What Are Your Beliefs About Personal Identity?

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

"I've never had a good positive case for what the criteria of personal identity could be," he says. "If I'm standing here and you make a perfect copy of me, and that perfect copy is standing right there, that's interesting... But it's so not me." He would love to have Parfett's sense of liberation over death: "For the very thing, I'm not even joking"

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.