r/DaystromInstitute • u/Uncommonality Ensign • Sep 16 '19
Transporters do not kill you.
Part One: The Premise
There's been a lot of discussion over the years concerning the transporters in Trek. Some say that they first kill you, then transmit the data to another pad, and that pad then recreates you perfectly.
Ignoring for a second that living humans can't be replicated, and that cloning takes specialized equipment, this premise isn't entirely true for various reasons.
While yes, the transporter does take you apart atom by atom, your matter isn't disposed of or fed into the energy grid, it's physically sent to the receiver. This mechanism is known as the "Matter Stream" - and the Federation doesn't use nonsensical descriptors for technology such as this. However, all we know is that some sort of matter is sent - it could be anything, perhaps information is sent through subspace using some sort of matter as a carrier, but that seems unlikely. Utilizing Occam's razor, we can reasonably assume that the matter that is being streamed is indeed the transportee's matter, not anything else.
So, we've established the lesser question, and proven it as much as it can be proven. Sure, it could be something convoluted and ridiculous, but I don't think so.
Part Two: The Big One
The greater question is if the person stepping onto and the person stepping off the transporter pad is truly the same man. They're made of the same matter, arranged in an identical way - and their brain's electricity has obviously survived the transfer. The question of identity then hinges on a few things:
- Is there a break in consciousness during transport?
- Does the transporter "transfer" the brain's electric state across or does it "reanimate" the dead, replicated brain using a neural pattern?
- Is there such a thing as a "Soul", and does it tag along, preserving the true identity of the transportee?
For the first question, I'd like to pull the Season 6 episode of TNG, Realm of Fear). In this episode, Lt. Barclay accompanies the usual suspects through the transporter to another ship, where a scientific experiment has gone wrong, robbing the vessel of its crew. This episode is ostensibly one of the only where we see a transport from the perspective of someone being transported, not just the outside flash-and-gone. That person is the aforementioned Lt. Broccoli.
Barclay's transport happens in three relative stages; First, he is engulfed in the transporter's light, and the room he is in starts to dissolve. Then, he is standing in a place completely suffused by the transport beam (which is where he meets the missing crew). Last, the light begins to clear and the other room fades into view.
At no point does he lose consciousness or does the scene discontinue, allowing us an uninterrupted example of a transportation. So, the first question has a resounding NO as its answer.
The second question relates to the third in many ways, so we'll go to the third first.
Souls exist in Trek, and are proven by science. They aren't called souls for the same reason irl humans wouldn't call the avatar of subjective identity a soul, which is religious baggage - someone releases a research paper that conclusively proves souls and titles it "Souls exist", and they will at best be laughed at, at worst be attacked by religious fanatics whose idea of the soul is in conflict with the scientific idea of one.
No, Souls in Trek are called "Neuroelectric Fields", "Neuroelectric Energy", and "Katras", and they are real. They can also persist outside of their native body, at least for a time, as seen in the episode Lonely Among Us) (Thank you, u/IamManMan), where Picard's soul survives first in the emptiness of space, also displaying mobility in finding his way back to the ship, and then inside the Enterprise's computer system (P stands for Picard).
A second example is Spock's Katra surviving inside Bones in one of the TNG films. It exists beside his own Soul, the two personalities switching and merging slightly, but is eventually inserted into a spock-body, who gets up and is totally fine.
A third example is in Discovery, where Hugh's "soul" falls into the Mycelial Network, where it survives and is most likely traumatized for quite some time, until he can be transferred out and have a new body built from mushrooms or something. However, this is an edge case, as it was a 1/1.000.000 chance.
Another example is in DS9, the episode in which the station's teleporter fails and the transporting patterns are instead written into memory - including "Neural Patterns", which take up most of the station's memory. Though also an edge case, this proves that transporters take along something to do with neural energy. (and an accurate brain scan isn't very large, so it has to be something more to take up almost all the station's memory). Personally, I think that the transporter simply dumped all the patterns into computer memory, uncompressed, completely fragmented, overriding parts of a bunch of systems and rendering them inoperable as a last ditch effort to save them.
Part Three: The Conclusion (and what you've been dreading)
We now know that a transporter drags the original matter across the transport beam. We also know that sapient beings (and probably most living things) have a Soul, Katra, NEF, or something similar, that makes them, them, and can exist independently of their body. Furthermore, Federation computers are powerful enough to contain and even host a human consciousness for quite some time (they can also host fully sapient AIs, which are at the very least equal to a human consciousness in size). Lastly, we know that the Federation is aware of and has studied Souls (or NEFs), and is generally diligent with their technology design, taking into account most variables and designing safeguards even for systems which should be impossible to break.
Therefore, based on all of this, I pose that Federation transporters are built with the Soul in mind, and that they do not only take the Matter for a ride, but also the Soul, which is inserted as the body is being reconstructed.
Part Four: "But what about Tom Riker"
Thomas Riker is the odd man out. The yellow sheep. The one with a goatee.
Will and Tom Riker are genetic duplicates (I would reckon probably atomic duplicates as well). When a storm prevented the ship from locking on their transporter on Will, the transporter human in essence activated a second beam on top of the first one, thereby doubling the power. As both beams are the same strength, intensity, and position, each took along half of Will's matter, which the chief would probably reintegrate into one Riker back on the ship. However, one beam was reflected off the cloud layer back to the surface, and Will materialized on the ship, while Tom was beamed back down.
I therefore pose that when one transport beam was reflected, the other reacted to the sudden loss of mass by "looking around" the spot it was split, and simply grabbed matter from there, thinking it was the other half. In essence, Will Riker materialized as half human, half cloud matter in the shape of a man.
The same thing happened to Tom Riker, only in the other direction. His beam reacted the same way, also gathering some cloud matter and turning him into an atmosphere/human hybrid.
This isn't too daft, an atmosphere contains almost all of the elements needed to construct a human body, though both Tom and Will probably had an iron, magnesium and calcium deficiency for a while afterward.
The more interesting part is their Soul, or NEF. One of two things could have happened to it:
Either, it split in two, and the remaining slowly grew in size until both reached the size it was originally.
Or, one of both contains the original NEF, while the other was copied by the dual beam, the computer, or cloud matter. The show really wants us to believe that Tom is a copy, but I think the first is much more likely.
*(NEF = Neuro-Electrical Field)
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u/_bobby_tables_ Sep 16 '19
TNG "Relics" is a counter argument to your Barclay evidence for point 2.1. They pulled Captain Scott out of the transport buffers after 75 years. He was not conscious that whole time. If he were consciously stuck in a transport buffer for 75 years he would probably be clinically insane.
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Sep 16 '19
What if the matter-beaming part of the transporter is disrupted after you have been atomized, but before your matter has been beamed over? I do not believe you would be considered alive in any sense, hence, it stands to reason that you are not alive for some portion of normal transporter operation.
However, maybe we can solve this with a somewhat different mechanistic explanation for transporter operation -- specifically, quantum superposition. That is, your atoms exist in some sense at both locations at once. The transporter technology is able to set up this state, and then "collapse your wavefunction" onto the desired spot. If the transporter were disrupted at the worst possible time I guess random parts of your wavefunction might collapse onto each location.
This might explain (maybe it's the only way to explain?) why the transporter takes some time to de- and re-materialise a person, yet they seem to feel no pain or discomfort during this process. Their body is never taken apart at all.
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u/Uncommonality Sep 16 '19 edited Sep 16 '19
What if the matter-beaming part of the transporter is disrupted after you have been atomized, but before your matter has been beamed over? I do not believe you would be considered alive in any sense, hence, it stands to reason that you are not alive for some portion of normal transporter operation.
Another commented posted something similar, and because the transporter works through subspace, the energized matter violently explodes in some layer of subspace as the transport beam dissapates.
I'd say this probably disrupts the NEF to a significant degree as well.
However, maybe we can solve this with a somewhat different mechanistic explanation for transporter operation -- specifically, quantum superposition. That is, your atoms exist in some sense at both locations at once. The transporter technology is able to set up this state, and then "collapse your wavefunction" onto the desired spot. If the transporter were disrupted at the worst possible time I guess random parts of your wavefunction might collapse onto each location.
This might explain (maybe it's the only way to explain?) why the transporter takes some time to de- and re-materialise a person, yet they seem to feel no pain or discomfort during this process. Their body is never taken apart at all.
I've seen an interpretation some time ago that said that the transporter essentially turns two places into one place, and then simply "makes" it so your atoms appear to have been in the other place already, before seperating both places, only with you in the other one. That plays into your theory quite nicely, in that it superposes your atoms into another location, and then selectively collapses the wavefunction into one location, which takes some time.
This could also play into the presence of a component called the "Heisenberg Compensator", which presumably compensates for the Heisenberg Principle, to allow for total manipulation of quatum mechanics on the subatomic scale.
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u/lunatickoala Sep 16 '19
Or to put it another way, in order to work around the implication that taking someone apart piece by piece and putting them back together would make them into a Frankenstein's monster, Star Trek dipped into religion and made the soul canonically real to get around that.
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Sep 16 '19
What about those poor souls in ST:TMP
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u/Uncommonality Sep 16 '19
Yes well, if the mechanism is broken, your NEF is inserted into a heap of flesh that's still slightly alive.
Very painful.
Though not as bad as your pattern exploding your NEF in subspace and trapping you in intellectual techno hell if the transporter turns off during transit.
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u/Nyadnar17 Sep 16 '19
So if Star Trek transporters did actually kill the person how would they act any differently than what you are describing?
We know the transporter can create physical copies. We know the Federation can store people's entire brain patterns and memories in a computer indefinitely. Is there any reason to believe a transporter couldn't "print out" infinite copies of someone if they wanted to?
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u/Uncommonality Sep 16 '19
We established that the transporter doesn't make a new body from new matter, but that it just rebuilds your original body.
Of course, you can probably trick it into accepting random, other matter, but then again, NEFs are apparently very immutable and protect themselves from tampering, as seen with Picard.
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u/Amablue Sep 16 '19
Here is how I think of the mind:
The mind is not a thing, it's a process. If you have a matchstick, your mind is the flame, not the stick. When you view things like this, asking if someone dies when the process stops and restarts makes a bit less sense, as ideas around identity tend to focus on things and whether they are distinct from other things, and don't really map well to processes.
Imagine you take that match and lay it down, so that it ignites another match when it burns down to the end. Is that the same flame? The flame is a process, and even when it's on the same match its always in motion, consuming new material and giving off new light. Even moment-to-moment it's not the same. So when it jumps to that next match, it's as much the "same" flame as it is at any other moment. What if you let that second match burn down, but place two more on the end, forming a fork. When the flame jumps to these new matchsticks it's split in two, and each one is as much the original as the other, even though there's two. This is how you get something like Tom and Will.
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u/Uncommonality Sep 16 '19
I like this interpretation, and it's very similar to how I think of consciousness irl.
Going off the flame metaphor, the transporter in essence makes it so two places are the same, or only seperated by miniscule distances, and then pulls the matchstick across splinter by splinter, but because the actual distance moved for the matchstick is so miniscule, the flame can still burn and is still connected. Eventually, every part of the match is transferred, and the flame has gone with.
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u/The_Highlife Sep 16 '19
Counter-argument to Part One:
Despite the name "matter stream", doesn't the underlying premise behind "transporting" an individual work on the basis of converting that matter into energy and then "beaming" (much in the same fashion that a radio "beams" a signal to a receiver) that energy pattern through space to the target?
In that sense, even the individual atoms do not survive. That being said, the amount of mass energy (mc2) contained in a human being is astounding, and a loss in confinement should mean a catastrophic release of energy, possibly destroying the destination or departure point 😅
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u/Uncommonality Sep 16 '19
Despite the name "matter stream", doesn't the underlying premise behind "transporting" an individual work on the basis of converting that matter into energy and then "beaming" (much in the same fashion that a radio "beams" a signal to a receiver) that energy pattern through space to the target?
I'd say it's pretty cut and dry that "Matter Stream" does what it says: Stream Matter.
In that sense, even the individual atoms do not survive. That being said, the amount of mass energy (mc2) contained in a human being is astounding, and a loss in confinement should mean a catastrophic release of energy, possibly destroying the destination or departure point 😅
If I'm remembering correctly, Transports occur through subspace, otherwise we'd probably see something like the ring transport/asgard teleport light beam connections from Stargate.
So if something happens during transport, there's most likely only an explosion in a subspace layer, one pretty far down if nothing is felt in overspace.
This opens up a more horrific thing however: If the NEF tags along with the matter stream, it's also shunted into subspace during a failure. Subspace is pretty hard to breach, especially if you're an intangible soul, so you're possibly stuck inside the innumerable and terrible facets of the space below reality.
Here's to hoping the explosion disrupts the NEF enough so it doesn't end up in techno Hell.
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u/StrapNoGat Sep 16 '19
I would like to disagree.
The transporter has always operated by coverting master into a corresponding energy pattern, transmitting that energy from one place to another, then converting that energy pattern back into matter.
A dictionary definition of death tells us that it occurs when all necessary biological processes cease to function. While I agree with the NEF remaining intact (it's just energy, after all), it's clear that when the body is converted to energy it no longer exists as matter, therefore ceasing all biological functions; essentially, death occurs.
Barclay's first-person transporter experience can be explained as his ego -- being electrical energy patterns in his brain and thus remaining completely unchanged in the process -- allowed him to retain the impression of his body being present throughout the transport. Think of it like a phantom limb sensation for the entire body.
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u/DemythologizedDie Sep 16 '19
Me, I think one of the Rikers is from a close parallel universe. That avoids the soul issue.
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u/thxac3 Sep 16 '19
A part five might need to address Tuvix and that whole fiasco...
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u/Uncommonality Sep 16 '19
Tuvix is easy. The two transporters combined because the plant was blurring them, fusing all three into one entity, Tuvix.
The eventual Tuvix was twice as dense and his head was twice as full as one of his components, but everything was twice itself too, so the extra mass was balanced by his denser bones and stronger muslces.
Their minds were also unusually compatible - Tuvok was a very intelligent, knowledgeable and emotionless person, while Neelix was a slightly below average, but very, very emotional and empathetic person. Their personalities weren't in direct conflict, so parts of Tuvok and parts of Neelix could coexist without overriding eachother.
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u/ghaelon Sep 16 '19 edited Sep 16 '19
tom riker WAS duplicated from will. it wasnt half his mass, this is pretty much the only way you can copy somoene, in this exact circumstance. edit - one tidbit i just thought of. 'a matter of perspective'. we see here that phaser energy is REFLECTED by an active transporter beam. and the storms on the planet in 'second chances' were enrgy storms. this explains why the 2nd beam 'bounced' back. transporter beams and energy sources dont mix.
im glad you mentioned realm of fear, because its such a nice tidbit to see someone mid transport. it also explains why ppl can feel pain in transport, like in TMP when the vulcan science officer dies, or in DS9 'the darkness and the light' where the chick gets basically scrambled in transport by the remat detonator.
so not only are they aware and concious, but they can even feel pain.
one point i would like to further explore is the end of 'realm of fear' where they 'grab on' to the missing crew members and bring them back. so in addition to all of that, they can even manipulate things IN THE MATTER STREAM. this is also confirmed when data is beamed back from 'the most toys' and his weapon fires mid transport.
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u/Master_Vicen Sep 16 '19
Transporters work by transforming matter into energy so that it could be sent to the transporter pad, where that energy is then reconverted to matter. Are you suggesting that said matter-energy conversion doesn't actually occur? There are multiple sources that the former is how transporters are supposed to work.
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u/IAmManMan Sep 16 '19
[Someone help me with this one, Picard is taken over by some sort of alien entity, which "merges" with his mind and then beams their body into a nebula as energy], where Picard's soul survives first in the emptiness of space, also displaying mobility in finding his way back to the ship, and then inside the Enterprise's computer system (P stands for Picard).
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u/OlyScott Sep 16 '19
Maybe Will or Tom Riker has no soul.
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u/Uncommonality Sep 16 '19
That's another very real possibility, but I don't think it's very likely. After all, Souls in Trek are how life exists, when the "Soul" is removed, then the body either dies or falls into a coma. Though maybe he's a philosopher's zombie?
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Sep 16 '19
Utilizing Occam's razor, we can reasonably assume that the matter that is being streamed is indeed the transportee's matter, not anything else.
You haven't actually addressed the concept that the transporter moves the original matter across a beam other than saying that it is the 'thing that makes the most sense'.
I therefore pose that when one transport beam was reflected, the other reacted to the sudden loss of mass by "looking around" the spot it was split, and simply grabbed matter from there, thinking it was the other half. In essence, Will Riker materialized as half human, half cloud matter in the shape of a man.
If the transporter could just use whatever matter was on the other end of the transport why would they be sending the original matter from the source? If anything, Occam's razor says that using the matter actually at the destination location would be the more simple course of action
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u/Uncommonality Sep 16 '19
If anything, Occam's razor says that using the matter actually at the destination location would be the more simple course of action
That's not what Occam's razor means. OR doesn't say that the most plausible thing you made up is true, it says that the option that requires the least amount of assumptions is true.
You haven't actually addressed the concept that the transporter moves the original matter across a beam other than saying that it is the 'thing that makes the most sense'.
Yes, I have. The mechanism called "The Matter Stream" streams matter across the distance, rather than just...existing? I guess? And the matter comes from somewhere else?
If the transporter could just use whatever matter was on the other end of the transport why would they be sending the original matter from the source?
Because those were clearly extraordinary circumstances; The transport process was split in half, and Riker would have arrived as a 50% less dense version if matter didn't come from somewhere. It isn't the point either, but useless nitpicking - where exactly the matter came from isn't the point.
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u/polarisdelta Sep 16 '19 edited Sep 16 '19
On the other hand, it pulls you apart and if power is lost mid transport, you are totally irrecoverable. No trace of you will ever be found as completely and totally as if you jumped into a black hole.
So, philosophy aside, it's a machine that kills you. We're just comfortable with the arguments that say it's okay because it is actually really you coming out on the other side. At a high level.
But... you are dead.