Teletransporter: You are placed in a machine that will instantaneously disintegrate your body, in the process recording its exact atomic configuration. This information is then beamed to another machine far away, and in that machine new matter is used to construct a body with the same configuration as yours. Would you consider yourself to have survived the process, and teleported from one machine to the other (“survival”)? Or do you think you have died, and the duplicate in the far away machine is a different person (“death”)?
In other words, it’s important to avoid the worst argument in the world. I believe that the former statement is implied by a uniquely best answer to a set of verbal questions—but at the same time, it’s a mere technicality.
Teletransporter: You are placed in a machine that will instantaneously disintegrate your body, in the process recording its exact atomic configuration. This information is then beamed to another machine far away, and in that machine new matter is used to construct a body with the same configuration as yours. Would you consider yourself to have survived the process, and teleported from one machine to the other (“survival”)? Or do you think you have died, and the duplicate in the far away machine is a different person (“death”)?
It’s important to distinguish between
and
In other words, it’s important to avoid the worst argument in the world. I believe that the former statement is implied by a uniquely best answer to a set of verbal questions—but at the same time, it’s a mere technicality.