4 - Transformation

Summary

We never vanish without a trace. Even in death, the stuff into which we decompose continues. Most of it is recomposed into other things, often things that are alive. We are food for worms. For those of us who want to continue, these facts are small comfort. Why exactly? For many of us, at least at the level of theoretical belief, it is not, I want to claim, because transformation is not good enough - because we want to preserve our identities; rather, it is because we do not identify fully with the things into which we expect to transform. If we were to identify fully with the people (or whatever) into which we expect to transform, many of us, as we shall see, would be happy to forfeit our identities provided we could secure certain other benefits.

Identity counts for something, so the value of these other benefits would have to outweigh the value of identity. But for many of us identity is not so valuable that it is difficult to think of benefits that might outweigh it. The trades many of us would be willing to make, and might rationally make, show, I think, that for many of us neither robust physical continuity nor robust psychological continuity either does or ought to matter primarily in survival. Whether the same nonfission examples can be used to show that not even minimal physical or psychological continuity matters primarily is a more difficult question.