From my recall, Kagan gave the example of someone who lived forever, but whose memory was fully erased every X years. Who would they be at any given moment? It seems to me, in that case, they would lose identity each time their memories were fully erased. You’d have a completely new person after each “reboot”.
What if, instead of perfect erasure, those memories were simply altered slightly, every time they recalled them—thus creating an ever-shifting continuum of identities, each subtly different from the last? When is someone a completely new person, then?
I don’t know. I suppose that would feel a lot like what we feel in our current state, since, as you point out, memory recall isn’t flawless. I guess we are always shifting identities; re-engaging with our memories, preserved at whatever level of fidelity they may be, in each present moment.
The question of “when we become a new person” seems to be asking for something that may not be possible to define or answer. It feels like the only answer that makes sense is that we are a completely new person perpetually, and that static identity, of any kind, is only a (pretty damn persistent) illusion.
What if, instead of perfect erasure, those memories were simply altered slightly, every time they recalled them—thus creating an ever-shifting continuum of identities, each subtly different from the last? When is someone a completely new person, then?
I don’t know. I suppose that would feel a lot like what we feel in our current state, since, as you point out, memory recall isn’t flawless. I guess we are always shifting identities; re-engaging with our memories, preserved at whatever level of fidelity they may be, in each present moment.
The question of “when we become a new person” seems to be asking for something that may not be possible to define or answer. It feels like the only answer that makes sense is that we are a completely new person perpetually, and that static identity, of any kind, is only a (pretty damn persistent) illusion.