Beaming Bodies: A Neo-Lockean Account of Material Persistence
Date
2024-07-17
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Philosophies
Abstract
Conventional wisdom holds that human bodies do not and cannot persist through beaming: scanning and destruction of the body, followed by transmission of the scan information and replication of the body in another location. I argue that given the minimal time travel assumption that information can be sent into the past, it is logically possible for (duplicates of) human bodies to exist in object loops. If so, then conventional wisdom is wrong, and bodies can persist through beaming. The lesson generalizes to all composite material objects that can persist through intrinsic change.
Description
This article was originally published in Philosophies. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies9040109.
Copyright: © 2024 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Keywords
beaming, teleportation, time travel, object persistence, survival, personal identity, psychological continuity, bodily continuity, causal loops, object loops
Citation
Hanley, Richard Mark. 2024. "Beaming Bodies: A Neo-Lockean Account of Material Persistence" Philosophies 9, no. 4: 109. https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies9040109