Spock Must Die!
When a transporter experiment goes horribly awry, suddenly there are two Mr. Spocks! One is the true First Officer of the Enterprise. The other is his complete opposite, a traitor whose very existence poses a grave threat to the crew, the ship, and the Federation itself. One of the Spocks must die. But which one...?
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- Then the teleporting chief would have to shoot the original
As an aside, there was a great Star Trek novel where there was a long range transporter invented that accidentally cloned people.
(I think it was "Spock Must Die")
- That's the plot of "Spock Must Die" by James Blish, the first Star Trek novel ever written. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spock_Must_Die!
- A variation on this story was the plot of the very first Star Trek novel: Spock Must Die!
(I think there is a beaten up copy buried in my old closet at my mother's house, from when I was a boy.)
- There's a Star Trek novel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spock_Must_Die!) where IIRC they explore how the transporter is sort of destroying the original you and recreating a new one somewhere else. It's a legit philosophical question, but practically speaking, the people who use the transporter don't feel like they're longer themselves. They just feel like they've moved.
That's fiction, of course, but what the characters experience is what I'd expect to happen in real life if a transporter did exist. If a structure (human) is destroyed and recreated identically at some other location, I don't see why that should be any different than moving the atoms over while preserving the structure.
And I don't see why things would be different if you created the same structure (or an isomorphic one) inside a computer.
Of course, I'm assuming that what makes you you is simply the structure and how it operates as a system. That's definitely a philosophical question, but I think if its answer is what I expect, then a perfect recreation of you is you.
And yes, this raises the question of whether there can be more than one of you. (Which I think the Star Trek novel also covers.) I don't think this cloning presents a philosophical barrier, though. I think it's similar to calling fork(). The only observable differences come from the kernel intervening to change the pid and fork()'s return value. There's nothing fundamentally unsound about the idea of splitting into two and both being "you". Although there are definitely things that are unsettling about it.
