Avatar as Philosophy: The Metaphysics of Switching Bodies

In the final moments of James Cameron’s Avatar (2009), the main human character – Jake Sully – switches bodies with his blue-skinned avatar. This dramatic ending resolves the movie’s remaining plot conflicts, such as Jake’s desire to regain the use of his legs, his newfound loyalty to the Na’vi people, and his love interest in Neytiri – who is twice his size and breathes an atmosphere poisonous to him. But while this climactic event makes for good storytelling, does it make any sense philosophically? Is body switching really possible? More specifically, is body switching really possible as it is portrayed in the movie – without transplanting Jake’s brain or appealing to the existence of immaterial “souls”? This chapter tries to answer this question. After clarifying what it means to “switch bodies” and exploring some dead-end ways of trying to do it, this chapter develops and defends one tenable way of switching bodies that is compatible with the events in the movie. This solution involves articulating a specific theory of human persons (constitutionalism), developing a series of thought experiments, and examining the phenomenon of “split brains,” in which a person with a severed corpus callosum displays two independent streams of consciousness. The chapter ends with an application of this solution to the possibility of secular life after death.