ABSTRACT
Although Captain James T. Kirk never said the words that are burned into popular imagination – “Beam me up, Scotty” – Scotty often beamed Kirk and his crew up, or down, as the situation demanded, and every time the faithful Scotty complied, we witnessed a perfect illustration of a central puzzle in the philosophical study of personal identity. How can a person be destroyed in one place and put back together in another place, and still be the same person? When a mind-swap transplant misfires in All of Me (1984) causing both Lily Tomlin's mind and Steve Martin's to coinhabit his body, again we face a puzzle about personal identity. Can a single body house more than one person? Even when mind swaps (or body swaps, depending on how you look at things) go well, there are questions about just what counts as the same person, as for instance we see when Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan wind up having their bodies exchanged in Freaky Friday (2003). The obvious problems here are these: How can a teenager who is suddenly put into her mother's body act appropriately in the very foreign world of adulthood, and how can an adult learn how to act in a way appropriate to what she appears to be, namely a teenager? What should we say about personal identity in a situation where minds or bodies are swapped? These examples all encourage us to get clearer about what we think counts as the essence or nature of personal identity. Is it something primarily physical, or is it primarily mental? Is it some complex combination of the two?
