Suppose that you are an immortal who lived for an infinite amount of time, and each year, your body replaces all its cells with new cells constructed from the matter in your food. Furthermore, you only eat local food, and at the beginning of each year it is randomly chosen by a coin toss whether you will live in Australia or America. Moreover, in the world we are imagining, the food in Australia and America has no matter in common.
Consider these two plausible principles:
If x and y are people living in worlds w1 and w2, respectively, and at no time t in their lives do they have any matter in common, then x ≠ y.
The identity of an already existing person never depends on what will happen to that person in the future.
But now whether you exist in year n does not depends on what happens in year n, since you are immortal and by (2) your identity was already determined in year n − 1. By the same token, whether you exist in year n does not depend on what happens in year n − 1, and so on. In particular, it follows that whether you exist now does not depend on any particular coin toss. However, by (1) whether you exist does depend on the totality of the coin tosses, since if all the coin tosses go differently from how they actually do, the matter in the body would always be different, and hence by (1) the person would be different.
But it is quite paradoxical that your existence depends on the coin tosses collectively and yet each one is irrelevant. This points to the hypothesis that beings that are significantly changeable cannot be eternal (and slightly supports causal finitism).
If you think that your identity also depends on your memories, add that in Australia and America you form different memories. If you think that your identity depends on your soul, then instead of running the argument about a human being, run it against something soulless.
If you think all complex objects have something like soul (as I do), the argument may not impress.
No comments:
Post a Comment