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may take me many hundreds of years to complete. It is also dubious to assume that a healthy
future self several hundred years older than I am now might would be unable remember things
from current life stage. Old people often remember their early adulthood quite well, and it is not
clear that these memories always decline significantly over time. And of course, the concern
about distant future stages being unable to remember their earlier stages disappears completely if
we suppose that enhancements of memory capacity becomes available.36 Furthermore, if Glennon
was right, it would follow that it is undesirable for a small child to grow up, since adults do not
remember what it was like to be a small child and since small children do not have projects or
intentions that extend over time spans as long as decades. This implication would be
counterintuitive. It is more plausible that it can be desirable for an agent to survive and continue
to develop, rather than to die, even if psychological connections eventually become attenuated. In
the same way, it could be desirable for us to acquire the capacity to have a posthuman healthy
lifespan, even if we could not remain the same person over time scales of several centuries.
The case that personal identify could be preserved is perhaps less clear-cut with regard to
radical cognitive or emotional enhancement. Could a person become radically smarter, more
musical, or come to possess much greater emotional capacities without ceasing to exist? Here the
answer might depend more sensitively on precisely which changes we are envisaging, how those
changes would be implemented, and on how the enhanced capacities would be used. The case for
thinking that both personal identity and narrative identity would be preserved is arguably
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It is not even a psychologically plausible consequence even within the limitations of current human
psychology. Compare the case to that of a man on death row who has a remaining life-expectancy of 1 day.
An unexpected pardon suddenly extends this to 40 years an extension by a factor of 14,610! He might be
delighted, stunned, or confused, but he does not cease to exist as a person. If he did, it would presumably be
bad for him to be pardoned.
Even if one believed (erroneously in my view) that mortality or aging were somehow essential
features of the persons we are, these features are consistent with vastly extended healthspan.
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(Glannon 2002).
36
It is clear that in order for an extremely long life to not become either static or self-repeating, it would be
necessary that mental growth continues.
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strongest if we posit that (a) the changes are in the form of addition of new capacities or
enhancement of old ones, without sacrifice of preexisting capacities; and (b) the changes are
implemented gradually over an extended period of time; (c) each step of the transformation
process is freely and competently chosen by the subject; and (d) the new capacities do not prevent
the preexisting capacities from being periodically exercised; (e) the subject retains her old
memories and many of her basic desires and dispositions; (f) the subject retains many of her old
personal relationships and social connections; and (g) the transformation fits into the life narrative
and self-conception of the subject. Posthuman cognitive and emotional capacities could in
principle be acquired in such a way that these conditions are satisfied.
Even if not all the conditions (a)-(g) were fully satisfied in some particular transformation
process, the normatively relevant elements of a person s (numerical or narrative) identity could
still be sufficiently preserved to avoid raising any fundamental identity-based objection to the
prudentiality of undergoing such a transformation. We should not use a stricter standard for
technological self-transformation than for other kinds of human transformation, such as
migration, career change, or religious conversion.
Consider again a familiar case of radical human transformation: maturation. You
currently possess vastly greater cognitive capacities than you did as an infant. You have also lost
some capacities, e.g. the ability to learn to speak a new language without an accent. Your
emotional capacities have also changed and developed considerably since your babyhood. For
each concept of identity which we might think has relevant normative significance personal
(numerical) identity, narrative identity, identity of personal character, or identity of core
characteristics we should ask whether identity in that sense has been preserved in this
transformation.
The answer may depend on exactly how we understand these ideas of identity. For each
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