Would You Step Aside?

There’s a sort of fantasy scenario that seems quite appealing to those of us with regrets in our lives.  You look back at some mistake you made (maybe it’s the day you incurred a serious injury), or accident incurred by a loved one, and wish you could change things.  The fantasy is to go back and live your life over from that point, but doing it better this time.

You might think not just of applying your knowledge of a particular event in order to avoid making a mistake, or to warn a loved one about some turn of events, but a deeper change in the way you approach life in general.

A reformed alcoholic might wish he could go back and live again those years of his alcoholism, but this time do so sober, and avoid both the harms to himself and to those around him that he has, in later years, learned not to incur.

It’s an appealing fantasy.  But one problem with it that you might notice (aside from its impossibility), is that in order for you to go back and relive those days, you’d have to supplant and replace the original version of you who lived them.  He went to sleep on August 12, 2012, you wake up in his place.  If you’re going to change the events of his life thereafter, then those events will never have happened.

What I’m mostly concerned about is the 2012 version of you.  How should he feel about this, if he knew it was about to happen?  If Doctor Who shows up in his room one night and hands him a helmet, saying:  “A future version of you is going to replace you when you sleep tonight, but if you put this helmet on before you sleep, it will prevent that happening”, should he put it on?

There’s one very clear argument for yes.  If he doesn’t put it on, he ceases to exist!  Of course he should put it on.  If he doesn’t he dies.

Dying is usually considered bad.  Put on the helmet.

On the other hand, who is the person replacing him?  It’s you.  It’s a future version of him.  Tomorrow he’s going to be replaced by a future version of himself no matter what.   The only question is, is it a day older version of him or a 13 year older version of him?  The difference between those two things doesn’t seem to be the difference between life and death.

Maybe he thinks that the version of him tomorrow is still him, but the 13 year later version isn’t.  But if that’s his view, and he therefore thinks that being replaced by you means his own death, then that means he thinks that either way he will be dead in 13 years, because if he doesn’t put on the helmet 13 years from now he will become you.

If he doesn’t die in becoming you by the long way, it seems strange to think that he dies in becoming you by the short way.

The argument for no is also pretty straightforward: his future becomes, at least potentially, much better.  He may not know how, but he should trust that his future self cares a lot about his wellbeing, and wants to improve it, and furthermore has learned a lot of ways to help him do that.  Empowering his future self in this way just seems like a great idea. 

If you could give your future self a million dollars, you’d do it.  Giving your future self the chance to fix past mistakes and apply current knowledge and skills (let alone knowledge about the future) seems significantly more valuable than a million dollars.  The very straightforward reason not to put on the helmet is that doing so prevents immense value for his future self.

That’s usually a bad thing to do.

So what should he do?  The answer hinges on personal identity.  Are you him, or someone else entirely?  How should he determine this?  What factors matter to answering that question?

I have my own ideas, but for today I’m more interested in what you think, so I’m looking forward to any comments.