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Star Trek: Murderers

So I've been thinking about identity. Sustained consciousness.

And it seems pretty clear to me that consciousness differs from where you look at it. Let's say, just as an example, that a device is created that allows you to create a perfect duplicate of someone. I point the thingie at you and *bam* there are two of you standing next to each other and looking confused. Both of you will believe that they are the original you. After all, yous had exactly the same memories, going right up to the point you were split from each other. An outside observer would only know which was the new you by knowing where the original was standing. However, there is an original you, and that you is the one whose consciousness gets maintained through the transaction. The duplicate you may act exactly the same, but the older you is still the one, true you.

Now, further, let's say that the new you gets created somewhere else, and the original you suddenly ceases to be as part of the transaction. As far as the new you is concerned, you've suddenly been transported to someplace new and hopefully exciting. However, from the point of view of the old you... you're dead. Kaput. End of file error. Gone off to meet the angels. Your consciousness, the one which stepped into the device expecting to be transported, was instead destroyed.

Now let's say someone else builds a new device. Instead of creating a copy and destroying the old copy, it instead makes all your molecules suddenly exist at the new location. You are perfectly transported without a break in consciousness. Now: how can anyone tell the difference? The effects are perfectly identical. The only difference between the two is that in the first case, anyone who steps on it dies instantly, and in the second case, not. The creator of the first device and second one may not even know themselves that there are differences in the way their devices work.

This becomes even more complicated when you consider that no one really knows what consciousness entails. How can we know that the second device, the one that transports all your molecules, actually does so without creating a new consciousness? There is no test we can perform that will tell us if there is a death involved in the procedure. This means that Star Trek's transporters could quite easily have been wholesale killing devices without anyone being the wiser. "Bridge to slaughterhouse: two to beam up." McCoy was right to fear, and wrong ever to use the thing at all.

If there is no afterlife, no soul and what have you, then the discussion can end right there and happily, but tossing a soul into the mix makes things even more complicated. If a perfect copy of you is created, where does its soul come from? Would the soul move in the case of the first device? Or, if not, does that mean that once someone creates a working transporter that the afterlife will get crowded with duplicates of people, each being a slice of the final version?

All of which together explains why if perfect matter transmission is ever created I am never going to step on the pad.