Last week I Twittered/Facebooked some provocative results from a poll of philosophers. In particular, this little tidbit:
Accept or lean toward: survival337 / 931 (36.1%)
Other304 / 931 (32.6%)
Accept or lean toward: death290 / 931 (31.1%)
Yes, that's all the detail presented in the question: "Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death?" As a professional philosopher, you're supposed to be familiar with the issue, which I reconstruct as follows. Imagine that someone has invented a working teleportation device. You step in the box, lights flash and sparks fly, and "you" rematerialize in another box, exactly the same in every way, but constructed out of a completely new collection of atoms. The original version of you is destroyed. Did you die? (And then, what if a million years passed in between the two events?) It would probably be annoying to real philosophers, but I personally put this question in the category ...
