Quote:
Originally Posted by **********
'
Stay away from the Transporter. "You", are not "you", when you materialize on the other end. Star Trek got it wrong. When you transport from A to B, what comes out of B is a copy of you. It's completely you, but another you. "A" you is actually destroyed, and "b" you lives your life, not you. Transporters suck.
|
This is an interesting philosophical question. What is "you" other than a specific arrangement of chemical and electrical signals in a physical brain? Replicating those patterns exactly should give each copy an equal right to claim it is "you". Functionally, "you" wouldn't know the difference -- you'd have no way to tell, and isn't that "you" from that perspective?
Incidentally, the movie based on Michael Crichton's 1999 novel Timeline excluded this exploration of the effect, while the book did not.