What It Is Like for Two to Become One

Abstract

This chapter considers in depth a particularly perplexing thought experiment that has puzzled theorists of personal identity, namely person-fusion. Philosophers have wondered: if two people were to go through a process of brain-interfacing that gradually changed them into a single, integrated, person combining the traits of both, should that be regarded as the destruction or the survival of the original subjects of experience? The chapter discusses this question, and tries to think through what this process might be like for the people involved: how they might experience a gradual shift from recognizably interpersonal ways of relating to the other person, to relations more like those that hold within a single person’s consciousness.