I’ve heard this view referred to as a time-slice view of personal identity before.
Personal identity is tied to ordinary questions about the identity and persistence of ordinary objects.
So, you should probably have the same set of persistence conditions (time-slice / constant replacement) for cups, computers, organisms, atoms etc.
If that’s true, then “personality, relationships, and ongoing projects” are also only things that exist at a time-slices. Plausibly, they don’t exist at all since each necessarily exists through time. Either way, there’s no sense in which they can be shared with future selves.
I think this kind of issue is better solved by the “reductionist” understanding of Parfit’s views than the “eliminativist” / “illusionist” version. There’s no illusion of selfhood or constant replacement, just degrees of similarity that compose our idea of a self.
I’m not following why “[I] should probably have the same set of persistence conditions (time-slice / constant replacement) for cups, computers, organisms, atoms etc.” I don’t have those persistence conditions for myself, in every possible sense—only in one particular important sense I pointed at in the post.
I think there are coherent uses of the words “Holden Karnofsky” and the singular tense; you can think of them as pointing at a “set of selves” that has something important in common and has properties of its own as a set. What I’m rejecting is the idea that there is some “continuous consciousness” such that I should fear death when it’s “interrupted,” but not when it isn’t. By a similar token, I think there are plenty of reasonable senses in which “my computer” is a single thing, and other senses in which my computer one day is different from my computer the next day. And same goes for my projects and relationships. In all of these cases, I could be upset if the future of such a thing is cut off entirely, but not if its physical instantiation is replaced with a functional duplicate.
I’ve heard this view referred to as a time-slice view of personal identity before.
Personal identity is tied to ordinary questions about the identity and persistence of ordinary objects.
So, you should probably have the same set of persistence conditions (time-slice / constant replacement) for cups, computers, organisms, atoms etc.
If that’s true, then “personality, relationships, and ongoing projects” are also only things that exist at a time-slices. Plausibly, they don’t exist at all since each necessarily exists through time. Either way, there’s no sense in which they can be shared with future selves.
I think this kind of issue is better solved by the “reductionist” understanding of Parfit’s views than the “eliminativist” / “illusionist” version. There’s no illusion of selfhood or constant replacement, just degrees of similarity that compose our idea of a self.
I’m not following why “[I] should probably have the same set of persistence conditions (time-slice / constant replacement) for cups, computers, organisms, atoms etc.” I don’t have those persistence conditions for myself, in every possible sense—only in one particular important sense I pointed at in the post.
I think there are coherent uses of the words “Holden Karnofsky” and the singular tense; you can think of them as pointing at a “set of selves” that has something important in common and has properties of its own as a set. What I’m rejecting is the idea that there is some “continuous consciousness” such that I should fear death when it’s “interrupted,” but not when it isn’t. By a similar token, I think there are plenty of reasonable senses in which “my computer” is a single thing, and other senses in which my computer one day is different from my computer the next day. And same goes for my projects and relationships. In all of these cases, I could be upset if the future of such a thing is cut off entirely, but not if its physical instantiation is replaced with a functional duplicate.