What am I? What is it for my life to go well or badly for me? Let’s imagine aliens to find out.

What am I? That is, what is the self, the fundamental I or me which lives my life? Is it a representation, a subject of experience, an agent, an organism of a natural kind, a person, an individual? Is it nothing, because there is no self? What is it for my life to go well or badly for me? That is, what is welfare? Is it being happy, getting what I want, becoming fully human, becoming fully myself? Is it something each of us must define for ourselves? I address these questions by exploring the space of possible selves using science fictional imaginings of alien individuals and forms of life.

I engage both with philosophical work by Derek Parfit, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Christine Korsgaard, Philippa Foot, Jay Garfield, Martha Nussbaum, Galen Strawson, Margaret Boden, and others; and with science fiction novels by Adrian Tchaikovsky, Ann Leckie, Ken MacLeod, C. J. Cherryh, Vernor Vinge, Linda Nagata, Gregory Benford, and others.

My method is to construct possible human and alien selves in imagination, and relate them to extant and new accounts of welfare. The point is to understand our selves and welfare by connecting them and placing them in a larger conceptual space. Science fiction helps in two ways: the novels I draw on do excellent work imagining various kinds of self; and science fiction as a literature has developed distinctive modes of construction, investigation, and understanding which I articulate and use.

I have multiple goals in this exploration of the space of possible selves: I aim to map a significant part of that space; to investigate the links between self and welfare; to explain and do science fiction as understanding; and to develop and defend my self-realization account of the self and its welfare.