The Use of Thought Experiments

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