I decided to take a little road trip over the Memorial Day weekend, so I loaded up the truck and I went over to Phoenix. While there I went square dancing with the Bucks & Bows club of Scottsdale, which was very enjoyable, and I also got in a good bit of listening to audio books while shooting through the desert.
One of the books I listened to was Lawrence M. Krauss’s The Physics of Star Trek. It was a nice read.
It came out a good while ago, so it didn’t go all the way up to the end of recent Star Trek history, but it was nice to hear a professional physicist’s take on the show.
It was clear that Krauss enjoys Star Trek and can appreciate episodes even when they contain physics mistakes. He also handled the subjects he considered in a quite balanced way, regularly avoiding the trap of saying "This could never happen" while making it clear that the current understanding of physics would make it very, very hard for it to happen.
One of the things that Krauss was most impressed with was how good the technobabble on the show can be. While a bunch of it is just junk (from a physics point of view as well as a dramatic point of view), there are a startling number of times where the writers of Star Trek seem to have picked terminology for things that eerily mirrors the actual terms scientists use, started using after the show, or might plausibly use in the future. (An easy example is a TOS episode in which the writers referred to something that sounds like a black hole–before the term "black hole" had been coined–as a "black star.")
After discussing warp drive and time travel and deflector shields and inertial dampers and the like, Krauss concludes the book with a couple of chapters dealing with particularly good and particularly bad physics moments on Star Trek.
I was kind of surprised that in the bad physics moments that he picked on a few things that dealt with minor matters of terminology that I wouldn’t have included in a top 10 mistakes chapter. I was also kind of surprised that he omitted some of my favorite science errors on Star Trek (like where the heck is Spock getting all of his body mass from as he’s rapidly re-growing to adulthood on the Genesis Planet in Star Trek III? I mean, he should be stuffing his face with food every second, if it were even possible for him to metabolize it into body mass that fast.)
But then that’s the fun of top 10 lists: Debating whether they actually are the top 10 or not.
Krauss also handles the subject of religion quite well. He’s respectful to religious sensibilities and interested in the theological questions that are raised by Star Trek technology, such as the implications for the transporter on the question of whether the soul exists.
In his discussion of this topic, though, I think he makes a mistake in reasoning, though it is a forgiveable one since it would require significant theological background to spot the problem and, after all, "He’s a physicist, not a theologian, dammit!" (Please excuse the bad word in deference to Dr. McCoy.)
Here’s the issue: If a transporter takes you apart molecule by molecule (or particle by particle), it would seem to kill you. If it then assembles an identical copy of your body (either out of the same atoms or new ones) and that new copy works properly then–one might suppose–it looks like we are nothing more than molecules in a particular, replicable pattern. In other words: There is no soul.
Krauss remains neutral in the book on whether souls exist, but I would take issue with whether the above line of reasoning works.
From a Catholic perspective, everything that is alive has a soul. Not everything has an immortal soul (only rational beings have those as far as we know), but life and the possession of a soul are concomittant.
So if a transporter makes an identical copy of your body and it’s alive then it has some kind of soul. If it’s clearly rational then it also clearly has a rational and thus an immortal soul. (But be careful here: The reverse is not necessarily true. If it isn’t clearly rational then that doesn’t mean it automatically lacks an immortal soul. Irrational people still have immortal souls by virtue of their membership in a rational species–mankind–even if their exercise of reason is impaired.)
If a transporter made a down-to-the-particle copy of you and it was not rational then I would say that this constitutes evidence that the soul does exist since clearly something other than a molecular copy of your body is needed for you to be rational.
But if it makes a copy and the copy is rational then I don’t think we have evidence one way or the other about the existence of the soul.
Why is that?
Because the evidence is consistent with either the hypothesis that we are nothing more than patterned molecules or the hypothesis that the copy has a new soul (yours presumably having departed when you were taken apart and killed).
To see the basis for the second hypothesis, let’s set aside the issue of killing: Suppose that the transporter doesn’t destroy your body. It just scans it and makes a copy of you, so now there are two of you. In this case, the transporter is functioning as a kind of high-tech cloning device, one capable of making an identical copy that doesn’t even have to grow up and acquire new memories. It’s a totally identical clone in the best tradition of bad sci-fi cloning stories.
But this would put the theological issue on the same footing as cloning, which theologians have already had the chance to chew over in real life.
As I’ve often pointed out before, if you were able to clone a person (either by fissioning an early embryo or by nuclear transfer) and you got a rational being as a result then it would be unambiguous that the clone has a rational soul.
Why is that?
Well, all you’ve done in this case is come up with a new human body by a morally illicit means. God means human bodies to come into existence as the result of sexual union between a husband and a wife, and at the moment the body comes into existence, he provides it with a soul. That’s how he set things up to work for our species, and that’s the only way that it is moral for us to bring new humans into the world.
But God has already shown himself willing to provide souls even when human bodies are not generated in a morally licit manner. Humans have had the ability to create new human bodies in immoral ways for a long time (e.g., by premarital sex, by adultery, by rape). Recently we’ve added some new techniques (e.g., in vitro fertilization). And we may soon add more (e.g., cloning). But it’s all the same thing: You’re just coming up with a new human body by immoral means.
God has been willing to endow people who were born in such ways with rational souls as is evidenced by the fact that they are both living and rational. Jesus even had some people like that in his family tree (think: the Tamar incident in Genesis 38).
So if–in addition to artificial twinning and nuclear transfer–you come up with a new cloning technology (transporter cloning) then you haven’t changed the playing field theologically. All you’re doing is coming up with a new human body (a rather mature one) by immoral means, but that won’t stop God from endowing it with a rational soul.
So it doesn’t seem to me that having a transporter produce rational copies of you would be evidence for the non-existence of the human soul.
It would be evidence for the existence of the soul if the transporter couldn’t produce rational copies that were known to be particle-for-particle identical to you. In that case we would have found an instance where God doesn’t provide a soul even though we’re providing a body. But the reverse isn’t the case.
I would thus say that the existence of the soul is to some extent verifiable but not falsifiable by transporter technology.
That doesn’t mean I’d be theologically comfortable with transporter technology. If it works as advertised then it’s basically a murder/cloning device.
Fortunately, in at least one episode, they indicate that you remain conscious through the transporter process, and if that’s the case then it doesn’t look like you’re being killed at all but simply adjusted in some way that allows you to pass through solid matter without actually being killed.
I’VE WRITTEN ABOUT THAT BEFORE.
So I differed with Krauss’s reasoning on this point, but it was still nice to listen to him tackle the obvious theological question that transporter technology would pose, and it was a pleasure to listen to his balanced and informed take on the physics of the show.
If you’d be interested in hearing an actual physicist offer a sympathetic but critical look at the subject then be sure to
GET THE BOOK.
The Pirates of the Caribbean turned out to be the surprise summer hit of 2003 and left the newly-minted fans of the franchise wanting more.
