[SFRA-L] Parfit, Personal Identity and Science Fiction

[Ryan Nichols]

Hi Bruce,

Yes, I'm someone on the list who teaches philosophy through SF. Parfit is
well known for introducing techniques for the discussion of personal
identity that owe explicit debt to SF. I don't know his speaking schedule or
whether he would accept an invite to speak at SFRA; that would be a treat,
though. Since you raised this issue I'll contribute a word about Parfit and
his relationship to SF. Think A. Budrys' "Rogue Moon" for starters.

To give you a sense for his method and its relationship to SF, Parfit opens
his discussion of personal identity in *Reasons and Persons* writing:

I enter the Teletransporter. I have been to Mars before, but only by the
old method, a space-ship journey taking several weeks. This machine will
send me at the speed of light. I merely have to press the green button. Like
others, I am nervous. Will it work? I remind myself what I have been told to
expect. . . . The Scanner here on Earth will destroy my brain and body,
while recording the exact states of all of my cells. It will then transmit
this information by radio. Traveling at the speed of light, the message will
take three minutes to reach the Replicator on Mars. This will then create,
out of new matter, a brain and body exactly like mine. It will be in this
body that I shall wake up. (From: Parfit, Derek. *Reasons and Persons. *Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1986. p. 199; see http://tinyurl.com/3mvafyy).


John Locke played around with thought experiments, pushing the relationship
between mind, body and personal continuity long before. But what startled
the profession about Parfit's position was his repudiation of the utility of
the concept of personal identity. He argued that SF thought experiments
showed that 'identity' in accounts of personal identity cannot be analyzed
as diachronic numerical identity (same unique individual thing over time).
(FYI see ch 6 of http://tinyurl.com/3r7p975.) But in the decades since, many
philosophers have reacted against Parfit's speculative, a priori, SF-nal
mode of argument. Now one can find books devoted to personal identity that
explicitly avoid his thoughtful but speculative methodology. For example, *Real
People: Personal Identity without Thought Experiments* (
http://tinyurl.com/3excxtp).

Ryan


I just read the review essay on Derek Parfit in this week's New Yorker. He
> strikes me as a philosopher whose ideas lend themselves to SF analysis. I
> wonder if we could ever get him to talk at a SFRA or Worldcon program. Does
> anyone on the list teach philosophy with SF?  Here is a link to some reviews
> of Parfit's new book "On What Matters" :
> http://habermas-rawls.blogspot.com/2011/06/reviews-of-derek-parfits-on-what.html
>
> Bruce Rockwood
>
>
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