"I think that's a cognitive illusion..." No one has yet shown that personal identity consists in anything other than self-identification, i.e. that I happen to consider myself the same person as 10 years ago and expect in 10 years to be someone who believes himself to have had my past. If that is the case, there is no reason for a person not to self-identify with anyone he wants, as for example his own descendants (cf. Scott Alexander's post). In this way there is no more and no less cognitive illusion in wanting to live on through one's descendants than in wanting to be physically immortal.
No one has yet shown that personal identity consists in anything other than self-identification, i.e. that I happen to consider myself the same person as 10 years ago and expect in 10 years to be someone who believes himself to have had my past.
I just tried to consider myself as being the coffee cup in front of me, but I can't seem to manage it. Then I tried considering myself to be the chap who lives next door, but that doesn't work either. There seems to be a certain ineluctability about my identification with this body and this mind which is left unaccounted for by sticking onto it XML tags saying .
This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.
Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.
To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.