Why worry about personal identity when you could be enjoying your vacation? Go for it! Does this answer, however, sweep some of your concerns under the rug?

The year is 2042. Your days as a student at Florida State University are fond but distant memories. You are now quite successful and because you have been working so hard lately, you decide to reward yourself with a well-deserved vacation. Time is money, however, and cutting down on travel time means you can spend more time enjoying your trip. You’ve heard about a new form of travel: the teleportation machine. While new, this technology appears to be convenient and painless. A traveler can walk in the machine at one location and instantly walk out at one of many desirable locations around the world. In fact, they have just installed a teleportation machine in the exact city where you hoped to vacation! It’s expensive, but you decide to book your trip on the new teleportation machine.
While doing some research about how the machine works, you find out that the machine creates a digital copy of every cell in your body, including every neural pathway in your brain, and uses the energy created in the destruction of each cell during this process to reproduce each cell, one by one, in a second machine, anywhere in the world (there is even one on the new Marriot on the Moon hotel!) using a high-energy matter assembler. In the industry, these machines are referred to as the Scanner and the Printer respectively, although they do not use these terms in the advertisements. The scanner and printer combination has a one hundred percent accuracy rate ensuring that every memory and personality trait will remain intact, along with an exact replica of your body. They even have the option to trim off a few pounds of fat while adding some muscle tissue, a popular option during the summer season.
As you approach the machine, you recall a lecture from your undergraduate Introduction to Philosophy class on personal identity:
You remember that according to those who endorse a psychological view of personal identity, the person who steps out of the printer of end of the teleporter will be the same as the person who entered the scanner. Afterall, they have the same memories and personality and therefore simply are the same person. You recall however that this leads to transitivity problems and further, the fact that your current body will be destroyed makes you feel a bit queasy.
You then recall that there is a competing, bodily view of personal identity. According to this view, a person is identical to their body. This means that if a person’s body is destroyed, then the corresponding person is also destroyed. If this view is correct, the person stepping out of the printer is a new person while the person who stepped into the scanner is simply dead. A new person will be built from scratch in the printer. This would mean that this new person gets to enjoy your vacation while you were simply duped into walking into a suicide machine!
You recall a dualist view, but reason that it seems like a dualist might have trouble accounting for why we should think your immaterial mind, or soul, would travel to the new body. It seems like an immaterial soul would go to the afterlife while a new soulless “biological robot” is simply 3D printed somewhere else. There is no clear connection, regarding the immaterial self if you have one, between the physical death of your body and the emergence of a you-like copy shortly thereafter.
A four-dimensional time-worm view might have a problem with the fact that for a brief moment, neither person exists, and it is therefore not clear on who steps out of the printer. Alternatively, there could be a brief moment where both of you exist, and this could be a lot for a theorist to explain. Can time-worms have temporal interruptions? Can they split? Either answer seems ad hoc.
Parfit’s psychological connectedness view would hold that this question is not very troubling at all. So long as the printed person is psychologically connected in the right way, and presumably they are, then this is all we need to ask. Why worry about personal identity when you could be enjoying your vacation? Go for it! Does this answer, however, sweep some of your concerns under the rug?
All of the above rushes through your mind as you stand in line at the teleportation station, or Tele-station as the sign above affectionately calls it. Your time has now come to enter the machine. Do you teleport?
As always, provide a clear, reasoned argument for your first paragraph. For your second paragraph, construct what you take to be the strongest objection to the reasoning contained in your first paragraph. Finally, in your third and last paragraph, show the reader how your argument overcomes that objection.

Do not use sources just what you think.

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