What if the deepest question about “you” isn’t whether you’re the same person over time, but which future life it’s actually rational for you to anticipate and care about as your survival?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Trenton Merricks is Commonwealth Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia, and his work focuses primarily on metaphysics, but also religion, epistemology, language and mind. In this interview, we discuss his book, "Self and Identity".
2. Book Summary
In Self and Identity, Trenton Merricks argues that a lot of debate about “personal identity” mixes together two different questions. The first is his What Question: what it is for a future person to have, at that future time, what matters in survival for you. His answer is that survival-relevance is constituted by what it’s appropriate for you to first-personally anticipate and to have future-directed self-interested concern about—where “appropriate” is a distinctive, non-evidential and non-moral norm. He also insists we shouldn’t conflate what matters in survival with what matters to you about the future in general (friends, projects, agency, etc.), since that conflation can distort arguments about survival.
The second is his Why Question: what relation to a future conscious person explains why that future person will have what matters in survival for you. Merricks’s headline view is: identity is not what matters in survival, but identity delivers what matters in survival—i.e., numerical identity is (on his favored endurance picture) the right kind of explanation for why survival obtains. He then defends both the sufficiency and the necessity of personal identity for survival, targeting Parfit-style fission reasoning in particular and arguing that (depending on one’s metaphysics of persistence) Parfit’s argument can be blocked; he also rejects the idea that unbranching psychological connectedness/continuity is sufficient for personal identity (and so for what matters in survival).
Chapters 4–6 then stress-test rival “psychological” answers to the Why Question—views that tie survival to having the same self (values/desires/projects), the same self-narrative, or forms of agential / narrative continuity—and Merricks argues these proposals mishandle cases of deep transformation (including being “turned” into someone evil in a way that seems bad for you without being merely like ceasing to exist). Finally, Chapter 7 applies the framework to personal immortality (“the hope of glory”): immortality is framed as there always being someone who will have what matters in survival for you, and Merricks uses his earlier claims to respond to familiar worries—e.g., that survival comes in degrees, or that immortality would inevitably be tedious.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:44 - Self and Identity
04:25 - What and why questions
07:25 - Semantics
12:29 - Normative issues
13:29 - What matters in survival
18:36 - Numerical identity
21:04 - More conditions?
22:42 - The past
24:35 - Permanent comatose
30:49 - Memory wipe
36:05 - Psychological continuity
37:25 - Puzzles of identity
40:47 - Persistence and eternalism
46:43 - Relative identity
53:42 - Sci-fi cases
58:17 - Other views
1:00:24 - Non-reductionism
1:05:51 - Examples
1:10:55 - Vagueness
1:14:37 - Narrative accounts
1:18:32 - Christian theology
1:25:03 - A puzzle
1:27:32 - Value of philosophy
1:29:25 - Conclusion
