Sci-fi short film "Liminal"

[Jeebo]

BootinUp posted one of these the other day, and I am so grateful to that DU member for introducing me to these gems. I have watched several of them and I'll get around to watching all of them eventually. Here's the best one I've seen so far:

It's reminiscent of a scene that's been bouncing around in my skull for years in a science fiction novel I'd like to write some day but probably never will. I've long thought that a human being is something that adds up to much more than the sum of its parts. There's something there that is not explained by the chemicals, the cells and flesh and blood, the neural connections and electrical activity, there's something more there than what we can explain and identify and quantify. So, if we ever get to where we can teleport like the transporters in Star Trek, how will we transport that unidentifiable and unquantifiable and unreproducible something extra?

The scene in my science fiction novel will be between an extraterrestrial and a human. The human will be asking the extraterrestrial if they have something like the transporters in Star Trek? The extraterrestrial will answer, "Yes, we do, but we cannot use it to transport living organisms, only inanimate matter."

"You can't beam somebody down like they do in Star Trek? What happens when you do? "

"The living thing transports perfectly, in every way that we can understand. It is reproduced exactly, as far as we can tell, down to the molecular level, everything is perfect. Yet, it's just not alive. It's not dead, it's just something that has no life, that never was alive. There's something in living things that makes them alive, something that we cannot identify or reproduce, so our transporters perfectly reproduce living things but without that extra unidentifiable something that makes them alive."

Who was it who said that the eyes are windows into the soul?

Enjoy the short film. I sure did.

-- Ron

[yonder]

1. Yes, that Dust channel. We stumbled across it last year

when they were doing all these sci-fi short stories featuring robots.

I keep forgetting about it - thanks for the reminder (and this movie). Bookmarking for later.

[tblue37]

2. I don't get what happens at the end. It's too dark. What are the gunshots about?

[Earth-shine]

3. "They" kill the man who has been transported to cover up whatever it is "they" are doing.

[tblue37]

4. Thanks. My old eyes can't make out action when it is in the dark.

[Earth-shine]

5. This has been done before. "Is is live or Memorex?"

There's a Star Trek novel called Spock Must Die. In the story, the transporter creates a duplicate Spock. Much of the novel involves them analyzing what the difference is between the two Spocks. (There are none.) I read this book about 45 years ago.

This is of course different than when the transporter created two Kirks; one evil and one good. (That well-known episode, The Enemy Within, was made about 55 years ago.)

Somewhere in the first season of The Next Generation, it is explicitly stated that consciousness is something beyond the space-time continuum. I don't remember the particular episode, but I'm pretty sure it was Mr. Data who said it. It was about 35 years ago.

One of the problems with the concept of precisely duplicating something is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. In theory and reality, one could never create a perfect quantum-level copy. In TNG, transporter chief Miles O'Brien frequently mentions the "Heisenberg compensators" as something integral to the functioning of transporter units, or rather, their malfunctioning.

In a Newtonian universe where everything from particles to planets operates as clockwork machinery, the notion of human "freewill" can easily be philosophically questioned.

In a quantum mechanical universe, where the outcomes of particle interactions have a calculable uncertainty, a free-willing consciousness may be more of a certainty.

Star Trek may be my favorite thing in the whole damn world, but I have always disagreed with some of its Sci-fi premises.

For one, I believe that the mind-body relationship is best described by the theory of epiphenomenalism. This directly implies that whatever you want to call "consciousness," or describe as "consciousness," that thing ultimately obeys the laws of physics.