We Are Not Human Beings

Philosophy 87 (1):5-28 (2012)
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Abstract

We can start with some science fiction. Here on Earth, I enter the Teletransporter. When I press some button, a machine destroys my body, while recording the exact states of all my cells. This information is sent by radio to Mars, where another machine makes, out of organic materials, a perfect copy of my body. The person who wakes up on Mars seems to remember living my life up to the moment when I pressed the button, and is in every other way just like me.

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Author's Profile

Derek Parfit
Last affiliation: Oxford University

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References found in this work

Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View.Lynne Rudder Baker - 2000 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
The Human Animal: Personal Identity Without Psychology.Eric Todd Olson - 1997 - New York, US: Oxford University Press.
What are we?Eric T. Olson - 2007 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 14 (5-6):37-55.
Reductionism and the first person.John McDowell - 1997 - In Jonathan Dancy (ed.), Reading Parfit. Oxford, [England] ;: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 230--50.

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