The Value of Thought Experiments in Deflationary Accounts

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Kathleen Wilkes: Thought experiments are only useful when you can establish the phenomenon. But she was singling out parfit among others as giving these thought experiments that we just don't understand what it would mean for two people to fuse together or, you know, one person to be branching out into five different people. And so like our intuitions on that are kind of worthless because we can't fully wrap our minds around what any of that would mean. I feel like there is a role for imagination that your view is not allowing for in philosophy where like, yeah, it does like no one's ever going to get to another solar system. It's true, but imagine that 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.