Fabio Patrone

Non-Consensual Sexual Deepfakes (NCSD) are a growing issue of our onlife experience. We argue that, far from harming individuals merely indirectly, NCSD constitute a _Direct Personal Harm_ to the persons they depict, because they can be understood as parts of their personal identity. We defend this claim by developing a narrative theory of identity according to which a person is constituted by their life story—a story that is not solely self-authored but socially shaped and often beyond one’s control. On this basis, we argue that digital artifacts such as NCSD can become elements of a person’s narrative identity. We ground our account in a four-dimensionalist metaphysics that treats persons as aggregates of both biological and digital temporal parts. Finally, by examining the verbal behavior of imaginary and actual victims of NCSD, we show that this account is less counterintuitive than it may initially appear and helps make sense of why many experience NCSD as violations of their person, rather than merely of their representation.

Identity seems uncomplicated: everything is identical to itself and to nothing else. Yet this formal simplicity has profound metaphysical implications. If identity is absolute and fundamental, applying uniformly across all domains, then its application to time leads to a radical reconception of our world. Through analysis of classical puzzles—from the Ship of Theseus to personal fission—this book develops a five-dimensional ontology called “pixelism,” treating spatial, temporal, and modal dimensions symmetrically. Like pixels on a screen, entities are instantaneous, atomic, and world-bound, connected only through counterpart relations. This yields a coherent view of persistence, composition, and modality—one with no persisting persons, no composite objects, no trans-world individuals, but only fundamental units: pixels configured chair-wise, person-wise, or universe-wise.

Derek Parfit’s thesis that identity doesn’t matter in survival has been extensively discussed except for its metaphysical robustness. How can we justify the abandonment of identity in the way Parfit suggests? My argument is the following. Those who want to endorse the thesis that identity doesn’t matter (and, therefore, abandon identity across time) should adopt exdurantism, i.e. a metaphysics according to which the world is composed by temporal parts each existing at a time and according to which there is nothing as a numerically same entity which exists at different times. I do that by showing that the metaphysics behind Parfit’s theory is neither compatible with endurantism, according to which object persists by being wholly present at different times, nor with perdurantism, according to which entities are aggregates of temporal and spatial parts.

In this paper, I examine the implications of Chalmers' [2017; 2019] digital realism on personal identity, building on Floridi's [2014] onlife concept and supporting the idea that persons extend in biological and virtual realms. By positing the physical existence of virtual entities within computer systems, digital realism suggests a relationship between individuals and their digital counterparts akin to that between two physical entities. I argue that four- dimensionalism, which conceives of objects as composed of temporal parts, offers a robust framework for understanding this relationship. By treating virtual entities as aggregates of virtual temporal parts, this framework brings two theoretical advancements. First, we would be able to account for the apparent paradox of simultaneous existence in biological and virtual spaces. Second, by maintaining the theoretical framework of digital realism, we can provide an account of personal identity that adequately captures the increasingly intimate relationship between ourselves and our digital counterparts.

This paper responds to Paula Sweeney’s characterization of avatars as proxies, proposing instead a framework that treats avatars as genuine parts of “hybrid persons.” Adopting a four-dimensionalist metaphysics, I argue that persons should be understood as maximal aggregates of both biological and virtual temporal parts. This approach reconceptualizes the relationship between users and their avatars as analogous to the relationship between present and past selves rather than as a proxy relationship between separate entities. While Sweeney identifies an “epistemic gap” in avatar-user relationships as problematic for responsibility attribution, I argue that this gap is not unique to virtual contexts but appears in ordinary cases of personal identity over time. The real challenge stems from what I term the “consciousness gap” - our inability to directly experience our avatar’s actions. Drawing on Parfit’s insights about the unimportance of identity in the survival of persons, I show a way to attribute responsibility across such gaps. To address potential challenges to my framework similar to Johnston’s personite problem, I adopt a priority perdurantist solution to persons, treating both biological and virtual parts as metaphysically derivative from the hybrid person

The Extended Mind Thesis (EM) claims that cognitive processes can extend beyond the body into the environment. While EM has often been taken to support an Extended Self Thesis, its implications for personhood, personal identity, and personal composition have rarely been explored in a systematic way. This paper aims to fill the gap, connecting EM with the rich metaphysical debate on personhood. Adopting a Lockean framework, we distinguish two versions of the Extended Person Thesis: a Weak version (WEP), according to which personhood-defining properties can be externally instantiated, and a Strong version (SEP), according to which persons themselves may be partly constituted by non-biological parts. While WEP follows naturally from EM, SEP requires more substantial ontological commitments. We argue that these commitments, though not entailed by EM, are consistent with its functionalist assumptions. If one is prepared to accept them, as a supporter of EM arguably should, then EM does imply SEP.

Derek Parfit played a crucial role in the XX century philosophical debate. His masterpiece, Reasons and Persons, has been highly influential both in moral philosophy, and personal identity. It is hard to overlook the fact that Parfit’s ideas gave the main contribution to the contemporary philosophy of persons. He reformulates a debate stuck in the classical contraposition between psychological and physical criteria of personal identity, by introducing his most famous idea: identity doesn’t matter in survival. This thesis, and its moral implications, has been a challenge for everyone tackling the issues related to persons and normative moral philosophy.

Pixelism is the combination of three metaphysical thesis, namely a radical form of exdurantism, mereological nihilism and counterpart theory. Pixelism is a theory that evaluates all the metaphysical phenomena of persistence, composition and modality in a homogeneous and consistent manner. In a pixel world, there is no identity over time and over possible worlds and nothing persists over more than an instant or a world. Entities can be univocally identified by a five-coordinates system (the three spatial dimensions, the temporal one and the possible worlds), and their relation is a counterpart relation both in different worlds and at different times or different regions of space. In this paper I will provide two models for pixelism: the first one takes pixels to be hypercubes, i. e. four-dimensional cubes, the acceptance of which is conditional on the acceptance of extended simples. The second one considers pixels as points in a four-dimensional space.

Derek Parfit’s thesis that identity doesn’t matter in survival has been extensively discussed except for its metaphysical robustness. How can we justify the abandonment of identity in the way Parfit suggests? My argument is the following. Those who want to endorse the thesis that identity doesn’t matter (and, therefore, abandon identity across time) should adopt exdurantism, i.e. a metaphysics according to which the world is composed by temporal parts each existing at a time and according to which there is nothing as a numerically same entity which exists at different times. I show that the metaphysics behind Parfit’s theory is neither compatible with endurantism, according to which object persists by being wholly present at different times, nor with perdurantism, according to which entities are aggregates of temporal and spatial parts.