Say I got isekai’d into Subnautica. This would obviously be terrible. I’m going to die. I do not have the skills to survive or thrive or cure the planet or build a rocket. And even with all my enormously advantageous relevant meta knowledge I’m in any realistic scenario just hunkering down on the planet and accepting that this is where I live now.
So I hunker down on the planet. It’s miserable and I’m lonely and I’m constantly afraid for my life. I will also be inevitably bored. So maybe, one day, I go a bit too far. I discover I can respawn. Amazing, maybe I can beat this game.
So I do. I gather resources and I keep dying and I base chain the pants off the lost river and eventually, I win. I have infinite tries and a tremendous amount of boredom. I can do it.
I wonder what will happen. Maybe I will be unisekai’d. Maybe this was my goal all along.
None of that happens. Instead, everything ends. I wasn’t, and then I was, and I can’t really remember how I even got here. I'm no longer in Subnautica. Instead, like a little cosmic joke, someone's speaking into my head and asking me questions.
So, from outside me’s perspective, it goes a little more like this:
Five years ago, I took a walk down to the neurology lab at my university, spent an hour or two in their chair, and got a 25 dollar Amazon gift card and a novel experience for my efforts. Today, I get an email from the university, updating me on the progress of the project I participated in because I was curious and signed up for updates. They ask if I’d like to do a follow up, if I’d like to see what they’ve been doing. Why not.
It could or could not be a philosophical zombie, but at any rate, it performs flawlessly and is indistinguishable from the real thing. That is, it is indistinguishable from the me of five years ago, with the one exception that some form of context was removed so it wasn’t experienced as a continuous jump between being in the neurology lab and being in Subnautica.
It is interesting to notice how much the temporal displacement affects my own view of the scenario. Normally, I am staunchly on the philosophical side of, if a perfect clone/copy is made, neither individual has claim to the original identity, or rather that both individuals have complete claim, equally. There are two of you, and you are the same self, starting from that instant. But here: That person is still, strictly, “me”, but they are the “me” of five years ago, and I am not the me of five years ago anymore. When I go into the lab and look into the monitor and see what could or could not be a conscious entity, but in either case perfectly appears as one, and furthermore, as a conscious entity that fundamentally shares my experience. My view shifts much more in line with how I see most other people think of clones, more like a younger sibling or a friend.
Also dependent is the idea of memory. A large part of what makes us, us and provides a sense of identity is the fact that all of our memories stack on top of each other in a linear, sequential fashion to provide the experience of moving straightforwardly from moment to moment as the same person. That’s why we are the same people when we go to sleep and wake up, or when we think back to yesterday and project our predictions forward into the future. Say, when I was isekai’d into Subnautica, I wake up, perfectly myself, but without any memories. Say, this is an earlier iteration in the experiment and some things wrong. At which point, then, could it be considered me? How could we even tell? Does it matter if we could tell? I think the reasonable conclusion, if the current me lost my memories, that I’m still the same person, but how far can that conclusion be extended to someone built off the same brain but without the physical form? It’s the same thing, but it feels less impactful.
