Fission, cohabitation and the concern for future survival
. What does it take to satisfy my desire for continued survival? To borrow a term from David Lewis, a ‘platitude of common sense’ (1976a: 18) has it that my desire is satisfied iff the person I am now exists in the future; that is, iff there is a future person with whom I am identical. On this view, what matters in survival is personal identity (for brevity, simply ‘identity’). Derek Parfit has challenged this view by observing that one can imagine oneself undergoing certain processes that do not interrupt what matters, but do interrupt identity. One such process is fission: I divide into two people, each of whom is bodily and psychologically very similar to me, but neither of whom is identical with me.