This is philosophy bites with me, David.
Edmonds, and me, Nigel Warburton.
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You'd imagine that people who believe the self to be constantly changing might worry less about their own death than other people do.
After all, they believe they probably won't have much in common with the self that eventually dies.
Sean Nichols, a philosopher and moral psychologist, has conducted empirical research on death anxiety and the view of the self.
He's come up with some surprising findings.
Sean Nichols, welcome to philosophy Bites.
Thank you.
A pleasure to be here.
The topic we're going to talk about today is death and the self.
Most people know what death is.
Tell us a bit about the philosophical background to questions about the self.
Well, there is a long tradition of work in philosophy and different traditions that challenges the idea that there's some consistent self that stays the same across time.
So the idea is that most people think that there's one self that they have from the beginning that they retain throughout their biological life.
But in Buddhism, and David Hume and Derek Parfitt, this is challenged in various ways.
The most extreme version is the buddhist view that claims that there's no self at all, that that's just an illusion.
People like Parfitt maintain that there might be a self, but it changes radically across time in all of these traditions.