Consider the following scenario: you know a couple, both of whom are very kind, funny, intelligent, have many memories together, love each other, etc. Well call them A and B1. One day, a horrible tragedy occurs; they are in a car accident. B makes it out with relatively few injuries, and none of them serious, but A suffers severe brain trauma. It manifests itself quite strongly in A's personality in some way, although I am not concerned too particularly about how - A becomes vegetative, or can no longer remember anything about his past (including B), or some fundamental aspect of A's personality changes - say, A becomes terrible cruel or constantly angry, in ways never shown before. You're talking to and trying to console B, who is devastated. You hear B say: "A just isn't the same person anymore!"
What are we to make of this? There are many reasons we could argue that the A in the hospital bed shares identity with ("is identical to")2 the A prior to the car accident - sharing the same genes, being the same organism, being the same legal entity, etc. Disregarding the fact that it would be incredibly insensitive to be so coldly rational in the presence of B's grief, we would also be missing the point of what B said: pre- and post-accident A differ in fundamental ways, which are rather crucial to B's conception of the "person" A - dissimilar memories, dispositions, responses, etc.
Locke outlined three different types of identity: the physical, the animal, and the personal. In this hypothetical conversation, it seems as though there is confusion between "animal" identity - is A the same organism as before the accident (I'm thinking yes) - and "personal" identity - is A the same person as before the accident (not so sure about this one, either way).
Here's another example: consider a human test subject of the very first teleportation device, called S. The device scans the configuration of every particle3 of the subject, deconstructs the physical subject, sends the scans of the configuration to the other end of the machine, and reconstructs the individual. Imagine the subject goes through the process relatively satisfied - no experience of pain or abruptness. One moment over here, the next over there. S remembers everything those close would expect S to.
Would you use this device? Would you let someone you loved? Despite our possible reservations, we would be hard pressed to say S pre- and post-teleportation were not the same. If a close friend were not aware of the experiment, not only would they not think to questions S's S-ness, but from this scenario, no consequence of the act of teleporting could never possibly inform someone of post S's non-identity to the person of pre S. I am making a careful distinguishment. We can conceive of a phenomenally skilled imposter, R, who pretended to be S, memorized all facts about S's life, and somehow thwarted every DNA test made, etc, etc, to convince us all that R is S. But we could conceive of what it would take to recognize that R is not S - R is revealed as an imposter, willingly or otherwise, or has a memory of something S could not have, etc. There is only one thing which might call us to question post S - the teleportation - and even so the ground is not as certain as with R.
Again, a strictly physical response is unsatisfactory - whether or not post-S was re-assembled from the same particles seems immaterial4. We could argue that S is no longer shares "animal" identity, but our first example shows that, at the very least, a good argument needs to be given to couple "animal" and "personal" identity.
A final pair of examples: suppose that the teleportation machine malfunctions. No, S will be fine. In one scenario, the machine correctly scans S, and S is assembled in the other platform - all this without first deconstructing S! So who is the real S? Similarly, imagine that S is deconstructed, and reconstructed at both ends of the teleportation machine? Is this substantially different from the first case? If so, why? What if no one noticed S's initial deconstruction in the starting chamber? Then the first scenario would be nearly identical to the second, would it not?
More in a third, and final, post.
1: Notice I'm trying to avoid any assumptions about what constitutes a "normal" couple
2: In the last post, I sketched an argument for why exact physical identity is not incredibly enlightening.
3: Please ignore Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. This is philosophy, not physics
4: A really, really bad joke.
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