My philosophy on “what counts as death” is simple, though unconventional, and it seems to resolve most otherwise mind-bending paradoxical thought experiments about personal identity. It is the same basic idea as the one advanced by Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons;1 Parfit also claims it is similar to Buddha’s view2 (so it’s got that going for it).
I haven’t been able to find a simple, compact statement of this philosophy, and I think I can lay it out in about a page. So here it is, presented simply and without much in the way of caveats (this is “how things feel to me” rather than “something I’m confident in regardless of others’ opinions”):
Constant replacement. In an important sense, I stop existing and am replaced by a new person each moment (second or minute or whatever).
The sense in which it feels like I “continue to exist, as one unified thread through time” is just an illusion, created by the fact that I have memories of my past. The only thing that is truly “me” is this moment; next moment, it will be someone else.
Kinship with past and future selves. My future self is a different person from me, but he has an awful lot in common with me: personality, relationships, ongoing projects, and more. Things like my relationships and projects are most of what give my current moment meaning, so it’s very important to me whether my future selves are around to continue them.
So although my future self is a different person, I care about him a lot, for the same sorts of reasons I care about friends and loved ones (and their future selves).3
If I were to “die” in the common-usage (e.g., medical) sense, that would be bad for all those future selves that I care about a lot.4
(I do of course refer to past and future Holdens in the first person. When I refer to someone as “me,” that means that they are a past or future self, which generally means that they have an awful lot in common with me. But in a deeper philosophical sense, my past and future selves are other people.)
And that’s all. I’m constantly being replaced by other Holdens, and I care about the other Holdens, and that’s all that’s going on.
I don’t care how quickly the cells in my body die and get replaced (if it were once per second, that wouldn’t bother me). My self is already getting replaced all the time, and replacing my cells wouldn’t add anything to that.
I don’t care about “continuity of consciousness” (if I were constantly losing consciousness while all my cells got replaced, that wouldn’t bother me).
If you vaporized me and created a copy of me somewhere else, that would just be totally fine. I would think of it as teleporting. It’d be chill.
If you made a bunch of copies of me, I would be all of them in one sense (I care about them a lot, in the same way that I normally care about future selves) and none of them in another sense (just as I am not my future selves).
If you did something really weird like splitting my brain in half and combining each half with someone else’s brain, that would create two people that I care about more than a stranger and less than “Holden an hour from now.”
I don’t really find any thought experiments on this topic trippy or mind bending. They’re all just cases where I get replaced with some other people who have some things in common with me, and that’s already happening all the time.
Footnotes
For key quotes from Reasons and Persons, see pages 223-224; 251; 279-282; 284-285; 292; 340-341. For explanations of “psychological continuity” and “psychological connectedness” (which Parfit frequently uses in discussing what matters for what counts as death), see page 206.
“Psychological connectedness” is a fairly general idea that seems consistent with what I say here; “psychological continuity” is a more specific idea that is less important on my view (though also see pages 288-289, where Parfit appears to equivocate on how much, and how, psychological continuity matters). ↩
“As Appendix J shows, Buddha would have agreed. The Reductionist View [the view Parfit defends] is not merely part of one cultural tradition. It may be, as I have claimed, the true view about all people at all times.” Reasons and Persons page 273. Emphasis in original. ↩
There’s the additional matter that he’s held responsible for my actions, which makes sense if only because my actions are predictive of his actions. ↩
I don’t personally care all that much about these future selves’ getting to “exist,” as an end in itself. I care more about the fact that their disappearance would mean the end of the stories, projects, relationships, etc. that I’m in. But you could easily take my view of personal identity while caring a lot intrinsically about whether your future selves get to exist. ↩
Your topline answers to the questions you assume xlr8harder cares about more seem similar to Holden Karnofsky’s, and I haven’t seen his essay on this mentioned so in this thread so I thought it’d be useful to link it here: What counts as death? An unconventional but simple take on personal identity, that dissolves most paradoxes