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Derek Parfit's Transporter

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Imagine this scenario: my good friend Liesl is about to step into a teletransporter that's going to take her to mars. Interestingly enough to transporter won't actually teleport Liesl, but would instead create an exact clone of Liesl (including sharing her memories) on the other “end” of the transporter while simultaneously “killing” the original Liesl. What happened to Liesl in this scenario? Is she dead with only the clone to wander around in place of her existence? How would anybody be able to tell the difference between the two? Or is she still alive living through the clone who, for all intensive purposes, is still Liesl in every shape and form. This example is credited to Derek Parfit, a brutish philosopher who specialized in the problems of personal identity, ethics, rationality, and the relations among them. For the above example he would argue that Liesl would actually continue to survive through her clone. Parfit has a large number of reasons as to why he would hold such a belief. Customarily an average human would assume that simply because the original Liesl has been destroyed that she is dead and that the clone is an entirely different entity, but Parfit argues that because the clone retains all the memories, characteristics, and thoughts of the original Liesl that there is no substantial difference between the two and as such should still be regarded as Liesl. Parfit posits the question of responsibility, as in would this new Liesl be responsible for

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