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.

I wonder if there’s a technical manual out there that tries to explain it. It seems like energy manipulation is something startrek tech excells at.

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.

I always thought the least believable part of transporters was that they worked without a pad on both ends.