Two philosophers recently surveyed nearly 2,000 of their fellow thinkers and asked them what they believe when it came to God, free will, moral judgment… and zombies, among other things. (But not those kind of zombies.) The full results can be found here. (Spoiler: 72.8% of those surveyed hold to atheism.)

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Jason Morehead

Jason Morehead (Owner and Associate Editor) lives in the lovely state of Nebraska with his wife, three children, zero pets, and a large collection of CDs, DVDs, books, and video games. He's a fan of Arcade Fire and Arvo Pärt, Jackie Chan and Andrei Tarkovsky, Doctor Who and Community, and C. S. Lewis and Haruki Murakami. He's also a web development geek, which pays the bills -- and pays for new music, movies, and books.
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  1. From page 12 of the study: Teletransporter: survival 36.2%; death 31.1%; other 32.7%.

    The basic setup is that a Star Trek like device disassembles the constituent parts of the human body and reassembles them from different matter elsewhere. Variations include such exciting scenarios as the original person dies from an unrelated cause just before disassembly, the machine aborts the disassembly but not the assembly (resulting basically in an adult clone or carbon copy), etc. You may recognize many of these scenarios from Star Trek. One episode of TNG comes to mind where they encounter a slightly lower-ranked Riker. I thought it was interesting that everyone treated the copied Riker as if he were totally legit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Chances_(TNG_episode)

    So what happens in the transporter: does the original person die and a new person is created that is initially identical to the old? This is the suggestion of the situation in The Prestige. Does the old person die and then resurrect?

    The question is way above my simple undergraduate philosopher abilities, but another question from the survey is integrally bound up with answering this one: “Mind: physicalism 56.5%; non-physicalism 27.1%; other 16.4%.”

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