An analysis of decision-making under uncertainty about personal identity

Description:
This essay briefly enumerates common metaphysical identity postulates and their implications on modern decision theory through rationally accounted adjustments to counterfactual selves from which policies are evaluated.
It argues that the debate of metaphysical personal identity is not trivially resolved, and inclusion of that fact as a material input into leading decision theories such as FDT should in principal preserve classically rational self interest in benign circumstance but employ universalist moral consideration where there is highly asymmetric outsourcing of consequence - independent of constitution, priviledged inclusion and exclusively self interested rational objectives.
It follows with a brief exploration of practical relevance to advanced agent frameworks and a reflection on the historical precedence for myths which appropriated this epistemic gap with both descriptive and normative world model frameworks which were ultimately conducive to survival.
Epistemic Status:
Speculative conceptual work. I am not an alignment professional. The argument is philosophically motivated and internally reasoned, not empirically validated or formally proven.
AI Involvement:
Some editing and re-writes by ChatGPT 5.2 for clarity and brevity - though the essay itself is a framework consequent of 8 months of research and independent thinking on the topic.

Abstract

Reductionist accounts of personal identity undermine the metaphysical depth of subjecthood, yet standard decision theory continues to presuppose sharply bounded agents whose interests terminate at the edges of individual persons. This paper argues that once reductionism about personal identity is taken seriously, the traditional taxonomy of identity views collapses into a single substantive divide: closed individualism versus open individualism. Crucially, this divide is epistemically underdetermined from the first-person perspective. No conscious subject can observe the metaphysical boundaries of identity, nor can experience discriminate between termination, recurrence, bounded reincarnation, or open instantiation.

When this identity and temporal uncertainty is incorporated into expected utility theory, even purely self-interested agents are compelled to treat all sentient welfare as carrying expected self-relevance — not ...

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