Nighty-Nite, Captain.

Good news, everyone.   I've thought of a new reason to be terrified.

There's a line of reasoning that states that if Star Trek teleporters were real...

Wait!   I know.  Don't leave.  I know that the word "teleporter" is often an excellent cue that the person you've been indulging has drifted into choppy water, but I think this might be worth consideration.

As I was saying:

If the Star Trek teleporter were a real machine, there is a school of thought that the person stepping into it is actually destroyed.  What emerges from the other side is a replica, perfect in every physical detail, with a set of identical memories, because memories are a biochemical thing that can be replicated through exact placement of neural pathways, but the emergent thing has a completely different consciousness.

So.   The last thing Kirk sees, in his entire life, is a Scotsman in red velour pushing a slider.  And then he belongs to the ages.

Scary?  No?  Fine.

What if this happens when we go to sleep?


A-HA!  Right?

My reaction to this idea when it first occurred to me, deep in the clutch of a chilly night,  was that familiar little jolt of bad news electricity that you get from doing mortality math while you stare at your clock.

It's 3:37. 

It's still 3:37.

I wonder how many more times I'm statistically likely to see The Summer Olympics.

Oh, look. It's 3:38.

The more I thought about it, the more plausible it seemed.  We don't know what sleep's purpose is. We know what happens when it doesn't occur, but we don't know why those things can't be carried out by a biological process that doesn't leave the host completely vulnerable for a half dozen hours at a time.  Similarly, we don't know what consciousness is or what its relationship is to the mucus and electricity of our head-buckets.

And of course, this is one of those stupid things you can only speculate on, like "is my green the same as your green" and "how do we know this isn't all a computer simulation?" And in that respect, it's a worthless notion.  And yet, what if this is real?

Well, nothing. You'll go to sleep and that will be the end of everything.

OR you'll wake up in Valhalla. 

OR hell. 

OR some weird computer simulation hell where nobody can see the same shade of green.

But then again, if you got a message from an angel, or Starfleet or, I don't know... the Matrix or something which proved to you that this is really the way the universe works, would it really change the way you live?

This is what surprised me.  It's not really much of a reality-shifter, if you think about it.  If you've ever had one of those nights where you were pretty sure tomorrow was going to be terrible for some mundane reason, you might have tried to lull yourself to sleep with the assurance that there was nothing to be done about it, that it was tomorrow's problem.  You've already shifted your experiential self using the thin fulcrum of "now".

Wow.   I really sound like a guy who wants to sell you some candles.

Anyway, I had a weird curve of panic with this idea.  It was terrifying at first, but slowly it dissolved into this banal metaphor for the lives that we all know we ought to lead -- divorced from the past and not sweating a future that we're misinterpreting anyway. 

And if you have a sense of entitlement which may or may not be classified as pathologically low according to some questionable self-diagnostic online quizzing, there is this whole other way to consider it.  If each awakening means that a new consciousness gets to be alive, even for just one mundane, frustrating or tragic day of an average person's life, maybe that's better than no experience at all.

I don't know.  I never watched a lot of Star Trek.  Those people may already have this figured out.  Let's just boldly go out there and tough out being really decent to one another.  It's only a day.  You can do anything for a day.

And, hey.  You're not going to stay awake long enough to receive the check if you close out your IRA's, so leave all of that where it is.