IX—Moment Universals and Personal Identity

Abstract

In this paper i argue, regretfully, that we are not really persons. first i show through a series of thought experiments that each moment of experience, in all its subjective detail, is a distinct universal, numerically as well as qualitatively the same wherever it is instantiated and in no strong sense belonging to any one body, mind or series of moments. but each of us takes himself to be a person, i.e., a being whose future experience coheres strongly and uniquely with his present (hence our disturbance at hypothetical cases of human fission). i conclude that this mistaken belief is a product of evolution, as the basis of concern in the organism.