Leading a normal life, one hardly has any doubts about what it means to

survive a certain event. Granted, there are some shady areas: for example, if a
person has a traumatic brain injury in an accident and can’t remember his or her life
prior to that moment, maybe some would say he or she was now not the same
person. However, there is always the possibility of that person slowly and
progressively remembering what he or she had forgotten, and it would be weird to
say that he or she was reborn from the dead. Rather, it seems that when one makes
such a claim, it is more in a poetic way, just like we could say an old friend changed
so much he was not the same person any more. We don’t mean that the friend
literally died. Putting aside those cases, it seems that we can easily say whether a
person is the same as a person in another time or not.
However, entering the realms of science fiction, we can think of situations
with no clear answer, such as a person being destroyed in a certain place, having all
the information about his or her body transmitted to a different place and then
being recreated on that place. Can we say the person would survive such a
procedure? Or, worse, what if that person is not destroyed, effectively undergoing
fission, did he or she survive? To answer that, we first must think about what
constitutes survival. It seems this is strongly related to the problem of
consciousness.
Lewis, for example, draws an analogy between Highways and people: just
like two highways can split and reunite, so could, theoretically, people. And, just like
in the joint part we say that there are two highways there, we could say that there
are two people, or rather person-stages, using his terminology. Lewis theory tries to
unite common sense with a philosophical sound theory but then entails the very
weird and counter-intuitive idea that a person can really be more than one person if
he or she later undergoes fission, and the other way around if the two people
undergo fusion. Another issue is maybe more explicit: highways aren’t conscious. No
entity can think “I am the I-90 highway”and be right at the same time. In this case,
splitting really is just a matter of words. Of course, the analogy might still hold, but,
when there is consciousness involved, the problem changes a lot. We have to answer
based on what the person would feel, or rather how its consciousness would behave.
First, we could state that you are the same person simply if you remain with
the same body. However, consider a brain transplant was possible, a procedure
which would put the brain from one person (say Maria) in another person’s body
(say Anne). Let’s call this new person that was created Marianne. It seems that the
Marianne is really Maria, not Anne: she would have all the memories from Maria and
if asked, would say she was Maria. We could then say that what really matters was
the brain, not the body. After all, if the problem is connected to that of
consciousness, then of course it has to do with the brain.
It’s important to point that it’s not the cells that make the brain that matter.
Those come and go as time goes by. We can take two views here. In the first, what
matters is just the pattern, not the individual cells. Let’s call it the P-theory. In the
second, what matters is both the individual cells and the pattern. Call it the CP-
theory. We can say then that two people are the same if there is a continuum
connecting arbitrarily similar brains (meaning just pattern or both pattern and
cells) going in time from one person’s brain to the other. This view is similar to that
held by Parfit.
Now let’s go again over the problem of teletransportation. The P and the CP
theories give different answers here. According to the P-theory, you survive
teletransportation, but according to the CP-theory, you don’t. It seems that holding
the former view leads to a myriad of problems and paradoxes.
For instance, if you don’t get destroyed but a copy of you is still made, then it
makes sense to call the original you you, and the copy the copy. In fact, this is what
the closest continuer view suggests: we call “you” whoever most closely resembles
you. If you were destroyed, we would consider the copy you. But then the status of
the copy depends on whether you were destroyed or not. If you are then later
destroyed, the copy would suddenly become you. This seems irrational.
On a similar situation, we consider a teletransportation where the original is
destroyed and instead of one, two copies are made. If we consider a simple
teletransportation ok, but a teletransportation without the destruction of the user a
murder, as the P-theory entails, it also seems quite weird, it’s like considering a
double success a failure. The CP-theory, on the other hand, considers both murders,
entailing no weird consequences.
Other problems arrive if we think about the physics behind it. According to
special relativity, there is not a unique time for all the universe, it depends on your
reference frame. If we assume you only survive teletransportation if you first get
destroyed, then your information gets transported and “you” are recreated at the
same time as you are destroyed, then your survival depends on the reference frame,
because “at the same time” depends on the reference frame. It is irrational to say
you survive on some reference frames but not on others.
Physics provides us with yet another problem. When “you” are recreated on
the other side, we assume that you are going to be exactly the same. This assumes
we know everything that is important about the physics of the world. But maybe
there is some physical property that is unknown to us that is not preserved. Maybe
this leads to discernible effects on you, maybe it changes your personality, or
messes up with your memory. So even if you have philosophical reasons to believe
you survive a teletransportation, that doesn’t mean you are safe to do it. In fact, it is
very reasonable not to do it.
We can draw an analogy to evolution, similar to that Lewis drew to highways.
Like identity, the concept of species is hard to define in an evolutionary timescale.
Like in the case of fission by teletransportation, a species can fission: our species
and the chimpanzees branched off about 2.4 million years ago. It would be weird to
call the previous species chimpanzee or human, and even more weird to say it was
both chimpanzee and human. Identity is lost in a bifurcation. Also, animals are
genetically continuous, or almost continuous, from generation to generation, but can
change a lot over large periods of time.
However, despite these problems, there are elements of the closest continuer
theory that we can put into the CP-theory. While it is worse, arguably much worse,
to die and only have a copy of you survive, it is better then to have nothing. A
mother, for example, would prefer her son to live after she died, and that can give
her some consolation, even though she knows perfectly well her son is not the same
person she is. Your copy is exactly like you in every respect except that it is not you,
so that too should give you some sort of consolation. In fact, no matter what theory
of identity you believe is correct, it should always be better to have a copy of you
(whether or not you believe that is you) to survive rather than nothing.
It seems that the reasonable answer really is the one given by the CP-theory,
while the P-theory, or the closest continuer view seem wrong, or at least lead to
very weird consequences. On top of that, the CP-theory agrees with common sense
in the situations we have analyzed and is also the most conservative one: unlike the
other theories, you would never accidentally kill yourself by wrongly believing in it.
It seems to be at least a good contender with the other proposed theory mentioned
before.