Title: Personal Identity, Substantial Change, and the Significance of Becoming
Abstract: According to philosophers who ground your anticipation of future experiences in psychological continuity, it is rational to anticipate the experiences of someone other than yourself, such as a self that is the product of fission or of replication. In this paper, I concur that it is rational to anticipate the experiences of the product of fission while denying the rationality of anticipating the experiences of a replica. In defending my position, I offer a novel explanation of why you have good reason to anticipate the experiences of your post-fission successor but not your replica: in the former case, you become (i.e., substantially change into) somebody else, whereas, in the latter case, you are merely replaced by somebody else.