Because teleportation is murder. Whatever comes out on the other side may look and act like you, but isn't you, because you're now dead for having been disassembled by the teleporter.

Teleporters are interesting because when you think about it long enough, you realize the person on departure end died.

Then you think about it more, and if the person that comes out the arrival end is an exact replica, down to the atom, and has continuity of thought... if you accept that they died then you kind of also have to accept that the "you" of any given instant is constantly dying and giving way to the "you" of the next instant. That person living that experience at that exact moment will never exist again.

So then you're kinda back to transporters being business as usual again, but with a fun new existential crisis on the side.

In practice, I agree with you. The transporter scans, disintegrates, and reconstructs the thing being transported. But when the thing being transported is reconstructed at a subatomic level it is effectively identical.

I can imagine the society we see in startrek having already worked through the moral and philosophical implications. I would have loved to see that addressed in an episode tho.

Outside of measure of a man-type episodes, I don't think they've ever had a super in-depth discussion on selfhood and the soul as characters see it in universe. , but it seems like materialism is the generally accepted philosophy. Post Enterprise, people who have hangups on the transporters (perhaps more based in dualism) are treated as weirdos.

More evidence for materialism: Q, the godlike being who might be able to tell the difference, treats Golem-Picard the same entity. And last I checked nobody's going around saying that Thomas Riker and William Boimler are p-zombies.

(I guess Gray Tal is the odd man out, since there was some consciousness that got somehow ceremonially split off before shoving it in a golem. Maybe that's just trill symbiont weirdness though).

The fact that everyone treats Golem-Picard as True-Picard felt to me like confirmation that, in the ST universe, what makes you you is your mind. Memories, thought patterns, etc... I know it was tv-show hand wavery but the fact that no one mourned the death of their friend, or really ever once questioned the validity of the golem taking his place bothered me a little.