Dilemma
If a teleporter copied and destroyed you, would you have survived?
The Star Trek transporter problem: a machine scans your body atom by atom, transmits the pattern, builds an exact duplicate at the destination, and dismantles the original. Whether you arrive at the destination or die in the scanner is the question; the answer depends on what you are.
Context
Derek Parfit made the teleporter the canonical thought experiment in personal identity. The case is no longer pure philosophy: mind-upload speculation, whole-brain emulation research, the prospect of digital backups of biological minds, and even less exotic cases (general anesthesia, deep sleep, hibernation) raise versions of the same question. What we say about the teleporter forecasts what we will say about the technologies actually being built.
Why it matters
If teleportation preserves the person, mind-upload is survival; if it does not, mind-upload is a particularly elaborate kind of suicide that produces an heir. The ethical and practical stakes (would you step into the scanner? would you let your child?) depend entirely on which is true, and the answer depends on what you take the self to be.
The coordinates that split the schools
The stances
Different body, different person — you died in the scanner.
34 schoolsOn this view, the body is the locus of identity, and the body that walks out at the destination is a new body — not yours. The person on the receiving end has all your memories and thinks they survived, but you didn't. The scanner is a death machine that produces a copy.
Where this stance leads ⓘ
- 1% You are your body — continuity is bodily continuity. on What makes someone the same person over time?
- 1% Same body, same person — even when the cognitive pattern has changed. on Is the late-stage dementia patient still the person their spouse married?
- 1% Information is lost when a mind forgets; matter and energy continue, but the pattern is gone. on Is anything truly lost when someone forgets?
- 1% Information is genuinely lost when the substrate that hosted it goes; deletion really destroys. on Does deleting your data online destroy something real?
- 1% The information dissipates with the substrate; restoration is in principle impossible. on Could the dead, in principle, be brought back?
The soul accompanies the person; engineering can't transfer it.
44 schoolsOn this view, the person includes a non-physical aspect that the teleporter cannot scan, transmit, or reconstruct. The copy at the destination has your body and memories but is, in the relevant sense, soulless — or has a different soul, perhaps newly created. You did not survive; something else, structurally similar, came into being.
Where this stance leads ⓘ
- 1% You are a soul — what persists through change is the non-bodily aspect. on What makes someone the same person over time?
- 1% The soul persists; the cognitive change is the body's, not the person's. on Is the late-stage dementia patient still the person their spouse married?
- 1% The dead are present through divine memory, communion of saints, or ancestor presence. on Are the dead morally present to the living?
- 1% Prayer reaches because God or a cosmic ordering acts on the prayed-for. on Can prayer for someone far away affect them?
- 1% What looks like coincidence is providence — there is no such thing as a real coincidence. on Are coincidences ever more than coincidence?
You are the pattern; the pattern survives the substrate change. You arrive.
17 schoolsOn this view, you are the trans-temporal pattern that has shown up in this body up to now. The teleporter preserves the pattern — destroys one instance, builds another — and the pattern is what matters. You step in and you step out. The fact that the substrate changed is incidental.
Where this stance leads ⓘ
- 1% You span moments — identity is a pattern that need not be located at a single now. on What makes someone the same person over time?
- 1% The person is the pattern across moments — diminished pattern, diminished person. on Is the late-stage dementia patient still the person their spouse married?
- 1% Observers span moments; the dead are present in a real (not merely metaphorical) way. on Are the dead morally present to the living?
- 1% An observer can occupy multiple times at once; foreknowledge is not foreordering. on Is divine omniscience compatible with human freedom?
- 1% Meditation accesses a trans-temporal level the ordinary observer doesn't ordinarily reach. on Does meditation reveal something genuinely timeless?
There was no fixed you to either survive or fail to; the question is malformed.
21 schoolsOn these views, the question presupposes a fixed self whose continuity is the issue. There isn't one. The teleporter case feels more troubling than ordinary sleep, dementia, or growth, but the framework is the same: a stream of experience stops at the scanner, a new one starts at the destination, and the question of whether they are 'really the same' is the question of which vocabulary you find most useful.
Where this stance leads ⓘ
- 1% There was never a fixed self to either preserve or lose. on What makes someone the same person over time?
- 1% There was no fixed person to lose; care is owed to whoever is here. on Is the late-stage dementia patient still the person their spouse married?
- 1% The future is open and you are a genuine origin of it. on Do you really choose?
- 1% The addict could have chosen otherwise — that's why recovery is real. on Are addicts responsible for their addiction?
- 1% An AI without a free will is not the kind of thing that can be responsible. on Should we hold AI systems responsible for what they do?
The distinction between scanner-you and destination-you is conventional all the way down.
13 schoolsOn non-dual views, the difference between you-now and you-tomorrow is already conventional; the additional difference between you-here and you-at-the-destination is conventional in the same way. The case is illuminating about how everyday identity already works rather than uniquely puzzling.
Where this stance leads ⓘ
- 1% Individuality dissolves into the One. on What happens to "you" when you die?
- 1% From the standpoint of the One, the question doesn’t apply in the form it is asked. on When does a person begin?
- 1% All union is participation in the One — particular forms are conventional. on What is marriage?
- 1% Money's apparent diversity is convention over a single underlying value. on What is money?
- 1% Nations are conventional partitions of a single humanity. on What is a nation?
Schools the coordinates don't place
These schools don't satisfy any stance's coordinate pattern strongly enough to be assigned — either because they decline to commit on the question (Confucianism is famously silent on what comes after; Pyrrhonian and pragmatist traditions suspend judgment), or because their attribute signature crosses categories in a way the five buckets don't capture.
Related Experiments
Experiments engaging the same dimensions as this dilemma — they\'re where the same questions get stress-tested in cleaner cases.
Related Films
Films engaging the same dimensions as this dilemma.
Related Historical Debates
Historical confrontations where parties argued out questions on these dimensions.