The Use of Thought Experiments

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Do you think that these kinds of thought experiments actually yield insight into something like personal identity and what their criteria for it are? I'm going to give maybe what I think is a good reason and then what I Think is a batteries. The bad reason maybe is that there are a ton of cases from sci-fi that I really enjoy that have maybe made these into more of a reality. So if you'll permit me, I want to tell you about one case that's always fucked with me and it's from the, the Star Trek Voyager series. There is this episode where a transporter accident fuses two people into one person and that one person sort of has a new identity. But they

Tamler’s earlier self committed to doing an episode on Parfit, and David holds his current self to that promise, which shows how unconvinced David was by Parfit’s skepticism about personal identity. Or something like that. We argue about the value of Parfit’s sci-fi thought experiments and the implications of believing there’s no clear sense of “me.” Plus, we talk about a recent article on aphantasia – the inability to conjure images in your mind – and the question that pops into everyone’s head when they hear about this condition.