Yes, yes he did, time and again (substituting "copy" for "zombie", as MP points out below). That's the Star Trek paradox.

Imagine that there is a glitch in the system, so that the "original" Kirk fails to dematerialise when the "new" one appears, so we find ourselves with two copies of Kirk. Now Scotty says "Sowwy Captain" and zaps the "old" Kirk into a cloud of atoms. How in the world does that not constitute murder?

That was not the paradox. The "paradox" is this: the only difference between "innocuous" teleportation, and the murder scenario described above, is a small time-shift of a few seconds. If Kirk1 disappears a few seconds before Kirk2 appears, we have no problem with that. We even show it repeatedly in programmes aimed at children. But when Kirk1 disappears a few seconds after Kirk2 appears, all of a sudden we see the act for what it is, namely murder.

How is it that a mere shift of a few seconds causes such a great difference in our perception? How is it that we can immediately see the murder in the second case, but that the first case seems so innocent to us? This stark contrast between our intuitive perceptions of the two cases, despite their apparent underlying similarity, constitutes the paradox.

And yes, it seems likely that the above also holds when a single person is made absolutely unconscious (flat EEG) and then awakened. Intuitively, we feel that the same person, the same identity, has persisted throughout this interruption; but when we think of the Star Trek paradox, and if we assume (as good materialists) that consciousness is the outcome of physical brain activity, we realise that this situation is not very different from that of Kirk1 and Kirk2. More generally, it illustrates the problems associated with assuming that you "are" the same person that you were just one minute ago (for some concepts of "are").

I was thinking of writing a post about this, but apparently all of the above seems to be ridiculously obvious to most LWers, so I guess there's not much of a point. I still find it pretty fascinating. What can I say, I'm easily impressed.