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An Analysis of TeleportationIn conclusion, this episode (and pretty much all of season 2) has been an atrocity to Gene Roddenberry's vision. The new-new direction has still not addressed any of the real problems that plague the show. Since this episode actually had no substantive material, and was merely a long drawn out plot device with lots of illegitimate techno-garbage, it invites scrutiny of its scientific propositions. Truthfully, we don't like being the nay-sayers in science. We would like to believe in infinite possibilities, but EFC needs to be held accountable for its flagrant misuse of technology as a substitute for an actual plot. They attempted to blind us with meaningless dribble hoping that we would not notice. The following article is designed to both educate and to make a statement that the fans will be offended when EFC is bastardizes science for the sake of their own incompetence.
An Aside: The Metaphysics of Teleportation (optional)
In Star Trek: TOS, the crew constantly had access to this amazing device called the "transporter". It was a tool to allow the plot of an episode move more quickly. It was too expensive and would take to much screen time to land the ship, so the transporter was a legitimate device to assist in the telling of the story.
Since then however, there have been tons of discussion about the feasibility of teleporting a person from one point to another. The idea of mass to energy back to mass conversion seemed very unlikely. We can convert mass to energy by basically destroying the object, but reconstructing that object into its original form seemed nearly impossible, due to questions ranging from how to convert energy directly to flesh to problems with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (explained a little bit in the Quantum section for those who don't know what this is).
Furthermore, there are philosophical questions about whether a person is actually the same person coming out. This is actually tied to a branch of philosophy that is concerned about what "Personal Identity" consists of. The concepts are interesting, and it is worth a moment to diverge from central topic to mention this, since it is my most sincere hope that I will never have the reason to discuss transporters in the context of EFC ever again (this also applies to body switching). My apologies if I butcher the subject. (Please feel free to write us a better article.)
What does personal identity consist of? This is the question that the philosopher John Locke first realized to be a serious problem. In his famous Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Second Ed. 1694), he discovers there is a problem connecting one in two instances of time. For instance, how can you say that you are the same person today (reading this article) as you were several weeks ago watching EFC? Why aren't you simply some kind of copy that has no connection to the person of several weeks ago? This seems like a strange question, which seems to have a simple solution, but I promise you that it gets a lot weirder.
The simplest answer would claim, I am the same person I was yesterday because I am in the same body and am composed of the same material.
John Locke however, proposed a complication to this idea. He imagines a situation where the souls of a prince and a cobbler switch bodies. So when you ask the person who looks like the cobbler to make you some shoes and he takes great offense to the notion claiming such tasks are below him, you would say that is really the prince (but in the cobbler's body). And vice-versa, if you asked the body of the prince about how negotiations with the neighboring kingdom were going, and the person becomes puzzled and says he only knows about shoes. Then you get the families and friends to interview these two people. Their memories and stories are so accurate, that everybody is convinced that it is indeed the prince in the cobbler's body and the cobbler in the prince's body. So this seems to deny the possibility that personal identity is based on the sameness of material.
To fix this problem, Locke proposes a theory based on memory. So it is not physical body that defines personal identity, it is memory. The fact that I can remember myself yesterday makes me the same person.
So it seem that personal identity is based on memory. Though Locke's specific theory has some weaknesses, many philosophers believe the spirit of Locke can be saved and personal identity does lie in memory.
However, there are some complications to the argument based on memory. A good example comes from a science fiction story using technology similar to the Star Trek transporters. (I'm sorry, but I can't remember who wrote it.)
The story goes somewhat like this: It is the future. Mars has been colonized and a teleportation system between Earth and Mars is in place. You frequently do business on Mars and use the transporter regularly. On a routine trip, you step into a transporter on Earth. You disappear. Information is sent to Mars (via EM waves) and you step out of a chamber on Mars. You conduct your business and then want to return to Earth, so you step into the chamber. However, something goes wrong and you don't disappear. However, the information is still sent to Earth, and several minutes later, another you appears on Earth. The engineers tell you (on Mars) that something went wrong and there are now two of you.
However, there is an additional complication because the transporter device did something to you and you only have 6 hours to live, then you will die. But your counterpart on Earth is perfectly healthy.
You then receive a video message from your counterpart on Earth. (There is a time delay since light takes several minutes to travel between Earth and Mars.) Your counterpart tries to comfort you by reassuring you that they will still live on so you won't really die. Your counterpart also reassures you that they will take care of your family and so forth.
However, you don't find the prospect that there is some other guy that looks like you that will outlive you to be very reassuring. You're not convinced that just because the person is identical to you, this person is you. (I'm going to switch pronouns here to make the discussion a little easier.)
If remembering myself yesterday allows me to claim that I am the same person, there seem to be some problems here. Say I am the one dying on Mars. By the memory theory, I am the same person who stepped into the transporter. But the person on Earth is also the same person who stepped into the transporter. However, I seem to have a problem saying that the Earth "me" is really me because I would much rather have it the other way, that he/she (Earth) is dying, and I (Mars) get to stay with my family. The person on Earth will survive, but I can't seem to say that it is "me".
Before going further into the Mars example, I would like to take a step back and look at some other thoughts proposed by another philosopher named Bernard Williams in his article The Self and the Future (The Philosophical Review, vol. 79, no. 2 April 1970). He attempts to demonstrate this kind of flaw in the memory theory. First he gives an example similar to the prince and the cobbler, but in a way that doesn't presuppose the outcome. (There were some criticisms about the imprecise use of language, so terms like psychological continuity allow for this kind of experiment to happen without explicitly implying that something specific happened to cause the apparent switch.) He proposes that two people, A and B walk into some kind of machine. When they come out, two people will come out looking like A and B, but the A-bodied person is psychologically continuous (thinks the same way and has all the memories) with the B person who walked into the machine. And vice-versa, the B-bodied person is psychologically continuous with the A person who walked into the machine.
Now he says if you say to A and B before they enter the machine, you will give one of the people who come out of the machine $100,000 and will torture the other. You ask each of them to answer on purely selfish reasons, who to give the money to and who to torture. (This assumes that A and B already have seen the machine work before.) The A person will say give it to the B-bodied person on the other side and torture the A-bodied person. B will give the opposite response.
Now you let them go through the machine, and out comes the people. You decide to give $100,000 to the B-bodied person and torture the A-bodied person. If you ask them who they think they were and if they got what they wanted, the B-bodied person will say that they were the A person and they did indeed get what they wanted. The A-bodied person will say he/she was the B person and didn't get what he/she wanted.
So far, there doesn't seem to be much of a difference between this and the prince and cobbler story. But Williams then complicates the idea by suggesting an alternative story. You are person A. You have been captured and you will be tortured. You really don't like the idea of this. However, there's more. First, the captors are going to give you amnesia, and then torture you. And now you feel even worse. But then the captors tell you they will complicate it even more. First they will give you amnesia, then mentally derange you by making you think you are somebody else, and then torture you. You are supposed to think this is the worst yet.
Williams concludes that your terror is not reduced any when told you will both be given amnesia and tortured. In fact, it compounds the terror. This leads Williams to conclude that the memory theory isn't so great, and your identity is connected to your body.
However, you might not agree with this point. You might claim that if you know your memory is going to be wiped, you won't care what happens to your body afterward. Since a person with amnesia cannot remember anything, and may even act differently, it doesn't seem that unreasonable to claim that the person with amnesia is not the same person as before the amnesia. Following this, you can even make the claim that the person before the amnesia is dead. In this case, getting a memory wiped is equivalent to death. So it seems the victim would not have compounded horror as Williams suggested, since from the perspective of the original person (before the memory wipe) it would be like torturing a dead body.
But it isn't over yet. What if we change the story slightly. First, let's say that you are still a captive. However, the captors aren't going to do anything to your body yet. Instead, they grab person B and will torture them. On purely selfish reasons, you don't care. Now they tell you, they are going to wipe B's memory and then torture them. You still don't care. Now they tell you, they are going to implant memories into B so B becomes psychologically continuous with you. Then they will torture the B-bodied person.
At this point, it seems that you still don't care. This is reminiscent of the Mars example where I wasn't reassured by the fact that the other person was going to survive. I didn't think that person was me. In this new case, you seem to show the same kind of doubt about the B-bodied person.
However, let us change the story again. Now I say, you will be given amnesia, you will be made psychologically consistent with B. Furthermore, we make the B-bodied person, psychologically continuous with you and then torture the B-bodied person. In this case, you can't say you don't care. Why not? Because this is the exact example with A and B going into the machine and coming out psychologically continuous as the other. (There are two important things to remember. First, with psychological continuity, it is not specified how you switched, if you switched at all. Thus transporting like in Star Trek and powerful brainwashing are considered the same thing. The second thing to remember is that we have already eliminated physical elements as part of personal identity through the prince and cobbler story.)
So now, to drive the point home, what if we say we are going to make B psychologically consistent with you and then torture the B-body. But, I haven't decided what I am going to do with you (the A-bodied person). I will flip a coin. Heads, I will wipe your memory. Tails, I won't. So it seems now that you caring about the torturing of the B-bodied person is completely dependent on the coin toss. This means your caring is completely dependent on the possibility of there being two of you.
Continuing this line of thought, when faced with multiple copies, how do we decide which is "me"? There seem to be three possibilities. First, we can claim that you actually die and neither of the persons are actually you, second, claim that only one of the persons is you (forcing a decision), or third, all of them are you.
If we accept the first possibility, then it seems we have given up on the idea of survival. But it also seems strange that we only give up on survival when there are more than one of you. So in the Mars example, if you transport correctly, you live. But when two of you exist, you died. And it also seems weird to say that you died because the original copy on Mars never disappeared. Imagine that the body got stuck there standing on some pad like in Star Trek. Nothing seems to happen... no disappearing, no sparkling. Yet, another person comes out on Earth. To say the Mars original died seems contrived. If you say you die no matter what when you step in the transporter, we then return to the original problem about how to say you are the same person as the one from several weeks ago. By saying you die in the transporter, there is nothing to prevent you from "dying" every nanosecond.
The second possibility forces us to pick one of the persons as you. In the Mars example, we might appeal to a bodily definition and redefine personal identity as the entity that most closely matches your memories and your material, putting bias on the memory part. So in the Mars case, the person on Mars is "you" because though the Earth and Mars persons share the same memories, the Mars person shares more of the original material.
However, this is problematic if the example were to change. Suppose you did teleport off Mars, but 2 copies of me materialized on Earth, one in New York, one in San Francisco. Now the decision seems arbitrary since both share the same memories, and both lack the original material.
So, the remaining possibility is that both copies are "you". But then we seem to have a problem with the transitivity of identity. The problem is if we apply the "you will die in six hours" to this case, you still are not convinced that the other copy is you. So in the case where you appear in New York and San Francisco, if we label the person on Mars A, the New York person B, and the San Francisco person C, it seems that we get A=B, A=C, but B!=C. Mathematically, it seems that B must equal C, but it doesn't.
So none of these answers seem to be satisfying. And of course we can further complicate the situation. Suppose the person going into the transporter had just murdered somebody. If you argued that it is not the same person, because it died, then it seems that you cannot hold the person that comes out on the other side accountable. The person who committed the murder has been destroyed going into the portal. On the other hand you might wonder what if you argued it was the same person. What if somebody was brain washed to be made "psychologically continuous" with the murderer. Do you punish that body?
So you might be wondering what the solution to the problem is. Well, that's for you to determine. For more material on this topic, a good place to start is, Personal Identity edited by John Perry, University of California Press, 1975, which includes a collection of essays on this topic, including the relevant parts of the Locke and the Williams articles used in this discussion.)
So there is a very superficial introduction to "Personal Identity". My apologies if I screwed it up or misrepresented the concept. (Please feel free to write us a better article to post.)
Anyway, a few last notes before moving away from metaphysics back to quantum physics; these kinds of thoughts placed a lot of skepticism on the idea of transporters because the consequences are just too strange. You will find however, that quantum teleportation at least removes the possibility of duplicates being created, and is unlikely to work with macroscopic objects.
Finally, if I am fortunate enough to have the attention of an EFC writer or some other future Roddenberry writer, and have been inspired by this discussion to write an episode using this, please don't. I don't think you could legitimately use the technology, nor could make it reflective or relevant to anything. Furthermore, the characters will be wasted if you try to do a truly intelligent discussion of this. This is better left to shows that don't need to be concerned with continuity like The Twilight Zone. And finally, there have already been many written works and plenty of Star Trek episodes that do this kind of thing. EFC doesn't need to add to the list. And come on, even Disney did a full motion picture involving body-switching back in the 1970's called Freaky Friday starring a young Jodie Foster.
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Last updated: March 27, 1999
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