[kevkrom]

My take on the star trek transporter: It breaks you up into billions of pieces, effectively killing you. It reassembles an exact copy that, if it is alive, has no human soul and no intelligence. But you are still dead.

Look up the story "Think Like a Dinosaur" -- it covers this exact topic (minus any reference to Star Trek).

[who_would_fardels_bear]

Then there’s that last bit of the New Generation (or was it Deep Six Nine?) that had two versions of Riker due to a transporter accident.