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From Earth to Mars: The Implications of Parfit’s Teletransportation Experiment
A Classic Thought Experiment that Challenges the Concept of Identity
Derek Antony Parfit was a renowned British philosopher who was an expert in the fields of personal identity, rationality, and ethics. He is widely recognized as one of the most significant and impactful moral philosophers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Based on the musings of some previous philosophers, he developed a hypothetical scenario (a “thought experiment”) designed to push the boundaries of our conceptualization of the self.
Parfit’s classic thought experiment is a seminal contribution to the philosophy of personal identity and ethics. In this scenario, he raises important questions about what it means for a person to persist over time, and how we should evaluate moral claims about the consequences of our actions.
The teleportation thought experiment begins with the premise that it is possible to copy a body and destroy the original. The experiment asks whether the original person is the same person as the one who was copied, or whether they are two different people. In order to explore this question, Parfit presents a number of variations of the scenario, each of which raises different challenges to our understanding of personal…
