What makes you, you · Quiz question 5/35
The Teletransporter (Parfit)
Disassembled in Seoul, rebuilt atom-for-atom in New York — is the person who arrives you? Derek Parfit's teleporter and the personal identity debate.
A teleporter breaks your body down atom by atom in Seoul and rebuilds an exact copy in New York — same memories, same personality. Nothing is left of the original in Seoul.
The person who arrives in New York is me.
Derek Parfit opens chapter 10 of Reasons and Persons (1984) with it. A scanner on Earth records every cell in your body and destroys it; a replicator on Mars builds an identical body from new matter. Parfit used the case to argue that what really matters to us isn't "is it the same person?" but psychological continuity and connectedness (his "Relation R").
If you agreed, you're a psychological continuity theorist: if memories, personality and intentions carry on in the right way, it's the same person. That idea goes back to John Locke, who said personal identity reaches as far as consciousness does.
If you disagreed, you think continuity of body, brain or life is needed — or you feel teleporting kills the original and makes a copy. Parfit's provocative conclusion was that we don't have to settle this. If the person in New York is fully psychologically continuous with you, that's as good as ordinary survival, whether or not he's strictly "you." Parfit wrote that this made him less afraid of death. The glitch case where the original survives is covered in The Teleporter Glitch.
If memories and personality carry on, it's the same person. The teleporter is just transportation.
Key names: John Locke, Derek Parfit, Sydney ShoemakerYou're a human organism. If the organism was destroyed, you died and the New York person is new.
Key names: Eric Olson, Bernard Williams"Is it really me?" may have no determinate answer. What matters is psychological connection, not identity.
Key names: Derek Parfit, Buddha (similar to no-self)In the 2020 PhilPapers Survey, about 35% of philosophers said teleportation is survival, and about 44% took the psychological view of personal identity.