Beaming Bodies: A Neo-Lockean Account of Material Persistence

Abstract

Conventional wisdom holds that human bodies do not and cannot persist through beaming: scanning and destruction of the body, followed by transmission of the scan information and replication of the body in another location. I argue that given the minimal time travel assumption that information can be sent into the past, it is logically possible for (duplicates of) human bodies to exist in object loops. If so, then conventional wisdom is wrong, and bodies can persist through beaming. The lesson generalizes to all composite material objects that can persist through intrinsic change.