Think of the following the next time you are upset by someone’s calling you a name or labeling you. *
Ah! The technology. Transporting, ala Star Trek, a person from one place to another would certainly be an accomplishment beyond today’s technologies and probably beyond all technologies yet to come.
Glitch: Although experimenters are probably close to transporting something really tiny, say a subatomic particle or maybe even an atom, chances are that transporting a macro object like you is virtually impossible. Too many things to keep track of. What are you, like a gajillion subatomic particles and atomic particles? Hey, you can look up estimates of how many subatomic particles make a human, but remember that estimates aren’t specific.
And then there are the problems of not knowing simultaneously the whereabouts of an electron and its motion, of even knowing what quarks are, and of knowing whether or not something like electron tunneling that possibly makes your neurons work might be screwed up by a transporting device that possibly alters the chemistry of your cells in disassembling you partly or entirely.
It’s good that you are so complex that we can’t put you in a machine, disassemble, and then reassemble you. Talk about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle magnified so many orders of magnitude that, well, I don’t want to figure the numbers. Nor do I want to speak at length of the Pauli Exclusion Principle, whereby you, in being reassembled might find yourself mixed up with other matter at your destination. And the energy required? Remember that if you pump some energy into an electron, it’s going to do some jumping and some photon emitting. The point here?
You are incredibly complex, and that physical complexity that I just wrote about doesn’t even come close to all those immaterial “parts” like memories and the whatnots of knowledge and skills. Scotty will never be able to beam you anywhere.
That complexity that is YOU, can serve as the basis for an unending optimism. You will always lie just beyond the reach of AI, beyond the reach of any mechanism that attempts to give the definitive YOU to the rest of the world. Your individual Uncertainty Principle makes you an irreplaceable part of the universe. Nowhere in this Cosmos can there be another YOU. That means that whatever you do has never been done and can never be done in the same way and that no macro entity can duplicate you. The total YOU can’t be cloned, can’t be shared, can’t be transported by disassembling and reassembling. On the other end of any “transporter” you would not show up. Not the real, complete you. You cannot. Be definitively labeled or named.
And that’s why you should never be upset by someone else’s attempt to disassemble and reassemble you with name-calling or labeling.
*Conversely, think of this the next time you call someone a name or label a person.
Ah! The technology. Transporting, ala Star Trek, a person from one place to another would certainly be an accomplishment beyond today’s technologies and probably beyond all technologies yet to come.
Glitch: Although experimenters are probably close to transporting something really tiny, say a subatomic particle or maybe even an atom, chances are that transporting a macro object like you is virtually impossible. Too many things to keep track of. What are you, like a gajillion subatomic particles and atomic particles? Hey, you can look up estimates of how many subatomic particles make a human, but remember that estimates aren’t specific.
And then there are the problems of not knowing simultaneously the whereabouts of an electron and its motion, of even knowing what quarks are, and of knowing whether or not something like electron tunneling that possibly makes your neurons work might be screwed up by a transporting device that possibly alters the chemistry of your cells in disassembling you partly or entirely.
It’s good that you are so complex that we can’t put you in a machine, disassemble, and then reassemble you. Talk about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle magnified so many orders of magnitude that, well, I don’t want to figure the numbers. Nor do I want to speak at length of the Pauli Exclusion Principle, whereby you, in being reassembled might find yourself mixed up with other matter at your destination. And the energy required? Remember that if you pump some energy into an electron, it’s going to do some jumping and some photon emitting. The point here?
You are incredibly complex, and that physical complexity that I just wrote about doesn’t even come close to all those immaterial “parts” like memories and the whatnots of knowledge and skills. Scotty will never be able to beam you anywhere.
That complexity that is YOU, can serve as the basis for an unending optimism. You will always lie just beyond the reach of AI, beyond the reach of any mechanism that attempts to give the definitive YOU to the rest of the world. Your individual Uncertainty Principle makes you an irreplaceable part of the universe. Nowhere in this Cosmos can there be another YOU. That means that whatever you do has never been done and can never be done in the same way and that no macro entity can duplicate you. The total YOU can’t be cloned, can’t be shared, can’t be transported by disassembling and reassembling. On the other end of any “transporter” you would not show up. Not the real, complete you. You cannot. Be definitively labeled or named.
And that’s why you should never be upset by someone else’s attempt to disassemble and reassemble you with name-calling or labeling.
*Conversely, think of this the next time you call someone a name or label a person.
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