Do Star Trek Transporters Kill?
Transporters are a fictional yet scientifically plausible technology, which makes the consequences of destroying or disassembling a body in one location and rebuilding it in another difficult to dismiss. Answering the question of whether Star Trek transporters are truly suicide machines or merely efficient methods of travel, is a valuable exercise even if you aren’t into sci-fi because it tells you a lot about your current view of life and death. Concretely understanding what it means to be alive helps build a solid foundation for an existential framework, and that’s an essential tool for sustained mental health in a dissolving world.
The philosophical question to be answered isn’t simply whether a transporter kills you, it’s whether we and our lives are an experience of a specific physical phenomenon called a body and a reality, or a specific physical phenomenon that experiences a physical reality. Put another way, is it only important that our experience of existence is subjectively continuous and unbroken over time, or does it matter if there’s a change or disruption to the continuity and structural basis for that experience? The answer is apparent in my opinion, not because we know, but because we don’t really know anything.
Stepping onto a transporter seems like suicide to us because reconstituting a body that’s been severely reconfigured isn’t something we’re capable of, but that doesn’t mean we actually die. In our world, things die if they undergo change, especially the severe and instantaneous kind, but if modification of a specific arrangement of matter signified the end of life, we would have died countless times while reading this sentence. Transformation occurs at every single moment and at every point in the known universe, and it’s only our ignorance to these events that leads us to believe the structure and pattern of the body isn’t being continually updated.
Like a frog in a pot of slowly warming water, we’re mostly blind to gradual shifts in an environment, but abrupt ones catch our attention. Since slow evolution is nearly imperceptible, we don’t really mind alteration to our form as long as continuity of form is apparently maintained, which allows us to accept a ship of Theseus like existence. It doesn’t matter if the entirety of the ship or a body is completely replaced if it appears to be the same and we aren’t directly aware that it’s happened. This means we aren’t truly concerned with the continuity of a specific physical form; we’re concerned with the continuous experience of a specific physical form.
A thing existing apparently unchanged is more important to us than a thing existing actually unchanged, so the view of life as an experience of physical phenomena is more congruent with our reality and understanding than consistent physical beings experiencing what they call life. Because the experience of sameness is all we know, and because transporters theoretically maintain a consistent experience and form, they aren’t death machines, they’re just rapid experience relocation devices.
DO NOT USE A TRANSPORTER
Getting into a transporter isn’t actual suicide because life is just an experience, but I wouldn’t recommend using one because it could lead to a death of sorts, a philosophical one. Allowing ourselves to be disassembled and then reassembled at another point in space and time doesn’t end the experience of life and reality, but the idea of us most likely would end. What it’s like to physically exist as we have remains unchanged if we’re properly reassembled (the way red looks to our eye, how spicy a jalapeno is), but the narrative about who we believe ourselves to be will abruptly halt.
Before we step foot on the device that scans and then disassembles our physical form, we need to decide if we’re ready to give up our life and begin a new way of existing. Going through with the process, if it’s truly possible, means abandoning the illusion of us as a specific and individual being and adopting an “experience of a specific personal phenomena” as a basis for existence.
Continuity and ignorance may induce the hallucination of being a consistent thing over time, but that isn’t possible for our bodies or the world, that can only be had in the realm of the mind. Because the mind naturally occupies the bulk of our awareness, we instinctually believe ourselves to be a narrative about past events and experiences stitched together each morning and sustained throughout the day. The more consistent our narrative self is, the more real and true it becomes, but it never becomes an immutable physical fact.
Narratives can be destroyed like any nonfundamental thing, but they’re tougher to reform than a physical object because their constituent material isn’t particles or fields of energy, it’s knowledge and experience. You can’t destroy the existence of the things composing a body, quarks, electrons, electromagnetism, but if you change a person’s knowledge and experience, you change their narrative by destroying and replacing the material their story was made from. If a story doesn’t evolve slow enough for the effects of new information and experience to go unnoticed, a static narrative self becomes unsupportable and inevitably dies, no matter how much it felt like us.
THE DESTRUCTION OF “YOU”
Upon reformation at our destination, the mental support for a person with a contiguous existence throughout time and space is difficult to sustain without at least the simulation of movement through time and space. When there’s a gap in experience and explanation, the continuity the mind uses to support the story of a consistent us is disrupted. If we can’t reestablish our old self or exist as someone that simply appreciates the experience of existing as a human being, existential dread and crises are inevitable. Anytime conditions change beyond what the mind can account for and accommodate, we’re going to have a tough time and our mental health will be at risk.
Growing up in a world where people continually appear out of thin air and travel between vast distances happens instantaneously, the mind would likely develop a model capable of supporting the feeling of unique selfness, but that’s not our world or understanding. It will be incredibly difficult for a person to accept and assimilate the knowledge of physical destruction into their psyche when their entire narrative is based on physical and temporal continuity, which is why I champion the nonidentification of the Buddhist concept anatta. Not overly identifying with any concept, vessel, or image is sensible, especially when we don’t truly know the essential nature of reality or if we’re the original and singular us.
What a narratively or bodily identified person from our world will struggle to understand and accept in a future world with transporters, is that they aren’t unique or special in any objective sense. Realizing the specific arrangement of matter you thought was exclusively yours can be reconstituted or even duplicated, completely subverts the idea of life being tied to an individual body. When you once had a body that was exclusive to you, and now you only have an exclusive experience of a non-exclusive physical form, the established rules for existence get rewritten.
EXCLUSIVE EXPERIENCE IN A NON-EXCLUSIVE IDENTITY
There may be two or two thousand physical clones of a person, but there’s only one perspective to be experienced thanks to the physics principle called Pauli exclusion. In short and inexactly, Wolfgang Pauli’s law says that two things composed of matter (fermions) cannot exist in the exact same state, so two perspectives that are perfectly identical are actually the same perspective or one perspective. Individuality is physically and experientially maintained thanks to this principle, but personal identity may not be, not in an objective sense. You are you, only because you’re the one experiencing life from that specific perspective and the only one that can, but others may not agree that you’re unique because insight rarely penetrates to the level of personal experience.
If you feel alive, experience a body, reality, or what you call life, you are alive even if a transporter malfunctions, holds you in stasis for centuries, and no one believes you to be more than a facsimile. From your subjective vantage point, life doesn’t end just because you’ve been infinitely duplicated or reconstituted long after everyone alive during your time has passed on, but the mental narrative about you will be violently assaulted, potentially obliterated. It doesn’t matter what happens to your physical form or the world, if the experience of you is a possible reality you’re never dead, not technically, you’re just not experiencing a body and life for a time.
Duplicating our form just once will upset our experience of primacy and distinction, but it shouldn’t ruin life forever because there’s never an instant where true versions of a self are known from multiple perspectives. If a thousand perfect clones of a person exist, they must be kept in stasis, unevolved, because their slightly unique positions in space and time will cause their experience to diverge every moment they’re alive. As soon as the universe has moved from one state to another, as soon as the atoms and molecules in the body flux and the most miniscule differentiation in brain states is had, the incredibly similar copies begin to branch and never stop.
You shouldn’t use a transporter unless you’re ready to kill the narrative you, but there’s no reason to fear an actual death because we are simply a consistent experience of a seemingly consistent thing. Until the fundamental nature of the universe and consciousness are no longer debatable, theoretical, accepting experience of individuality over the illusion of an experiencing individual is an infinitely more stable foundation to build an existential framework on. In this world where the material composing narratives is continually destroyed, a solid framework will be the only shelter for the psyche and our best tool for sustained mental health.
