Are Teleporters Murder Machines?
Is Scotty a monster?
Star Trek: The Next Generation takes place in a beautiful world. Humans live in peace with each other, the Vulcans, and those guys with the scrotum faces.
“The nut sack is of great cultural significance where I’m from”
It’s an aspirational world in almost every way. They can travel at light speed, 3D print whatever they want, and simulate entire new worlds on the holodeck. They can even teleport people from the ship to the planet in an instant. Well, maybe they can. They either do that or they routinely murder their crew and replace them with identical clones.
This is an interesting question of personal identity. Is the person beamed from the planet’s surface really Captain Picard, or is it a new person who thinks they’re Captain Picard? Have we just murdered him without knowing? I think, probably yes. I certainly wouldn’t risk going into a teleporter myself, even if my only alternative was RyanAir.
There’s one episode where Captain Ryker is beamed off planet and duplicated. One Ryker ends up on his ship, while another is made planetside. At the point of duplication, they’re both identical down to the atom. They even both sit down on chairs weirdly. So an important question arises - which one is the original Ryker?
There’s only a few options:
Ryker on the Ship is the original (Ryker A)
Ryker that was left on the planet is the original (Ryker B)
There’s no fact of the matter
Both of them are the original
Neither of them are the original
(1) and (2) are hard to justify because it’s not obvious why you would favour one over the other. Unless it was random? But then someone’s personal identity being some strange metaphysical coin flip is also pretty weird.
(3) just seems impossible. Surely there has to be a fact of the matter of who a person is. I’m not even sure what it means for a person’s identity to be indeterminate. Either Ryker A is the original or he isn’t. Am I alone in this intuition? Sometimes people say that there’s no fact of the matter because personal identity is a matter of convention - but that also seems problematic. Let’s say Ryker A is the original Ryker so long as everyone says he is. That means before getting into the teleporter, Ryker Prime would have really strong reasons to get everyone to call Ryker A the original. It’s the only way he’d survive! However, it seems a bit weird that the survival of Ryker Prime hinges on what people say about Ryker A.
(4) also seems impossible, because there can’t be two of one person. Your clone can’t literally be you. They have two different conscious experiences and bodies. If this thing kept happening until there were 1 million Rykers, (4) would commit us to saying all 1 million of them are one person, or Ryker is 1 million people - but that’s weird!
(5) seems to have no obvious problems, which puts it above the rest - however it also means the original Ryker was obliterated. Oops!
Now, maybe you’d say that Ryker was killed in this weird scenario, but he isn’t usually killed. When the teleporter is working properly, he survives just fine - but then that seems a bit convenient. That means Ryker dying depends on whether or not a copy of him happened to get made, which seems a bit strange. It also means Ryker A’s identity depends on the existence of another person, but I don’t think personal identity is extrinsic that way. Surely you can’t kill people by making people. Unless you’re like, Hitler’s mum - but I banned her from this newsletter a long time ago.
I think Option 4 is correct. The reason it sounds weird is because the intuitive view of identity across time is false. When we say that some object at t1 is identical to an object at t2, we don't mean that the 3D collection of particles with no temporal extent located at time t2 is the exact same thing as the 3D collection of particles with no temporal extent located at t2 - that would be nonsense, and logically impossible, unless t1=t2. What we really mean is that there is some 4-dimensional object with both spatial and temporal extent and that the object at t1 and the object at t2 are both slices of it taken at a particular time. So they are not literally identical - rather, they are the intersection of the same whole with a 3D slice of spacetime, at two different times.
With this view of identity, it's not mysterious at all how both Ryker A and Ryker B are the same person as the original Ryker, without being the same person as eachother. Before the duplication, all the temporal parts of Ryker A and Ryker B coincided, and hence they were "the same person" before that. But their temporal parts after the duplication are distinct.
To add to this, suppose the machine malfunctions again and doesn’t delete the original (before making the two copies). Seems the original would be the guy, not the copies.