you a summary of it so I can remember it better and 2. I have Thoughts.

The question boils down to what actually determines identity. Teleportation and the Ship of Theseus are two common thought experiments to look at this. Some possible things that might determine identity: the material of which a body/thing is made of, the pattern in which it is ordered, continuity in spacetime, some sort of soul/intrinsic property(the religious answer), the function/goals or what my professor calls a ‘strong psychic connection’ which is to say having identical wishes, memories, preferences and the like.

The ship of Theseus, to explain the problem, imagined that this ship slowly, bit by bit, gets every piece replaced until it has no original parts left. The original parts however, are saved and put back together in the form of the ship. Now you have two ships. Which, if any, is the ship of Theseus

Personally, I feel like just the material alone is definitely not the answer, if someone just mixed up all the atoms in my body that wouldn’t be me. You can of course see as a necessary condition though (in which case you would cease to exist after teleportation).

The pattern after which a body is made, potentially including even memories and brain patterns, has a much stronger argument in favor. In this case, both ships are Theseus’ and after teleportation you remain yourself. This is perhaps the most scientific question.

Continuity in spacetime is a very interesting one if you regard in Doctor Who, I already changed this one a bit, because I think the assumption that one person cannot be in the same place at the same time just does not hold. Time travel just blows it to pieces. Barring teleportation (and perhaps bigeneration), however, you can draw a continuous line between all the places and times the doctor is if you consider the tardis to be a placetime that borders to everything. I think this one has some merit, but does posit that teleportation (disrupting this line) does not maintain identity.

I won’t get into the soul argument because it is very spiritual but of course a valid explanation for some.

Having a thing’s identity be based on function is basically my answer to the ship of Theseus problem, in my opinion this holds for all inanimate objects. So the ship of Theseus is the one belonging to Theseus. Or if it is just a name, one that is called this way by the majority of people.

Now, a strong psychic connection, meaning having the same memories, preferences, wishes, thought patterns and the like. I feel like this is what a lot of people regard as identity, but I personally have a lot of problems with it. For a start, memories are far from consistent. Not only can you experience amnesia, many physical changes to the brain can drastically change a person and to posit that they are no longer the same person feels demeaning. And even without that, people change! I’m not even the same gender I was five years ago! You can remember things that never happened and forget other stuff totally, you can change the way you think drastically, so I don’t think this argument holds. This, of course is also super interesting in regard to Time Lords and regeneration, because they change drastically. Is the tenth doctor the same as the eleventh? The first the same as the fifteenth?

I honestly have no idea but it’s fun to think about.

Another thing: is identity transitive? Meaning if a is identical to b and b is identical to c, then a is identical to c. This presents some questions in regards to teleportation, since if there are two identical copies to you made, are the now both you? Or is neither? (Since they are identical, it cannot be just one) after a time, they will diffr, so you would be two different people if they are both you. Is that possible?

Personally, I think it might be better to look at identity as a containing relation. So a is identical to b if a contains b (or the other way around). I feel like this makes sense with regards to how people change. I am not the same person I was five years ago for example, but I do contain her, so we share an identity. This way, if two copies are created, they are both the original person but not the same among each other, they only share the same roots in a way.

All right, that’s everything I can think about rn, thanks for reading if you got this far :upside_down_face:

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35

I’ve thought about this kind of stuff a lot, especially as a kid. For the teleportation mostly, it was the thought that if you died while teleporting, and a clone of you lives on, that took up more time in my brain than is probably healthy. Because like, how would people even know? The clone has no idea, the people seeing the teleportation happening also think everything went well, but the person who stepped in there is dead. From their perspective there was a flash and endless blackness. How would you confirm that’s the same consciousness?

Lots of time wasted thinking about that, because of course there’s no solution. If there was, it would’ve been a really boring philosophical debate. But that does make one think, how do you even confirm consciousness, what even is it? When is someone ‘conscious’.

Robert Shearman says in The Holy Terror (i brought it back to Doctor Who you guys) that the digital fish believes it’s conscious, therefore it is conscious. But like, how would you know it thinks that? If i programmed a chatbot to say: “I am real. I think for myself. I am conscious.” Does that mean it actually is? Of course not, that’s rubbish. It’s just being reactionary. It just reacts the way it’s been adjusted to. Like a plant.

But like. What are we, human beings, but that with extra steps? We also just react to what happens to us. We just have more things that we can save in this brain thingy to adjust to the way we react. And I at least think that I am conscious, and so do you (probably. I can’t confirm that. I gotta believe you on your word, as you have to with mine. Sorry, can’t confirm each other’s consciousness and all) so who are we to dismiss Shearman’s projected fish?

So guy steps out of teleporter. And they believe they are the original. And so they are the original. Does the true original from before it stepped into the teleporter know that? No. But neither did your past self from 10 seconds ago know that it’d be you from now. Is past you dead? I suppose they are! How sad. Or maybe they aren’t. Or maybe it doesn’t actually matter at all, which is the right answer. I call these kinds of philosopher’s things “Questions people ask when they have too much time on their hands.” (that’s me btw) or “Question you could think about for a thousand years and not find the answer or think about for one second and solve.” For example:
“What is the meaning of life?” “What you want.”
“Does free will even exist?” “Of course.”
“What if everything is a dream?” “So?”
“Teleport question” “If it isn’t the same guy then it would be a pretty shit teleport.”

Basically I’ve tried stopping thinking seriously about these types of things too much, because they started giving me existential crisises. As you can see, I have a long way to go regarding ‘stop thinking about these types of things’.

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36

I remember, totally aside from the question of whether teleportation kills the original or not, that Larry Niven did some interesting things with it.

He had the Puppeteer home planet laid out where there were teleportation disks, and if you walked onto one, you got teleported to the next one in the direction you were walking in, so you could travel long distances by just walking down the sidewalk from disk to disk and then you just circle around the disk when you are about where you need to be.

He also had teleporter booths where you just punch in a code and you get teleported to that location, and had things like “flash mobs”, where when something was going on in a location, a whole bunch of people would all start teleporting there and it would cause issues…

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37

Another issue with teleportation is coordinates etc. like, if it’s from one teleportation machine to another, that’s plausible because you’re sending the signal from transmitter to receiver. Where it get hairy tho is teleportation to a location outside of a machine. You’d have to take into account the rotation of the planet (or moon/station/asteroid etc), its orbit around another celestial body (either another planet/s and/or stars), the orbit of the system around the galaxy and then the movement of that galaxy according to other galaxies and the expansion of the universe etc. You’d need several satellites to triangulate position on the same planet etc but anything outside of that without that tech would be, to quote Montgomery Scott, “ is like trying to hit a bullet with a smaller bullet, whilst wearing a blindfold, riding a horse.”

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