why have a meta-care about the race if you will not be around to witness it? It's like planning your own funeral--you'll never know how it turned out.Does anyone ever stick around to experience how anything turns out, anyway? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus#Definitions_of_...
Normally, from instance to instance, each of us ceases to exist. A new person, under an illusion of being a "continuous" person and not merely one one in a sequence of related instantaneous persons, takes the place of the old person. And so it goes, from instance to instance. An instant from any given instance, the you of that instance will not exist. So why bother planning for those instances of you (who might remember being you, but are not you) that will exist (in their respective instances)?
That you that were you when "you" began reading this, is not the you that is you now. That former you left you his memories, but he cannot experience what you are experiencing now. So, why did he bother leaving any memories for you at all? Such bothering should have been pointless from his point of view, now that he is extinct. Yes? (...Unless he were under the illusion that he would somehow still exist, rather than the more-likely scenario of merely some creature like him, i.e. you, existing in his stead and who might be under the illusion that he is the same person as the person who kindly left the memories, the physical possessions, the bank account, the bodily health, etc.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleportation#Scenarios
someone with a materialistic view of the world might also see the disintegration of a given corpus as the killing of a human being. The reassembled human might be considered a different sentience with the same memories as the original, as could be easily proved by constructing not just one, but several copies of the original and interrogating each as to the perceived uniqueness of each. Each copy constructed using merely descriptive data, but not matter, transmitted from the origin and new matter already at the destination point would consider itself to be the true continuation of the original and yet this could not logically be true; moreover, because each copy constructed via this data-only method would be made of new matter that already existed at the destination, there would be no way, even in principle, of distinguishing the original from the copies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_and_change#Identity_an...
The problem of personal identity relates to change as applied to people. [...] The question is exactly why we call the old woman in 1998 the same person as that little girl in 1920.