Bilkent University Department of Electical Engineering,
IEEE Bilkent Student branch and
Bilkent ACM SIGART (Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence)

presents a series of seminars

This bi-weekly series will include six seminars on a wide-ranging set of topics. The idea is to introduce students (and faculty) to the joys of philosophical inquiry by focusing on some of the more entertaining puzzles that philosophers attempt to answer. The seminars will be informal and it is hoped that everyone will contribute to the discussion.

The first talk is on

Are you the same person as your clone? Does the beaming procedure in the TV series "Star Trek" work? and other philosophical puzzles regarding personal identity.

Suppose your body were to be disintegrated by a super-high-tech machine, which can then put your exact body back atom by atom by atom. This is the kind of thing that takes place when people are "beamed up" in the popular TV series "Star Trek (Uzay Yolu)." But will the recomposed person be a continuation of you? Or is it that, during the process, the machine kills you and then fabricates another person who looks exactly like you down to your atoms. A number of variations on this thought experiment with puzzling implications will be considered.