Could You Wake Up in a Different Body?
location in relevance to me. I am aware broadly of the physical thing that is me, and can give an accurate description of what it is to be me down to the atomic level. In reference to this, it is proposed, the term ‘self’ was created with definite intent to our physicality. The concept of a mental self arguably comes from an extension of this concept into the mind. As I know I have legs, arms in the physical world, I assume that I have some sort of equivalent in the mental world the self. However, we already know from our thought experiment, that we don’t have any immediate evidence for the concept of the self we can’t be acquainted with it, only thought and sense we find it impossible to directly describe it at all. Therefore, as we don’t have the same relation to the mental self as the physical self, the mental self becomes a referenceless condition, corresponding to nothing. When we say ‘I woke up in a different body’, what we are saying is meaningless, as ‘I’ is referenceless, and as such we find no constant identity that we can be taken from the first body to the body we transfer into. However, some may counter the possibility that a physically based identity can still be transferred into a different body by abandoning the dualist approach. The paradox of the ship of Theseus, when tackled from the point of perdurantism (specifically stage theory), demonstrates how an object, although it may change its physicality, can maintain its identity without resorting to untenable dualism. It proceeds as such. The ship of Theseus is to be preserved for a thousand years via the progressive renovation of one plank per year. By the end of the thousand years, the ship will have none of its original physicality left, consisting of only renovated planks. Stage theorists such as Tim Sider argue that despite this change in physicality, the ship is still the ship of Theseus, because the ship is composed of temporal parts, which extend across the fourth dimension of time. Working under the principle of numerical identity4, Sider argues if we examine slices of time between the renovation of each plank, we will find the ship numerically identical to how it was last year, although it’s physicality has changed. Therefore, it is possible to have a changing physicality but still retain a constant identity. Applying this to the possibility of being able to wake up in a different body, we may find that it is indeed possible. While we must cede that waking up in an entirely different body, as Samsa does in Metamorphosis, is not possible as our current body is not numerical-
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