Latest / Art of the Question / Are You Still You If Everything Changes? - Prof. Marya Schechtman - #54

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Are You Still You If Everything Changes? - Prof. Marya Schechtman - #54 · Art of the Question

• Julius Moorman: Maryas, thank you so much for for coming on ⁓ the show, ⁓ talking about the self today, which is something that is really interesting to me because I've changed myself quite a bit over the last ⁓ few years. I had people in my family change as well, which we'll get into later ⁓ for sure. So it's something that I'm I'm really fascinated by, really interested in. So I'm really grateful to to have you on the show and to talk about this very, very interesting ⁓ topic. ⁓ before we get into the specifics of things, I thought it would be a good starting point to kind of understand where your fascination and your interest into ⁓ the self and and identity ⁓ when it started and and why it started. You. Yeah. And thank you so much for having me. I'm really glad to be here. And that was a really helpful introduction because I think that for most people, interest in the self starts around change. When there's a big change in your own life, when you suddenly get exposed to a whole new perspective that you never considered before and you wonder how it applies to you. Or as you say, when people close to you change a great deal and yet they're still those people, right? So I think most people get interested in philosophy in that way, in the philosophy of the self in that way. And I think I probably did as well. ⁓ I was always interested in philosophy in general, ⁓ but I was always interested in the way it applied to my life. And really, I just in graduate school, I wasn't yet sure what topic I wanted to work on. ⁓ I took some courses where we talked about the self and different views of the self that I found fascinating. And then really it was one of those things where it came time where I had to decide what I was going to work on. And I looked over all the papers I had written for various classes. And I saw that whatever the topic was, somehow it ended up being about the self. ⁓ So that was it became clear to me that that's what I was interested in, but also what was another good ⁓ observation about how people think about the self. Sometimes you think about it because of change, and sometimes you just step back and take a look and think about right what really interests you, what you really value, what you really care about. ⁓ and you see things that you miss in the day to day. So sort of puts together the various ⁓ interests in the cell. And so yeah, I became interested in it in in my graduate work and I've worked on it ever since. Super interesting. And and w before yeah I I wanna get into the the definition, but something that just came to mind as you were were explaining that is when I I I journal every now and then I should do it more often. I have periods where where I do it more ⁓ than than when I don't. And I think that I recognize in myself that I do it more when things aren't going exactly the way I want to, right? And I feel that is probably also similar when people want to explore themselves and start asking these questions. Because if everything is going your way and life is perfect and and you're completely happy, like There is no really a reason to look into this. Would you agree? Well, yes and no, right? So I I think what you say is really important. And also I should just say at the outset when you said before we get into definitions, I don't have a definition of myself. So nobody's disappointed later on. But I have lots of things to say about it, but no definition. I think what you say is exact. Right. And one of the things that I've spent a lot of time thinking about is, you know, what are our everyday ideas of self and identity? ⁓ and one thing I think a lot of people feel so one thing I touched on when I said I looked at all my papers and they were all about the self is that there's something there that's really me that I might not know that I have to identify. And there's some constants throughout my life that, you know, something stays the same. I don't know if that's really true anymore, but I think a lot of people think that right despite everything else that changes, there are some core features that make you you. But another very common way of thinking about the self and identity is that it's somehow what you are when life is easy. And I think it has to do with the idea that self-expression is a fundamental good, that it's really important to us to somehow be authentic and be who we are. ⁓ and that lots of times when things are going badly in our life, our life is just a struggle, just every day is a struggle and, you know, not getting joy out of day-to-day activities. You think something's wrong here. And a lot of times what you think is wrong is I'm not really doing what I want to do. I'm not really being true to myself. And that if I were true to myself, everything would just be much easier. ⁓ so there's this idea there's a kind of struggle. And I think there's something very right about that, but also potentially misleading. ⁓ Yeah, well what why why do you think it's it might be misleading? Well, I think it's ⁓ it's it can be misleading because sometimes life is hard and meaningful activities are hard and meaningful relationships are hard. And sometimes this feeling of this is the right thing, you know, when you go visit the beach or something, it's like, no, this is what I'm meant to be doing. This is who I am. is just a moment of relief from some of the realities of doing the things that we find important that are not always terrifically fun. I I used to call it the fallacy of the affair. So I would think of the person who, you know, when life gets too much and it's complicated and there's money problems and arguments about what to do about the kids, and then they meet someone and they think, ⁓ I'm with the wrong person. This is who I'm meant to be with. ⁓ And then, you know, it's a sort of common story and then if they take up with that other person once they have money problems and arguments about household chores and things, you're right back where you started. So you get this sense sometimes that that you finally found yourself because you feel relief. Right. And you have to look at how it works out over time or in a broader context to think about whether that's Yeah, I agree. So many interesting things to unpack there because there's something that came to mind that I used to be a lawyer. I used to be a tax lawyer. I went to law school and I was deeply unhappy with working in a corporate environment and I really wanted to change. It's like this isn't me. I don't belong here. So there was a sense of this environment, this the lifestyle, everything I'm doing, this isn't me. So that's why I wanted to change. I quit my job. It's the way I became a journalist. I wanted to express myself. I wanted to create things. and and and talk to interesting people, right? So there was a desire and a feeling of a a misalignment, if you will, with my sense of self and the position I was in at that time. However, if we look at any interesting book, any interesting movie, it is exactly why we appreciate some people, how they deal with adversities, how they solve their problems, how they show character in times of hardship. And that's how we view other people. We respect other people if they can pull through and turn their situations around. And I think it's a quality we admire in in in our heroes, in in in people around us. So maybe from an internal point of view, we have a sense like this isn't us and we should change, but from an external point of view, we see that person has a strong character because he or she was able to turn things around. Does that make sense? It makes sense and it's really interesting. I hadn't thought of it that way because in some sense I do think one way of turning things around is by changing what you do. Right? One way of turning things around is by ⁓ facing the fact that whatever expectations people have of me or whatever expectations I had of myself for whatever reason, this just isn't working. This is not the thing that I want to do, and finding the thing you want to do. And I think that that can be very hard too. So the misleading cases I'm thinking of are are in fact the ones where it's just a temporary release. know, sort of an example that someone gave me once a you know, that was meant to be finding your true self as someone who, you know, works a job that's hard and then they go and, you know, do some jazz improvising with their friends on the weekends, and then suddenly they say, This is what I'm meant to do. And there you have to think about, well, is it? Right? Maybe it is, but maybe you don't want to turn that into a job, right? maybe once you're doing that, that will also be a grind in a job. So so some of it just depends on the the nuance of the case. Because I think in the jazz case and the changing to the podcast case, it could go either way. And you don't always know, right? Sometimes you go there and you really build something that really is authentic and really is you and it was just the right thing to do. And other times It's just you have to recognize this is just something I can do to blow off steam and maybe my life really is okay as it is, but it doesn't mean that I'm always, you know, feeling like it's easy and free and and so on. And and so yeah, it is it it and also it's just a an extremely good point you bring up about the internal versus external perspective. Because one thing that I've really come to believe over my time working on the self, right? I started out with this idea of, you know, there's A self that I have that's independent of what other people think of me, that you know, I have to be careful about letting their expectations guide me and so on. Over time, I found that it seems more complicated than that. That our interactions with other people, our relationships with the people we care about are very integral to the self. And what that means is needing to think about how other people see you seriously as maybe part of who you are. ⁓ so I I think it's a comp complicated formula, but I I do think that there is something right still about there really are cases where you come to see that what you're doing is not expressive of who you are. And that it would be a good thing to change because of that. and that there are real cases also where you sort of lose who you are and have to find it again, as it were. Yeah, and I I like what you s say about th that perspective change that you may have had over over the years where The self is something that is truly you independent of the environment. Would you be the same person if you were the only person on the planet? Probably not, right? I don't even think you would be a person if you are the only person on the planet. ⁓ I mean, it depends on exactly how we imagine. If s if everybody else suddenly disappeared, who knows what would happen to you. Right. Right. ⁓ over time, people who are isolated tend to change psychologically in that go beyond just having different, you know, personality traits, but you know, sort of their whole experience of time and place and self starts to dissolve. And I don't think it's coherent that there ever could have been just one person. ⁓ and so this is something, you know, that I've come to over time. but really what I I've come to understand is that what it is to be a self, at least in you know, my view now. is to occupy a place in a world of activities and relationships and other people and so on. I mean, so much of what we think about in being a self is not only just relationships with other people, but activities that wouldn't exist and couldn't exist if there weren't other people. Yeah. Or you can add podcasts too. There wouldn't be podcasts. There wouldn't be media. There wouldn't be any of that. There wouldn't be philosophy departments. There wouldn't, right? So so much of what we do only exists because we live in these really complex sociocultural contexts. ⁓ and so much of what we mean by self and the ways of actualizing who we are depend on that. And I think that That's a great thing that we have this context and we have these connections and that it allows us to be selves and it carries dangers with it, right? Yeah. ⁓ 'cause it puts limits on who you can be and what you can be and Requires recognition from other people. Yeah, and it can also change quite fast, right? In the in the the these dynamics that we have created in in modern times is that we can be a mother when we're at home, and then we're a colleague when we're at work, and then perhaps we're a a sporting partner when we are in the at the run club. And in every group that I have, at least, I am a little different. Also I feel like I'm a slightly different person when I speak in English. ⁓ when I'm with my English friends, I feel like a very different person actually than when I'm with my Dutch friends. So merely by speaking a different language, I kind of feel like someone else. I mean, it is still me in there and the way that this difference occurs is by expressing myself in a different language, but It is interesting to think about. So again, it's we are ourselves, but it's it's highly dependent on the context that we operate within. Yes, it is. And and one of the things that I have also come to think over many, many years of working on this is that A lot of the philosophical accounts of personal identity and a lot of the everyday thought about personal identity or the self is this idea of some core central, you know, traits that stay the same. You've got to, you know, you have a lot of different beliefs, values, desires, and so on. Some come from outside, some come from inside, some are circumstantial. And there's this attempt to look for, but what's that? core set that remains the same. And I don't think we need that to have a good conception of the self. I think the fact is we are really multifaceted. There are many lives we could have lived, many things we could have pursued. We really may be very different. ⁓ you know, I'm very different when I'm in the middle of the term and everything's really busy, and in the summer when things are more relaxed. And that's cyclical. So we have sort of cyclical things where we just, you know, are in different modes at different times. and actually one of the times I I really thought about this just coincidentally, it was very early in my philosophical career, but also I was a fairly new philosopher, but I was an even newer mother. I had, you know, a a twenty month old at home. And I had not gone anywhere since he was born. I was just Very ⁓ very inv invested as one is and being a parent and like, you know. And I got an invitation to come speak in Amsterdam. Wow. And I had not been away like at all. And this would involve like going far away for for four days. And it was inconceivable to me that I would leave my son because I just sort of hadn't, you know, we had just been been doing the the parent child bonding thing. But I knew in my heart that if I could get myself on the plane and get to the this place, get to to you know, the conference, that there was a part of me that would spring that had been there before, that had been sort of backgrounded, that would come to the foreground and I would be glad of it. And so I I got myself on the plane, which was very difficult. But then exactly once I got to the conference, I like something that's like, ⁓ yeah, philosophy. I like this. I like talking about this stuff. I know these people. I like these people. There are people I know who aren't in my house, right? And I think we do that all the time in small and large ways. And it wasn't like I forgot about having a child or that I didn't miss, you know, there There was still some of that ambivalence, but I also felt that it was really healthy to remember there was this other piece of me that that didn't get expressed. And I I just think we do that all the time. And so that's one of the things that led me to the answer I gave to the question of only one person on the planet. Because I think given that we just what gives us our unity is not some. Core set of things that holds together. But what gives us our unity is a social and natural world that's structured so that we have to view ourselves and others view us as single beings throughout our lives. We know people can change and we know they do change. And we know that when they change, sometimes, you know, relationships shift and what they can do changes. But we do view people. at the end is sort of like from roughly cradle to grave one thing. And to get by in the world, we have to understand that other people think about us. And so we have all kinds of things that sort of hold us together. Jobs and passports and, you know, old friends who will come and journal entries that we can look at and say, ⁓ yeah, that right. And and I think that's where the unity of a person comes from. It it it depends a lot on the ongoing structural supports that don't just like enforce it on you, but help you think about your life in a way where you have to think about how the parts of it fit together and work out how they're going to fit together and what you're going to give priority to when. And so that sort of being a self is juggling all of that more than having some on and how you juggle it rather than some underlying you know, consistent and ever never changing set of beliefs. Yeah. And and you s you said in the beginning that you don't have a strict definition, but you have spoken about the the narrative self. Yes, I have. Can you maybe explain ⁓ what you mean by the narrative self? Yeah, so in a way it's just what I'm saying. ⁓ early on, I was thinking of a very internal psychological sense of self. And I was addressing this very standard question in philosophy and in life, which is, hey, what makes me the same as myself when say I was eight years old? So I look back at a picture of myself on my birthday. I don't look like that anymore. My body isn't even made out of the same matter anymore. I've certainly changed psychologically. Everything I do is different more or less. I can think of a couple of similarities, but I've changed so much that so what makes me the same person? Or am I? Right? Is that really me? And so it's a difficult question to answer, but we feel it's a really important question to answer because A lot of important things depend on personal identity, right? So ⁓ who's responsible for what? I'm responsible for what I did. I'm not responsible for what other people did, or if I am responsible for what other people did, it's usually indirect because of some negligence of mine or or whatever. ⁓ I care about my own future in a different way than I care about the future of other people. It's I mean, I might care more about the future of other people than my own future, but it's a different kind of interest because I think I'm gonna feel what happens to me and experience it ⁓ directly and and they won't. So if I do something to have a small pleasure now that's gonna cause me a lot of pain later, I can be criticized for being imprudent or irrational. But if I do something now that gives me small small pleasure that will make Other people suffer, that's being immoral. It's just a different relationship. So there's a special relationship I have to my own future, a special responsibility for it as well as for the past. And ⁓ and things like, you know, whether I'm gonna survive, am I still gonna be there? ⁓ I wanna continue or I don't want to, but you know, I care about that. And so that's all connected to identity. So you think that whatever identity is, it should be a relation. That's important in those ways. And the question is, do I have a relation to that eight-year-old that's important in those ways? Mm-hmm. And, you know, it seems like just being the same organism isn't enough to make sense of all of that. And so people thought, well, it's gotta be something psychological, but what is it? ⁓ and the prevailing theory and philosophy when I started thinking about this as well, the best we can do is say the relation I have to that, ⁓ you know, eight-year-old or whatever, is that today I'm very psychologically like I was yesterday, same beliefs, values, design, you know, things change a little bit. Maybe I have a new memory, but very similar yesterday to the day before, the day before to the day before that. And there's an overlapping chain of this kind of similarity going all the way back to the eight-year-old. And so that's what makes me the same person. And I and many other people found that unsatisfying because it just doesn't seem like a strong enough relationship to the eight-year-old to make all that difference, right? ⁓ and then there are all these cases. I mean, you're aware of where you know, I could have that relationship to three different people. Could I be all of them and so on? And so when I started working on this, I thought, well, not only is that not satisfying as a way of explaining this really important relation of identity and continuity of the self, ⁓ but it's not even psychologically accurate. I think. Our lives, our psychological lives aren't nice and linear like that. I think, you know, there's the I think when I got off that plane in Amsterdam, I was not very psychologically continuous with myself the day before. I was more psychologically continuous with myself back when I used to go to conferences before I had my child. So ⁓ I was looking for another way of thinking about. our experienced psychological unity. We seem to experience the self as an ongoing we experience ourselves as ongoing subjects of experience, right? We want our consciousness to continue. The worry about the standard view was ⁓ about the overlapping chains of connectedness is that it'll it would allow some, you know, if there was technology to replicate people, it would allow someone to you know, in a in a sci-fi kind of way, destroy me and replace me with a replica, and that didn't seem like enough, right? You wanna there's some relation I have when I'm really surviving that isn't just having someone like me. What is that? And so narrative was meant to be a response to that. My my feeling was that a good way to look at the kind of unity of the self over time. and of a you know human self in particular, living a human life was analogous to the kind of unity that there is in a story or a narrative. ⁓ and what I meant by that is there's a certain sense in which narratives aren't just parts related to one another, which is what the picture of you know personal identity was ⁓ in your right. subject line to me when you first wrote you talked about the ship of Theseus, right? So there's this famous puzzle about the ship of Theseus. It's a wooden ship. It's important that it's the ship of Theseus, because Apollo wants you to take that very ship, right, to do the honoring. And so the store the puzzle about the ship of Theseus, which goes back to, you know, antiquity, is that suppose you have the ship of Theseus and plank rots and you replace it. The wooden ship, you know, Saltwater Sea, that's still the ship of Theseus, we would all think. Then suppose later second plank rocks. Now that's still the ship of Theseus. ⁓ and then the question is if over 20 years all of the planks have been replaced. So now you've got a ship that's made out of entirely new wood, is that still the ship of Theseus? And people really argue about that. They argued about it in the first century, they continue to argue. But it's a puzzle about identity, and you know, one common answer is well, you had a c you had a ship that functioned all along. And so that means it's the same ship. But if you had replaced 90% of it all at once, you wouldn't have. There would have been a break in the continuity. And that's sort of how the the view of personal identity that was standard at the time looked at it. It's like our psychological life is like the ship of Theseus, except the Planks are individual beliefs, desires, traits, and stuff, and you can replace them one by one gradually. And I just think that's the wrong way to think about human psychology, which is much more messy and holistic. So I wanted a a more holistic view where sort of the the self was more than the sum of the beliefs, desires, and so on. And that our continuity over time. was something more than just sameness from moment to moment or enough sameness from moment to moment. And I thought that a narrative ⁓ gave a really good way of thinking about this because when you're say reading a narrative or watching a ⁓ you know, you're reading a novel, you're watching a a movie, whatever, you do go through it, you know, in time. And the events unfold in time, and you can extract passages and stuff, or scenes of a movie. But somehow, none of them is what it is outside of the context of the whole. It's always artificial. You don't start with parts and then put them together into a whole. What you've got is a story. And as you read the story, each part has its character and significance because of what. came before and what you think will come later. And as you go along, you may have to go back and rethink what the significance of the thing was, ⁓ in light of what you've learned since and reinterpret things, ⁓ and so on. So it's really only a story as a whole. Right? You can't you can't say the ⁓ you know like what makes ⁓ There's no real answer to the question what makes an event at the end of the novel part of the same novel as the one at the beginning. There's some prosaic, you know, answer like, well, it's between the same book covers or something. But then that would be true if someone put a a wrong page in an error. What makes a part of the whole story is is its place in the whole thing. It's the story that has identity as a whole. ⁓ and then the individual. parts take their identity from the whole rather than the whole taking its identity from the parts. ⁓ so that's how I think about the unity of a life, right? And that's how I think about our psychological life. And so that was a long-winded way. And so I'll just wrap this up and let you, you know, ask further questions. But it was a long-winded way of saying the the initial thing that I was trying to do was to say, how do we have a sense of the self where it it makes sense that I can be haunted by things I did in the past even if I've changed a lot, or that I can recognize something in the past as mine, even though I now give it a totally new significance than I did at the time. Or that it makes sense that I have a particular kind of responsibility and worry for my own future. And I think that the holism of a narrative, the fact that there's some sense in which the past and future are in the present all the time for us. as I do this podcast, right, it makes sense that I'm answering for the narrative you that I started with and that, you know, I worry about how it's gonna like. It makes sense because it's all part of a story. And it doesn't just come to me as an isolated event. It comes to me as part of an ongoing career. And I know where I am and I know where you are and I know what part of my career I'm in and that it's different from before. All of those things are making this experience the experience it is. And so in that way, the whole story and the whole self are part of every moment of our lives. And that was to answer that question. And then I can say more, but I'm gonna start. Yeah. No, it's a I I really like that concept and I think it's a great way of ⁓ thinking about it because it also at least hopefully I always say this about good stories, good storytelling. There has never been a book or a movie, at least not a readable or a watchable ⁓ one that is the same throughout. there's always change happening in movies or books. ⁓ usually there's character development, there's growth happening, and that doesn't exist without change. ⁓ without state changes, ⁓ without good parts, without sad parts, ⁓ happy parts, ⁓ c questioning things and I I think it's a great way to to look at it. And and yeah, just because ⁓ the middle part of the movie is sad doesn't mean that the entire movie has to be sad. There can be a good ending, there can be a bad ending, and it it has to start somewhere. So I I like that. And I also think it's incredibly important to you you mentioned it as well, but why do we even think about these questions, right? ⁓ I I think apart from the fact that We will get lost if we feel like we don't have an identity and if we lose our sense of selves, that is usually a very difficult time in one's life, ⁓ for whatever reason it may occur. But also our entire le our entire legal system ⁓ depends on it. Like let's say I were to borrow a million dollars, I would go to the bank and say, Hey, give me a million dollars. ⁓ I have to repay it in ten years from now. And then ten years later they they ask me, Hey, can you can you pay ⁓ pay us back the million dollars with interest? And then I go, No, but all my ⁓ cells have since been regenerated and ⁓ cells usually take seven to nine years to completely ⁓ so physically I'm I'm an entirely different person and therefore I shall not be bound by your request to to ⁓ repay you guys. And it may be a silly Point, but it is true. And and it is also important in the context of punishment, right? If if someone does something when they're 18, they might go stand trial as an adult. and yeah, sometimes that does change the entire trajectory of of one's life. ⁓ but I think when we wanna perhaps release people. after they served a a large amount of their sentence when they might be up for a parole. These things do matter. Like what was the context of the crime? When did he do it or she or why? ⁓ what how old were they? So I think it really does matter apart from interesting philosoph philosophical discussions, ⁓ it also really matters ⁓ in the real world, I think. I agree. And and a few things to say about that. first is sort of very directly to the point. I think that the example of punishment is really great and really shows sort of the strength of the narrative view because, you know, one of my examples that I like to use is, you know, take your favorite politician, sports idol, movie star, whoever who is just like, you know, great in right thinking now, but it comes to light that they did something you know, really offensive. Let's say it's not even criminal, but you know, some kind of, you know, choose your value system. Really offensive thing. And so there's a big, you know, sort of media flurry about it. This person is disgraced and cast and all those things. Yeah. And what I always say is, you know, to people who say, ⁓ but I'm not the same person I was. If this person has, you know, changed and they would never do it now, and their reaction is, ⁓ I don't do that anymore. I'm like, that is terrible. What does that have to do with me? We would not be satisfied with that response, right? ⁓ you know, so like, yeah, that guy was terrible. Glad it's not me. Right? You're supposed to say, I'm appalled, I'm ashamed, I'm more you know. Because we think you need to take accountability and recognize that you did that, but at the same time, it also does really matter that you change. And it does matter what the context was. It does matter if you can tell a story where, you know, at that time I was really ignorant and I haven't been exposed to all this stuff. And since I've learned it and, you know, I I see how terrible that was and I've tried to make amends to the people. I mean, that all matters too. The whole story matters. It's not just a are you responsible or are you not? ⁓ there's some very basic sense in which you are because otherwise, like if we didn't do that by human organisms, we wouldn't be able to do it at all. Right? Yeah. ⁓ but also the rest of the story matters. And I also say this about your point of your point about novels, that People also in personal identity a lot, this always really bothers me. They say, well, but there are cases where you know a single individual just becomes a different person, and often they'll bring up some kind of radical religious conversion, saw Paul or something. And my answer to that is it's not a conversion unless there's some sense in which it is the same person. So right, a story. shows change in the main character, ⁓ and makes that change intelligible to us in some sense. And so it would be it's it's a different thing, right? If you know Saul is struck on the road to Damascus and changes his life and name. That's one thing. And it's another thing if, you know, Saul is incinerated on the road to Damascus and some new person named Saul and Paul emerges, right? These these are just Two different cases. And because one is a story and it's really central to it, that there is one person through even that very ⁓ profound change. And and I think for both of those cases that I've talked about, and it's true for the good cases too, not just when someone did something bad and gets better, but That one of the reasons that we think it's important is that on the other side of these change, this change, we want someone to understand that they were capable of whatever it was they did. They, you know, who are still here, did that. And that's a part of who they are. And and they have to make sense of themselves. I mean, it should be humbling, if nothing else, right? Or you should be on guard against. Writing twelve step programs, you say I am an addict because it to signify, even when you're 30 years sober, to signify but I need to recognize that that's a part of my whole identity that, you know, doesn't have to hold me back, but I just need to be aware of it. I need to know about it. It's important thing for me to know about myself. And also for people who have done really great. Things, right? They can't take that away from you when they you know when somebody's done a great deed or won the championship. You know, they can never take that away from you, whatever happens. And I think it's because it's about what your whole life story is and not just as you say what's happening now. And and then the final thing ⁓ that I want to say, or maybe two more. We have all the time, so go please go ahead. So So one thing is, I mean, one of the things that that sort of gratified me the most or made me think that I was on the right track with narrative was when I gave a talk at an interdisciplinary conference and there were neurologists there talking about patients ⁓ who had various conditions that had been associated with sort of a loss of self. Mm-hmm. And one of the neurologists came up to me and said, you know, the The whole idea of narrative is really important for families who are dealing with a loved one with dementia, who's in really late stages of dementia, because they're so distraught. And the more that you can help them see, this is a tiny part of the the life of the person you love, right? This is just a little bit at the end and it's awful and it's terrible. And you should be angry and sad and all the things that you are. But remember this is a whole person and none of what happened before is taken away by this. It's all still part of who this person is. And he told me that people find that very comforting, which I think I probably would too. I mean, in your in your life in general, right, if you can take the perspective of, you know, the a longer perspective and as you say, remember all the the good and bad. ⁓ that's very helpful. And maybe I'll leave that there and come back to the other. Yeah, no, I I think it it will exactly as you say, it is very comforting and it solves for a lot of these questions, whether it's dementia. For example, my father had a stroke ⁓ around twelve years ago, and that changed his personality significantly. ⁓ he used to be a very strict ⁓ person, very tough guy. And it made him quite friendly and quite soft. And you could argue that that's a good thing, but it felt very weird because it wasn't him, you know? ⁓ that's not how we how we knew him. So by framing it as the the narrative self, it's yeah, it's not a different person, it's just part of the entire story of the person who is my father. So I I really do understand why people find that comforting. And I also, yeah, I I agree with it. and then there's the more extreme examples, right? So I I believe there's a very famous example that is often used when people are discussing ⁓ free will. ⁓ I believe Harvard has ⁓ and this is going to sound a bit macabre, but they ha they have his skull, I believe. There's a man who got i ⁓ is it the the man who got ⁓ like his his Yes, the the the the story of the pole, but for the people who are unaware of what I'm talking about, there is a a man, I forgot his name. ⁓ I really just that's the name and his he took an iron pole. Hole through the skull, he survived, but I believe his ⁓ prefrontal cortex was destroyed or some other significant part of his brain, and therefore his entire personality changed. And the reason this is used as an example in in philosophy, but in other discussions as well about free will, is as soon as his brain changed and certain limiting factors of limiting parts of the brain that control your behavior and and probably withhold you from doing some crazy stuff weren't there anymore. So that changed his behavior significantly and it r yeah gives rise to the question is that still the same person? Which makes a lot of sense because it In a sense, it's a completely different person because they behave in completely different ways. But the narrative self solves this as just being a part of this person's ⁓ story. Would you would you agree? Yes, but I I mean, I should also say right a couple of things. I mean, one is as the ⁓ the neurologist said, it doesn't make it any easier to be in the bad part of a story. Yes. ⁓ if if that's what happens. and and it's part of you can say that it's part of the same person because it's part of the same narrative. And I think you have to, and this is where I think the social piece of it comes in because right, it's distressing to the families of people. when this happens and their friends and their employers because they can't engage with this person in the way they used to. But it doesn't distress them that there are people in the world that they can't engage with that way. It's that this is their beloved, you know, husband, father, brother, friend, who suddenly is very different to them. And that's It's precisely because it is the same person that it's so anomalous ⁓ and so distressing. And I think, you know, a a more real, well, I mean, a more common, sadly, example of this is PTSD, people who come back from combat and they just can't engage with people in the way that they did. And and I think ⁓ I mean I I'm trying to think about how to say this because I think it's important that the view allow for the reality of the sense in which people say this is just a different person, that that there is some sense in which that's true when like your whole social world and set of activities and demeanor change ⁓ something very radical. and unusual in a lifetime has happened. So I want to allow that. And so the narrative view does have to allow for that. But I don't wanna I I think it's too far to say that this has become literally someone else or that that person is gone. And one way of putting it that some people like and other people don't like, and I go back and forth on it, is that right, there's this notion, you know, as I said before, the social world sort of enforces an identity on you. ⁓ you talk about the legal world and right, and it would have been an interesting question if Phineas Gage had committed a crime before this happened, right? Would we want to prosecute him for it? ⁓ My guess is I mean, it actually, you know, in his case he was very reasonable before the the poll. And then when the Rad had said that was when he was more likely to commit a crime. And there, you know, there are reasons we don't hold people responsible that aren't because they're not the same person. We can say they are the same person, but they've got diminished capacity, which I think is what we'd say in his case. So I wanna I want to mark the significance of these kinds of changes within the narrative view. And one way of doing it is to say that sort of the keeping of your identity in those cases has moved from you to the people around you, who are sort of maintaining your identity in whatever way they can by, you know, recognizing you as the same person despite the changes. ⁓ and that mostly when we're mature adults, we're sort of responsible for directing and keeping our identity. So what does that mean? One thing I mean by that is there's been I I've lately found a bunch of great work in developmental psychology. It's been around for a while, but but I came to it kind of late. ⁓ where there are a lot of people who hold a narrative view of the self and who describe how right as children. We get taught how to narrate our lives according to our sociocultural norms of what a human life looks like. This little kids from the beginning, where are you gonna be when you grow up? Then, you know, are you gonna be a mommy? One day you'll go to school like brother and you'll be big, but also just sort of putting together the events of the day into a narrative. We went to the park and then we saw your friend and then you had a fight and you were sad and what did you have to do? You had to say sorry and just all of that stuff. And kids learn to do that. And then when you become a mature adult, it's sort of at adolescence is standardly that where you're, you know, you've got all the pieces together and you realize, okay, I'm living, you know, I've learned what a human life looks like in my world, and that I'm living one. And I get to direct it to a large extent. And I'm also responsible for making it cohere, right? So you you realize, okay, you know, there are different ways to do it. You can sort of accept the template you've been given. Yes, I'm gonna get a job at this point and I'm gonna, you know, have children at this point or whatever, or you can decide not to, or you can find that you can't quite do it, or you can rebel against it and say, I don't think this is right. I think it these are all ways of directing your narrative. But they all take place within a certain framework that we all learn as children that allows us to engage with one another effectively so that, you know, I do know this is expected of me and I don't think it's right. I think society, you know, expects too much of X kind of people, for instance, or doesn't give them enough opportunities. And I'm going to resist that and try to change it. You can do that. Because you can you know what people are expecting and you know how to tell them a story of why that's not right for you. or you can write decide to you know confound people's expectations by changing your career midstream and you can say something about why. So so we get to direct our narratives to a large extent. ⁓ but In order to do that effectively, we need to sort of have mastery of the narrative style of our culture and we need to explain ourselves to one another, which we do with stories. Let me tell you why I did it. Right. How did you get into this, you know? Why did you get interested in this? And we don't always know the story and we don't always exactly get it right. And other people can help us, you know, they can remind us of things and so on. So it's still very social, but we have a big piece of it. And then in the case where something really changes due to a brain injury or an illness or a traumatic experience or something, people sometimes lose the capacity to sort of put the story together and direct it ⁓ in the same way they did and then other people step in and sort of pick up the slack. So that that is the way I would think about those things. Yeah. Yeah. I I want to comment on a on a few things there. very interesting. ⁓ first thing you mentioned the the legal ⁓ well thought experiment basically what if Fin Phineas Gage would have committed a crime before the incident and then he would have to stand trial after. I know that in the Netherlands at least, I don't know what the US system how they would handle a situation like this, but I do know from law school that we this will h would happen with ⁓ war criminals, for example, who were prosecuted for like 30 or 40 years after the fact, maybe even longer. that sometimes they would say, okay, this person is guilty. so verdict guilty, but g guilty without punishment, because it is pointless to punish a person who has dementia, for example. Th some of these people who would be prosecuted for ⁓ war crimes during the Second World War, they were gone, basically. The their dementia wouldn't allow them to be prosecuted anymore. So yes, guilty, no punishment. Pointless to punish a person that is merely a shell, to put it bluntly, of what they used to be, right? So in in our legal systems, at least again in the Netherlands, we do take this into account. And I would assume that this that it will be very similar. ⁓ it doesn't have to be dementia. It it could be a car crash or or something else. I would assume I I would have to double check. But that's that's very interesting. So we do take that into account. ⁓ other thing I wanted to say is you're you're bet you're speaking about agency, right? So that's also why ⁓ sense of self is so important is If we know who we are and if we have a strong feeling of of who we are, we can give meaning and we can steer our lives into certain directions to change the narrative in a way we like, we would like to see. And that's why I I really like thinking about agency so much and I like to surround myself by people who are are high agency and I respect people who have a high sense of agency because they are so aware of the fact that they can change things and they are bold enough to try new things and they're trying to persuade people to to buy their product or to invest in their company or to join them in whatever it is that they're trying. So I really get inspired by people who have a high ⁓ sense of agency. But before you can have a high sense of agency, you need to figure out where you want to go, right? You can you can't really steer towards a future you so desire if you don't have a plan. And you can't really have a plan if you don't know who you are and what aligns with your vision. And that brings me to this next question I I I have and something I wanted to raise is a lot of people nowadays they they go to to bali or they go to Asia or whatever to find themselves. And it's a great idea. I love traveling. I've been to Thailand, I've been to Bali, and I can recommend anyone that likes traveling, good food and sunshine to to go there. But I always that when I read or see something like that, I I think trying to find oneself is a wrong way to look at it because We are always changing. So how can you find something that is constantly on the move? And I would rather consider it that sometimes we have to calibrate ourselves. So we have to realign. And I was curious to hear your opinion on whether it's even possible to to find oneself. Yeah. No, I I think that's That's a much better way of putting it 'cause right, what I was thinking is that when people say they're going to find themselves Yeah, no, there's there's nothing defined, you know, nothing concrete defined. I think what they mean is I want to go away from distractions into just some new environment that's you know not got my to help break my patterns that will give me a way to to break my patterns so that I can think about things from a different perspective than I can when I'm really immersed in the day to day. ⁓ but but the idea of calibration I do really like that 'cause that I th I think to me that does sort of capture what it is you're trying to do. and and from, you know, the way that I would think about this kind of idea within the narrative framework is that one thing I love about narrative, and this is a point that's made by a philosopher named Peter Goldie, ⁓ who writes on narrative and the self as well, ⁓ or did he's unfortunately passed away, but But narrative is inherently multi-perspectival. That when you're engaging with a narrative as a reader, as an author, as a character, I think we do well not as character. We do in our lives as characters, not but when you're reading a novel or watching a movie, you have to hold several different perspectives at once, right? There is the perspectives of the different characters, which can be different from one another. There's the perspective of the narrator. If there's a narrator that will maybe be different from the characters and also maybe different from the author. So then you have to wonder about the perspective of the author, you know, into the novel now. And then there's your own perspective as the reader and what you bring to it. And you're sort of holding these different perspectives and moving back and forth between them. Throughout novel and the way that I think about it in our lives, I mean, he uses this to talk about things like, you know, ⁓ our relation to our past. Or we might say something like, you know, I made a complete fool of myself by getting angry at the meeting and yelling at everybody. you know, I stupidly opened my mouth and blah, blah, blah. And as you say it, There's a little bit of how you felt at the time when you were, you know, angry that comes up in you. But you're also now calling it stupid and foolish, which was not what you thought at the time. So you've got the perspective you felt at the time and your current perspective on it and the relation between them. And I think that in our lives, there's this perspective shifting all the time. And sometimes we zoom in. And sometimes we zoom out, and sometimes, ⁓ like in the case I gave you about traveling to the Netherlands, you sort of say, I know I'm in this perspective. I'm gonna try to get to another one, ⁓ by by changing my location, right? I'm I'm just too much in the thick of it here of parenthood to get any picture that includes anything else, but yet I know I've got this extended life and this is a piece of it. ⁓ And so I think that when people are trying to find themselves, a lot of times it is, I mean, in that case, I wasn't unhappy. I was just trying to find a little balance, but but it can be something like I was ecstatically happy. But ⁓ it can be like, you know, the jobs, you know, the change thing that you talked about. Like something's not right here. I'm not, you know, enjoying this, but I I can't put my finger on it. I can't say what to do about it. I don't know exactly what the problem is. And then sometimes radically changing your environment lets you take the bigger perspective, lets you, you know, background where you are a little bit and and see the broader picture. ⁓ and then I think that is a recalibration. It's like, well, let's think about like where my life is going. And how I think about na what I now anticipate is the whole of my life. How do I feel about that? And how would I have to readjust things a little bit like it better, you know, that it was working back. Yeah, and and it it just when people talk about finding themselves, it it implies this binary moment that this was pre finding myself and then I found myself and that's and then I lived heavily ever after. But It's it's a lie, really, because I know it sounds like we are one career change away from living our dream lives, but problems will always occur. And I remember being so miserable working in this corporate environment and then being ecstatic when I made the change and then I was hired for the Dutch News and I had like a serious job as a journalist, and I went from being an intern again to then being a minimum wage like semi-intern and then making like the title as a full journalist. And it's like, if you would have told me that a year ago or two years ago, I would have been so extremely happy. But then I got the new title. And then my goals kept shifting and I kept moving the goalposts. And it's really made me realize that there is no such thing as finding it or or it's it's your your goals and your desires and your personality. Everything is constantly changing. So yeah it it really it it only will be over when it's when it's over, you know so so I'm I really, really believe believe that now. What one thing now that we're talking about this, I I was curious to to hear, have you ever read the book ⁓ The Midnight Library? Okay, so so it's it's now a series because it recently a part two came out, which is the Midnight Train, ⁓ which is about new books, yes. Yeah, so this is phenomenal. So ⁓ Midnight Library is basically about a woman who wasn't really happy with her life and I believe she has just broken up with her her boyfriend and then I believe she she goes to to bed and she she's kind of miserable. She reflects on this relationship and also what life could have been if she would have made different decisions. Now ⁓ she she spent all these years with this guy and she feels really sad about it and she wish kinda wish she wouldn't. And then she goes to bed and she wakes up in the midnight library and then every book inside the library is A different path she could have chosen. So in one life, she would have focused on her music career. And then in another life, she ⁓ would be a professional athlete. And then in another life, she would be an explorer. And then in a later, another life, if she would have stayed with someone else, it it and every book she she grabs from the shelf, it it transforms her into this life, and she can live all of those things. Lives and and it gives her some very incredible insights. And now recently a second one came out which is in the same universe, but it's called The Midnight Train. And this is quite literally a depiction of the the narrative self, basically, because The participant, it it it goes when you die, you can go in the midnight train and then the train goes by your entire life and you can reflect back on all all your life. And the the person in this book also has a lot of regrets on on how they choose to ⁓ yeah, live their lives and then all these things happen. I won't spoil it, but I would highly ⁓ highly recommend ⁓ reading it because it ties ties right into ⁓ what we've been ⁓ been talking about. w one thing ⁓ speaking of books ⁓ you've written books ⁓ as well on this on this topic. ⁓ I believe one was ⁓ a longer time ago and one one was ⁓ a bit more recent. ⁓ both about this this topic about the self. W has your perspective changed between writing those books? And ⁓ if so, how? Yeah, no, I thanks. I think it has, and I have a story to tell. Yeah. About how it did. ⁓ so I the first book was ⁓ as I mentioned, sort of a response to the standard view of the psychological, the kind of psychological unity that a life had to have to make a self or an identity over time. So it's very much about picking up on this idea that it comes from John Locke, right, many, many years ago, but ⁓ revived in in the last century that what makes for the same for personal identity over time is sameness of consciousness. That's what he says. I want my consciousness to flow on. I want my consciousness to be connected ⁓ to past and future events. But that's a slippery notion, right? What is sameness of consciousness? What does that even mean? So I was trying through narrative to give like a better picture of sameness of consciousness over time, what it meant For like a single experiencing subject to continue over time, than I had found. I thought that the one of overlapping similarity was too weak. So it was very focused on the internal experience of the subject. ⁓ and then there was the next development sort of in the philosophical world was that there was this sort of ⁓ renaissance. Of the idea that really it's being the same body or the same human animal that makes us the same person. And that the idea of a person is a separate thing, myself is a separate thing, something that could go on without my body or whatever. It didn't make sense if we were talking really about fundamental questions of identity, these sort of ethical questions or psychological questions. ⁓ and I thought that there was a lot. in the arguments for this that needed to be answered that was really right. that there were some fundamental sort of factual, you know, just the sort of thing that that you talked about the ⁓ a legal system and checking people's plane tickets. And you know, right? There's just right, really a lot of reasons to think that being the same organism is a really fundamental thing. And that once you've got that in place, okay. I mean, that the the sort of tone of the views that argued this was sometimes sort of like, and then you can talk about the ethics and the psychology and stuff. But that's not the real question of identity. ⁓ and I thought there was a lot that was right in the views, but I really wrestled at this that's not the real question of identity. because I do think We are organisms, but we're not just organisms. And that doesn't mean only that we are organisms that, you know, have other properties, but that at the core we're just complicated biopsychosocial beings. It depends what you mean by organism, right? I mean how broadly, but the way that is understood is just that all that matters is what goes on under the skin. Right. The biochemistry, that's all that's important to whether you continue or not, is one view. And then the psychological view was it's only what goes on in your experience that makes you the same person. And what I came to appreciate between the two views, although the two books, although I think it was there in the first book, I just didn't understand it well enough and didn't emphasize it enough, was the absolute centrality of the social. Aspect of things. And the fact that just as a matter of fact, the social aspect of things is, in my mind, a part of our biology, right? The kind of sociality that creatures have is part of their biology. That's part of what it is to be a bee or an ant or a pack animal. it's part of what allows them to survive and reproduce and all the things that you know, evolutionary biologists want to talk about, and evolutionary biologists do talk about the sociality event. And so ours is like a really complicated form of sociality that ⁓ that involves culture, which is so far as we know, unique to us, although there are definitely questions about whether other animals ⁓ have culture that we just don't appreciate. But But certainly what they aren't doing as far as we can tell is building universities and having systems of government and you know, the kind legal systems and podcasts and the technological parts that that hold up our cultures. And the Our psychology and our biology and our social organization are just both historically, like an evolutionary time, but also in the day-to-day, absolutely interdependent. That so that was, you know, back to the the original question about could there be just one person on the planet ⁓ without a social world. And so The second book, instead of being a narrative view of the self in quite the same way, where it's all about your self narrative constituting who you are, talks about the identity of a person, not in terms of their narrative, although I think it is a narrative view in the end. It's just a complicated interpersonal narrative. But it's but instead of the continuity of their life, but not just their biological life, their life as a person, which means a bio-psychosocial being. ⁓ and so a lot of the answers I gave to questions earlier come out of this idea that what we are are really these complicated beings who are whose integrity, like whose literal integrity is a single thing, depends upon all three of these elements. And that In principle they can come apart. Like sometimes you can be in a vegetative state and then you've got biological and social ⁓ without the psychological part. ⁓ perhaps, right, you can have the psychological cart part without the biological. There are a lot of thought experiments about that. There's a lot of, you know, attempts to upload, you know, figure out how to upload ourselves and so on. Who knows? There are many people who believe that they their you know psychological life will continue after the death of the body. So I I remain agnostic on that. ⁓ and the social part, I think it would be hard to do without the social part, actually. I think that's the hardest one to get rid of. So where I end up in that book is to say all of these three things are Part of what maintains our very fundamental literal basic identity and their interaction. And when they come apart, ⁓ that is ⁓ an insult to our integrity as a as an individual. Sometimes it can be compensated for by the others. Right. So ⁓ I think that was the sort of thing that I was talking about where the social world can do a lot. To sort of hold you in place as an individual, but it's still an anomalous way of continuing. 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And so I think ⁓ one of my, you know, epiphanies in that book is that the way the question of our identity usually gets asked is to say, well, we know that in the life of a regular person, as we know them, a human person. There are biological, psychological, and social features, but we want to know which one is really you. Right. And so in philosophy, you had all these thought experiments where people would switch, you know, psychologies would switch bodies or so on. ⁓ and then that was supposed to test: is it the biological or the psychological that really matters? And so my first book was sort of taking on, well, what is the psychological to begin with? And my second book was saying to the people who had said, wait, don't forget the biological. Yeah, you're right, we shouldn't forget it. But not forgetting it doesn't mean that it's the right thing and that the psychological thing really has nothing to do with our fundamental integrity as individuals. They're all part of it. And it's a weird way to ask the question about something, about what something is. To say, let's abstract from the paradigm case where we know what it is and look at some case that's really anomalous and then make a judgment about that. I mean, it's precisely an anomalous case. So my analogy there at the end, even though it's an imperfect one, was the way I saw the discussion going until then was it was like you had a rope that was made of a bunch of pieces of twine. And it could do all these things because it was a good rope. And then people were saying, Well, let's cut this strand, you know, this string here and see if it's still a rope. And let's cut this string. And they keep doing that, and it can do less and less because it's weaker and weaker. And finally the last one breaks and they say, ⁓ that's the one that was really the rope all along. Whereas, you know, you could have cut them in any order, right? When you start when it starts coming apart, it starts coming apart and eventually. breaks and I I sort of think that's true of us and that this has implications for things like debates in bioethics about the definition of death and stuff. Right. Wow. Okay. Yeah. No, I I love that that's a beautiful, beautiful answer. And I I love the the rope analogy. I know exactly what you mean. Another thing you mentioned, and I'm glad you brought it up, is something I wanted to touch on. The whole copying of of minds, copying of identities. I believe you wrote about this as well, ⁓ about second life characters, ⁓ whether they could ⁓ qualify as a self or continuation or of oneself or or perhaps a copy, which now is going is becoming more and more relevant because ⁓ for example Alex Ramosy, who is a very famous entrepreneur. He basically has made an AI system that is trained on all the books he wrote, on all the emails he's ever sent, on all the meetings he's doing, and he's now selling this as a product to for people to allow people to interact with an AI version of him, which is supposed to be even better. than ⁓ him because of course the AI is able to structure it it it better, at least supposedly. Which of course in this scenario it's just a chatbot that is trained on material. But if you go a little further, I love ⁓ TV show Black Mirror, where they do all these kinds of of thought experiments and and copying of identities is something that has been featured in many episodes. One of my favorites is San is called San Junipero, where people after they before they die they can choose to upload to make a digital copy of themselves and they can basically live happily ever after in in a digital world and there's like exact copies of themselves and The more s whether we can ever simulate an entire brain, entire body is difficult. People are trying it. I've done an entire episode ⁓ on it ⁓ with neuroscientist Randall Koenen, which was a fascinating conversation. But people are actually trying it and techno technology is enhancing, which also gives rise to these very interesting ⁓ philosop ⁓ philosophical ideas. So I guess my question is would this be if we just look at the narrative self, wo would it be one narrative and then the narrative splits like it's it goes goes two different directions or would this just be an adjacent ⁓ narrative? ⁓ how how do you view ⁓ assuming that we one day are able to make a perfect copy of of one's mind, ⁓ also given what you just said about it's not just the mind, it's also the body. Like you have to have this holistic view. How how do you interpret such a thought experiment as such a problem? Yeah. So I think there there's a difference between different kinds of thought experiments that raise different problems, but I have sort of the same answer to both. But to me they feel different. So there's one where there's Sort of a copy that starts after you die. So brief box. I mean, some people want to continue themselves, ⁓ but some people write get an AI version of someone they love who's died so that they can continue to talk to them. And you know, I I think right now it's sort of not hard. I mean, to I'm I'm pretty confident. that a you know a chat bot of me is not going to continue my consciousness. Right. I don't think chat bots, whether they're conscious or not, we're not connected. I mean, we're not there because it's like trained on the internet initially and not on me in my world. So ⁓ so if you're worried about, you know, that kind of first personal continuation, people feel differently about it. ⁓ and so I'll come back to that one. I think grief bots also it depends a lot on what people think they're doing when they're talking to a dead loved one, whether it's a transitional thing. But I think one thing they know is that they can't, you know, if it's ⁓ you know a bot, they can't go to the movies together, they can't go out to dinner together, they can't say here, try some of mine, right? Right. They can't have physical intimacy. We're not there yet. Right. So so there's that for now. But it's one question I think if it's like could eventually some kind of ⁓ Some kind of bot continue when this body wears out? Could you just get a new one and and so on? And who cares about the particular gray matter as long as the stuff continues? And then another question is what if we could make multiple copies? Right. And then like then what happens to your narrative? Right? Or to your life? And so ⁓ my answer to both of these, which I I discussed this question a little bit in the second book, ⁓ where I talk about the life of a person and really emphasize heavily the sociocultural level, is one that many people think is cheating, but it is my answer and I believe it. I think it just really depends because I think the the social role. Importance of the socio-cultural framework for maintaining the identity of an individual is so important that it would really depend how practice is developed in the culture. So a lot of the thought experiments in philosophy, science fiction is usually a little better because it builds, you know, the good science fiction is a world building and There's a whole world in which we know how this works. But like in philosophy, they just say, suppose, you know, a person split in two, which of them would be the original person or would the original person die? Right. And a philosopher named Kathleen Wilkes said, well, like, how do universities work in this world? How does taxation work? How does employment, right? I mean, what are all the th you know, how do you relate to your family and so on? So What I think is we don't know ahead of time, and living as long, even as long as I have has convinced me of this, we don't know ahead of time what kinds of changes in what a person and their identity is and their relationships to others and so on. A culture can absorb until it happens. We can make predictions, but we really don't know. And so on the single case continuation, if we imagine the thing developing, right, so that really they could give you practically a new biological body and no information was lost, and they really understood how the brain works so that you know they could really simulate the working of the brain and it wasn't, you know, right now we have no idea really how any of that works. So you don't know what you're losing and you know how it would change things. Then maybe that would be a world in which ⁓ people could continue in that way. And it would change a lot about how, according to the the view I have now, about our experience of right, we would feel differently about the future. we would start taking that second future into account or whatever, right? ⁓ in figuring out what to do now and how to organize our life now. So insofar as I think, right, from the first personal perspective, the self narrative is important, like it it's holistic because you're reaching forward and back all the time. If we extended how far forward and back, like we could open up past lives, right? If it turned out that we discovered we all really did have multiple past lives and we could access them and and so on, maybe that would change things too and expand the narrative. I have to think it would change us fundamentally because being mortal and having finite time is really a big part of what structures our lives and our experience in the background, right? We don't have to think about it all the time or worry about it, but you know, we're feeling it all the time, right? I know where I am compared to where I was forty years ago on this plot and and it informs how I respond to things. And so we'd be different, but could we survive? You know, good individuals, I don't know. For the splitting, just quickly, I think it would change the social organization so dramatically that we just wouldn't have personal identity the way we have it now, or it wouldn't be important in the way we have it now, and different questions would arise. So yeah. Yeah, no, I I really like a thing you you said at the end there about the mortality and and that that is such an important. Important part of yeah, how we interact and beh behave. I I don't know why, but this occurred to me ⁓ a couple days ago or a week ago. A random thought I had what life would be like if we were we have our first life, which is this one, which is the one where we are not sure whether there is an afterlife. At least if if you're not exclusively religious. you believe you don't know. You're I'm I'm agnostic to to these types of things. But let's say there was a second life where you know that you already had a first life. And everyone in that second life knows they had a first life and therefore everyone knows that you just keep on living. I think that broke would be a hellscape because people would know. Let's let's assume that there is no hell or heaven in this scenario. Everyone would just get a restart in something that is very similar to to to Earth. Then there would Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like there that people would take extreme risks, people would probably commit more crime ⁓ people would it it would probably be a very different environment than than we currently have and it it put me in into perspective that how important mortality is on on how everything is structured and ⁓ how we interact. ⁓ but that was just a random sight thought I I have but I I just had to think about it when you just ⁓ mentioned that there. It would be really different and most ⁓ most you know artists and and authors and people who have tried to imagine it think it would be a hellscape. Either it would be boring or ⁓ people would just write. Or like, huh, I can in this one let's try serial killing. Yeah. Yeah. Why not? Right? They'll come back, I'll come back. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, ⁓ Maria, we we've covered so many ground today and I'm having a lot of fun. I could go all day. ⁓ but I just wanna know ⁓ before we eventually end it, is there something that we haven't touched on that you think would be important to discuss while we are on the topic of self? ⁓ that's a really good question. I mean, there's there's so much. I think I think we've we've actually covered a lot of ground and ⁓ and there's nothing in particular. I guess the the sort of closing thought that I had, which is ⁓ coming to focus while we talked, and especially when you were talking about the Midnight Library. ⁓ that it is really, I think, important to understand. And also your your discussion of when you change jobs and then the goalpost keeps moving. It is important for people to understand we really could have lived a lot of different lives and they could have gone a lot of different ways. And ⁓ it is a very common fantasy and, you know, film and and novels to, you know, go try the take the other path and see how it would have turned out. And it's always instructive. And so one of the things I really like about the narrative view ⁓ is that I like to think that if our lines truly are narrative, one of the things they can do, like a good novel Or film can do is say much more than it says, point to so much more than, you know, there's much more in it than is explicitly depicted. And I like to think that one of the things thinking of of life as a narrative or self as a narrative allows you is to recognize ⁓ that the parts you're not Pursuing. This happens in writing just philosophy too. ⁓ I have to excise this part. You know, I went down this rabbit hole and it doesn't fit in the argument, but I love it. But having done it changes what you do, right, even if you omit the whole thing. and a lot of times in these fantasies about living out your different possible lives, there are weird kinds of convergence, right, in the end. And I think, I don't know, for me it's helpful to stop thinking that I have to find out who I really am and do it in the time I have left. ⁓ and more to think about the whole, you know, sort of attempt to think about these things and try different things out and choose a path and stick with it and wonder, but that's all that's all part of the identity. And the parts that you don't pursue gets expressed one way or another. ⁓ even if they aren't the actual life you live, you do what you do differently because of those parts of yourself. So I love that. And that's ⁓ that's a beautiful, beautiful way to end it. ⁓ like you say, there's so much more to discuss, but maybe ⁓ we ⁓ should run it back someday in the future when ⁓ yeah, some new thoughts have ⁓ occurred. ⁓ for now I want to know what is the best place for people to go if they might wanna buy ⁓ one of your books ⁓ or follow ⁓ some of the other things you publish, or if you have a website or some other channels that we can find you, follow you. Yeah, so ⁓ I'm very bad I don't have a website for someone who talks about curating your wife and all of Sort of thing. I really don't do it. I don't have social media. I'm I'm very old. But ⁓ my books, you know, either from the press, which the first is Cornell, the second is Oxford, and the the third, I have a third, which is a very short, you know, one of those Oxford very short introductions. Mm-hmm. ⁓ so those can be gotten at the press, but Amazon or, you know, your favorite online bookseller. And I hate to plug Amazon, but it's a good place to get things. and ⁓ you know, Google Scholar and and there's a website called Phil Papers. It's philosophy papers, have lists of the papers and some of them are available there. ⁓ people can email me if there's something that they want that they can't find. readily. And I've got some content. I actually have just filmed a series of lectures on ⁓ personal identity that should be coming out in September on YouTube. Very cool. ⁓ that's awesome. Yeah. I mean this is going to come out before September, ⁓ at least if everything goes to plan. But I assume this is going to come out somewhere in August. But I can always update the description to ⁓ to link ⁓ to those. So ⁓ that is ⁓ not a problem. Yeah, because it's gonna be on YouTube and it's also it's ⁓ company that's trying to just make like short philosophy courses on their own platform. So it will be on their platform too. No ad, no paywalls. I mean I don't want to advertise them either on your podcast. But yeah. there's there's a lot of stuff there. So super cool. Well, I'm excited for that. I'm I'm definitely going to have a look. For now, I yeah, really wanna thank you for this extremely interesting and fun ⁓ conversation. I had a very good time and it was great. Meeting you and yeah, like I said, hopefully ⁓ we'll run it back some time someday because ⁓ this was great. That's great. Well, I had a really good time too and I got a good book recommendation and lots of good ideas. So it was great talking to you and I hope we do talk again sometime. Yeah. All right. Well, let's ⁓ stay in touch then ⁓ Maria. Thank you so much.