Shunsuke Sasaki

Parfit argued that what matters in survival is Relation R: psychological connectedness and psychological continuity with the right kind of cause. His treatment of this causal condition, however, has been criticized as ambiguous. Drawing on Woodward’s interventionism, this paper analyzes the dependence through which the psychological states of an earlier person-stage shape those of a later person-stage. It proposes four conditions for sufficiently strong causal connectedness—causal provenance, breadth of dependence, selective dependence, and functional integration—and defines a chain of such connections as causal continuity. Sufficiently strong causal survival is then defined as the existence, at a given time, of an active successor linked to the earlier person-stage by causal continuity. The framework distinguishes limited influence on others from dependence that extends broadly across a person’s psychological organization, and it addresses personal persistence through time without requiring either a unique successor or sameness of substrate. In branching cases, it distinguishes two later person-stages’ deriving from a common earlier person-stage from causal continuity extending from one branch to the other, and it examines how judgments of survival vary with the person-stage taken as the starting point of assessment. The result is a framework for comparing the causal aspects of survival and for identifying which questions call for additional psychological requirements.