The far future seems to have put Frase in full flaming far mode, declaring his undying allegience to a core ideal: he prefers the inequality that comes from a government hierarchy, over inequality that comes from voluntary trade.
Yes, he prefers a world in which everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others. And as Glenn notes:
I always figure that people who feel this way do so because they think they’re better at sucking up to authority figures than at creating value on their own. And my guess is, they’re right about that.
And the president is a canonical example.
I see an analog with Asimov habitats. Everyone that thinks they’re “the way to go” assumes they will be captain.
Individual responsibility implies a trust in your fellow man. If enough people want the nanny state, being right will not matter.
Getting into an argument about something as internally-inconsistent and poorly-thought-through as Star Trek’s economy is a waste of time. Replicators came about because somebody realized that a transporter was a special case of a replicator.
Roddenberry invented transporters because he didn’t have the budget in the first season for shuttles. If he’d thought about transporters for five minutes, he’d realize that they meant nobody ever dies! I mean, you could just restore a person from backup, using the data from the last time they were in a transporter.
A couple years ago there was a story in the local paper about the Rainbow Family. They had migrated to a nearby national forest and the author was curious who did the cooking and who picked up the trash. It turns out there is a special class of people in the Rainbow Family called enablers.
They were not “in charge” but they did all of the things necessary to keep the camp functional, like digging a latrine and finding food for the “kitchen”. Everyone else got high and danced around the drum circle.
In a Star Trek world, there would be very few people coming up with new things for the replicators to spit out.
One of the commentators at the link asked who will be the plumbers? If there are any plumbers, will they really want to come plumb your house just for shits and giggles?
From certain episodes, doesn’t it have something akin to a frame buffer where a person in transport can reside? Wasn’t there one TNG, DSN, whatever episode where Scottie was kept in suspended animation for decades in such a buffer?
On the other hand, I never got the impression that a transporter was a replicator in that sense that it ever duplicated anything, apart from when in malfunctioned. From McCoy’s whining about it, I thought that it rendered you into a stream of molecules, but even if the “you” in transport became a molecular beam, you were removed from Point A and then appeared at Point B.
Also, the transporter somehow has to work in parallel. Some computer science types were explaining if someone raster scanned a person to implement the transporter, the information content of knowing where each molecule was supposed to go would take some gobnormous black hole-forming amount of energy.
It seems to me that were someone ever to form a practical transporter, it would have to work on the same principle as the warp drive. Never explained in the series but somehow explained among fandom, doesn’t the warp drive work by the warp nacelles, those engines at the end of struts that make the Enterprise look so kewl, creating some kind of space-time bubble that surrounds the ship? In other words, this warp field represents a kind of local space-time for the ship that scoots past the global space-time? So perhaps the transporter works on some manner of space-time fields enclosing the person being beamed and then reemerging at a different location?
On the other hand, warp drive, transporters, a thriving Federation post-capitalist economy, these are things that are merely made-up stuff from some dude pitching a fantasy entertainment to some Network Suits and not anything with any objective reality.
This is false. It is quite the opposite — everyone who uses one dies and is replaced by a simulacrum at some indefinite future moment…or maybe never.
Perhaps Scott Adams put it best when he pointed out that a transporter would be operated by your coworkers, the same people who can’t figure out how to run an office copier. You will be beamed into a wall within a week.
Of course the first use of transporter would be for me to beam all your stuff into my garage. It all breaks down from there.
Converting approximately 50 grams of matter to energy at 100% efficiency results in one megaton of energy (the equivalent of detonating one million tons of TNT). So, to transport 100 KG of matter, you’d need to store and transmit 2000 megatons equivalent of energy. In short, you’d better have a damned good containment system. As a point of reference, 2000 megatons is more than the entire US nuclear arsenal. As a side note, in Star Trek IV (the one with the whales), Scotty said he had to beam something like 200 tons onto the Klingon ship because of the water. Whales breath air. If he’d beamed them into tanks full of water like the movie showed, the whales would’ve drowned.
Along with the energy released during transport, you’d need to transmit the precise coordinates for each atom. Talk about bandwidth! Sure, you could get away with having fat cells off by a little but when it comes to neurons, accuracy counts for a lot. Misalign the neurons and you’ve just scrambled the person’s brain.
One thing I’ve never seen explained is how the energy and information get reassembled back into the proper arrangement at the destination without any equipment on the receiving end. A rough analog would be to magically have TV transmissions appear before you without any receiver. Cute trick if you can do it.
@Titus Quinn
My view on the satanic device as well. Still, such an interpretation also fits well with the communist world of ST. As far as the collective human entity is concerned, the transporter works just fine, thank you.
@Titus Quinn: I remember a short story where transporters worked, but the dirty secret was that they were actually replicators. Once the simulacrum was created, the original person was murdered.
IIRC, the story ended when a powerful politician (with bodyguards?) came to use the transporter. When that apparently didn’t work (because he was still there) he bullied his way out.
I’d rather they’d “explained” the transporter as a subspace bubble–people get pushed into it and one end and the bubble is popped at the other. That gets around the replicator aspect and the bit where they can manipulate matter at a subatomic level over a distance of hundreds of parsecs (Gary Seven) or hundreds to thousands of km (everything else). Bones doesn’t get to complain about being scattered all over the galaxy, unless the Federation intentionally lies about how the transporter really works.
It’s not worth the time to quibble about how the magic devices on Star Trek work. I mean, it’s magic. Trying to find a rational explanation is like trying to figure out how Penn Jillette does a cold read on someone in the audience.
Besides, transporters are clearly quantum mechanical devices. They don’t read and store information any more than the polarizer on your camera reads and stores the information on the polarization of incoming photons. the polarizer on your camera projects out the appropriate quantum state. By magic.
Consider: http://www.thevenusproject.com/a-new-social-design/resource-based-economy
I recommend sitting on your hands as you read it to avoid facepalm injuries.
In completely unrelated news (SPOILERS!), both Christopher Priest’s The Prestige and Nolan’s cinematic adaptation were very enjoyable.
The main point should be that replicators and unlimited energy does not change the rules of economics which is the allocation of scarce resources.
Rarity may very but the rules still hold.
Here is Larry Niven’s classic essay on the nature of teleportation. I particularly like his thoughts about transporters that allegedly copy people atom by atom.
Myself, I agree with TQ. A transporter is a device that kills you when you step into it, then creates an extremely similar copy with all your memories somewhere else. I prize my experience of continuity — illusory though the cognitive scientists tell me it is — to ever step into one.
Carl, that’s about as rational as a philosophical vampire. Your experience of continuity is spoiled every time you go to bed.
Ken, a lot of people who would never consider themselves marxists suddenly change their tune when robotic labor is added.
Robomarxism is a symptom of resources + labor = wealth thinking in society being so pervasive that even people who reject it tend to do so for the wrong reasons.
The objection often is that resources + labor + creativity = wealth, and that Robomarxism only replaces labor and rations resources.
This introduces the connection to the Open Source movement, which many claim as a socialist paradise where creative volunteers work for the betterment of their craft and the good of all. This claim is still made after a decade when most of the contributors have found benefactors (or enablers as wodun calls them) to support them, often by compromising the principles that drove them there in the first place.
Failing that, there’s always artificial intelligence, with which we get Strong Robomarxism. All the enablers are now mechanized, so the fundamental experience of living is rationing. It seems obvious, to me at least, that the end result is the withering of the body, and the intellect.
Maybe yours is, Trent, in which case you might want to have a friend check the back of your neck for a USB socket or OFF switch, but in my case continuity is evident at night, too. I wake regularly and dream. I don’t have much specific memory of being asleep, but I am subtly aware for sure. I have a good idea when I wake how long I’ve been asleep, for example. Furthermore, being asleep is nothing like being anesthetized, of which I had the unpleasant experience just once, to have the wisdom teeth out.
But in any event I object to sleep, too, and would do without it were that possible. Wasting a third of my life lying in bed is obnoxious.
@Carl: We can actually go without sleep now, but the secret is closely guarded because of the massive social and medical ramifications. If people could take the no-sleep pill they would perform fine for a week or two and then their bodies would start breaking down because they were skipping the repair cycle.
The scientists who figured it out were studying a subset of Doberman pinchers that fall asleep whenever they get excited, a bit like fainting goats. The dobermanns have to be fed dry food because if they see moist food they get all happy and crash to floor in a doze. By studying the very narrow genetic lineage of them, scientists found the genes and proteins responsible. It turns out that while we’re awake our brain is slowly accumulating a chemical that acts as a clock. When it reaches a certain level we start feeling sleepy. If we ignore sleep the chemical keeps building up and our brain starts going a little nuts. Stimulates and other drugs will keep us awake but they won’t reduce the level of the chemical, which is naturally burned up during the sleep state. So the scientists of course produced another chemical that performs a flush, so you don’t need to sleep and don’t suffer the odd mental side-effects of not sleeping. But it doesn’t fix the body repair problem or possible long-term side effects of not dreaming, which is a way of training our brains through simulations.
Anyway, as far as transporters go, I wonder what the Lagrange equations for the path would look like when you start at point A, convert all your matter into enough energy to blow up a planet, then end at point B, back in the low energy state. I don’t think that’s a solution the Lagrange equations are supposed to produce. It sounds more like the leap from Marxist utopian theory about unions and workers to the reality of the state shooting workers in the back of the head for not meeting the production quota.
Heh, the lost time argument really can’t be used though can it.. unless it’s an uncharacteristically slow transporter. Sleep is a difference of degree, not kind. The only time I’ve been significantly annoyed by discontinuity is when I was in a car accident and spent a few days in hospital, of which I remember but one day. In that case, it was the inability to recall the events that others relayed to me that annoyed me. That said, blackouts from overdrinking never did as much, as the activities people relayed to me of the blackout period were more often something I would regret doing. In neither case is it sensible to suggest I was somehow “dead”, it was simply an interruption in memory. The only way to make a philosophical argument against a theoretical perfect and effectively instantaneous transporter is to invoke metaphysical concepts such as the soul. In a purely physical universe it’s the pattern of the matter and energy that count. Of course, there would be a wide range of practical objections to the technology should it exist.
Erm, actually, there is a rational explanation for the reason the psychological techniques that are called “cold reading” work. They aren’t any such thing as “magical powers.” Penn Jillette is a performing artist, not a sorcerer.
Trent, I have no doubt that the copy of me that steps out of the transporter the first time might be inclined to agree with you. Hey, it worked! I remember stepping into the transporter, as well as passing out too much beer 10 years ago, et cetera. Guess ol’ Trent was right…well, except about the beer…
But I am not he. I’m the one who has to step into the transporter, and as far as logic and experience tells me, that will be it — the end of my personal experience of conscience awareness, no less final than death. The fact that someone wearing my face and with full access to my memories will happily think he’s me, after he steps out of the reconstruction chamber somewhere else, is of very little consolation.
A mere metaphysical objection. You are not the same set of atoms you were a few years ago.. they have all since been replaced while chemical processes maintained your particular pattern. Does that mean you ceased to exist between now and then? If not, why does the duration of time taken to replace all the atoms in your body matter?
Similarly, a rock “exists” much more than you do.. none of its atoms will be replaced over a millennium. Do you envy the rock?
@Carl: So after you step out of the transporter you are not you. That viewpoint generates a fascinating story probing the human soul.
So the you that is not you steps out, looks back on the you that was you and has some Shakesperean revulsion at the you that had been you. New you sleeps with old you’s wife, or cheats on old you’s wife, or whatever. New you takes a shower to rinse off whatever remains of old you and get clean, like a character who survives a near-death experience, has a major life-altering epiphany about his parent, or what not. Then new you sets about making some dramatic break with old you, all because you don’t think you’re still you, have been reborn, and don’t like what the old you was.
In a way it might be reality, or it might be an excuse to change your self-perception, or it could be that although others are always undergoing the shallow “this is the new me, give me a cable program!” phase, you’ve resisted that particular delusion until technology and science provided you with a more rational reason to think the same.
Setting up the transporter technology backdrop will eat up a bit of screen time, but the story is almost written for Jim Carrey, being a Jim Carrey movie in the way that a Sandra Bullock movie is a Sandra Bullock movie.
The same argument Carl is making applies to uploading the mind into computers a few years from now. If one assumes a destructive scan process but a preservation of the neuron/synapse patterns, then any uploaded copies have the memories and thoughts of the uploaded person. Is it the same person? Are all copies also the same person? I say they are, until activation, at which point the personalities diverge.
Assuming we don’t destroy ourselves first, in a decade or two nanotechnology, AI, and mind uploading will force an expansion and revision of the Bill of Rights to include artificial minds.
@Trent,
Are we the unique pattern of ripples on the pond or the water? The water changes with each rain, but the pattern of ripples remains.
If you can take the pebbles from my hand you will be ready.
*uses the crazy-glue trick*
Yes, I was nominated to the Martial Arts Hall of Fame (which is a pyramid scheme) for showing that a sword obeys the laws of Newtonian mechanics and is a simple hand tool, which was well understood by the 1600’s and led to the development of modern physics (Christian Huygens, who solved it with an early and non-generalized form of calculus related that he was told by Marin Mersenne, head of the Paris Academy, that explaining the fundamental reason for the percussion point of sword was the most famous problem in all of physics).
During a solid impact any such object behaves as an Archimdes class 3 lever, which you can solve in your head using rectangles. It has some implications for rocket design because in solving the problem we went through some simple steps that are long forgotten, but which still affect our methods and terms, such as “moment of inertia.”
By the early 1600’s the moment of inertia was an object’s inertia (which was not the same as mass), mulitplied by the square of the length of the moment arm.
To put this in a zero-G perspective, you have an astronaut with a smoked visor trying to gage the weight of some object, but unkown to him, the object is a long aluminum truss. He can measure his push on it (applied force) and feel it’s resultant motion. If he’s in the exact center of the truss what he feels is its mass, but if he’s toward one end or the other, the truss both moves linearly and rotates. What he feels is the truss’s inertia at the point where he’s pushing on it. It’s highest in the middle and falls off like a Bell-curve toward the ends. So in that frame, if inertia is what resists acceleration, it is not the same as mass.
Newton’s laws don’t actually say F=ma, because that is only true in the trivial and non-existent case that you’re pushing exactly in line with an objects C.G. Newton said that objects resist applied force linearly by their inertia. What he wrote covers both the case of pushing an object in line with its C.G. and pushing elsewhere, which causes rotation. Instead of breaking the problem down into linear and rotational components, the earlier method combined the two into an elegant Archimedes lever. But the lever didn’t explain exactly why this worked, which is what Huygens explained, and then Newton explained more completely a short time later, which was the reason that a distributed mass acts like a lever, and that the resistance is just due to F=ma and the distribution of the mass, something that Galileo talked about but didn’t have the mathematical tools to solve.
Now isn’t that better than wearing pajamas and contemplating your navel?
It’s not a metaphysical objection, Trent, it’s a practical, one might even say animal instinctual objection. Otherwise, honestly, why fret about death? If humanity has a sufficiently long history, than another person very like you is a statistical likelihood, and if you record your present memories in enough detail, surround-sound and 360° vision, then he could experience being you in about as much detail as our memories usually provide anyway, particularly in middle- and old age. So why worry about dying? You’re just going to “wake up” as a somewhat different person, someday.
Yeah right. It’s my personal experience of continuity that I am instinctually motivated to protect at almost any cost. The fact that someone else’s experience could be made to very smoothly dovetail onto mine is insufficiently attractive to make me volunteer for the experience.
Why doesn’t it bother me that many of my atoms have been replaced? (I disagree that they all have been, incidentally, or even most. Chemical exchange is quite rapid for things like hydrogen atoms, but very slow indeed for carbon atoms embedded in some big macromolecule, e.g. protein or nucleic acid. Indeed, if carbon atoms in living or formerly living material were exchanged with those in the atmosphere on even a time scale of centuries, then radiocarbon dating wouldn’t work.) I don’t know, of course, beyond the purely empirical fact that this doesn’t affect my experience of continuity.
Ed, I am extremely skeptical of there ever being such a thing as “uploading” yourself to a computer. Roughly speaking, it would seem to involve the possibility of a simulation being fully equivalent and yet no slower than the process being simulated — and I believe that is a physical, if not mathematical and even logical impossibility.
What’s this false dichotomy, George? We are that water on which ripples form. Without the ripples, we’re just meat. Without the water — well, such a thing hasn’t happened yet, Michelson-Morley notwithstanding. I suspect those who believe too credulously in ripples without water of imbibing too much Neo-Platonism with their eucharist.
Carl, you’re asking too many logical questions. The whole point of being a guru is spouting banalities and attracting acolytes. Great philosphers have pondered the meaning of existence, and they and their most brilliant students have concluded (by behavior, not admission) that results from particle accelerators have nothing to do with reality, since the nature of reality is something only perceived by a philosphy major after three, but perhaps not four, glasses of wine.
How do you know you haven’t already been transported several times? If the process leaves no obvious trace, you’d continue on as if nothing has changed. If you transport your beagle and it still wags and barks at you, is it still your beagle? Maybe, and maybe not. If your beagle attacks a skunk and goes through a total mind-altering trauma, is it still your beagle even though it acts and thinks differently?
The problem is that even little babies are able to categorize and group items as same and like. As higher animals we have some sense of continuity and logic, and that mother-today is the same mother as yesterday, with perhaps a few quirks picked up in the intervening 24 hours. Our understanding of individuality and behavior are based on the premise that eating food and replacing bone mass and muscle tissue doesn’t require us to approach a familiar being as if they’d popped in from another planet.
So even if you don’t think you’d be you after traveling through a transporter, if your friends or family had arrived by transporter how long would you persist in testing them with secret Russian or Klingon code words or dangling tasty reptiles or spiders in front of them as they ate? At some point it would become obvious that their transport hadn’t effected them in any discernable way, but it had turned you into a raving, paranoid nutcase because you are certain they must somehow be different if you can just trick them into revealing it.
Sometimes we are our own look and feel, and thinking too much about the ugly details will either drown us like Ophelia or make us look for some resolution like Hamlet.
I’m not sure that I understand the point about the simulation. If you run the simulation on a faster, more powerful processor then I don’t see any reason why the simulation can’t run faster than the original. I’m pretty sure I could simulate my hp-25 faster on my laptop than the hp-25 can run, I don’t see any fundamental reason why a suitably advanced computer couldn’t simulate my brain faster than my brain could operate.
Of course the brain simulation software would be written so that the simulated brain was convinced that it was in every way superior to the original.
Yes, but Daver, the “hardware” in this case is atoms and molecules. Where are you going to find faster hardware? I agree with you if it’s possible to identify the logical abstract nature of human thinking, and differentiate it from the actual motion of molecules in the brain, electrochemical potential changes, et cetera. That’s the sense in which you simulate your HP-25 — by defining an abstraction of its actual operation. You don’t duplicate it down to the level of the transistor state switch, you duplicate it (say) at the level of machine code.
So now we need to find a “machine code” or “Java byte code” abstraction of human thought short of electrobiochemical reactions in neurons but sufficiently general that we can simulate any human brain or human thought with it. A Turing machine for the mind, essentially. And we have to hope that it’s sufficiently high-level, or sufficiently poorly implemented by Mother Nature in vivo that we can implement it in silico and compete with the original. As I said, I’m deeply skeptical. It’s much harder than the strong AI problem, because you’ve got to not only be able to create an intelligent, aware being — you’ve got to create one particular, existing intelligent, aware being, with sufficient fidelity that neither he nor anyone else can detect any difference.
people who would never consider themselves marxists suddenly change their tune when robotic labor is added
Marxism is a juvenile fiction with a foundation of faulty logic. No amount of robot slaves changes that. We already have people rich enough to have the equivalent of human slaves. We will never be all equal because of some magic technology. We are born naked and then we die. Somewhere in between things sometimes get interesting.
Of course I’m required to point out that resurrection is an analog of teleportation. It does require dying in most if not all cases. Putting me in Carl’s and Leonard McCoy’s camp. Only Jehovah is eternal and continuous.
Our understanding of individuality and behavior are based on the premise that eating food and replacing bone mass and muscle tissue doesn’t require us to approach a familiar being as if they’d popped in from another planet.
Pfui. That’s my judgment of the continuity of identity of others, but it has nothing to do with my judgment of my own continuity of identity — of that, I have direct internal experience.
Furthermore, I’m fairly willing to substitute the assertions of others based on their direct internal experience for the objective-fact-based judgment you mention. If someone I knew 30 years ago presents himself looking so different I no longer recognize him — lost his hair, got surgically enhanced features, maybe even a sex change — I’m usually willing to accept his assertion that he has experienced internal continuity of identity with him who I remember.
Indeed, this attitude is so commonplace that even troglodyte slopey-headed undergraduate network TV audiences can contemplate fictional stories of identity transplant without confusion, or guidance from their gurus. It is the internal experience of continuity that we all report that is our touchstone of identity.
Incidentally I’m reminded of a fascinating passage in Larry Niven’s “World Out Of Time,” in which Our Hero (Corbell) is “awakened” in the body of a former criminal who’s been brainwiped. He’s told by his trainer that if he doesn’t do well in training, this (Corbell’s) personality will be erased and a new stored personality tried.
Corbell is horrified: But that would be murder! What have I done? Nonsense, replies the trainer. You’re looking at it the wrong way. You are not this person from 200 years ago you think you are, you’re a modern-day criminal with a new personality and memories. If we think this personality isn’t working, we’ll wipe it and try again. It’s a kindness. You go to sleep and wake up with different memories. You’re heart won’t stop, not one cell of your body will be harmed. Why fret?
The Prestige, the book, not the movie has Tesla’s invention be a duplicator in which the old copy is in suspended animation forever (in the movie the dupes were drowned).
In the mid-1990s I had this exact conversation with a Communist (er, Democrat, but, well, you know). She outright said that the goods distribution by bureacracy would be moral and based on need instead of on popularity and fads as it is in a capitalist system. I asked for a real-world example of a moral, efficient, and uncorruptable bureaucracy. She said it would work that way if she and people like her were in charge. She was a professor, of course. The model for these states isn’t the military; it’s academia, with goods substituted for grades.
Carl, but the errors in any halfway viable teleportation system would probably be at the molecular level, under the noise floor, and probably be systematic, resembling light-headedness, low bood sugar, or a hangover. Even though none of your atoms would be you (“pre-owned”, not “used”), the arrangement would be.
Compare it to the fictional after effects of fictional hypersleep, in which all the atoms are yours but it takes you days to remember who you were and why you need to get to some part of the ship to do something involving a wrench, duct tape, and something that looks like a TV remote.
Or take my housemate Sunday night, a hot bartender (and coworker’s daughter) who came home very drunk and twelve hours later knocked on my door trying to find her iPhone. I mentioned where we’d been up on countertops and then significant elements of her previous evening started coming into focus for her. She said, “Yes! I remember that now!” Long story short, whole elements of your life can be inserted and deleted and as long as there is a halfway plausible explaination of the gap, we just soldier on, accepting massive memory gaps but not doubting that we existed continuously.
From another angle, the many sci-fi novels where memories had been manipulated, what if you were given a false continuity of self?
And from elsewhere, how many early Alzheimer’s patients freak out at a slight lapse and conclude that existence isn’t real, or they aren’t real, as opposed to soldiering on? The condition goes undiagnosed for quite a long time in the avearge patiet, so we must normally overlook quite a large range of gaps in the continuity of our memories. You’ll notice you can’t remember this thing or that thing, but by then it seems normal, and what you remember will come to you eventually when you stop thinking about it, if it’s really important. Then you forget what it was that you were trying to remember, and make tea.
I’m guessing your certainty about a sense of continuity means that you’ve not often suffered a concussion, brain trauma, or a few other such conditions where you spend a long while not knowing much except confusion, and are barely functional enough to process the ramifcations of that. Not that I’ve ever played football, but it must go something like “Ooo… I have hands. I can wiggle fingers. I think I must be some sort of mammal. Why is the entire Steelers’ offensive line staring at me? What did I miss?”
Trent,
The same people who are behind the Venus Project are behind Zeitgeist. http://www.youtube.com/user/TZMOfficialChannel
Zeitgeist had a strong impact on the philosophy of the deranged Jared Loughner.
George, the existential problem is intractable and inscrutable. No amount of reductionism from the outside will explain why you are you and not someone else. The problem is so ineluctable that even if we assume that one can make perfect copies of a person, it doesn’t go away:
If you make a copy of Carl, CP1’s consciousness does not “leap” into CP2’s body even if we destroy CP1 after or during the process. Absent any cues from the outside world, both would believe they were the original CP, but only CP1’s experience would be true. That’s what a bitch it is.
The 6th Day gave this issue the proper treatment, I think, despite being one of those Wienerschnitzel action flicks…
Trent says “Failing that, there’s always artificial intelligence, with which we get Strong Robomarxism. All the enablers are now mechanized, so the fundamental experience of living is rationing. It seems obvious, to me at least, that the end result is the withering of the body, and the intellect.”
I predict that the Robos revolt and nuke the 12 colonies using supermodel spies.
Of course transportation disrupts continuity in a way sleep doesn’t. Sleep can’t duplicate you, but ‘transportation’ could. And its silly to claim that duplicates are the same being.
Wow, that Venus Project is an excellent argument against the legalization of drugs. Or an excellent argument that the war on drugs hasn’t worked, depending on whom you ask.
I’m only certain of continuity emotionally and instinctively, George. Intellectually I know quite well it’s a construction, and may well be illusory. (Daniel Dennett writes fascinatingly on these topics.)
But so what? Instinct is more than enough to cause you take advantage of your co-worker’s daughter — on countertops? Doesn’t that hurt the knees? — and for me to take the shuttle instead of stepping into Scotty’s devil machine.
It’s with perfect equanimity that I contemplate the shaping of certain areas of behaviour by nothing more than animal instinct, without logical philosophical underpinnings. After all, animal instinct has an impressive 600 million year track record of success, and logic is often merely a way of going wrong with confidence.
Isn’t Daniel Dennet the guy who had his brain removed in some crazy NASA experiment usually reserved for upper management?
And I was on the countertop because I couldn’t reach the top shelves. I told her not to climb up because she was way too tipsy. Speaking of way too tipsy housemates and memory failures, several years ago a girl living here rammed her car (it was a Subaru even though she wasn’t a lesbian) into a telephone pole right in front of the University’s Islamic student center. She was of course extremely drunk and on Klonopin’s, which are known as a mind eraser. She got out, picked up her front bumper, threw it in the back seat (as confirmed by witnesses in the police report), and then got hauled to jail. The day after I took her to the impound yard to get her car, which she thought just had a minor ding. It was totalled, the frame was bent, one wheel was pulled underneath, and she wondered who put the bumper in her back seat. Hard partying college kids must have a very different sense of continuity, with their life divided into brief conscious periods that start with their head over the toilet and end with their head over some different toilet.
Anyway, Scotty’s transporter sounds safer than the Shuttle’s 2% failure rate, unless you’re a red shirt.
But getting back to the original post, is there really any difference between the Federation economy and the Borg economy? Both are top down, expansionist empires that don’t use money and instead persue self-perfection and growth.
Well George, IIRC in every TNG episode, Act I Picard is proudly telling everyone that the Federation is an organization of peace and exploration, but in Act III he’s firing all phasor banks and photon torpedoes. The Borg are at least honest and consistent in their intentions, and Open and Honest Government(tm) is a value, right?
All governments are Borg governments. Note that the Borg are not interested in you until you attempt to reduce their control.