Analysis Of Teletransportation, Death Or Travel

Teletransportation, death or travel?
Teletransportation, death or travel? This question is asked in relation to personal identity and the question that is often debated in philosophy, what is personal identity? What does it consist of? The Teletransportation thought experiment raises the question “can we survive inside another body, or do we cease to exist if our physical self is destroyed?” the real question is actually, however, what constitutes survival and does personal identity truly matter in the notion of survival? If there is somebody out there with our memories, thoughts, intentions and so on is that enough to constitute our survival? In this essay I hope to express why I disbelieve that we survive teletransportation as the same person.
Teletransportation as a way of travel has always been of interest to me, the idea of travelling from one place to another in an instant has its merits for someone who was psychologically traumatised in a car accident. The idea of hopping into a receptacle, pushing a button and voila you are in another place is ideal when you don’t like to travel in cars or planes. I always imagined it as portrayed in ‘The Fly’ where you climb in at one …show more content…
Although it has been argued that the two aren’t mutually exclusive, I claim that unless the teletransporter somehow disassembles us and sends all the pieces, along with our memories, thoughts and soul to Mars to be reassembled then there is no way we have survived, despite Parfit’s theory that personal identity is not required for survival. I believe that it is not any one of these theories that renders us a completely individual, it is all of these items combined that render us unique and produce our personal