Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
For centuries, philosophers – and more recently, science-fiction writers – have been concocting riffs and variations on a particular thought experiment: if every bit of your body could be perfectly scanned and replicated, in what ways would the replica still be ‘you’? In this interview from the PBS series Closer to Truth, Andy Clark, a professor of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, dissects a version of this experiment posed by the US philosopher Daniel Dennett, in which a body is scanned, destroyed, and replicated in a distant place. While science hasn’t yet brought us close to putting Dennett’s conundrum to the test, we can still grapple with the intriguing and perhaps troubling metaphysical questions it raises, questions that might become even more material as we careen further into the information age, including: would ‘you’ be dead, or would your sense of self perpetuate in the copy? And, if you were recreated several times, where exactly might you expect to find your embodied sense of self?
Video by Closer to Truth
video
Philosophy of mind
‘Am I not at least something?’ A surreal dive into Descartes’s Meditations
3 minutes
video
Cognition and intelligence
A father forgets his child’s name for the first time in this poetic reflection on memory
4 minutes
video
Metaphysics
What do past, present and future mean to a philosopher of time?
55 minutes
video
Bioethics
What a 1970 experiment reveals about the possibility and perils of ‘head transplants’
6 minutes
video
Neuroscience
Dog vision is a trendy topic, but what can we really know about how they see?
11 minutes
video
Metaphysics
Simple entities in universal harmony – Leibniz’s evocative perspective on reality
4 minutes
video
Cognition and intelligence
What’s this buzz about bees having culture? Inside a groundbreaking experiment
8 minutes
video
Thinkers and theories
Henri Bergson on why the existence of things precedes their possibility
3 minutes
video
Metaphysics
Why mathematical truths exist with or without minds to consider them
8 minutes