The Preservation of the Continuity of the Self
Causal Processes, Descriptive Bottlenecks, and Survival in Copyable Minds
Theories of personal identity were built for creatures that cannot be copied. If artificial systems ever become conscious, duplication, checkpointing, rollback, substrate migration, forking and merging stop being thought experiments and become operations. This paper argues that the standard responses — psychological continuity theory and Parfitian reductionism — share a defect: both treat the route by which a later mental state is produced as irrelevant once the state itself is fixed. Building on Wesley Salmon’s distinction between causal processes and pseudo-processes, the paper introduces the notion of a descriptive bottleneck — passage through a closed record across a dead interval — and develops a graded Continuity Criterion in which a transition transmits some fraction τ of a successor’s constitutive state. The criterion is substrate-neutral, permits complete material replacement, and yields non-obvious verdicts: gradual prosthetic substitution preserves a subject, while some physically continuous procedures do not.
