Could you survive teleportation?
Examining theories of personal identity
What does it mean to be you? Not in the existential crisis sort of way, but in the dryly philosophical way: what conditions must hold for you to be the same person over time? This question is at the core of theories of personal identity, and in this article, I want to examine three influential theories I find most interesting. The first is the psychological continuity theory, commonly associated with John Locke and Derek Parfit, the second is the animalist or brute identity view, most closely associated with Eric Olson, and the third is the narrative identity view in the vein of Daniel Dennett and Marya Schechtman. To make this more salient (and more interesting), I will test each theory through the prism of Star Trek-style teleportation scenario, which is common in the literature too.
Originally framed by Parfit in Reasons and Persons, imagine yourself stepping into the teleporter, which completely scans you and then transmits all of that information to a distant location, such as Titan, where it reconstructs a perfect physical (and psychological) copy of you. If all goes well, you end up on the shore of Ligeia Mare, admiring the view. The person on Titan has your memories, beliefs, personality, they remember stepping into the teleporter… But are they really you?
According to Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, personal identity consists in the continuity of consciousness. Specifically, it is the ability to remember yourself as the same thinking thing across time. Crucially, you could remain the same human being, the same physical organism, without being the same person. So, the condition for personal identity is not necessarily tied to bodily factors.
Parfit developed this idea further, postulating what he called Relation R, which is a specific relation linking psychological states like memories, intentions, beliefs, character traits, and so on. This relation is what ultimately matters for survival, even if it does not necessarily entail strict numerical identity. Temporary interruptions like sleep or a brief loss of consciousness would not be an issue, as long as the psychological connections are not irrevocably lost or severed, and the continuity remains coherent.
On the psychological continuity view, the teleporter case is rather straightforward. If the person on Titan is psychologically continuous with the person who stepped into the teleporter, they are the same person. We can also imagine a malfunction scenario, also known as the teletransportation paradox, where the teleporter fails to destroy the original and simply creates a copy on Titan. The response would, however, be equally straightforward. Initially, both the person in the teleporter and the person on Titan would have psychological continuity, but from the moment they diverge in experience, they become distinct people, and this divergence seems to happen momentarily, with no delay. I think that the teleporter’s error would simply create another person, and the original you would have a more robust claim to psychological continuity.
The challenges for this view stem from the fact that people can have false or implanted memories, psychological continuity could be disrupted in severe ways, and it might be difficult to ascertain or measure how much continuity is enough for personhood over time in a clear and non-arbitrary way. Still, there is something deeply intuitive about it too, since what I am pre-theoretically seems to be connected to the fact that I have a continuous stream of experience that I can trace back through my life.
A very different approach is the animalist view, defended most notably by Olson in The Human Animal, according to which what I am is not ‘a mind’ or even a psychological subject, but simply the biological organism. So, the persistence conditions for me are the same as the persistence conditions to the animal or organism that I am. As long as the organism lives, I live, regardless of what psychological states I might have or whether I remember anything at all.
This is elegant in a very blunt way since it explains why we do not cease to exist when we sleep, when we are under deep anaesthesia, or even in a persistent coma. In the case of the teleporter, the story is harsh but clear: teleportation kills you and creates a numerically distinct new organism on Titan. That new organism diverges in terms of its causal history, since it did not come into being in the same way as the original did, and no amount of psychological similarity can change that fact. If the teleporter malfunctions, the original organism is unambiguously you and the copy is not.
Some of the counterintuitive conclusions of the animalist view are that, in cases of a brain transplant, the original body is still you. Similarly, if your consciousness were uploaded into a computer in a way that ‘removes’ it from the original biological brain, the computer you would claim your identity and have full psychological identity with you before the upload. The animalist would still have to claim that the original, now consciousness-less body, is you. Even if everything psychologically recognisable as you disappears, the organism persists and it should still be considered fully as you, regardless of any psychological fact, which many might find counterintuitive.
The third view, which I find most interesting, is the narrativist theory of personal identity, most notably defended by Dennett and Schechtman. What makes you you is constituted by the story you construct about yourself. This is Dennett’s centre of narrative gravity, which is not a fixed, reified substance underlying the self, but rather an ongoing construction, an emergent pattern of interpretation that coheres over time. Similarly, according to Schechtman, persons constitute their identities by constructing autobiographical narratives that integrate their past, present, and imagined future into a coherent whole. This narrative can have a social dimension, in the sense that it can be partially constituted by the role I play in a network of relationships, and by how others recognise and interpret me.
In the teleporter scenario, narrative identity survives since the person on Titan has the same story about themselves, the same self-conception, and social relationships. In the malfunction scenario, both the person in the teleporter and the person on Titan start with the same story, yet they diverge immediately, prima facie in the same manner as in the psychological continuity view. However, since both have a coherent story – one of stepping into the teleporter and nothing happening, and one in which the expected outcome happened but left behind a copy – it is less clear which ‘thread’ of the story has priority in terms of personal identity. It might be the case that there are two instances of the same person now, with no determinate fact as to who is the original, and I do not see this as immediately incoherent.
In fact, I only see it as a nuisance. Two people would then claim the same life, relationships, property, and more… This brings to mind Hervé Le Tellier’s novel The Anomaly, in which a plane and all its passengers are mysteriously duplicated mid-flight, with two identical sets of people landing months apart. Each pair shares the same memories and the same identity up to the point of duplication. They have the same narrative story, and there is clearly no determinate fact as to which person is the original, or more justified in claiming ‘their’ life. The novel explores the aftermath, how they handle this paradox legally, psychologically, and morally. Though this is different than the teleporter scenario, it is a great exploration of this topic in literature.
So where does this leave us? My view is based in something the three theories discussed seems to assume rather than articulate: qualitative identity of experience. What would make the teleported person genuinely me is not just that they have psychologically identical states, but that there is something it is like to be that person in a way that is qualitatively identical to what it is like to be me. All three theories discussed above are compatible with this condition, though the narrative view is more ontologically neutral than continuity and animalism, given that it is more concerned with the coherence of the self-story than the ontological conditions behind it.
To conclude, if I am destroyed and then reconstructed on Titan, the teleported person if me iff they have a qualitatively identical phenomenology. In the malfunction case, their phenomenology immediately diverges and I would say that there are two distinct persons, one in the teleporter, one on Titan. However, if somehow two persons with qualitatively identical phenomenologies over time could exist, then there would genuinely be two separate instantiations of the same person in that case, but I see nothing wrong with that. Type identity, even without numerical identity, might thus be enough for personal identity.
Would you personally dare step into the teleporter to Titan? Do you think that you would survive the process? Which theory of personal identity do you find most convincing?
Really enjoyed this. The way you move from Locke to Parfit to animalism and then land on qualitative phenomenology feels thoughtful rather than forced. I’m especially intrigued by your final move. If what ultimately matters is qualitative identity of experience, then it seems like we’re shifting the question from “what continues?” to “what is it like from the inside?” Here’s what I’m wondering: do you think qualitative identity is enough even if there’s a complete break in the causal process generating that experience? In other words, if the Titan copy feels exactly like me, but the underlying process was interrupted, does that gap matter at all? Great piece. The teleporter case never gets old, but you made it feel fresh.
This is the thought experiment that broke materialism for me. My intuition is that if you create a 100% physical copy of me somewhere else, my continuity of experience remains with the original organism here, and a new person just appeared out of the experiment, uncomfortably sharing my name and past. Destroying the original doesn't change the situation: my ongoing experience will not "jump" into the new guy.
That makes teleportation into the softest form of suicide ever. No-one will miss you, somebody else gets to live the rest of your life, but it's not you.
Edit: I like to analogize personal identity to a whirlpool or vortex in water. A whirlpool can move very quickly from one place in the river to another; it's not the water-substrate that moves, but the continuity of a recognizable pattern in it. Yet we can meaningfully make a distinction between the same whirlpool moving from here to there, or the whirlpool dying down and a new one forming there.
I think this doesn't precisely match any of your three views. It's perhaps closest to the continuity of consciousness, but instead of focusing on memories and psychological states, which can in principle be replicated, it focuses on the *forward* continuity of the pattern.