Self-Control, Mental Time Travel, and the Temporally Extended Self

Abstract

Intertemporal choice scenarios are scenarios in which someone must make a choice whose consequences play out over time. In those scenarios, the capacity to exercise self-control involves making a choice that does not provide an immediate advantage for the present self and instead benefits the future self. In this chapter, the author argues that the extent to which one can resist temptation in those scenarios is a function of the extent to which one cares about one’s future self. Caring about one’s future self entails having a temporally extended self. Given that mental time travel is crucially involved in the coming about of the temporally extended self, the author acknowledges its importance in self-control. After clarifying what this hypothesis does not imply about the relation between mental time travel and self-control, she discusses two puzzles concerning the phenomenology of resisting temptation and, respectively, the explanatory power of the temporally extended self and a possible solution.