"Survival" in Everettian Quantum Mechanics
1 : Morehead State University
The question of individuals in metaphysics comes in at least two flavors: what exactly constitutes an individual and how does one re-identify her over time. If one takes seriously Hugh Everett's claims about the central importance of relative facts and takes this to imply that the proper understanding of our world is that it is branching in some way, then on the one hand we are left with deeper questions about how one is to understand what constitutes the objects that seem to make up our everyday world, but, I will here argue, on the other hand we are given a physical justification for Derek Parfit's 1971 proposal for handling the difficulties of diachronic identity in a branching context. Parfit suggests we use an intransitive, asymmetric relation that he calls "survival" rather than the equivalence relation to track people across time in a branching context. I will argue that we can make a perfectly analogous argument for the diachronic tracking of people in any metaphysical picture implied by pure wave mechanics.
