Meanwhile, your question, which ignores all this, makes even less sense as a moral question, because it is an objectively true fact that one ought to always take the 2 million even if someone else receives it. Saying, tautologically, that Egoists don’t care about other people simply describes them as immoral, not as rational ontologists.

If the Egoist was a rational ontologist, they would recognize that they survive a teletransporter just as much as (and for exactly the same reasons as) they survive CPR or magical or divine or nanobot resurrection—or a year in college. So their future self isn’t even a different person to care about. It’s themselves. In every rationally relevant sense.

If what you want to know is what it means to survive a teletransporter, then please read the article you are commenting on:

This should have been obvious from my remarks above about identity.

And then so instructed, you should have read the section on identity:

[B]iology is incidental (rather like what hardware I’m running my word processor on: doesn’t matter to the content of the book I’m typing)…Identity is a mental pattern with a shared unique causal history. Thus, if I woke up tomorrow converted into an electronic body and brain, I’d still be me, however altered. The extent to which someone is a “different person” is largely a function of what one means when one asks that question; one can be both the same and a different person at the same time, on different senses of each. Robert Downey Jr. is the “same person” today as starred in 80s films under that name in the strictly causal-historical sense; but he is also a “different person” today than then insofar as he was then a reckless drug addict and today is not. Though there is a biological platform those changes and similarities are being “run” on, the changes and similarities are only relevant in respect to their psychology (who Robert is “as a person”). Like all semantics, we can simply choose what degree of “sameness” matters for any given query, as we please. We merely need to avoid equivocation fallacies when switching among different thresholds of “change.”

So your Egoist has to decide whether he is killed by evolving as a person, such that next year he has different interests and values and knowledge and memories, and therefore “is a different person” and not the same one who existed a year before. If they answer “despite change, it’s the same” then he would choose to get the 2 million dollars next year. If they answer “it’s not; I’ll be dead then” they will refuse the offer of 2 million dollars in a year. Only one of those positions is objectively rational.

And yet it makes no difference whether the substance of a person changes (memories, personality, skills, character) or the substrate (atoms). In fact, the former is far more substantive than the latter (swap all the atoms and change nothing about the person, and they have changed less than when living a year changes them as a person). The substrate is irrelevant to identity. Identity is pattern (knowledge, skills, memories, personality, etc., hence the algorithm that distinguishes one person from another) plus causal history (a numerical causal pathway from past self to future self, regardless of transformation, hence the location that distinguishes one person from another).

People are software, programs run on a hardware. The hardware can change endlessly, without changing the software. And this can even be happening now. Due to quantum mechanics, your atoms are being swapped out all the time (virtual quarks replace actual quarks in your protons, which you perceive at your scale as a steady state, but in fact the protons today are not the same ones as yesterday). So your hardware is constantly being destroyed and rebuilt beneath you. But it makes no difference to you, the person. Because “you” are not just a collection of atoms. You are an organization of atoms. The atoms can change all the time, but you survive like a wave on water: as a stable organization of whatever atoms are there.

Everything else is addressed in the article (like “but what happens when there are multiple copies of you” and cases of literal “death and resurrection”).

Egoist may very well be irrational or immoral. I am not trying to prove that we die when we step into teletransporter. I am just trying to understand what you mean by saying that we “survive” it.

If Egoist accepts Offer 2, then we would survive in the stronger sense of the word. If Egoist rejects Offer 2, then we would survive in the weaker sense. Even if the weaker sense is enough to call it survival, I am still curious to hear your answer.

Would he accept Offer 2?

I don’t see any logical argument here. It would be irrational to not care about a copy of yourself (or indeed even someone else) receiving a million dollars rather than (presumably) live in poverty. So all this demonstrates is that the Egoist is immoral and irrational, not that he dies when his atoms are replaced with new ones, which could already be happening to him every minute of his life for all he knows.

This is as irrational as saying “I don’t want 2 million dollars next year because I will be a different person then.”

Let’s say we have an Egoist. Egoist only cares about his personal subjective experience. He doesn’t care about other people, including clones or people with exactly the same psychology (who are just clones in the sense that he cares about).

Offer 1: Egoist gets killed, but an exact clone of him is made in a factory. That clone receives 2 million dollars.
Egoist would refuse that offer because his subjective experience would cease to exist after death. He doesn’t care about the money that the clone receives because the clone is not him.

Offer 2: Egoist goes through a teletransporter and receives 2 million dollars.

Would he agree to this offer based on the criteria of Offer 1? If your answer is “yes,” then it is fair to say that he survives the teletransporter. However, if your answer is “no,” then he dies in the sense that people intuitively care about.

Like anything, it’s worth what it’s worth.

Indeed, philosophy cannot be regarded as a science; and thus in no way is its consensus comparable to that of, for example, biologists. So in no way can you cite both consensuses as carrying the same weight.

However, since all philosophers are equally likely to be bad at their job (an ample quantity of the worst philosophy comes from theists, and I see no trend favoring either side in this respect), the divergence in conclusions about theism cannot be explained by that variable.

And since all philosophers are not equally bad, and even bad philosophers tend to be better at it than untrained philosophizers and average everyday people (a.k.a. national polls), the fact that the net effect trends strongly toward atheism is more likely explained by this divergence in capability than by any other factor. We see the same divergence when tracking even just education (the more you have, the less likely you are to be a theist) and expert natural knowledge (the more science you know, and especially the more fundamental science you know, the even less likely you are to be a theist, e.g. physicists are more godless than biologists who are more godless than college graduates who are more godless than high school dropouts). So we have corroborating data for philosophy: this is a skills- and knowledge-based divergence.

In other words, it’s unlikely this divergence is just “an accident,” and more likely the product of what happens when you get better at reasoning things like this out, as all philosophers do with respect to non-philosophers, and as many philosophers do with respect to other philosophers. That “better” does not mean “perfect” has little impact on this conclusion. The effect is the same.

Indeed, you could explain even the percentage of theists as representing the effect of inconsistent competence in the field. That is, the reason the percengage is even as high as it is is because most philosophers suck at their job. This combined of course with the fact of self-selection (many theists become philosophers to specifically become apologists, not actual objective-skills-based philosophers), and you can fully explain both facts (that theists are rare in the field, yet more common than one should expect from it).

You’ve often mentioned on your blog that a large proportion of philosophers today are somewhat incompetent:

“Singer is, like many in the academy, a lousy philosopher.”

“How do you tell good philosophy from bad? How do you find the philosophy that avoids all ten of Bunge’s defect criteria? Philosophy as an academic field simply isn’t making any effort to.”

If that’s the case, how meaningful is it that the majority of them lean towards atheism?

I think this is an interesting question because if the majority of biologists were fairly incompetent, then the fact that most of them accepted evolution would lose a lot of its force. Especially to creationists (even more so than now).

Hi, Dr. Carrier. Funnily enough, Jonathan MS Pearce has an article on this very topic that seems to agree with you:
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/tippling/2015/10/28/philosophy-101-philpapers-induced-7-belief-in-god-theism-or-atheism/
Hopefully that’ll be a useful resource to anyone wondering.

Correct.

“Philosophy of Religion” is really just code for “Christian Apologetics,” which some atheists study only to debunk it. Were there no theists, PhilRel wouldn’t even be a listed category, so few would waste their time studying it (like, for example, “philosophy of magic,” which isn’t even a selectable option). Indeed, even the atheists who specialize in PhilRel enough to even list themselves in that category for PhilPS only do so because they are interested in debunking the delusional theists crowding the field. Were there no delusional theists to rebut (or too few to care about), even those atheists wouldn’t have bothered entering that specialty enough to have even thought to list it for PhilPS.

For perspective:

Imagine a world where instead of Christians, 80% of the population were Scientologists, even 90% of those in power, and society was awash with Scientology Apologetics as a lucrative, well-funded enterprise with hundreds of its own colleges and universities, and thousands of pulpit jobs and website ministries.

In that world, hundreds of doctoral candidates and professors in philosophy, devout Scientologists that they are, choose to specialize in the Philosophy of Scientology, and since a handful of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Wiccans, Hindus etc. also study a similar subject, the field chooses to give it the neutral label Philosophy of Religion, even though really, it’s almost entirely Scientologists crafting Scientology Apologetics or debating competing Scientology theories, like whether Xenu was a material or ethereal being.

Then imagine someone came along and said, “Wow, most of the people in Philosophy of Religion are Scientologists, doesn’t that mean Scientology is true?” How you would respond to their question is how anyone should respond to yours.